Being in the Groove
By Charles Rush
March 6, 2011
John 1: 1-5, 16-18
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the delightful film, “How Stella Got Her Groove Back”, a high powered executive that is raising her son alone, takes a vacation to Jamaica and meets Winston, twenty years her junior, with the rock abs, dreads and “the great accent mon”. They get into a heated romance and it forces her to actually think about what life is really all about anyway? It bowls her over, and eventually she finds her groove again. Being bowled over is really wonderful at mid-life, however it happens. And at some deep level, I would suspect that we keep towards the spiritual path because we hope, at the end of the day, secretly we hope… that we can get our groove back.
Our text has
the profound words, Jesus Christ was “full of grace and truth and dwelt among
us”. Usually we read this text on Christmas Eve and never preach on it. I want
to look at it today from another angle. Theologically, the affirmation that
Jesus was full of grace and truth means that if you want to see what human life
looks like when it is full of transcendent purpose, look at the life of Jesus.
If you want to know that God intends for our fulfillment, it is not different
from what we know in the Christ. Jesus was fully in the divine way.
Let's come at
it from the other direction. When is it in your life that you were really in
the groove? When was it that you knew things were coming together and it was
all just clicking? When was it that you just knew that you were living the good
old days for a moment?
Let me move
from the banal to the sublime. Hack golfer's, and I would certainly qualify for
that fraternity, have an experience from time to time, where they show up to
play, and for some reason their normal cruddy game stays in the car. The next
thing you know they are hitting beautiful shot after beautiful shot. Even when
they hit an errant ball, somehow it takes a strange bounce right towards the
pin, and they score well. This goes on for about 9 or 11 holes and then the
wheels fall off and they come totally apart. If you ask them what happened,
they will almost invariably say something like “I woke up”. By the way, if you
want to know what keeps these sad sacks coming back to course, laying out huge
money to play, it is the possibility of getting back into that groove. Today
might be the day.
For all of us
boys and increasingly for our girls too, it is an experience that we have had
or been near when we were young and in our athletic prime. If you ask our girls
lacrosse team from last spring, the team that was #1 in the state of New
Jersey, they can tell you about being in the groove. One of them was describing
a play, one they had worked on conceptually a few times. As it was unfolding,
she was cutting toward the wing in a great circle. Without any speech, she just
knew that the center forward that was cradling the ball, saw her. She cut
around a couple of defenders, but she knew the pass was coming. She kept her
eyes focused on the defenders in front of the goal, looking for an opening. At
the last minute looking up, the lane cleared and she could see her teammate
just barely, passing the ball to her. Just as she caught it, she let it go down
an opening between the defenders she had spotted. It went right between two
defenders, just over the shoulder of the goalie. The grandstand went wild. That
is being in the groove.
Being in the
groove in the clutch, of course is the magic that happened when Michael Jordan
turned basketball into something close to ballet. He and Scotty Pippen were remarkably
disciplined and that they train relentlessly, and they practice until it was just
right. But something happened to them when the game was on the line. When all
the fans were tightening up with anxiety, Michael
would get in the zone. He seemed to stop thinking about himself and he just
merge with the game. New moves come
out of the bag. He passes the ball where no one is and someone appears. Shots
go down more often. The whole team comes together around him. He is the “go to”
man. You want the ball in his hands, not just because he can score, but because
you know something is going to happen.
I think it was
Joe Namath who said that sometimes in situations where it was 4th
and long, where there was a lot on the line, he said he would look down the
line at Don Maynard, start the play, and he could see down the field the whole
play unfold before it unfolded and he just knew that they were going to
complete a clutch throw for big yardage. You live for that. That is a day you
don't forget. You will spend a great deal of time, trying to get back to that
place, being in the groove. It is a strange thing, but it is a transcendent
experience. It's you but you've locked into something that is bigger than you,
a part of yourself that doesn't operate in the daily work-a-day world really,
something that can't be dissected into parts. It is like you have tapped into
the power of the whole that pulls the parts together. For just a moment, it all
comes together.
It's a
relational experience. It is personal but not just individual. You are part of
some bigger relationship. Change gears. Sometimes it can happen in nature.
