1 Corinthians 11:12-14, 27 | Ephesians 4:25-5:2
Jeremy Richards
I don’t think I come across as your stereotypical jock, but the truth is, I’ve been playing sports my whole life. My parents still have a picture of me with my dad, when I was just a couple years older than Esther, and I have full on football oufit on – shoulder pads, a helmet, and a Seahawks jersey. I still remember playing football with him out in the yard beside the house we used to rent.
As soon as I was old enough (kindergarten?), I played t-ball and then little league. I picked up soccer when we were living in Cote d’Ivoire when I was 8 and played through high school and then continued to play in adult rec leagues and intermurals in grad school (Mitch played with me). In fact, my sister met her husband Phil because he and I played on an indoor soccer team together. In third grade I started playing basketball, and that same year I tried snowboarding for the first time. I played basketball through middle school, and continue to play pickup games into adulthood. In grad school, a group of us would play pickup basketball every Friday afternoon. I kept snowboarding until, basically, I couldn’t afford it anymore. These days, Brie and I love to hike, and most recently, as many of you know, we’ve gotten into climbing (though that’s taken quite a hit since Covid). So I’ve played a lot of different sports over the years.
When it comes to team sports, there’s a pretty big difference between playing for a school team and playing on rec leagues. And one of the biggest differences is practice. When you’re playing on rec leagues, you and your team – which usually consists of some friends, some friends of friends, and at least one random person no one on the team really knows, but somehow ended up on the team because you needed more player – usually just show up for the games. Maybe you have one or two practices during the week if you’re really serious (but I’ve only been on one adult rec team that did that).
But in school sports you practice a lot. When I played soccer in high school, we usually play one game a week, but we practiced 4-5 times a week. And that’s not counting the month or so of practice leading up to the actual start of the season. We spent way more time practicing than we did playing games.
The first practice of the season was always exciting. The summer was coming to an end, I was going to see all my old teammates again, and there was always a sense of anticipation. Would this be the year we won state?
I remember one year, I think it was my senior year, we all circled up at the beginning of the first practice of the season, and our coach gave his opening speech, and then he asked if we had any questions or comments. I raised my hand and said, “Coach, you know how every year I’m really out of shape at the beginning of the season?”
“Yes,” he said (a little too emphatically).
“Well, this is an especially bad year,” I said.
At the end of that practice, we were doing sprints, and we were all dying because none of us practiced in the off season or anything like that. Most of us had spent the summer sleeping in, eating junk food, and playing video games. At one point we thought we were finally done, but then the coach said, “Do one more round because we’ve gotta get Jeremy back in shape!”
And he did get me back into shape, just like he did every year. But, of course, it didn’t happen in one day, but practice after practice after practice. Every year, we got in shape through practice. And we also improved our ball handling and our passing and our shooting. We came to understand the game better through practice. We learned strategies and skills. We learned new formations and tactics. Some of us had to shift out of positions we’d previously played and take on new ones. Others of us had to continue to improve at the positions we already played.
In short, practice is where we really became soccer players, where we became athletes. Games were such a small fraction of our time playing soccer. The vast majority of our time playing soccer was in practice.
And beyond our individual soccer skills, practice was where we became a team. I grew up in a small town, so many of us who began playing soccer together in 3rd grade played together through our senior year. So we knew how each other thought and played. We knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses. I played defense, so, for example, my teammates knew they could trust me to steal the ball from an attacker, but they also knew that they probably shouldn’t expect me to score many goals. So if it was between passing to me and another player near the other team’s goal, they should probably pass to the other guy.
Another part of being on a team is the interpersonal relationships you build. And most of that also happens in practice. We spent a lot of time together practicing: laughing, trash talking, occasionally fighting. We spent so much time together, we didn’t just get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses as soccer players, we also got to know each other as people. We knew who the jokesters were, who the “cool” guys were. We knew who listened to similar music and who didn’t, who liked the same hobbies and who didn’t. We knew who to avoid after a game if we lost. We knew who would prank us if we fell asleep. We learned how to interact with one another on those long bus rides between towns.
