3 John 1-8
September 16, 2012
The elder to the beloved Gaius, whom I
love in truth. Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may
be in good health, just as it is well with your soul.
I was overjoyed when some of the
friends arrived and testified to your faithfulness to the truth, namely how you
walk in the truth. I have no greater joy than this, to hear that my children
are walking in the truth. Beloved, you do faithfully whatever you do for the friends,
even though they are strangers to you; they have testified to your love before
the church. You will do well to send them on in a manner worthy of God; for
they began their journey for the sake of Christ, accepting no support from
non-believers. Therefore we ought to support such people, so that we may become
co-workers with the truth.
I might be testing your powers of observation with this
one, but If you haven’t noticed, I’m a guy. And one of the prerequisites to
being a guy is that we have to like sports movies. It’s part of our DNA. If we
don’t like sports movies, we get kicked out of the guy club—whatever the “guy”
club is.
Like a lot of guys, I get a little misty eyed over sports
films such as Remember the Titans, which
is the true story of the 1971, T.C. Williams High School football team, in
Alexandria, Virginia, that was forced to integrate along with the school. Their
new football coach was African-American, and the movie followed the struggles
of the team to integrate on its way to winning the Virginia state championship.
Another film that gets me misty-eyed is
Miracle, which is about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that, against all
odds, beat the Russians and also won the gold medal.
The funny thing is that these are really the only two
films I like that involve my favorite sports. I’ve seen a bunch of football and
hockey movies, but for me most of them aren’t memorable. The irony is that the
sports films I like best are in the sports I like the least. There are a number
of baseball films that I love, Bull
Durham, A League of Their Own, The Rookie, and Field of Dreams. There are a number of golf movies that I love,
such as Tin Cup and The Greatest Game Ever Played. Also among
my favorites is a basketball film, despite basketball being my least favorite
sport of all. This film is called Glory
Road. It chronicles the 1966 Western Texas University basketball team
during its one and only NCAA Division I championship season. The team was
notable because the players were predominantly African American, and the coach
of the team decided to take a stand against the country’s bigotry by playing only
the African American players against the all-white University of Kentucky in
the championship game. The Western Texas team had suffered a fair amount of
racial slurs and incidents, including the mugging of a player and the
desecration of the players’ belongings at a hotel, during their championship
season. The coach of the team, Don Haskins, made a monumental decision to only
play his African American players to stand up against the bigoted belief by
many whites that African Americans were too stupid and ignorant to win without
white players in the mix.
I didn’t bring this up so that I could give you a review
of my favorite sports movies. I brought it up so that I could give you some
context before talking about an inspiring scene in Glory Road. There is one scene that stands out to me because it
reflects our passage and spiritual fruit for this morning: faithfulness.
The Western Texas team had a center and power forward
named Neville Shed. He was a talented player, but he was also a timid player.
In one scene, he and David Lattin, the towering starting center of the team, go
up for a rebound. Shed is timid and gets bounced to the ground. The coach yells
at Shed, calling him out for his timidity. The next day he busts into Shed’s dorm
room and begins to pack Shed’s bags, telling him that he’s too scared to play
for the team. Shed is devastated, and begs the coach to take him back, but
Haskins is resolute, saying, “Here’s your
ticket home.”
Shed doesn’t know what to do. He spends time alone
reflecting in anguish. Finally he shows up for practice the next day. The coach
is in the middle of giving a speech to his players, telling them that they are
talented, disciplined, but above all care about each other. This is important
because Haskins is telling them that one of their fundamental qualities is
their faithfulness to each other—they’re
willingness to sacrifice and do what’s necessary for each other.
After the speech, Shed comes up to Haskins and says that
he’s ready to play. The coach dismisses him, telling him to go home. Shed
persists, eventually yelling, “LET ME PLAY!” Haskins relents, letting him
practice, and an inspired and tough Shed competes under the hoops. Gathering a
rebound away from Lattin, he falls to the floor and breaks his nose. But he
won’t leave the court until the coach finally tells him to get his nose fixed.
Shed comes back on the court with cotton in his nose wearing a baseball
catcher’s mask. He tells the coach that he won’t leave the court. Finally
Haskins says, “Go get your nose fixed. We’ll need you in the game
tomorrow.”
This was an important moment for Neville Shed because it
turned around his whole life. He eventually was drafted by the Boston Celtics,
played in the NBA for 12 years, and returned to Western Texas (later named the
University of Texas at El Paso) as an assistant coach to Don Haskins.
This scene from the movie inspires me because it speaks
to the importance of faithfulness in overcoming obstacles. But even more
importantly, it speaks to living life together. Without faithfulness to each
other in our relationships, no matter what the situation is, life becomes
harder.