Sometimes in nature you can get into the groove, when you feel yourself part of
the cosmos, anchored, connected in a way that flows through you in a
relationship bigger than yourself. I assume that is what drives people to want
to climb Mt. Everest. It is a physical challenge that requires your maximum
effort, great planning and good fortune. And when it all comes together, the
team is standing on top of a magnificent peak, looking down on the clouds, an
ethereal horizon, exhausted, victorious. You've seen the pictures, I've seen
the pictures, but I'm sure they don't do it justice. You have to be there and
feel how connected you feel at that moment, not only with the rest of your team
that have made it happen but with, the mountain, the sky, Mother Earth, the
Cosmos. You can see it in these people's faces. They radiate. They beam. They have tapped into the Mysterium Tremendum as Rudolph Otto used
to say, the sense of anchor in which your personal identity makes a deep
contact with the awesome wonder of the Earth, the Cosmos. It is a transcendent
moment, personal but relational. It is simply much bigger than us.
In the movie, The Deer Hunter, Robert DeNiro plays the
part of a steel worker in Pennsylvania, an ordinary guy. Every year, a bunch of
these steel working guys go to the mountains to hunt deer. That is just what
guys do in Pennsylvania. Most of the guys just get drunk and fool around like
guys do. Because of a whole lot of reasons, personal and more, DeNiro is
focused. On the day of the hunt, he spots a tremendous sized buck. It is the
kind of deer that hunters live for, to be able to bag once in their life. It is
one thing to see a 15 point buck in a photo, quite a sacred moment in the wild.
The deer is majestic in beauty. And he is wily too. He stays just far enough
from the hunter that the hunter can't get a bead on him. DeNiro is relentless
in the chase and focused. He is in great shape, up over the rocks, running down
the rugged mountainside. He won't let the deer go. Suddenly, the buck is below
him. He has a clear shot. The gun is up. The deer is in his sights. The snow is
falling. He's exhausted. Through the scope, he sees the buck turn in all his
majesty, and look straight at him. In that moment, he makes a connection; he
makes an unspoken contact with the animal. He pulls back for a second and looks
through the scope again. The buck is still staring at him. He turns the gun
aside and fires the shot off in the distance. He stands up and looks down at
the buck. The buck is still staring back. The buck turns slowly and walks away,
doesn't run. He walks. It is a sacred moment, a transcendent moment. He made a
connection and for just a second he was in the groove I'm talking about. He can't
even talk about it to the knuckleheads that are drinking beer back at the
cabin. They most certainly wouldn't understand what he was talking about. But
in the midst of nature, he made a deep contact. It is a moment that you come
back to time and again in your life.
We want to make that kind of contact.
When it happens, it is like we are being lifted out of ourselves. Correct that.
We are still in our selves, very deeply in ourselves but it is more than us. We
have tapped into the whole that pulls together the parts.
We get connected. Do you remember
looking into the face of your first child, really looking into that face? For us Dad's, it is usually not quite as
blissful a moment as it is for Mom's. Usually, when it happens to us, baby has
been crying bloody murder for what seems like hours, we've gotten the hand off.
It is the middle of the night. Suddenly, inexplicably the baby stops crying and
stares into your eyes.
For Mom, it is a particularly sacred
and grounded time. She has just finished nursing. Baby is happy, euphoric and
you can see it in their little expression. They are just looking up, eyes wide
open in wonder, trying to focus, as if to say ‘who is this wonderful woman that
gives this nectar milk?' And you look and they seem to be trying to focus, to
really see you. And you are looking back and suddenly you realize that you are
really looking back, that you are seeing in a way that you don't
usually see, that you are really making a contact. And you realize that most of
your life, you are touching other people but you are not making contact like
this. It is important to make a good contact; in fact it is the the most
important thing you could do. It is a gift really, a fundamental gift to be in
this moment. It is a blessing, such a blessing that all sorts of failures,
frustrations, and disappointments from the past have just been trumped.
You are blessed to be part of this wonderful mystery of living. And in a moment
like that you realize that what is really important, what is fundamental, are
relationships. It's making contact; it's being in the groove.
