The Rev. Maureen R.
Frescott
Congregational Church
of Amherst, UCC
September 2, 2018 –
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
James 1:17-27
“Sunday
Saints”
10,000
hours.
Supposedly, that’s
how many hours of practice it takes to master any activity or skill.
If
you want to be a concert violinist, paint like Picasso, or unleash a 120 mph
tennis serve like Serena Williams, 10,000 hours of practice is the minimum
commitment needed to rise to the top of the heap.
Author
Malcolm Gladwell, popularized the 10,000 hours of practice theory in his 2008
book, Outliers.
Building
on studies done by University psychologists in the 1990’s, Gladwell proposed
that the Beatles would not have achieved the success they did, had they not
spent their formative years playing in German bars and clubs for 5-8 hours a
night, seven nights a week.
The
Beatles played an astonishing 1200 live shows before they ever set foot on the
stage of the Ed Sullivan show - which is more than most professional bands play in a lifetime.
Likewise,
Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, might not have helped launch
the age of the personal computer, had he not spent hours and hours in a
computer lab, from 8th grade onward, teaching himself to write code.
In
addition to class time, Gates spent nearly every night and weekend pouring over
printouts and typing strings of numbers into terminals that looked more like
oversized typewriters than computers.
By
the time, he dropped out of Harvard at the age of 20 to start his own software
company, Gates had been programming non-stop for seven consecutive years.
In
2010, a 30-year-old commercial photographer named Dan McLaughlin, was so inspired
by Gladwell’s book, and the 10,000 hour mastery theory, he quit his job and set
out to become a professional golfer with the goal of making the PGA Tour,
having never swung a golf club in his life.
McLaughlin
built his game from the ground up.
For
months, all he did was practice his putting.
Gradually,
he added wedges and irons and worked on his swing on the driving range.
It
was 18 months before he played his first full round of golf.
At
his peak, he was playing 18 holes a day, with an additional 4 hours a day spent
on the putting green and driving range.
After
five years, and 5,000 hours of practice, McLaughlin had pared his handicap down
to 2.6—a mark achieved by fewer than 6% of golfers.
But
when he could no longer afford the membership fees at an elite club, where he
played with pros who gave him tips on how to improve his game, McLaughlin switched
to a public course and found playing amongst the weekend warriors to be far less
motivating.
The
quality of his practice time went down, and after 6,000 hours his body fatigued
and his back went out.
He
couldn’t swing a club for six months, and now, eight years later, with his body
no longer able to withstand the rigors of playing golf every day,
he
has given up on his quest.
The
10,000-hours of practice theory has since been challenged,
as subsequent
studies have shown that it’s the quality of practice hours, not the quantity,
that leads to the mastery of a skill.
And
even Gladwell has clarified his previous claim with the caveat that 10,000
hours of dedicated practice won’t get you very far if you lack the talent,
mental acuity, and physical capability to master a chosen task.
Gladwell
writes, “I could play chess for 100 years and I'll never be a grandmaster. The
point is simply that natural ability requires a huge investment of time in
order to be made manifest.”
So
what hope do we have as practicing
Christians as we attempt to master this thing we call “following in the
footsteps of Jesus?”
Knowing
that the only way to become proficient at feeding the hungry, welcoming the
stranger, and forgiving seventy times seventy is to practice it, over and over
again.
There
are no shortage of scripture passages, like the one we just heard from the
Epistle of James, that lay out a path for the practicing Christian to follow.
The
early Christian communities were eager to receive such instructions on how they
might differentiate themselves or build upon what they’ve learned from the faith
traditions in which they were raised.
Especially
those communities that were isolated, like the dispersed Jewish-Christian
community that James was writing to.
With
their fellow Christians so far away, they turned to the gospels and the letters
of the apostles to teach them what it meant to be a follower of Christ.
Some
of it was familiar, as the teachings of Jesus came straight out of the Torah,
but much of it challenged them in a new way.
Be
slow to anger.
Practice
kindness.
Refrain
from speaking ill of others and holding grudges.
Return
no evil for evil.
Be
doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves into thinking
they are righteous and religious.
These
are not easy tasks to master.
Between
the Ten Commandments, and the Greatest Commandment, which directs us to Love God
and our NEIGHBOR as we love ourselves,
it’s
no wonder that so many of us fail miserably at this thing we call religion.
Even
though many of us have been doing it for most of our lives
If
we embrace the 10,000-hours of practice theory, and think about how many hours
a week we devote to practicing our faith, we can see how we might be coming up
short.
At
the bare minimum, the hour we spend in worship every Sunday only gives us 52
hours of formal practice a year, if we attend every week.
