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It seems prayer and sports have always been connected. In honor of Zeus, the ancient Greeks would kill and feast on 100 oxen during each Olympic Festival. Though we don’t do animal sacrifices quite the same way (I still consider it mandatory to consume at least one hot dog at sporting events), prayer and sports still go hand in hand. As proof of this we need look no further than the critically praised television show Friday Night Lights. 

 

You’d be hard pressed to find a show with more prayers without tuning in to TBN. Yet the prayers on Friday Night Lights are different from the prayers typically featured on TV. They do not come off as pandering to the suddenly visible religious demographic (The Passion and VeggieTales crowd). Nor are they merely glib, before dinner petitions. Instead these prayers are consistent with the show’s attempt to realistically portray life in a small Texas town. You can actually imagine good people pinching their eyes shut and mouthing these words. In fact you’ve probably uttered similar prayers yourself. With this in mind, let’s take a look at the prayers of Friday Night Lights. Maybe they can teach us something about the way we pray.

 

The first prayer on the first episode comes from Jason Street, the star quarterback for the Dylan Panthers. He dates a beautiful cheerleader. The best college football programs in the country court him. A professional football career seems only moments away, and by all accounts he is exactly the type of kid who deserves it. After a playful scrimmage with the local peewee football team, Jason attempts to close the day with a prayer.

 

“Let’s pray,” he says. They all kneel obediently. But before he can begin, a little voice asks earnestly, “Mr. Street, do you think God loves football?” Jason looks up with a smile. “I think that everybody loves football.”

 

“Me too,” the child responds. Jason then leads them in the Lord’s Prayer.

 

Here the particular prayer is not as important as the role that it takes. In Dylan this kind of prayer routinely marks the beginning and conclusion to meals, meetings and games. This is clearly a ritual, but not a meaningless one. These prayers enact the stated belief that God loves football: God sanctions this world and the way they live in it.

 

This attitude is humorously illustrated when we find Buddy Garrity—a former player, successful car dealer, and the Dylan Panthers most fervent booster—alone in a church after Dylan is assured a spot in the playoffs because of an improbable victory by another team Buckly over the other team competing for Dylan’s spot.

 

“Thank You Lord, for letting Buckly win. I know that it was nothing short of a miracle. And I thank You for that miracle. I know you truly are an all-powerful God to let such a crap team win. I know I’ve sinned, but I have to ask for one more thing, and I know that You know what it is before I ask for it. The playoffs state. If it’s Your will, let us win state, dear God. In Jesus name, amen.” 

 

This prayer may seem somewhat absurd, but in the world of Dylan football, there is nothing odd or inconsistent about presuming God’s favor in a football game.

 

Isn’t this often the case in our world too? How often have we associated God’s favor with victories big and small? How often have we assumed that conquering a team, a business deal, or a nation was evidence of God’s favor upon our lives?

 

We would be wise, however, to remember that victory is not always a sure sign of God’s favor. It was precisely when the powers of darkness presumed they had conquered a traveling teacher and miracle worker named Jesus that “he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Col. 2:15 NIV). Perhaps, before thanking God for our next victory, we should ask Him if He was on the side of the victor or the defeated.

 

Of course, a God who speaks only in victory is difficult to approach in defeat. So when Jason is struck by a career-ending injury during the first game of the season he quickly loses faith in God.

 

“You just get angry, you know. And, you start wondering ‘God did you do this to me? Was it fate? Was it some dumb accident? Was it my fault?’ And I prayed and prayed and prayed, and the only answer I ever got was that I couldn’t walk. I can’t walk.”

 

For Jason, when victory and success are absent, so too is God. 

 

Lyla Garrity, Jason’s girlfriend, handles his injury somewhat differently. As the captain of the cheerleading team, Lyla too has been raised in a world that revolves around football. When faced with Jason’s new outlook, the romantic and idealistic Lyla lectures, “You are Jason Street and I am Lyla Garrity, and everything is gonna work out just the way we planned it.” Then she prays.

 

“Thank You, Lord, for all that You have given to Jason and myself. We don’t know yet why you are putting us through this test, but I know that You’ll find a way to show us. And we will pull through this test, whatever it takes. Amen.”

 

Jason and Lyla’s dreams are intertwined. But unlike Jason, Lyla refuses to imagine a world where her romantic dreams are not true. And so, unlike Jason who rejects God, Lyla more persistently turns to the power that created and sustains her world. 

 

Of course, over time Lyla finds that God is unwilling to protect her version of the world. We are not surprised then when Lyla’s idealism crashes and grief over the destruction of her dream drives her into the arms of Jason’s best friend, Tim Riggins. But this is not just about sex. Lyla’s infidelity is an expression of rage against both Jason and the deity who she believes conspired to demolish her dreams.

 

Ultimately Lyla and Jason have the same response. They both turn against God when He refuses to answer their prayers the way they wanted.

