The Rev. Neale L. Miller

Sermon for March 18, 2007

Texts: Joshua 5:1-12/2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Title: “What Practice Makes”

             You might ask violinist Itzhak Perlman what practice makes. Ask NASCAR champion Jimmy Johnson what practice makes.  Ask poet Mary Oliver what practice makes.  Ask golfer Tiger Woods what practice makes.  Ask Saint’s Coach Sean Payton what practice makes.

              Poll any of the people I have mentioned, and you might come up with a variety of answers, but in that variety of answers I doubt seriously that the word “perfect” would appear.  Practice makes a lot of things, but counter the old saying, practice definitely doesn’t make perfect.

              So what does practice make? Itzhak Perlman might tell you practice makes a full schedule of performances in the world’s major concert halls. Jimmy Johnson might tell you practice makes the winner’s circle at Daytona or Rockingham.  Mary Oliver might tell you practice makes a Pulitzer Prize. Tiger Woods might tell you practice makes a ton of money.  Ask Sean Payton what practice makes and he very well might tell you a Super Bowl. 

              What practice makes?  The first thing that comes to mind for me is self-knowledge.  When I have really put my mind to something that required practice, something like studying for example, I can tell you I learned a lot about myself.  Studying was not something that came naturally to me. When I figured out, and I was slow on the uptake, that I had to hit the books to make progress toward my goals, those first unfamiliar hours spent alone with the books were eye opening.

              You better believe that Tiger Woods learned a lot about himself out there on the practice range hitting bucket after bucket of balls.  You better believe that Jimmy Johnson learned a lot about himself the first time he took one of those high banked turns at Daytona at 180 miles an hour.

              What practice makes?  Wisdom is another byproduct of practice.  The violinist Perlman at his present age of 61 no doubt lacks the physical dexterity to play as he did at 40, but the hours of practice he has logged provides him insight into the music he plays insights that compensate for his diminished physical gifts. 

              I think of Sean Payton who about a year ago this time was named the Saints head coach.  First time as the head man, you better believe that a full season of head coaching experience, practice, behind him, he is much wiser in managing his responsibilities then when he first took the reins.

            What practice makes? Another byproduct of practice is humility.  Have you ever dedicated yourself to an activity in which you really wanted to succeed?  Many of us have taken a run at playing a musical instrument.  A Mozart sonata played by Van Cliburn can sweep us off our feet, but have you ever sat down and attempted to play the scales?  The piano has humbled many, many people. Practice makes humility. 

             Practice also makes frustration.  Humility comes first, and then frustration.  Humbled by a task, playing the piano, swimming, bowling, or painting, frustration often builds when we don’t make the kind of progress we expected we would be making.

                  What practice makes? If we can get past the frustration, and other such distracters, practice can, and often does, make competence. There are obviously levels of competence. There are competent golfers in this congregation, but none of you is competent at the Tiger Woods level of competence.  [I’m sure there are competent golfers out there, but none of you is competent at the Tiger Woods level of competence.  If you are, I might ask why you are here.] Practice can make us competent, but it can’t take us beyond the level of the innate talent we possess.

                  Practice makes a lot of things but one thing it can’t make is perfect. But how to define perfect?  The great philosophers and theologians of old took their shot, the efforts of the great Aristotle yielding a definition with which most of his peers, most thoughtful people of any age, might agree. Aristotle defined the perfect as that which is “complete, which contains all the requisite parts.” The Rolls-Royce, arguably the most luxurious automobile on the market today, may come close to being perfect, “[containing] all the requisite parts,” and then some, but is it the “perfect” automobile? 

                   Aristotle defined the perfect as “that which is good that nothing of the kind could be better.”  The beauty Itzhak Perlman is able to summon out of a Beethoven violin concerto may levitate us out of our seats, but is his the definitive performance, so good that a “better” is an impossibility? Finally, Aristotle defined the perfect as “that which has attained its purpose.”  Can a football team be said to have attained its purpose by winning one, or even twenty, Super Bowls.  Perfect would be, well, perfect, never losing a game, let alone a Super Bowl.

                  Practice “makes” a lot of things, but don’t place “perfect” on that list.  In fact, perfection is out of the reach of mere mortals, whether you happen to be teeing up a golf ball or driving a race car all out.  Oh, perfection does exist, only several degrees above the plane on which our daily lives are lived.

