United Methodist Church Westlake Village

Finding Your One Thing

• United Methodist Church Westlake Village

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What do Jack Palance's one-armed push-ups and the wisdom of "City Slickers" have to do with our spiritual journey? As it turns out, everything. 

Drawing an unexpected but powerful parallel between the classic film's message about finding your "one thing" and Paul's letter to the Ephesians, this message explores how we discover our true purpose within the body of Christ. Paul's metaphor of the church as a body reveals a profound truth: we are not isolated individuals competing for limited resources but interconnected parts of a greater whole, each with unique gifts and contributions to make.

Our modern world constantly reinforces feelings of isolation and independence, blinding us to the beautiful possibility of what we can accomplish together. But God envisions something far better—a community where each person flourishes by embracing their giftedness and playing their distinctive role. This understanding transforms our very concept of success from individual achievement to collective flourishing.

Through both scriptural wisdom and practical examples from community celebrations, we see how faith strengthens when people combine their talents toward shared goals. The body comes alive when each part functions as designed. Your "one thing"—those innate abilities and heart-driven passions—isn't just for personal fulfillment but provides your access point to experiencing the fullness of God's vision for your life and community.

Ready to stretch your piece of the body? What will you do to discover and live out your unique role in God's greater story? Your journey of spiritual maturity begins with this question.

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Pastor Darren:

Do you guys remember Jack Palance? Oh yeah, I figured this crew you were going to know Jack Palance, one of the guys that looked like we think cowboys are supposed to look like, right, jack Palance? Do you remember when he won the Best Supporting Actor and he got up there and did one-handed push-ups? I think it was 70-something and he's doing one-handed push-ups. It was pretty cool, living up to the image City Slickers.

Pastor Darren:

Remember that movie, city Slickers? Right, he plays this cowboy and it's actually a movie with Billy Crystal and Bruno Kirby and they're middle-aged and they're trying to figure out what it means to be a middle-aged man and trying to figure out what really drives you and brings you passion and gets you excited. And so they join this program where they're going to move cattle across country. They're going to pretend to be cowboys, right, city slickers. So, if you remember, as they're on this journey to figure this out, they're talking to Curly, played by Jack Palance, who tells them amidst other conversations that really the secret to life is just one thing. Notably, he doesn't give them the one thing right. And those of you who know Billy Crystal, you know he always plays characters that would be driven nuts by not knowing what the one thing is what is the one thing, right? And, sure enough, curly passes away in the movie before he's able to say what the one thing is. But the Billy Crystal character I can't remember his character's name. He learns it at the end, after they're able to successfully move this cattle. He said oh, it's the one thing. It's different for everybody. Everybody's got their one thing and the secret is you got to find that thing and start doing it Right, which was a pretty cool message, I think, for the time of that movie and hopefully you know it meant something to you or maybe it means something to you today.

Pastor Darren:

But it sets up this passage from Ephesians 4, right, this is a letter from Paul, you know, in our New Testament, one of his letters to the churches that we're getting started back in the earliest times there, or the earliest times of our Christian faith in any case, and it's an interesting letter because he spends a lot of time talking about God and what God is expecting and how God envisions this world, and then he transitions towards the end of the letter about how we're supposed to respond. This passage is right at that transition. So you're hearing this conversation, these words about who God is and what God did and what God expects and wants, followed up by the expectation of response. How are we supposed to behave with that? How are we supposed to understand that? So what did Paul tell us about how he understands what God wants? First, he wanted us to know that our creator loves us and wants us to flourish as individuals. Flourish as individuals, but also as community as a whole. We're supposed to all flourish. We also get this understanding from paul that we will all come to some understanding or some experience of god, and he equates that to spiritual maturity. When you have an experience of God, when you have an opening, an epiphany of understanding about God, you're maturing, you're growing, you're stabilizing in your faith, and the stabilizing is really good because in our world there are a lot of things that we don't necessarily want to listen to, a lot of people we don't necessarily want to have influence over our hearts and over our lives. So the more stable we are in our understanding of God, the better. Amen, right, that's pretty simple. I only do amens when it's simple and obvious, all right. So God's ultimate goal, as we understand in this letter to the Ephesians, is that we come to some fullness, some fullness as the body of Christ, the full body of Christ. Right that we come to know that all that God wants for us, not only as individuals as part of that body, but also as a body that we might fully understand what it means to have that experience.

Pastor Darren:

He uses this metaphor of a body, which is a good metaphor here, and I imagine I'm not the first time you've heard a sermon here about the body of Christ and the interconnection, the interreliance on each other. Right, it's a good metaphor for us to understand, because underlying all of that is this idea that even though we're independent to a certain extent, we're also part of a whole. Our actions aren't necessarily fully independent. The things that the hand does to a certain extent affect the rest of the body. So this image, this metaphor, it's pretty provocative really when you think about it. There's various parts of a body, each thing kind of having its own purpose. The hands have a purpose, the legs have a purpose, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, everything in a body has its purpose. And this is where the connection to City Slickers comes in. You thought I was just talking about a movie I liked. No, it related to the scripture. I promise Curly's one thing reference comes into play here.