When it comes to team sports, so much emphasis gets put on games, but again, practice is where you really become an athlete. Games are just the rare glimpses when you get to put it all together. But practice is what makes you an individual player and a collective team. Practice is as real as any game, and practice is as important as any game.
This is part 2 in our 4 part sermon series on renewing love of neighbor, and each week we’re widening the circle. Last week we talked about loving our individual neighbor, today we’re going to be talking about loving our church family, next week we’ll look at loving our local community, and in the 4th week we’ll look at loving our world.
And today, I’d like to equate loving our church family to practice. But again, I don’t mean that in the sense that it doesn’t really count because it’s practice. I mean it in the sense that practice is the place where you actually become an athlete and where you actually become a team. (I know, sports metaphors are pretty cliché in sermons, but I don’t do them often, okay?!). In fact, Google Dictionary defines practice as: “the actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to theories relating to it.”
Church is the place where we really become Christians, where we really become followers of Jesus, and where we really become a community. It’s the place where we put all the beliefs, theories, theologies, and convictions of our faith into practice. (And by church I don’t just mean Sunday mornings but I also do mean Sunday mornings. I mean it’s more than Sunday Mornings, but not less). Just as winning is a direct result of training, fitness, and strategy that’s developed in practice, so our collective witness, our service, and our advocacy is a direct result of our life together.
Last week we read from 1 John: “…those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” I think we could make a similar claim this morning, that “those who can’t love their neighbor in the church, can’t love their neighbor outside of the church.”
As the Church, we have a unique bond that’s only possible through the Holy Spirit uniting us to one another in Christ. Throughout the New Testament, the church is repeatedly referred as one body, baptized into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and called to embody, quite literally, Christ’s ongoing ministry to the world.
Unity is the theme of the Church. We read, just a few weeks ago, these words from Ephesians, which come just a few verses before our reading from Ephesians this morning: “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” Unity is central to the Gospel. In Christ, Divine and human become one, Jew and Gentile become one. There is no longer a division between men and women, slave and free, “for all of you are one in Christ,” Paul says in Galatians 3, and we were all made to “drink of one Spirit,” he says in our reading from 1 Corinthians this morning.
As those who have accepted Christ’s call to repentance, have been baptized into his Church, and have committed ourselves to lives of discipleship, we are united to one another as one body with Christ as our head. After Christ’s ascension, the church became the locus of God’s redemptive work in the world. The life of the church occupies almost the entirety of the New Testament. Most of the letters in it are not written to individuals but to church communities. The book of Romans is written to the church in Rome, the book of Ephesians to the church in Ephesus, the book of Philippians to the church in Philipi, and so on and so forth. In our individualistic culture, we’ve assumed that all the “yous” in the New Testament are directed to us individually, but most often they would be better translated as “y’all.” They are written to communities, to the collective body of Christ, gathered in specific locations, like Grant Park Church in Portland, Oregon. It isn’t about how you as an individual should act, it’s about how you as the local congregation should act.
The Church is meant to be the place in the present that embodies God’s coming reign in the future. The church is meant to embody now the kind of community that will exist at the end of time, when sin and death and sorrow are no more, when we are united with God in Christ, when the redemption God began through the resurrection of Jesus is completed on a cosmic scale, when God is, indeed, all in all.
The church is to be – now – the place where love and forgiveness reign, where everyone is taken care of, where everyone belongs. The rest of the world should look at the way the church lives as a community and say, “Wow, I want in on that. I want to be loved like that. I want to live like that. I want to belong like that. I want to know God like that.”
But that kind of community doesn’t come easy. Yes, we believe that God, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit, makes a real difference in our lives at the moment of conversion, that through our confession of Christ as Lord and our baptism into the church something truly happens in us and to us, but despite that reality, we continue to fall short of perfection in our day to day lives, don’t we? We make mistakes, we’re selfish, we hurt other people, etc., etc.