Forget the
stupid car that broke down that afternoon that made you go apoplectic and
scream at everyone because you got behind. That is not important! Forget the
goofed up airline schedules and the traffic that turned your 5-hour flight into
a 9-hour ordeal. That is not important. It is not important that you have to drive a Subaru and your friends all
drive Saab's. Or let's put it in Summit terms, if you drive a old Beamer and
all your friends drive new Land Rover's. That is not important. What is really
real, is relationships. Contact. That is what is important. What is important
is making a connection, a deep connection with someone else. That is a gift.
You want to get
back to that place. You want to get back to that feeling of being connected. It
doesn't happen all that often in groups but when it does, it is really special. I think that is one of the strange things
about crisis. You certainly don't want tragedy to come your way, but in a
really strange way people are never so alive as they are in crisis. Crisis
seems to allow people to drop the normal distancing games that they play, and
get involved in a connected relationship with others in a way that is special.
That has been one of the moving things about the terrible earthquakes that we
have seen on television in the past several months. In the midst of that huge
and devastating crisis, whole towns rallied together, and pitched in a hand,
working through the night pulling out piles of debris, calling down below to
check for survivors. Incredible adrenaline, profound stamina in hope, and solidarity-
everybody working together, pulling their weight, doing their part.
Occasionally, they would find some kid that had been trapped for 48 hours and
all of them would pull the kid out together and what a moment of celebration
they shared. What a great thing. They were together as one, working for a
purpose that was bigger than themselves. That doesn't happen often. We want to
get back to that place. Because it is all about relationships.
And we know
that this is true in our vocations. I was reading an article in the New York Times Magazine from last week
(Sunday, October 10, 1999) about a computer programmer named Joe Clark. Many of
you know that name well. Clark developed the internet company Netscape and then
went on to found the internet health care company Healtheon that brings
Doctors, HMO's, and pharmacies together on-line. At 45 Clark was just a
professor. 15 years later he is worth something like 345 million dollars.
His career was
very exciting to read about. It wasn't the ideas for his companies. He just
took a look at what was needed in the marketplace and put it to work. And it
isn't the fantastic money, although he nice toys like a jet. But he wasn't
really driven by money. And it wasn't the power. Clark didn't really stay
around to run his companies for all that long because he realizes that he is
not very gifted as a CEO.
But, if you
read between the lines, when he talked about his life, what really energized
him and got him going, was putting
together an A-1 team of software developers. Once he became identified as
something of a sure bet innovator, everyone wanted to work with him. I don't
care what your vocation is, who wouldn't want to work on a shared project with
the top 100 people in your field. If you can put together a team of excellent
people, if you can design a way that they can begin to work cooperatively and
competitively. If you can bring out the group synergy in the midst of excellent
talent, then it all just starts to come together. And years later you look back
and say that was the championship season.
It doesn't hurt
to have the perq's of success: recognition, security, material wealth. But
those all fade with time. And when we are wistful and looking back years later,
what you want to get back to is the
camaraderie, the people, the connectedness that all came together, and you
were part of something vital and important. And it may not have been successful
at all, you may have just shared misery together… but the thing is, you were
together.
Jesus brought
our focus back to this point in so many different ways. He was full of grace
and truth. It is about nurturing and developing relationships, contact, a deep
sharing. Jesus was a person that was in right relationship: with God, with
other people, with the wider world in which we live. He modeled for us what
balance really looks like.
People came to
him and asked him the same questions that we would ask about in managing their
practical lives. What do I do with my money? What do I handle power? What is
the proper scope of my authority? How much should I defer to the established
order? How do I forgive people when they hurt or disappoint me?
Jesus never
gave direct, formulaic answers because the way that he approached the whole
issue was not half a teaspoon, mix and stir- it was about finding the groove
and staying in it. He kept turning our focus to what is real, to the
relationship. He turned these questions back to us and asked us “With your
money, your power, your authority, your judgment and forgiveness, what does it
mean for you to serve others? How do you nurture other people? How does the
Spirit of God flow through you? How do you get in the groove and stay in the
groove?
Ultimately, the
question of giving is the question of living. I leave you with one question to
ponder this week: When have you felt the most alive? When have you felt the
most alive? This week, sometime when you have a few quiet moments, I want to
you to go back to that space. It is a place you can build on. Amen.
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