I’ve never particularly been a great football fan and I guess that the last match I ever voluntarily watched on TV was the FA cup final in 1972 when Leeds United beat Arsenal 1-0, and I even had to look that up on Google when writing this thought for the day today. Living in West Yorkshire for the first forty-six years of my life with the massive urban sprawl of places like Leeds Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Wakefield, Dewsbury, and Sheffield and even over the Pennines places like Manchester and Liverpool were within easy reach. Football was important to people but take any group of people and you would find a variety of teams being supported.
Life was very different when we moved to Norfolk, almost everybody in my congregations supported Norwich City and the rivalry between Norwich and Ipswich is very real and over the last nineteen years of my ministry, I have been able to gauge the mood of my Sunday congregation by what happed in the match the previous day.
Saturday 4th May 2024 was a significant day in Ipswich because Ipswich town won their match against Huddersfield Town 2-0 securing them a place in the Premier League for the next season. It is twenty-two years since the team played topflight football and the town erupted in celebration with revelry going on late into the night.
The morning after the match I had a service at one of our Ipswich churches which included the Christening of a little girl. It was a lovely sunny morning; the doors of the church were open wide, and we had a fairly full church congregation. The spirit in the place was amazing and I think that we did a good job of worshipping God together.
The Christian Church celebrates Pentecost today, the day that God poured out his Holy Spirit into the lives of his disciples and they burst onto the streets to celebrate in such a way that people thought that they were drunk.
It has been my privilege in recent years to share in worship with people from Africa and the Caribbean and those people know how to worship, there is a vibrancy I seldom see in British worship. I feel that we should take a leaf out of the book of the football fans who know how to celebrate when a team of blokes (or women) play a game and win. How much more would there be to celebrate in the world if God’s love reigned supreme and took our lives into the premier league?