But don’t get too beat up about it, because we’re not unlike the early church in that regard. I said earlier that most of the New Testament consists of letters written to church communities. Well, if you’ve read much of the New Testament, you know those letters aren’t just rosy messages reveling in how great it is to be a perfect, godly community without any strife. No, they’re all very contextual letters addressing very real problems in the early church. It turns out that the early church was a hot mess. They had all kinds of doctrinal disagreements, scandals, personal beefs, and pretty much any other drama you could think of.
That’s why there are a lot of passages in the New Testament encouraging church members to speak to one another with love, to have humility, and to forgive of one another. Because they needed to be reminded of that, because they were getting on each other’s nerves! There were all the Meyers-Briggs types, all the Enneagram numbers 1-9, there! There were a lot of conflicting personalities!
Being the church is messy. Relationships are always messy. People in the church are going to irritate you, disappoint you, and offend you, I promise. I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it many more times: I’m sure that I will personally irritated, disappointed, and/or offend you at some point if you stick around Grant Park long enough. I already have irritated, disappointed, and offended some of you! And you have in turn shown me so much grace and forgiveness. And for that I am very, very thankful.
But I can’t know that I’ve upset you if you don’t come to me and tell me, right? Part of being in true relationship with people is having hard conversations. Any married couple knows that. Paul and the other New Testament writers don’t encourage the church to be nice at the expense of truth telling. They don’t tell the early church to bottle up their feelings and keep them to themselves for the sake of civility. In our reading from Ephesians today, Paul says, “Let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for (here it is again) we are members of one another.” So we have to speak the truth to each other. Then he says “be angry but don’t sin.” So he acknowledges that we’re going to get angry with one another sometimes, but we need to handle that anger in a constructive way.
The Church is called to the very difficult task of being both loving and truthful, of uncompromisingly calling out sin for what it is and also extending forgiveness. It’s no walk in the park. To be honest, sadly, most people aren’t up for this kind of community. When we’re frustrated or angry with another person in the church, it’s easier to let the anger come out in unhealthy ways: either through avoidance, or passive aggressive comments, or angry outbursts. Or, most common these days, to just stop coming to church – to either find a new one or quit going altogether. But scripture tells us to speak the truth in love. That is, not to hold back the truth, but also not to hold back love.
And, of course, it’s worth it, because, as I said earlier, the church gets to be the place where we practice living in the kingdom of God. It’s the place where we get to become Christians, just as practice is the place where athletes really become athletes, so that when the time comes to step out on the field and help our neighbors outside these four walls, we’re of one mind and one spirit. We’re a team. We know one another.
I’m really excited about the ways I see relationships growing here at Grant Park. I’m excited that yesterday there was a women’s lunch and on Tuesday there’ll be a men’s breakfast. I’m excited for the various committees that have formed and the ways they’re working together, and the way I see people getting to know each other through those partnerships.
There’s one last thing that’s really important about practice that I want to point out, and that’s that what makes practice so effective is it’s consistency. As I said earlier, in high school my soccer team didn’t improve in a single practice. We improved by going to practice day after day after day. If half of us went to practice every day, but the other half only came sporadically, some of them coming on Tuesdays, others on Thursdays, some every other Monday, we wouldn’t be much of a team. When game time rolled around, those who hadn’t been coming would feel lost. They wouldn’t know the game plan, they wouldn’t know as well how to play their position, they wouldn’t have the skills or stamina to keep up with the other players, and they wouldn’t know their teammates either, because they just didn’t spend that much time with them.
The same is true of church. If you don’t come regularly, then you won’t know what’s going on, and probably you won’t feel as close to the other members, because you haven’t really spent time with them, which in turn will probably make you less inclined to come next time. But if you come to worship regularly and you come to other church events and you engage and you get to know the other church members, we can really become a community, we can really become a team, we can really come to love on another. And that’s what the church is all about.
Amen.