                  The renown cellist Pablo Casals was interviewed at age 95 by a young reporter.  In the process of the interview the reporter asked the following question, “Mr. Casals, you are 95, and the greatest cellist that every lived.  Why do you still practice six hours every day?”  Without missing a beat, the cellist responded, “Because I think I’m making progress.”  

                  Perfection in our golf, our music, our cars, is out of reach, but not so practice, as Pablo Casals so insightfully testified. We can practice all we want, as little, or as much as six hours a day. It is in practice, in establishing and working toward goals that we learn, grow, and expand our horizons, even as Pablo Casals, in his tenth decade of life, demonstrated.

                 Practice, life is about practice, not perfection.  No, we don’t perfect life, we practice it. Joshua and the Israelites trekking through the wilderness to Canaan and the Promised Land, could tell us a great deal about practice. Forty some years of practice in the wilderness, practice that saw harrowing escapes from death, and death, death that swallowed up hundreds who had originally set out from Egypt, death that even swallowed up Israel’s two most prominent guides through the wilderness, Aaron and Moses. Forty years of practice.

                The Israelites, learned, grew, and expanded their horizons, each gain they made hard won. They practiced, but often their practice led them down dead ends and caused great hardship. Make no mistake, Israel was a quarrelsome lot, giving Moses more grief than he could bear without God’s help.  Many of the quarrelsome paid with their lives for their stubbornness, others equally stubborn, but less demonstrative, passed from the scene with less fanfare.

                 Life under God is all about practice, not perfection. Practice, however, is not an end in itself.  As Christians we believe that God steps in to direct our practice to the ends he has chosen---we call that divine providence----and those ends have everything to do with holiness, holiness which is may be defined as right relationship with God.

                  God, under Moses, schooled the Israelites in her practice.  The Passover celebration commemorating Israel’s release from bondage in Egypt was foremost in her practice, but Sabbath, dietary, and other laws regulating the conduct of the nation, also had their place.

                  In their denial of God the Israelites would from time to time deviate in their practice, but God wouldn’t have it.  God sent his prophets to correct them and get them back on track. It was holiness God sought in his chosen, faithful practice. 

               Poised to enter Canaan, the Promised Land, God oversaw two rites of passage, two forms of practice, to secure Israel in holiness.  The ancient rite of circumcision was mandated in the law for all male children, this to identify to the world that Israel was a people set apart as God’s own, a holy nation.  The second rite of passage, Passover, was celebrated to commemorate God’s intervention in history to rescue Israel from oppression.

                 The Passover our lesson from Joshua talks about was decisive for it marked the official end of God’s custodial care of the nation, the produce that Israel would grow and harvest in Canaan by her own hand, replacing the manna God had provided during the forty-year wilderness passage.

                 The church is all about holy practice. God enjoins us to be holy, to live consistent with his will.  But we, like our Israel predecessors, miss the mark. We are tempted to deviate, to stray off course.  Our practice in important areas does nothing to distinguish us from what the world around us is doing, and fact of matter is no name we assign to ourselves, “Christian,” or “church,” no activity we undertaken, will mean anything unless we get our practice right.

                  Some one hundred and thirty five years ago some folks gathering at the National Sunday School Convention in Indianapolis decided that it was time to do something that would help shape good Christian practice. The byproduct of those efforts would eventually become known as the “Uniform Series, International Bible Lessons for Christian Teaching.”  The intent of the series, along with the many curricula we have used in this church, is to place in our hands tools for shaping holy practice.

Pablo Casals, ninety years of cello practice behind him, could say that he was “making progress” in his musical quest. Is not progress, friends, not perfection, all that God in Christ really expects from us?  Are we making progress? During this Lenten season that question looms large as the scriptures read, sermons preached, and hymns sung attempt to bring that question into focus.

               It is humbling to take up the question of progress as it relates to our life with God.  It must have been humbling for the Israelites poised at the river Jordan ready to enter the Promised Land, knowing that they were living to see a day the hundreds of people who set out from Egypt under Moses would never see. A new day was in the offing, ahead of them a new claim to stake out with land to clear and crops to plant, but first circumcision and Passover, holy practices.

              Centuries later, but very near the spot where Israel encamped before entering the Promised Land, holy practice would find a new focus, oh yes, circumcision and Passover, at least initially, would be part of it, but holy practice would center on a man, a man both human and divine, God’s own son, Jesus.

