Ephesians 4:1-6
June 26, 2011
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.
Many of you heard that I wasn’t in worship on Memorial Day weekend because I was taking part in a special event. I was down in Baltimore, Maryland, taking part in a celebration on the field of the Baltimore Ravens’ stadium. Every year the NCAA hosts the college lacrosse championships at a major stadium, where they attract upwards of 50,000 people. On that Sunday, the 1978 Roanoke Lacrosse team, which won the Division II-III championship, was introduced and celebrated at halftime of the Division II championship game. It was a fun event, and an honor, to be part of that group.
Before and after the event, I spent time reflecting on what it meant to me to be part of a championship team. Even though we were a small college of only 1200 students, we competed and beat most of the teams that came from the biggest universities. For example, we beat Duke University, Virginia Tech, North Carolina State, and others with big-name college lacrosse pedigrees.
I learned a lot from being on that championship team, even though I was only a freshman. I didn’t have a big role, but I absorbed a lot, especially learning lessons that I use in being pastor of this church. And one of the biggest lessons I learned was about what to do when things aren’t going well. I learned that when things go awry, focus on the fundamentals.
The first time I really saw this principle in play was after we lost to the University of North Carolina. The game was a close one, and it was one of only two losses we had that year. We were as good a team as them, but we just didn’t play well as a team. We struggled to find continuity. The low point of the game was when the goalie, who had the ball (goalies in lacrosse often come out of the goal to carry the ball up field to look for open players), couldn’t find anyone open, so he tossed the ball backwards to a player he thought was behind him. There was no one there, and the ball bounced into our own goal.
At our next practice, I expected the coach to do what we all want coaches of our favorite teams to do when things don’t go well. You know what I’m talking about. Whenever the Steelers or Penguins are doing really poorly, we say to others, “The coach needs to let them have it and yell at them! He needs to wake them up.” I expected that we would be yelled at, but instead the coach said to us very calmly, “We didn’t lose to UNC because they were better than us. We lost to them because they played better than us. They did the simple things better, and that’s what we need to get back to.” So we spent the whole practice working on our fundamentals. In lacrosse, the fundamentals are picking up the ball, throwing the ball, catching the ball, and shooting the ball. We spent 2 and ½ hours doing drills.
We started out doing what are called ground balls. The ball would be thrown out and we’d have to pick it up and throw it back. Then we would do one-on-one’s, where the ball would be thrown out and we’d have to compete with another to get the ball. Then we’d do two-on-one’s, with the person in the middle competing against the two on the outside. The expectation was that the person in the middle would beat the two. We moved onto catching and throwing. The whole practice was culminated in a weaving drill. We were broken up into groups of three. We had to run all 120 yards of the field, passing the ball back and forth to each other, while moving from the wing to the middle and back out to the wing. We were told that we couldn’t leave the field until we managed to go the length of the field without dropping the ball.
By the next game, we were a different team. We were solid. We were fundamentally sound. I’ve since learned that the really good coaches are always like this. I’ve been able to watch the Steelers’ coaches—Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher, and Mike Tomlin—and they all respond to losses by focusing on the fundamentals. I’ve noticed the same things when the Pirates and Penguins were winning championships. Championship coaches lead their players to play fundamentally sound, and all other success flow out of that. We responded to that loss by focusing on fundamentals, and that philosophy remained the same all four years I played.
I also learned from lacrosse how ineffective yelling can be. I’ve learned that the best coaches rarely yell in anger. They teach. Our college deviated from our norm of focusing on fundamentals in one game during my senior year. We were playing North Carolina State University as part of a double-header lacrosse game that also featured the University of Virginia against the University of Maryland. ESPN was televising both games, so this was perhaps part of my fifteen minutes of fame. By halftime we were down 10-3. And we weren’t playing even that well. We gathered in the locker room. The coach came in and proceeded to yell at us. He overturned tables in his anger. We were so motivated after that we ended up losing the game 23-11. We were worse in the second half than the first. What we needed was a way to calm down and focus. We needed simple instructions on how to get back into the game. We had a young team that was making fundamental mistakes. The yelling just magnified our problems. He never did that again, and in the future we always went back to fundamentals.
I learned a lot of lessons from those games, lessons that have influenced my faith and my life. One of the prominent lessons I learned is that when anything in life gets confusing, difficult, or uncertain, we need to focus on the fundamentals.
Unfortunately, when most of us go through tough times, instead of focusing on the fundamentals, we tend to look for answers that make our lives more complicated. And the added complexities tend to make our lives harder. Richie Furay is a perfect example of this, and of how focusing on life’s fundamentals can get us back on track.
Do you recognize Furay’s name. You’ve most certainly heard his voice. Furay is a musician who first gained notoriety as part of the Au Go Go Singers in New York City in the early 1960s. The group only recorded one album, but it was a first step to his greater fame. Stephen Stills was part of that group. After the group folded, both moved out to L.A., where they joined some other up-and-coming artists, such Neil Young and Jim Messina (later of Loggins and Messina), to form a supergroup. It lasted only three years, but they produced some really memorable songs. Their group was Buffalo Springfield, and they are known for songs such as “For What It’s Worth,” “Mr. Soul,” and “Rock and Roll Woman.”
