Shane Hughes 6-8-25

I was this week. I was at a McMurray University. Highland and McMurray have partnered with one another to help ministry students at McMurray to discern their vocation, figure out if ministry is what they really want to do. And so we have a student from McMurray, Kerrigan Parrott, that's going to be with us this summer, functioning as an intern. And as we go, she's going to figure out, is ministry right for her?

Does she feel that inward call from God? Does she feel that. That external affirmation from us? And it was. It was at that dinner, we were sitting around a table, Ashley Crisp and I and Kerrigan and some others, and we were talking about the classes that.

That they liked and that they were enjoying. And one of the classes said, well, the best ministry class at McMurray is this Christ and culture class about cinema. He said, we watch films. And she was telling us this, like, it's a brand new idea. We watch these films and we talk about how we see Christ in them.

And I was like, wow, that's great. I was like, I took that same class about 25 years ago. It was awesome. Let's talk about the films you saw. And she began to list them.

And I was like, well, I haven't seen any of those. And so I began to list. And I watched and I began to list them. And she was just like, no, no. And I was like, okay, well, were there any others?

And she said, well, there was this very old movie that we watched called the Matrix. And at the same time that I was about to say, that was college. She said, yeah, you know, it was a big throwback, but. And I was just. It was amazing, right?

So we talked about Neo and the Christ figure. And I want to talk about a different film today. And I wanted to serve as kind of the foundation for our thinking about Ephesians Chapter four. Now, this is the most. One of the most densely packed theological texts in.

In the book of Ephesians, perhaps in the New Testament. And so we're not going to cover everything that we want to cover today, but I want us to hear the Gospel in the words that Paul shared with his church and shares secondhand through us. I want to talk about Saving Private Ryan for a moment. Maybe you've seen that movie, maybe you haven't. It's a throwback, but it's about this group of soldiers.

And in the aftermath of D Day, they're given this special assignment. You see, there was this one family that had sent four sons to the European theater. And on D Day, the, the family had lost three out of those four sons. And so the, the, the American army, in its wisdom, decides to try to take that last living son and pull him out of danger so that that family doesn't lose all of their boys. But the problem is, is that all of France right now is in absolute chaos.

Airborne troops have dropped into the wrong locations. People's not sure where the German troops are, people don't know where the American troops are supposed to be. Everything is just wild. And so Tom Hanks, who plays Captain Miller, is charged with to go find Private Ryan and bring him safely home. And so he takes a squad and no one knows where Ryan is, just where he was supposed to be.

And so they have to cross through the American lines and the German lines. They have to get through battle. They go on to save him. But as they're on the way, they begin to ask some interesting philosophical questions about the logic and the morality and the ethics of taking this action. Is it worth risking all of their lives just to save Ryan's?

1 remarks along the way, he better invent a longer lasting light bulb or something to make this journey worth it. And when they finally find him, after fighting through France, through artillery barrage and all this fire, when they finally find Private Ryan, he, he doesn't want to go. He says, the unit that I am in now, they are my brothers too. And so Tom Hanks and his men, they stay with Private Ryan and the men that are with him to defend this bridge. And one by one, his unit is killed.

Even Miller himself is shot. And I'm not going to give away the very ending ending. But in this penultimate scene, the last second to last scene in the movie, Hanks is looking at Private Ryan and looks him dead in the eyes and he whispers, earn this. Earn it.

Now, if you've ever seen the movie, you know that the last scene goes 70 years into the future. And Private Ryan is now an old wrinkled man. He's in his 70s or 80s and he's come to France to the cemetery where the American servicemen died were buried. And he's with his wife and his children, his grandchildren. And he's at the grave site of Captain Miller.

But you can see in his eyes he's haunted.

And the last lines that he says in the film is he begs his wife, he looks his wife desperately in the eyes and he says, tell me I've lived a good life.

Tell me I've earned it.

His whole life is haunted by what he's been given and in my imagination as I watched that film this week, I was imagining my head like, did he waste it? Did he waste his life? Did he not earn it when he got fired from his job or when he kicked the dog? Or when he wasted a Saturday binging on Netflix, on tv? Did he waste what he had been given?