             Perfect, yes, perfect as God himself is perfect, but it was not perfection that Jesus taught, it was practice, practices through which the likes of you and I could attain the fullness of life. Frankly, the practices did not commend themselves much at first, not even to some of Jesus’ closest followers. Servanthood is not the role of choice for those who want to make a splash, and make a name for themselves in the world, but the people around him never convinced Jesus to deviate from his practice. Jesus knew that his practice led to a place all whom he met, all of us, needed to be.

               Jesus practiced something new.  He didn’t talk about it in the same way that the Apostle Paul would talk about it, but it worked out to be the same thing.  Jesus practiced reconciliation, and he practiced in the most dramatic way imaginable, he surrendered himself into the hands of his persecutors, was tried by them, was sentenced to death, and died a ghastly death on the cross.  He died to the enemies of God, that we might have life.                He did for us what we could not do for ourselves, he reconciled us to God.  But what does that mean?  Let’s let Paul have the floor.  “So [Paul writes] if anyone is in Christ [follows the practices he himself practiced] if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” Behind the word “new” the editors of the Bible place a big exclamation mark.   

                “New,” there is a new creation.  Note that Paul did not say a perfect creation.  But we will take new, won’t we?  You and I know enough about the “new” Paul was talking about to show up here, [in churches like this one] to pray, and to fellowship as a family who in our common life seek to better understand what reconciliation has won for us [even to take the next step and prepare Bible lessons designed to make the  “new” assessable to an ever larger audience].

                What practice makes.  Lessons of life have taught us that practice does not make perfect.  What practice does make is progress, and progress in this vocation we call faith is obtainable, but not by what we do, but by what God in Christ has already done. We are reconciled to God.  Now that, friends, is likely to be the closest any of us will every get to perfection.  AMEN.   

PRAYER

             Heavenly Father, even as Israel strove for a prize, Canaan, the Promised Land, so we also seek a prize, the prize of eternal life you have promised us through Jesus, your son.  Though we are learning day by day that you can be trusted, that you are faithful in your word and your deeds, we struggle to believe that good will at last triumph over evil, that your eternal reign will be established on the earth. We pray for outcomes that we cannot envision, a day when we shall know you and we are known by you, a day when sickness and heartache are left behind, and war is but a footnote in a history we have long since outlived. Brace us when doubt assails us, and we cannot bring ourselves to believe that anything will change.

                  We live in a small sliver of time, O God, our youngest children the only ones among us likely to see the dawn of the next century. The centuries come and they go, but as the great hymn of the church declares, “naught changes thee.”  Amid the changes of this fickle world, O God, help us to build a faith substantial enough to believe that you will always be near to hear our prayers and to act.

                  Living God, you commission us to guard the faith as our special treasure and transmit it to succeeding generations. We in this church stand in a great tradition of faithful men and women who took that responsibility seriously. Even in this time of vulnerability and uncertainty, we heed the call to continue the work that has already been done.  We thank you for the session of the church, and each member of our congregation who has assumed responsibility for the preservation and expansion of this ministry.  Embolden us to think expansively about our vocation, even as we mind the day to day details of restoration. Be patient and forbearing with us, O God, when we allow our own agendas as a congregation to command a disproportionate amount of our time and energy.     

                   Even as the Congress debates proposals to end our involvement in Iraq by a fixed date, we pray that you will be with the members of both houses of Congress, and the President, and those who serve under him in the Executive branch, that through their collective wisdom your will might be done. A God who loves all the children you created, we look on as lives are wasted in this war and other wars around the globe, we are disgusted by what we see, and call down your wrath on those responsible for those outrages.  Why do the wicked live to kill and maim while the innocent die so needlessly? We seek answers, but can’t find them amid the carnage.  O God, reveal yourself, we pray.

                 Lord, we pray for our mayor, the city counsel, and all those who are at work to make this city a better place in which to live.  We pray for dedicated teachers who are committed to educating the next generation of citizens of this city.  We pray for our over burdened police department, and other city agencies that are forced to perform their duties with inadequate resources. We pray for those in the mental health fields who face increased case loads but also lack the resources to make the effort required. We pray for doctors and nurses, and those who serve the community through our city’s hospitals.  Abide with them in these trying times.

           O God, enfold those present here today in your loving embrace.  Bless those who bring special needs that their prayers may be answered. Abide with our children, particularly those who are challenged in the classroom, or feel left out in activities at school or with friends. Where maturity is lacking to make a decision of consequence, guard them safely through the challenge.

             O God, whose Spirit is ever present we lift these prayers in Jesus’ name, praying the prayer he taught us….