As one of the lead singers, Furay was riding on the top of the world. He had fame, fortune, and everything he could want. His life was moving fast. Then everything crashed as the group broke up. Stephen Stills and Neill Young formed a new group with David Crosby from The Byrds, and Graham Nash from The Hollies. Jim Messina formed a new group with Kenny Loggins. Furay struggled for a while, but got it all back when he formed a new group called Poco, which became well known for a number of songs in the early 1970s.
Still, not everything was right. He was popular, playing sold-out halls and stadiums, and wealthy beyond his dreams. But something was wrong. It all came crashing down when he almost overdosed while in Paris. He realized things weren’t right, but he didn’t know what to do. He left Poco to form the Souther Hillman Furay Band, a band that also had some top hits. His life fell further apart, despite his success. It was during his seven-month separation from his wife that he started to focus on the fundamentals. He decided to put faith at the center of his life. From there everything changed.
He started attending the Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, and there he worked on creating a solid foundation for his life. It led to his wife and he getting back together. In 1982, he felt called to take his faith deeper and become a pastor, eventually starting the Calvary Chapel in Boulder, Colorado. He has been pastor there ever since. This doesn’t mean that he’s disconnected from life, while living in a religious reverie. He continues to play music, both Christian and rock. He’s rejoined with Stephen Still, Neil Young, and others to tour this fall with Buffalo Springfield. The difference is that now he’s doing so with the fundamentals in place.
Furay learned a lesson we all need to learn. As Christians, we’ve been given fundamentals. These aren’t the fundamentals that fundamentalists believe in. Those are theological fundamentals that often feel oppressive and restrictive. I’m talking about spiritual fundamentals that simplify and ground our lives. Just as in lacrosse, where the fundamentals are picking up the ball, catching the ball, throwing the ball, protecting the ball, and shooting the ball, in the life of faith there are fundamentals. And the spiritual fundamentals ultimately are those that help us love God and love others.
Our passage gives us some of these fundamentals. Among them are the fundamentals of our passage. I want to close by sharing some of these fundamentals with you to help you get a sense of how to root your life.
The first fundamental comes from Paul’s statement that he begs us to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called. He is saying that all of us have a calling in life, and our callings are distinct from those of others.
My calling is probably easier to recognize than yours, but that’s because they church has given my calling a title: pastor. To be a pastor isn’t the only calling, nor the most important one. I have other callings, too, some of which are more important. At one point my calling was to be an athlete. Now I’m called to be a writer, a teacher, a counselor, a spiritual guide, a father, and a husband. All of us have callings in life. Our careers and jobs may be part of our callings, but there’s much more to them. We’re called to find ways to love others, and care for others, to make the world better in our own small ways in the places we are—at work, home, with friends, or even in stadiums. The question is whether we pay attention to our callings. Do we seek God’s calling for us in life, in whatever stage of life we are living, and in each moment? To get back to the fundamentals of life means to spend time asking what our calling is, and to try to the best of our abilities to live that calling out.
Another fundamental is to live lives of humility and gentleness. What that means is that we are quit thinking so highly of ourselves, and instead to treat others with gentleness and consideration. To be humble doesn’t mean to become will-less and weak. It takes a lot of strength to be humble. It means having a strong enough ego to not have to be the center of the universe. It means being strong enough to not be offended by other’s slights. It means to be strong enough to put others first, especially God.
Humility means recognizing that at our foundations we are nothing but glorified dirt. The world “humble” comes from the word dirt. It comes from “humus,” or “earth,” which is also the root of the word “human.” To be humble means to recognize that we were created from earth, and that whatever we have that’s special comes from God’s breath—God’s Spirit—within us.
Patience is another fundamental. The life of faith is a life of patience. We recognize that God is really patient with us, and so we need to be patient with others. Impatience is arrogance. It’s thinking that the world must revolve around our schedule. Patience recognizes that some things take time. God takes time. And we often have to wait for God. The life of faith is fundamentally built on being patient with God, being patient with others, and being patient with life.
Finally, Paul talks about living in unity, saying that we should make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. In other words, we should find ways to work on what connects us, not divides us. We Americans aren’t good at this. We’ve become very good at dividing over everything: political belief, generational differences, faith differences, racial and ethnical difference, economic differences, and so much more. The life of faith calls us to union, not division.
I learned from being on a championship team that the greatest teams have this kind of unity. They have stars, but the stars are never more important than the unity of the team. To gain this kind of unity in faith, it requires being rooted in our callings, becoming humble and gentle, and becoming patient.
Living a life of faith isn’t necessarily hard, but it does require being grounded in fundamentals that form a foundation for our lives. And this is especially true whenever we begin to struggle. The question for us to answer is whether our lives our grounded in fundamentals, or in something else?
Amen.