 

I think we’ve all felt the same at some point. We’ve all been upset with God. More often than not, this is the result of misapplied faith. Abraham’s relationship with God serves as a model of faith.

 

“[God] took him outside and said, ‘Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.’ Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:5-6).

 

Here faith is trust in God and His promises. Yet too often we assume faith is trust in God to give us what we want. This misunderstanding of faith is particularly tragic because, like Jason and Lyla, we end up holding God responsible for things He has never promised. Then when God fails to do what He never promised to do, we abandon Him. 

 

We are given another model of prayer in the midst of tragedy when Coach Taylor leads the team in prayer at the end of the game where Jason was injured. 

 

“Give all of us gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable. And we will all at some point in our lives fall. We will all fall. We must carry this in our hearts: that what we have is special, that it can be taken from us, and that when it is taken from us we will be tested. We will be tested to our very souls. We will now all be tested. It is these times, it is this pain, that allows us to look inside ourselves.”

 

These are the last words of the first episode of the first season. The prayer’s placement is no accident. It foreshadows and summarizes the storyline of the entire show.

 

Like the rest of Dylan, Taylor loves football. However, he has a perspective they lack—a perspective borne out of dependence. His family and his future livelihood are at the mercy of this fickle town and their conditional adoration. He is popular and respected when the Panthers win. He is blamed and threatened when they lose. And so we easily identify with his conflict over doing the right thing and doing whatever it takes to win. It seems the show’s creators want us both to like and to identify with Coach Taylor, and by the end of the first episode, we do.

 

The only problem with our fondness for Taylor is that it causes us to overlook the Coach’s real shortcomings. We empathize with the coach because his livelihood and family rely on a capricious and often inhospitable town. But his family is in this predicament only because he has put them there. When daughter Julie—none too happy about being in Texas—describes a head coaching job in Seattle, Tami Taylor (mother and wife) asks, “Do ya’ll think that they actually have football in Seattle?”

 

“Not the same thing” Taylor grumbles. He is dependant upon the town because he is unwilling to coach in a town that takes football any less seriously than Dylan, Texas.

 

In fact, Taylor takes on the one role that is absolutely essential to maintaining the town’s obsession. As coach he becomes something like a priest for Dylan’s pagan football worship. This is why Buddy Garrity chooses the coach as his uncomfortable confessor when he feels guilty about his extramarital affair. The local football talk radio host makes the coach’s priestly role even clearer.

 

“He took a team that was battered, a town that was ailing and, and he did more than put a Band-Aid on things. I’ll tell ya that he healed this team, and he healed this town.”

 

In a town obsessed with football, winning is the cure for all ailments (except for those, like Jason, who have been discarded by football). For the coach, the cost of losing is high, but the rewards of winning are great. For good or ill, this is the role Coach Taylor chooses.

 

We watch coach Taylor play his prescribed role during the above prayer. Though it starts as a prayer, it quickly becomes a sermon. He affirms that “what we have is special” and goes on to guide the team and town on how to integrate this tragedy in order to maintain their special existence. In other words, he teaches them how to use this tragedy to become more committed and better football worshipers. To me, this echoes many of the vacuous prayers offered after Sept. 11. Prayers like this allude to meaning and self-examination, but they do not call for serious engagement with God. Instead they hurriedly and artificially manufacture meaning out of tragedy so that we can return to our prior activities with renewed vigor and purpose.

 

When Jason prays to a God who loves football, he prays to a God the coach mediates. When Smash, the star running back, leads the team in a wonderfully contradictory pre-game prayer we see the coach with eyes closed and head bowed.

 

“O, Lord God, we just ask that You be with us on the field tonight, God. We just ask that You just inspire us to greatness right now, God. We ask that You protect us, O Lord. We ask that You make us proud in defeat and humble in victory. But either way, God, we just ask that you be with us, God. You know how much we’ve been through this season, Lord God. And You know that this game is the key to our destiny, O God. So we just ask that you give us courage right now, God. We just ask that You give us strength right now, God.”

 

And when this team prayer seamlessly moves into a unified chant and pre-game hysteria we, along with Coach Taylor, are excited because we know this prayer has served its purpose: It has inspired the team to win.

 

It is easy to remain aloof when eavesdropping on these prayers. However, honest introspection reveals that they look conspicuously like words we regularly utter to God. We too use prayers as sermons, if only to ourselves. We sometimes use these prayers to sustain hopes, dreams and priorities that God does not share. In doing so we forget how prayer should invite God to align our thoughts, feelings and affections with His own. Prayer affects God, but it must also change us.

 

Likewise, we too often assume God’s failure to answer prayers reveals God’s shortcomings, not the shortcomings of our prayers. And we also imagine God’s favor can be assigned to the victor, and so forget to honor the God who knows our suffering (see Is. 53:3), the God who comes to us as the hungry, the thirsty and the naked (see Matt. 25:34-40), the God who chose the cross (see Phil 2:6-9). That we could be reminded of all this through a Friday night teen drama is surely an answer to prayer.