Sermon 6.15.25 10,000 Hours

Sermon begins @ 17:47

Happy Father’s Day everyone.

Or as I like to call it; Trinity Sunday - where we recognize that God is non-binary.

In honor of Father’s Day, I’m moved to preach to you about motivational speeches; pep talks, aphorisms, folk wisdom.

All the kinds of things that we try to teach our kids, while they stare at us blankly before ignoring us and going back to watching minecraft videos on youtube.

Do you remember the phrase, “Practice makes perfect?”

Motivational Speakers, Avid Pep Talk enthusiasts, and professional atheletes, all espouse the value of this aphorism.

Although, my friend Michael likes to remind me that it shouldn’t actually be “practice makes perfect,” but “practice makes permanent,”

Because if you practice something the wrong way, then you’re training yourself to do it wrong not perfect. And if you practice it the right way, then even if you never reach perfect, you’ll at least be on the right path.

Either way, whatever you practice may not be perfect, but it will be permanent.

A newer version of this kind of “practice makes permanent,” idea has been floating around the motivational speaker circuit in the last decade or so.

A cultural proverb for our day. The 10,000 hours rule.

Do you know this one?

Popularized by columnist Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success, and later picked up by a handful of internet gurus with good production value,

The “10,000 hour rule” says that if you want to do anything perfectly, or permanently, or professionally, it takes 10,000 hours of dedication, perseverance, and discipline to attain expertise.

The thing is, nobody else sees the actual 10,000 hours, they just see the evidence of it.

People may think you have natural talent, but you know that you’ve worked hard for your gains.

You got up early, you pushed your limits, you kept going when everyone else stopped.

This is the general jist of the “10,000 hours rule,” anything you do with discipline has a cumulative effect.

I’ll come back to this in a few minutes.

Many of you know that I referee professional soccer.

And people often ask me, “what do you all do to get prepared for a match?”

The long-term answer is 16 years of doing games, countless hours of travel, sitting on webinars, getting debriefed and rated on performances, self-evaluation after every match, and a grueling physical fitness routine.

The more immediate answer is that we get to the stadium about two hours before kick-off, we walk the field to make sure all the marks are right, the goals are properly set up, there aren’t any huge issues with the grass or turf, or any other issues that might crop up from time to time.

Then we go back to our locker room, talk through standard expectations for the game; who has what responsibility, in what situation.

What we’ll say over the microphones, what kinds of tactics each team uses, what their last couple of games have been like, etc…

We meet with the coaches an hour before game time and then we get dressed into our warm-up gear.

For about 30 minutes, we just have down time. Time to relax, maybe catch up with the other referees on life, because we are always matched with different people each week.

Some referees like to blast music; bachata, reggaeton, Taylor Swift, Queen Bey;

Some referees like silence.

I like to watch offside clips and get my brain ready to see impossibly tight decisions.

About 30 minutes before game time we head out to warm-up, before coming back to the locker room to get into uniforms and go out.

The time right before we go out is usually the time, when we – like the teams – get pumped up for the match.

Adrenaline flowing, music pumping, last minute prayer for player safety and courage to make good decisions.

The other week, I was at a game and one of my referee colleagues turned on his bluetooth speaker, but instead of music, he played a few short motivational speeches.

I don’t know why, but I’m not super into motivational speeches.

I know people who think they’re gold and it really amps them up.

For me – I don’t know – they usually just fall flat.

Maybe it’s because they are usually aimed at individual glory; “You are the best, you are the greatest, everyone else is terrible compared to you, nobody can stop you except yourself …”

Maybe it’s because they say things, where my preacher brain can’t help unpacking the minutia of the psychology or philosophy behind each statement;

“you’ve earned this,”

“what does it mean to earn something? Did I really? what about the other people who “earned” it?”

“winning is a state of mind, if you believe it, you will achieve it,”

“Really, because I’m pretty sure if you hit the crossbar instead of the goal, your state of mind isn’t going to make the reality of physics change.”

Stuff like that.

Maybe it’s because after spending so many years of my life studying the gospels and biblical interpretation, nothing else compares to the Good News of Jesus, or the silky smooth pen of St. Paul’s letters.

“Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

That is a motivational speech isn’t it?

And I’ve rarely heard motivational speeches that hit me as deeply true as what I hear when the Word is spoken or read or prayed.

But, I get why people like motivational speeches so much.

They fill that need in the human soul to hear wisdom.

Something that transcends ordinary human life and says something deeply true about what it means to be human and to give our all.

And Jesus leaves room in our christian cosmology for this new kind of knowledge to come.

The Holy Spirit is active.

In John’s gospel, Jesus says that there are types of wisdom that he didn’t speak while he was in human flesh, but the Spirit will bring them in time.