Did he go to med school? We don't know what his life was like. Did he go to med school and then save lives? Did he become a lawyer and defend the powerless? Or did he join the civil rights movement in the 60s and fight for against systemic racism?

Did he earn it?

Does he wake up some mornings and he knows deep in his heart that his life has more meaning and purpose than he can possibly imagine? And did that give him a sense of freedom and joy and purpose? Did his eggs just taste better that day?

And I wonder if we wake up like that.

And I think the point of the movie is not to ask the question, did Ryan earn it? It's not about Ryan. It's about all of us. The question that they're asking is, did America earn it? Are we living a life worthy of the calling that we have received?

It's asking the question, did we trade this tremendous gift for despots and charlatans? Did we earn it? Did we receive the gift that we have been given?

Have you taken what Christ has given you?

And can you possibly earn it? Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, as I am surrounded by voices praising your son, Jesus, as I was taken to the table today and taken to the cross, I am so grateful.

I'm grateful for the example of your son. I'm grateful for this cloud of witnesses that is here before me and those that have come before us.

And, Father, now in this time where we turn our hearts and our minds to your word, I pray that you might pour through me the gift of preaching, that I might speak your truth and love to these, your people. It's together that the church says amen. So if you're new to Highland and you've come here and. Or maybe you just. You're not from the Church of Christ, you may not have heard the name of Alexander Campbell, but if you grew up in the Restoration movement or you're any historian of it, you know, Alexander Campbell was the person who kind of formed, who planted the Churches of Christ.

It's one of the few movements in Christianity that is uniquely American. It wasn't transplanted from Europe or somewhere else. It actually came here in the US And Alexander Campbell partnered with somebody that was very different than Him, a man named Barton Stone. Alexander Campbell was rational, logical, a thinker. He liked to argue and debate.

Alexander Barton Stone was very driven by the Spirit. He was driven by his motions. He, he felt more than he thought. But these two men come together and they form this movement because they have the same dream. It's this big, beautiful dream, a dream of unity.

And Campbell's argument is pretty simple. He says that I think we can achieve unity throughout the churches that existed in America at the time. And there were all sorts of Protestant churches and Catholic churches and Orthodox churches that were in the US at the time. He said, I think we can achieve unity through the dissolution of the dividing walls that are between us. And that should sound familiar to us.

That's what Mike talked about to us a couple weeks ago. It's what Paul is trying to talk about between the Jews and the Gentiles. In chapter two, Campbell said, you know, I think that if we could just find less reasons to disagree, then we might find more unity in the body of Christ. And so it's not his quote. It may have come from early as Augustine, but he wrote in essential deals, in essentials, unity and non essentials, liberty, but in everything, love.

And the second quote, that's probably more likely his. He says that we are Christians only, but not the only Christians. And Campbell understood this. Campbell understood that if we can just make the things that divide us less important than the things that unite us, then we're going to have a chance to achieve the kind of dream that Paul talks about in Ephesians chapter four. He wrote, we not only pray for it, but we speak, we write, and we labor for it as the consummation devoutly to be sought.

There is but one body of Christ, one Spirit, one hope. There is but one God and Father of all, one Lord, one faith, one baptism. These are the basis of the sacred incorporation. We are all baptized into one body by one spirit. Whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, whether men or women, we are all made to drink one spirit.

Christians then, he argues, are radically, essentially, spiritually one. And ought not their union be visible and manifest to all?

And so on some level, what, what Campbell and Stone wanted us to see, Campbell thought we could get there by, by lowering the dividing wall. Stone thought it was the power of the Holy Spirit that would just do it to us. What we said, like, if we can just agree on as few essentials as possible, then we have a greater shot at unity. If we could get back to the core tenets of faith to argue it out. To reason it out, rationalize it out.

We could be one. It was a plea for simple Christianity for the purpose of creating the most commonality.

It's what Campbell lived and died for. And I think on an intuitive level, we get this as part of the Churches of Christ because our singing is in acapella, right? Like, that's how we began as our worship. And we've incorporated instruments here at Highland, but. But we.

