Dear God, Please Help Us Crush the Other Team
June 6, 2006
It's not really a big surprise to find plastic soccer balls in McDonald's kids' meals, Michael Ballack's face on every second billboard, soccer jersey giveaways from the insurance company and loaves of bread with octagons baked into them.
Even all the German flags in the shop windows -- in a country where nationalism is a no-no -- are well within the realm of reasonable, as far as the current soccer craze goes. (OK, the vibrators bearing the names of two national team players from Germany's most well-known sex shop may have been a bit overboard).
But now even the church has joined the bandwagon and put soccer at the core of its "marketing" campaign.
The soccer god
Two Berlin churches -- the Berliner Dom and the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche -- will be putting the first of the Ten Commandments in a new context from June 9 to July 9. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" may be a difficult one for the most extreme fans. But whether the difficulty is the soccer god or the porcelain one, these two churches are ready with a solution.
For the World Cup they will be offering 63 mini services during half-time. The modified masses, planned at a mere 15 minutes each, are to include sermons on soccer-related topics and fan songs rewritten with Christian lyrics.
If you can't beat 'em
"We don't want to fight against the World Cup, we want to use it to support our message," said Bernhard Felmberg, who is responsible for sports at the Protestant church.
Come to think of it, "Love your neighbor" (don't slug him with your beer bottle if he's for the other team), "Give to those in need" (even if it means your front row seat at the big-screen, open-air showing) and "Don't covet" (that includes the game tickets your friends somehow managed to get) would certainly make for a safer, friendlier World Cup.
No grace on the field
Depending on how the German team fares, fans may be doing some serious praying at half-time anyway, both in the church and the stadium. And, even if Germany's beloved Eleven don't pull off the title, their fans will still have the comfort that "the first will be last and the last will be first" in the end.