This statement opens up the possibility that wisdom is still calling, still raising her voice, still pleading with us to choose her, to listen to her, and to turn away from our destructive paths and violent ways.

The tricky thing is; if the Spirit is active, the devil is also active.

So, how do you tell the difference between things that feel right or important and things that are erroneous or wrong?

What is wise and true and what is good production value with a passionate speaker, but turns out to be empty after the dopamine hit?

We always need to be asking this question, but in times of crisis, they seem even more important.

When we look at what is happening in our country and around the world – I think – we see the ongoing process of the “10,000 hour rule” and “practice makes permanent.”

1.     We don’t believe our experts that we have

2.     We think we’re the experts, whether we are or not.

We see the evidence of our fellow humans getting up early, staying up late, staying disciplined and persevering in filling their hearts and minds with human things rather than divine wisdom.

This is even true of people who are spending their 10,000 hours doing things like reading the Bible.

Listen, when you see someone whose life is “getting into the Word,” and they can turn around and let poison come out of their heart toward trans kids, or family members, or complete strangers,

You know that it’s not enough just to know the Bible, or to spend time with the Word.

I know people who have been driving for tens of thousands of hours and yet you would still question if they knew how to drive.

I’ve been a dad for 10 years, and I’ll tell you there are days, when my “expertise” is put to the test.

I have a friend who has spent 10,000 hours on WebMD, that doesn’t make them a doctor.

You get the point.

Just because you spend the time, doesn’t necessarily make you an expert.

If you spend 10,000 hours with a bigoted interpretation of the Bible, you’re going to produce a biblically based bigotry.

And that’s not just a personal problem.

What we believe and what we practice believing has real world consequences.

This week, our neighborhood lost one of its beautiful souls to gun violence.

And while someone from Mississippi erroneously commented on our Facebook page that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions that it was a hate crime just because the person killed was a trans-woman,

This death comes out of the folk wisdom that we have to have guns to protect ourselves and reinforcing that with 10,000 hours or more of the patriarchal ideology that trans lives threaten masculinity and don’t matter.

Laura Schueler mattered.

What we believe, what we practice, what we immerse ourselves in has consequences.

If I’m honest, it affects me too.

I look at Israel taking out Iran’s nuclear program and I’m stuck between “oh no this is an escalation that could lead to a bigger war,” and “well, I’m actually glad that Iran isn’t getting nuclear weapons.”

I look at parades and protests that are talking about really important societal issues and then I go off to a soccer game, and I wonder which is better,

To spend all of our energy fighting for what is right, or to put our head in the sand every once in a while and protect ourselves from the constant onslaught of doomsday thinking.

I watch comedians make fun of people with whom I disagree and get a little guilty pleasure of having “their” faults and inconsistencies laid bare, while mine stay comfortably uninterrogated.

Where does God want me to spend my 10,000 hours right now?

What is Wisdom calling for me to pay attention to?

In my time of prayer this week, the answer that kept coming to me is the simple truth that things can change.

We don’t have to be stuck the way we are right now.

Maybe you don’t remember this, but during Covid, when everything stopped and things looked so bleak, God also showed us that change is still possible.

10,000 hours amounts to a little less than 417 days, or a little more than a year.

I remember seeing a report only about 30 days or so into the lockdown of a city in northern India that is only about 80 miles from the Himalayas.

For decades and decades – because of smog and air pollution – this city had not had a clear view of some of the largest mountains in the world.

I mean can you imagine being that close, but not seeing a mountain?

Very few had really noticed, but the constant practices of the region had just slowly wiped out the possibility of seeing the mountains.

And yet, within about 30 days of no cars on the streets, no hussle and bustle, no fires burning trash - all of a sudden - the mountains “reappeared.”

Friends, in our current climate, we’ve been spending tens of thousands of hours polluting our air and hiding the glory of God from our sight.

We’ve done it as individuals, worrying about our own things.

We’ve done it as a society and as a world.

The Good News for us today is that “practice makes perfect,” is wrong, and “practice makes permanent” can be undone if we practice something else.

The Holy Spirit is active, and she’s willing to give us a new view of wisdom, if we’re willing to turn away from polluting the spiritual realm and obscuring our view of God.

This week as you go about your life, as you talk to people who are so upset they just don’t know what to do.

Ask yourself, and ask them.

What is polluting my life? What do I want to make permanent in my life?

What do I have to spend the next 10,000 hours doing to make a change?

None of what we are experiencing is permanent, none of it is unavoidable.

Our Juneteenth celebrations this week show us that things can change, even things that seem like they never will.

That Greed is too great, that entrenched ideas are too powerful, that the devil is always on the prowl.

The Holy Spirit is still active in our day.

Let the living God declare to you today what is possible,

And let’s spend the next 10,000 hours listening to wisdom and doing something better.

Amen.