I love this time of year because it reminds us of our heritage, it reminds us of where we came from. And a cappella has this beautiful way that you can hear the harmony so clearly. It's open, and it can be tight and beautiful, but you can tell that when we sing different notes, we can make something beautiful together. Now, disharmony can happen, too, and some of us are better at this than others, but each one does their part. It's easy to tell when you have unity in our harmony, even though we're singing different parts and different notes.

But this got twisted for us. Historically, Churches of Christ are part of the restoration movement became less focused on unity and more focused on how do we get all the particulars, right, of what it is that our doctrine matters for. And instead of becoming a movement that broadly accepts everyone because there's a basis of faith that, how about everybody can hold together, we became very particular. Do you have the Church of Christ on your door? Do you baptize?

Do you take the Lord's Supper every Sunday? Do you? Do you? Do you? Do you?

The questionnaires for ministers to get jobs at Churches of Christ would number 8, 10 pages. Do you believe this? Yes or no? Do you believe that? Yes or no?

Do you believe? Believe this, yes or no? And if you didn't get each question right, you couldn't work there.

But there was something beautiful about Alexander's dream, about Campbell's goal that we all might be one. And it's a beauty of unity and uniformity. Uniformity means we all have to look the same. We'll have the same uniform, the same clothes, the same hat. We all need to be the same height.

We all need to be the same capable in the same ways. But that's not what unity is. That's uniformity. Unity means that we all have the same purpose and shared goal. It's kind of like the difference between a smoothie and a fruit salad.

In a smoothie, we take everything in and we just blend it up, and it becomes the mean total of the tastes of all that are in there. If you take a drink of a smoothie, and then you take another drink, it tastes exactly the same. But if you eat a fruit salad, your first bite might have mango, your second bite might be a grape. The third bite might be an apple. You spit that bite out, and then you can get the cherry the next bite.

Right? But it all has the same purpose. It creates this bouquet, this beauty around it. And for us, it's fair for us to decide. It's important for us to decide which issues go into the bucket of matters of first importance.

But that one needs to be a small bucket. I think Jesus has to be in that bucket, and God has to be in that bucket. The power of the Holy Spirit has to be in that bucket. But we want that to be a small bucket. And then we can have as much doctrinal peculiarity as you desire.

In fact, there is a huge differentiation of doctrinal ideas that exist in this auditorium right now. I go no, because I. I go to different Bible classes and I hear ideas. I think sometimes the only thing holding Highland together is like collective ignorance, because if you knew what they thought, you might have a problem with what they think. And we just don't know. And it keeps us together.

And that's okay because we share one body and one Lord and one faith and one God and one spirit, one baptism and the other one that I just forgot.

We have to have some doctrinal unity, but we've also got to have some leeway for one another over all of these things of doctrinal peculiarity. If love isn't on the top of that list, love for one another despite our differences, then we're just going to end up where we've always been, which is smaller and smaller churches dividing over more particular and peculiar things. I'm going to trust that this is Mike's line. I love this line. I'm going to trust that you're trying to follow Jesus the best you can, and I hope that you're going to trust me in the same way.

And the only way that unity is going to work is if we hold mutual love as a higher virtue. And so Ephesians, chapter four, it begins in verse one with this, therefore. And it's. It's this massive hinge in the book of Ephesians. Everything before it is leading up to this moment in chapter four, verse one, and everything after it is going to be follows what this moment, everything up until this point is what God has done for us.

And everything that follows it is how we live as a community in light of the work of God through Jesus. If God is triumphed over the powers of darkness by uniting humanity in Christ, if God has built them into a holy temple and now dwells in them by his Spirit, if God is growing them into a body with ligament and sinew attached to one another, then the people of God embody the triumphant. The this triumph by maintaining that unity created by the Spirit. De Silva says, when churches effectively perform their roles as communities of reconciliation, restoration and unity, God's triumph over the divisive powers is proclaimed to the cosmic realm. And the goal of all of this, Paul wants to say, is for us to grow up, to be mature, to fit into the clothes God intends us to wear.

And we grow, Paul says, into the head, which is Christ. Now, there's two words for head in Greek. And I want you to point this out. You don't have to know the Greek words. They're arcos and kefla.

