On Being One-Chris Jewell

“Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit” 1 Corinthians 12:4

During the 1990’s the sports world was fascinated by the Chicago Bulls. They were fun to watch—truly beautiful. Michael Jordan was, right from the start, great—a real artist—but the Bulls couldn’t win a championship until other gifted players and a new vision came to town. After coach Phil Jackson arrived, the way they played together was a revelation. To their opponents they were a five headed monster. To their fans they were a paradigm of athletic intelligence and beauty. In 1995-96 they offered, to sports fans, something like a religious experience. Rodman to Pippen to Harper to Longley to Jordan--five members making one body. Denis Rodman was a huge ego that was limited offensively but had a real gift for rebounding. Scottie Pippen was a gifted athlete, a decent shooter—and a great defender. Ron Harper was a shadow of his former self due to a knee injury but still played great defense. And Luke Longley was at best an average player—but he exhibited the basketball intelligence of a guy that had been very well coached. And Michael Jordan was of course the greatest player in the world—with an ego to match.  As you can tell, when each individual talent is considered separately, you get a disjointed jumble of separate things. It took a coach with a real vision to transform a heap of talented individuals into a whole. Their coach, Phil Jackson, practiced Zen meditation, and took a holistic approach to coaching— and it showed. He could see the beautiful, graceful, flowing singular team beyond the five disjointed and oversized egos. The One beyond the many. This is what made a Phil Jackson led team different from others—most NBA teams were—and still are five oversized egos simply playing together—Phil Jackson led teams were deflated egos and individual talents morphing together and forming ONE UNIT. This is different than simply playing together. People will play together, will come together naturally—we are and we will remain, despite cell phones, I pads, and computers, social creatures. But it takes special training to turn five players or 205 people into ONE UNIT WITH A SINGLE PURPOSE. Jackson trained his players—and the apostle Paul, as we can see from his letters, trained his players. When he was coaching Phil Jackson was a mystic and a social architect. Paul, when he was “coaching”, was a mystic and a social architect—as was Jesus. Both Paul and Jesus resembled great coaches far more than they resembled modern preachers. This is probably because training for life in the spirit has much more in common with the training of the body than it does the mind. In fact spiritual training requires physical training. I’m sure this is why Paul used metaphors from athletic events. In 1 Corinthians we hear, “Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? So run in such a way that you win it”. Spiritual training and athletic training are both about combining philosophy with exercises, exercises that can then bring about a mutation in the Whole person.

There has long been a central prayer in Jewish liturgy declaring God is One, Echad. One. This oneness of God goes back thousands of years in Judaism. Paul was of course a Jew, and there is considerable evidence in his letters that he considered the divine—in all its different forms, God, Spirit, Christ—to be the undivided wholeness within and beyond all individual things. We can call this the TAO of Paul. Phil Jackson and Paul were both teaching that there is a singular, whole, restless, creative flow that we can follow within any one individual’s life. THERE IS ONE energy that we are all grounded in. This is not something we share; so much as it is something that shares us. We, as individuals don’t share the team, the team shares us—we as individuals don’t share the spirit—the spirit shares us.

Phil Jackson famously said, “Good teams become great ones when members trust each other enough to surrender the “me” for the We.” All throughout Paul’s letters there is evidence that he was always trying to redirect his listeners to the ONE ultimate reality beyond the diverse world of people and things. “Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit”, “and there are varieties of services but the same Lord”, and there are varieties of activities but it is the same God who activates them in everyone”. Our text today is often interpreted as if Paul was a 21^st century individualist—preaching the idolatry of self, of difference. Nothing could be further from the truth. Paul is always looking beyond the many toward the ONE, in other words, he is always toward God or the divine Spirit. If we read 1 Corinthians 12 closely we see that this is embedded within a larger section of text in which Paul is trying to draw our attention to the undifferentiated whole that he sees everywhere. This is much like the Zen influenced Jackson redirecting individual players to the ONE TEAM rather than focusing on the needs of five separate players. Paul writes of the body of Christ—not the bodies of Christ—ONENESS. In Galatians we read “There is no more Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, for you are all One in Christ Jesus”—ONENESS. In our text today we heard, “Now there are varieties of gifts but the same spirit”. It is universally agreed that Paul’s “Christ-mysticism” forms the center of his religion and consequently of his theology. We know it is the world’s mystics—whether Zen Buddhist coaches or first century Jewish evangelists—who participate in meditative training that can facilitate an experience of ONENESS, wholeness, or GOD.  For centuries they have been coaching us, and training us to experience the ONE within, the undifferentiated wholeness beyond the many—NO MATTER how talented or gifted we are as individuals. Phil Jackson trained the most gifted basketball player of all time to surrender his ego for the good of the team. Paul asks us to see beyond our own individual talents and experience the ONE SPIRIT—I know that will be good for our team. AMEN.