Attendance at Sydney’s new house of worship will be compulsory for Eastern Suburbs locals once the glittering Sydney Football Stadium reopens in September.
Residents from Bondi to Botany Bay will be forced to worship false idols on a weekly basis, and be forced to pay tithes to the broad church that is Australian sport in order to recover the cost of the $828 million redevelopment at Moore Park.
Compulsory attendance at games involving the Sydney Roosters, NSW Waratahs and Sydney FC will expose the populace to society’s greatest role models, and will address the moral decline of a region which rejected traditional values for new-age pastel belief systems. It marks the dying wish of the nation’s most faithful martyr before his political execution, and is the most significant legacy of another great and powerful leader who fought tirelessly to deliver this gleaming temple to her once loyal subjects before succumbing to temptation.
“It is abundantly clear that services with no charge are undervalued in Australia’s increasingly secular society,” explained the faithful martyr, “and the collection of tithes from those attending the SFS will instil a deeper appreciation of the spiritual benefits of attending this shrine to capitalism.”
Attendees who forego weekly services, in lieu of celebrations such as the battle of the Cockroach and the Cane Toad, will contribute a far more generous tithe to compensate for their absence.
“It is also expected that compulsory attendance at these weekly services will persuade Eastern Suburbs residence to return to traditional values.”
Tithes from the faithful will also cover the cost of hosting the privileged members of the closed societies who will worship from exalted positions within their glass towers. From on high, the chosen ones can survey the walls of the SFS adorned with idolatrous images of money lenders and peddlers of products provoking all manner of licentious and destructive behaviour among the masses.
The first residents rostered on to fulfil their obligations will hear the sermon of the Rooster v the Rabbit on September 2, after which hundreds of animals representing the vanquished team will be ritually sacrificed in order to appease the lords of the airwaves who succeeded in delivering the glittering edifice to The Emerald City. Devotees will also be blessed with the transformative hymns of Guy Sebastian (the poor man’s Bruno Mars) who will perform on loan from another of Sydney’s gilded houses of worship.
The revolving roster will then supply worshipers for the sermon of the Wallaby and the Rose, as well as the moral of the Matilda, before the resumption of weekly services recounting the blossoming of the waratah under a bright blue sky.
First published in The Beast magazine, September 2022.
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