Arcos is where we get words like archangel or archbishop. And it connotates this kind of hierarchical power. It's the person that sits at the top of the food chain or the chart. One is about power. It's about control and direction.

But kefla, it's about source. It's more about the head of a river. It's the place where the river gets its life.

Paul emphasizes that the church, as it matures and grows up, is to fill the shape of Jesus in the world. The word that Paul uses here is not archos, it's kefle. It's not so much that Jesus needs to be in charge as Jesus needs to give life to the church. Just as Jesus is the incarnation of God in the world, so now the church is the incarnation of Jesus in the world.

Note that all of these things, they give us unity. There's one body and one spirit. Just as you were called to one hope. That was the one I missed of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

And he does this move in other places. He talks about this in Romans, and he talks about this in Corinthians, and he talks about it in other places. And every time he does it, he since we have one body, we get a diversity of gifts. Not every organ in the body does the same thing. Not every limb has the same purpose, not every sense has the same objective.

But all of them have to work together, and Christ is the gift giver. Before returning to talk about the gift of Christ that God has given the church. But here it's a little bit different in Ephesians, he flips the script just a little bit because in Romans and in Corinthians, what he begins to talk about are spiritual gifts given to individuals, like prayer, speaking in tongues, things like that.

But here he talks about apostles and prophets. He talks about evangelists and pastors, teachers. The recipients of the gifts are not individuals, but the church collectively. It's not so much about the gift that you possess, but rather it's that you are the person that the church possesses and your purpose is to bless those around you. We had dinner last night with some new friends that were out visiting from Malibu and I got to spend some time in California.

And if you spend time in any time in la, you know that the film industry there is going to just dominate at times. It disrupts traffic. They take in 15 trailers, they line them up in a residential street. It's just going to ruin everything. And it's amazing as you drive by those places because you're always very curious about what's going on.

And the question you really want to know are what stars are there? Like, is this a big budget movie? Are we going to see Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks? Most of the time, if I'm going to be honest with you, it's cat food or like WeGovy commercials. That's all it is.

But my friend was telling me about, like, their kids. Elementary school was the set for some scenes in Spy Kids. And so when they go to elementary school, they feel like they're walking into a movie set. And the goal as you drive by those, that street of trucks is you crane your neck and try to see a star. You try to wanna see somebody famous.

But do you know who you see 99 times out of 100, 999 times out of 100, you see grips and you see techs, you see makeup artists, you see producers, you see the hand, you see catering, you see all makeup and costume. All of those people, you never really get to see the stars. All of those people are there just so that the actor can hit their mark and say their line and move on.

And I think that's sort of what it's like for the, what the apostles and the prophets, evangelists and the pastors, the teachers, that's who they are. They are the crew on the set so that you feel equipped to hit your mark and say your line.

Look, it's going to be completely overwhelming for you to realize. And this is what Ephesians is saying. It wants you to realize that the purpose of your life is to radiate God's glory before a cosmic audience. And so that when you wake up in the morning and even though your knees are hurting and your back's a little sore, your eyes are bleary, your job is to radiate God's glory to the universe. And you might ask yourself the question, did I earn it today?

Did I earn it when I ate a pint, an entire pint of ice cream, watching old reruns of West Wing for four hours? Did I earn it?

But God has given gifts to the church to empower it for faithful performances.

These are one other, one, another who empower and equip and protect the church. They guide and they coach and they direct so that we can truly embody our purpose on earth.

And our purpose is profoundly simple and impossible.

To set the enslaved free, to break down dividing walls in our hearts and in our culture, to live lives of human flourishing, allowing the Spirit to cultivate unity while we live at peace with one another. To be the incarnation of Jesus to the people around us in our city in Abilene. That's a calling we can get behind. That's a purpose we can earn. And sometimes you're gonna spend the afternoon staring out the window of your backyard.

Sometimes you're gonna waste the day doing absolutely nothing.

But other days you're gonna partner with Jesus, empowered by the Spirit to change someone's life, to give a word of grace and a word of hope, to give a word of purpose and predictable direction, to provide them with the meaning that they desperately need.

And I think that's a calling that we can live into. I think that's a purpose that.