Brought to You By Hanes

Our local sports/civic arena has fallen on hard times lately. Every year seems to be a virtual torrent of red ink (“but don’t worry, we get great benefit to our economy from the visitors”); now the main tenant, the hockey team, has flown the coop.

If you’ve watched SportsCenter lately, you might guess what solution is being proposed. Maybe you’ve seen some highlights from an Astros game at Minute Maid Park, or perhaps you schedule your New Year’s Day activities around the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. In the 21st century sports world, the way to raise quick cash is to sell naming rights. The Army used to say, "If it moves, salute it; if it doesn't move, paint it." The modern equivalent is selling sponsorships; our local arena is selling every surface, region, and object, down to individual seats.

I’ll say more about that in a sec, but the most positive local news the past few days is that we’ve finally achieved a respite from the oppressive weather we’d been experiencing – one day last week brought a high temperature of 96 and a heat index of 115. It made me wonder, to the extent that one could form a coherent thought last week, whether it would have been a good time for a fire & brimstone kind of sermon: you know, clean up your act or you could be having this kind of weather for all eternity.

After thinking about it, though, I concluded that would never work. In the first place, one of my core beliefs (and I still intend to explore those more fully sometime) is that you can’t scare anyone into believing. Even more than that, you can’t impress today’s spiritual consumers (word chosen intentionally) with a threat of hell or a promise of heaven. Maybe colonial-era folks – who weren’t having all that much fun in this life, especially if you were the colonize-ee – were motivated by thoughts of the next, but in the present age if faith doesn’t have benefits for the “user” right here/right now, it’s going to be a tough sell.

The good news is, we believe faith does mean something more than pie in the sky, by & by. But even if threats were effective, I’m not sure we have much ammunition. After all, it may be hotter in That Other Place, but I can’t imagine there’s as much humidity.

And if you were wondering, I thought the first “title sponsor” of my blog should be Hanes – since this entry is… umm… brief.