Even
if we were carried into a church at birth and are carried out at the age of 100,
this amounts to only 5,200 hours, or less than 1% of our lives, where our focus
is fully on practicing our faith and communing with God.
This
is of course, ridiculous.
Faith
and religious conviction can’t be quantified in this way.
Few
of us limit our faith practice time to Sunday mornings, yet conversely, even
when we’re here in the presence of God, singing the hymns and saying the
prayers, our minds are not always focused on quality over quantity.
Even
pastors are guilty of having their minds wander during worship, thinking about
what comes next in the service, and how close to 11:00 we can get this all
done…especially on Communion Sundays.
What
does it even mean to be a practicing Christian?
Do
we have to attend worship a certain number of times a month?
Does coming 2 or 3
times a year count?
Do
we have to be an official member of a church, with our name appearing on the
membership rolls? Or is supporting a church financially and volunteering our
time in service enough evidence of our commitment?
Do
we have to be baptized to be considered a true follower of Christ?
Or
does Jesus welcome us all to his table, regardless of whether we’ve gone
through the ritual or spoken the words aloud which invite Christ into our
hearts?
Some
would say we’ve made it too easy to be a follower of Christ – that it’s too easy
to claim the name of Christian, or claim a church as our own – with no baptism,
membership, attendance, or financial support needed or required.
How
can we say we’re committed to Christ if we won’t commit ourselves to the
community formed in his name?
Perhaps
because too often the community formed in his name is not very committed to
Christ.
When
I tell people in passing that I’m a pastor of a church, it is amazing how many
of them feel the need to confess that they no longer make time in their lives
for organized religion.
Guilt
plays a huge part in this.
Whether
I’m at the dentist, or sitting on an airplane, or talking to the workers fixing
the roof on our house, telling people that I’m a pastor is like holding up a
sign that says, “God knows that you haven’t been to church in a while and he
wants to know why.”
And they always tell me why.
Too
much hypocrisy, they say.
Too
much judgment about rules being broken being dished out by those who break the
rules themselves.
Too
much fear and rejection, and not enough love and compassion.
Too
many people who are Saints on Sundays but conveniently forget how to practice
their faith on Mondays.
If
this is the perception that people have of the Christian church, then we
Christians as a whole must not be very good at putting our faith into practice.
And
just as likely, those who have walked away may have unrealistic expectations of
what it means to be part of an imperfect community.
They may not know that there are Christian communities that openly admit that we
doesn’t always get it right – that none of us is an expert at walking in the
Way of Jesus.
But
as a community we’re willing to try…and willing to be forgiving when we fail
over and over again.
Because
that’s how we learn how to be Christians…
by
practicing our faith on one another.
Let’s
go back to the epistle of James.
Where we find these words:
“In
fulfillment of his own purpose, God gave us birth by the word of truth, so that
we would become a kind of first fruits of creation.”
This
speaks to the natural ability that God has given each one of us, the natural
capacity for love and compassion, that comes to life through us, and serves as
evidence that God is moving in our world.
But
we often allow this natural ability to be hindered by fear and distrust.
And
it takes a lifetime of practice for us to overcome that.
As
Malcom Gladwell wrote, our “natural ability requires a huge investment of time
in order to be made manifest.”
Finally,
let’s go back to Dan McLaughlin, who fell short in his quest to become a
professional golfer, even though he showed that he likely had the natural
ability to back it up.
What
success stories like those of Bill Gates and the Beatles tell us is that it
takes more than time and talent to master a skill.
It
takes passion.
It
takes a love and devotion to ones craft that makes the hours spent performing
on stage or buried in code at a computer terminal seemingly fly by.
It
takes a willingness to push oneself beyond discomfort and failures because both
make the journey more meaningful and the results so much more rewarding.
Dan
McLaughlin admitted that he grew to love golf, but passion was never the animating
principle that motivated him to play.
He
said, “At the end of the day, I could walk away and say, “What’s next?”
So
beyond the hours we spend in church, and beyond the quality time we devote to
practicing our faith in the world in service to others,
if
we’re not doing it because we’re passionate about manifesting this presence of
God in the world – about living into our God-given ability to become the first
fruits of creation –
If
we’re not passionate about that –
Then
we should seek to understand what our passion is.
What
motivates us to want to be part of a practicing Christian community?
What
is pushing or pulling us to want to be here on a Sunday morning?
And
once we can name what that passion is,
all
it takes is practice, practice, practice,
and
the willingness to be transformed by the gospel of Christ –
as we to
become a master of our journey.
Thanks be to God, and Amen.
