One Thing, Just One Thing!
A Lenten Sermon by Brent J. Eelman
March 25, 2007
Abington Presbyterian Church

Philippians 3: 4b – 14
    If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: ⁵circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; ⁶as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
    ⁷ Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. ⁸More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ^, the righteousness from God based on faith. ¹⁰I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, ¹¹if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
    ¹² Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. ¹³Beloved^, I do not consider that I have made it my own^; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenl^y call of God in Christ Jesus.*
 

On my fortieth birthday, my wife took me to see the movie “City Slickers”. It is a humorous movie about men in the midst of a midlife crisis going on a cattle drive. The drive is led by a gnarly old cowboy named Curly. At one point in the drive he lectures his neurotic city slickers about the meaning of life.

Curley:  You all come out here about the same age.  Same problems.  Spend fifty weeks a year getting knots in your rope – then you think two weeks up here will untie them for you.  None of you get it.  Do you know what the secret of life is?

 Mitch:  No, what?

 Curley:  This. (Holds up his index finger.)

 Mitch:  Your finger?

 Curley:  One thing.  Just one thing.  You stick to that and everything else don’t mean [anything].

 Mitch:  That’s great, but what’s the one thing?

 Curley:  That’s what you’ve got to figure out.

That advice is much more profound than the rest of the movie, and in truth it echoes the words of Paul to the church at Philippi. It is advice that comes from years of living and reflection on living. Indeed, Paul, writing this letter is an older, more mature man. He had time to reflect on what was important and what was not. What did he conclude? There is one thing in life that is ultimately important. There is one thing in life that is worthy of pursuit. In the end, little else matters. Today I am going to address the one thing that matters: First, I want to look at our lives and all the things that ultimately don’t matter; second, the one thing that does matter; and third, the freedom that this brings to the rest of life.

I

Could it be that most of the things that we worry about are not worth the energy and the effort? Probably. As the cowboy Curly said, fifty weeks out of the year we tie ourselves up in knots, worrying and stewing about things that will not matter three years from now. And if they don’t matter then, they really shouldn’t matter now, except we think that they do. We schedule and we over-schedule. We put our time, our talent and our resources into things, projects, and the like. We also invest our hopes in these things, believing that they will give us that which we want. In our middle-class world, we chase the career and the resultant accumulation of things. We chase our career so hard we need to take time off to catch our breath so that we can jump back on the merry-go round. We accumulate so much that we have to build storage sheds to hold it all, and then we can’t find where we put it, because we have so much. Soon, we discover that we are working too hard to pay for everything that we have no time to enjoy what we have.

Not content with how we look we pursue some type of physical perfection that causes young women to develop eating disorders. Athletes take drugs to build muscles mass. We spend hours in front of mirrors, fretting over some imperfection. You get the picture? This is what Paul was alluding to… Paul was writing to people who were confronted with the question, “What really matters in terms of our lives?” The answer that many of them got was to live a rigid life, obeying the Law of Moses. This was a regimented and stressful life. It was important to be born of the right group, go to the right school, etc. Then one could get close to God. Paul said that for most of his life, he believed this and lived it, but ultimately he came to the conclusion that it was garbage: a waste!

What are you pursuing? What are you worried about? What occupies your time? Your energy? Your hopes? Have we taken life’s distractions and placed them front and center? Do we spend most of our time, most of our energy, worrying and sweating about them? What is tying you up in knots? Probably a lot of things, that in the end, are not going to matter a very much at all.

II

What does matter? “One thing.  Just one thing.  You stick to that and everything else don’t mean [anything]” That’s great, but what’s the one thing? “That’s what you’ve got to figure out.”

We don’t have to figure it out. We have heard the good news. We have heard what is ultimately important. We have learned what that “one thing” is. Paul wrote: “More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” … knowing Christ. Ultimately this is the one thing that matters. Everything else is relative to this one thing.

Knowledge of Jesus Christ is not the knowledge that we might speak of today. This is not the knowledge that we gain from reading a book, or taking a course, or doing a self directed study. Knowledge of Christ is gained inductively, through following Jesus as a disciple in this day and this world. It is gained by reflection with others on this journey of discipleship. This is the knowledge that one gains through prayer and meditation, through worship and singing. This is knowledge that is gained in serving others, be it building a habitat house or working in a kitchen. This is knowledge that comes, not from accumulating, but from giving. You won’t find this knowledge in a book. This knowledge of Christ is not something between the ears! It is something that is lived between the years: our first year and last. This knowledge is first and foremost the knowledge gained through commitment. Everything else is a distraction.

III

“One thing, just one thing.” I sometimes fear that we are unable to hear that message until we are ready to. Often times it takes a tragedy in life to realize that we have been going down the wrong road.. that we have been wasting time and energy on those things which don’t mean a darn thing. One of the most touching public realizations of this was in the 1990’s by the late Lee Atwater. He was a political consultant, known for his hard and nasty edge. He developed a brain tumor, and this tragedy led him to take stock of his life and what he committed himself to. This hard-nosed politico realized that he was living a lie and converted to Christianity and then began writing letters and making public apologies to people he had hurt during his life. In one of these letters he wrote about his illness: "my illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood and relationships that I never understood, and probably never would have. So, from that standpoint, there is some truth and good in everything." In February of 1991, he wrote in Life Magazine, under the heading of  “Lee Atwater’s Final Campaign”:

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring -- acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the future, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

The tumor on the soul is all the distractions that keep our life focused on the one thing… that ultimately matters. Tomorrow, at 8:00 a.m. I fear we will re-enter that stress machine we call “the real world” or “daily life”. We will make our lists of all the things that are causing us to go grey. My guess is that very little of it matters, at least not as much as the energy that we give to it.

But there is one thing. The amazing thing about that one thing: when we discover and know Jesus Christ, we find tremendous freedom from all those other things. We discover freedom from all the garbage that has cluttered our lives. This is the good news -- really good news. “One thing… Just one thing.” Amen.
 

*The New Revised Standard Version Bible, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers) 1989.

Abington Presbyterian Church, Abington, Pennsylvania,  www.apcusa.org