Pastor Darren:

It's in this understanding of life that there is this role that we get to play, that we're invited to play, that God hopes that we will play in the larger body of life. Right, it's a role that's based in our giftedness, right? The things that we are good at. I think it's safe to understand Paul understands that as innate gifts the things you were born that had gifts for, but also the things we have a heart for, maybe something innate inside of you that says this is something I want to work with. This is a community of people I want to help, I want to share my heart with. This is our giftedness in this world. We, understanding the body of faith, want to extend that metaphor to help us to understand each of us has a special role to play that we have been gifted to be able to play. Right, that's the just one thing relationship or or coordination I'm talking about here with that movie that just one thing is inside of us. It is our access to being part of the fullness of the body of Christ. If we want to know fully what God wants for us as individuals, fully what God wants for us as a body of Christ. Our access to that comes through that giftedness comes through living out our role in the body.

Pastor Darren:

Doesn't it make you think about the world in kind of a different way? In our day-to-day, when we're looking around, we spend a lot of our time with this sense that we're kind of isolated. Right, I'm a human being with my human body and I am just this human being. I'm not any one of you and you're not me, right? That's sort of the obvious biological reminder we get every single day. It leads to a sense of isolation. Right, it's just me. You know, and some of us might even have a sense that the world is even much more competitive than others. So you're not even just looking at everybody else as an other, but you're also thinking, oh okay, and you want what I want, so I might need to work a little harder to get my part of it. I mean, it's so easy to fall into that place, the way the world works these days.

Pastor Darren:

And so Paul shows up in Ephesians and he says you know what it doesn't have to be that way. And he says you know what it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, god has something better in mind for you and for your community, this life. If we see ourselves as sharing the journey instead of living it on ourselves or feeling like we're the only ones we can depend upon. When we look at life as something we share, well, then the whole idea of success comes out a little different too, doesn't it? All of a sudden, we're looking at ourselves as part of a team, recognizing with this role we get to play, oh, shoot, okay. Not only do I get to understand a purpose and a meaning in my little piece of this whole thing, but then there's something bigger too that's going on, and I'm able to tie into that bigger thing only because I'm looking at it in this way and understanding it in this way. If I think I'm isolated, if I think we're all independent, I'm blind to the possibility of what we can do together. I have to say and I keep talking about it, coming back to it, because I really appreciated it I feel like we got a good example of that last night over at First Neighborhood Community Center.

Pastor Darren:

There were a lot of people who put a lot of time in on this thing. They put it in starting gosh, was it April? I feel like it was right. After Easter we had the first meeting, agnes, right after Easter was it Somewhere in there? Yeah, somewhere around there which I identify as the last meeting I was able to make I'm teasing, I said it last night, though. I went to one, and then we were away for a little vacation or this, that, and I came back and it was rolling. The ball was rolling and I'm like God bless you, let her roll right. And they did Tons of work leading all the way up especially these last two weeks of getting everything organized these two days leading up to it people driving around, moving silverware and plates and this, that and the other thing, all the way through the event itself where we're all together. I mean that takes a little bit of work too to make sure all the things that were supposed to happen happen as they're supposed to happen. And then all the way into the evening, as I said, some people were there till 11 o'clock last night To me.

Pastor Darren:

I think I'm seeing a little bit of what we're supposed to understand as this fullness of the body. Why did these people work so hard on this? Because they love this church, because they love the people of this church and what they've meant to you, to each of us. People put all that time in because they love what this church has offered to this community. Lo, these 50, 55 years, what are we up to? I look at Boyd because he tracks that stuff. How many years? Where's Jeannie? Jeannie, she told me on Tuesday I'm watching online. Pastor, that party's going to go late. This is what she says. Anyway, lo, these many years, all the gifts that we've offered to the community around us not just for us, but for the community around us and friends, they did it because they love what God is doing here and where God is taking this community here.

Pastor Darren:

This, to me, this is what we're supposed to be learning in Ephesians. The body came together and showed the godly love that it's been given to share. We showed what this part of the body can do when we come together and live out our roles. And on that journey, I'm hoping you understand that our faith has been strengthened and deepened, even from something as silly and fun as line dancing on a Saturday night. Amen, agnes, we like our line dancing. I know this is how it works.

Pastor Darren:

So, coming back to it, just one thing. Just one thing Each of us is on this journey individually, but also as a body and I'm asking you today, as I've been asking for a little over a month now what are you going to do to stretch your little piece of the body? What are you going to do to bless yourself with your capacity to understand the fullness that can come when we all start working together? We all start growing together, we all start sharing our understanding of God together with the world around us. Are you on that journey? Are you ready to strengthen, are you ready to mature your part? Because that's the question we ask as we start this year and I invite you to take it on seriously. Amen.