Teams cannot win unless their players are faithful to
each other—unless the players are willing to trust, sacrifice, and give of
themselves completely to others. Faithfulness is a key element of living a
deeper life. Faithfulness is different from faith. Faith is trusting in God,
but faithfulness is being able to be fully
trusted by God, and a lot of Christians are missing this part of faith.
So many people demand that God be available to them when
they’re in need, but they’re not necessarily available to God the rest of the
time. They’ll blame God for not answering their prayers, but they never ask the
question, “Have I been a person through whom God can answer prayers?” They want
God to be completely available to them when they are in dire straights, but are
they available to God during good times, when life is going okay, or when they
aren’t in need? Are they available to God when God is calling them to worship,
prayer, study, service, and love?
Paul emphasized faithfulness because he knew that to
really experience Christ in our lives, to really discover the Holy Spirit, we
have to be faithful and be committed to God and to each other. We can’t truly
be Christian if we’re all about ourselves. Part of being authentic Christians
means being available to others and being able to be trusted by others. John
praised this kind of faithfulness in our passage.
Our passage is a letter from John, or someone writing in
John’s name (no one’s really sure, but that’s an issue for biblical scholars),
praising Gaius for his faithfulness in taking in missionaries. Gaius not only
took them in, but was generous with them, acting as a faithful host for Christ.
John and Paul are saying that the willingness to be faithful to each other has
to be at the foundation of our love for each other.
We live in an unfaithful culture. People don’t want to be
committed to each other. This is especially true in terms of faith. You hear
people say that they are “spiritual but not religious.” I tend to be
sympathetic to them because I recognize that they are accurately saying that
most of our churches are religious but not spiritual. And in many cases they’re
right because churches tend to be more about religious conformity or
theological orthodoxy. Still, there’s a major problem with the “spiritual but
not religious” way of thinking. Its fundamental flaw is that it is also a way
of saying “I have faith but little faithfulness.” It says that we are not
willing to be committed to others on the spiritual journey, and in that way it
says that we aren’t necessarily willing to be committed to God on the spiritual
journey. People today lack the willingness to commit to God as much as they
want God to commit to them.
Add to this all that we live in an entertainment culture,
a culture in which we will only commit to that which is fun or has a payoff.
Many people lack faithfulness because commitment isn’t always fun, and they
don’t see church as being fun. I don’t know that I would agree that church
isn’t fun (we try to make worship at Calvin Presbyterian Church both
enlightening and fun), but I’ll admit that church isn’t fun like watching football.
There’s a reason. Church isn’t meant to be entertainment. It is meant to help
people grow spiritually, to grow closer to God, and to become mature. The fact
is that like anything else designed to help us grow, whether it’s school or
training programs, fun is secondary to learning and growing.
Many of the non-denominational, contemporary churches
recognize that they compete with entertainment. So they try to be entertaining.
Let me give you an example of this. This past week one of the pastors of a
local, non-denominational, contemporary church in Cranberry put this on his Facebook
page to coincide with the start of the NFL season: “Know guys who think church isn't for them? Invite em to [our church]
tomorrow. Promise the experience will be more ‘football’ than ‘church.’"
That phrase, “more ‘football’ than ‘church’” says a lot
about our culture, but it also hides the fact that faithfulness to God, as well
as each other, takes work. I say this because I’ve done the work, as has Connie
Frierson, our associate pastor.
As pastor I’m trying to lead you to where I’ve been. I
didn’t get my Master of Divinity to become a pastor. I did it because I had
questions about God, and I was willing to do the work to get answers. I went on
to get a Ph.D. in spiritual formation because I still had questions—more questions
as a result of getting an M.Div.—and I wanted answers. I certainly didn’t do it
because I would make more money from it. I’ve gotten no boost financially from
my Ph.D. No one pays me more for it, but I was willing to do five years of work
on it because I wanted to be faithful to God and work to grow.
Connie and I also try to lead you into this kind of
faithfulness—an availability to God that says we will not only trust God with
our lives, but we will be people God can trust with life.
I’m going to challenge you this morning. Look at your
life. How are you faithful, and are you willing to grow in faithfulness not
only to God, but to each other? For instance, if you worship every week, what
else are you willing to do to take that next step? If you worship
semi-regularly, are you willing to step that up and become more available to
God? If you only come to church once in a while, are you willing to become more
committed so that you can become more available to God? The point isn’t to get
more people in church. The point is to get more God into you. What are you
willing to do to become more faithful to God?
Amen.
