Run the Race Set Before You
“Do
you think that I have come to bring peace on the earth? No, I tell
you, but rather division!” [1]
Normally, I preach on the Gospel lesson. I
almost always preach on the Gospel lesson, and believe me, I had an almost
overwhelming desire to preach on these words of Jesus, and the obvious
parallels they have, in word if not in spirit, to political climate in America
in the last several years.
I
decided to let the opportunity pass because the reading from the Letter to the Hebrews,
contains one of my favorite passages of scripture: "Therefore, since we
are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every
weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the
race that is set before us . . ."
I'm
not usually an obsessive type. I have the attention span of a gerbil. I
don't ordinarily get fixated on one thing and stay with it day after day, month
after month. But I have to confess to you that in the far distant
past, I became obsessed. I became obsessed with a race.
I
ran my first 5 kilometer race a year later, and my first 10K shortly thereafter. I
always started each race with a prayer, "Oh God, please don't let me be
last," and I never was. I never finished first, but then I
never finished last, either. I began to get the feeling that before
I turned 50, maybe this old fat boy could run a marathon. And
imagine my surprise when it was announced that the Quad Cities, where we were
living, would be having its first marathon on September 20, 1998.
Of
course, you don't just run a marathon. Remember, the name of the
race comes from the legend of a Greek herald named Pheidippides, who, after the
Greeks defeated the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 492 BC, ran the
twenty-six miles to Athens
You
have to do your homework. What kind of shoes should you wear, and
what kind of clothing? You can run four miles in just about
anything, but when you run longer and longer distances, you quickly find out
whether your shoes are right for your running style and the build of your body. Normal
cotton shorts and tee shirts need to be replaced with stuff that will wick
moisture away from your body, and which won't chafe you to the point of
bleeding when you run in them for hours at a time. And you discover
Vaseline. I won't even go into it, but I was astounded to find out
the importance of Vaseline.
What
kind of diet do you need to eat? The sugars in your blood stream
only last about 30 minutes when you're running, and your body begins to look
for something to eat, including itself, so you had better give it something. Linda
had to become an expert in cooking pasta, and our pantry became filled with
bizarre things called Power Bars, and
fluid supplement called Cytomax, and a
liquid food to eat while running with the appetizing name GU.
And,
of course, you have to run. You have to run a lot. The
experts recommend you run for at least a year before trying to run a marathon,
but the serious training starts about 18 weeks before the race. You
gradually increase the miles you run per week, and the miles you run each time,
until you peak about four weeks before the race by running a twenty-mile run. You
run in the heat, and in the rain, and in the snow. You run at night,
and you run during the day. Linda summed up the couple of years of my life in
which I ran marathons by saying, “He goes to work, he goes to church, and he
runs.”
And
remember, this was just a stupid race, a race that I wasn’t even going to win! The
writer of the Letter
to the Hebrews was talking about our lives in Christ, ". . . let
us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run
with perseverance the race that is set before us . . ."
Shouldn't
we put the same amount of effort into our lives in Christ that we put into
other, less important things? Shouldn't we be as obsessed with our
Christianity as we are with our careers, or our sports, or our hobbies? Shouldn't
we prepare as hard to run that race as we do to run these other races? Because
even though we become Christians through an act of God at our baptisms, that is only
the beginning of our race, and the race lasts for the rest of our lives.
The
Cursillo movement teaches that our preparation for the Christian life should
consist of three things; piety, by which they mean acts of devotion, study and
action. The Anglican Fellowship of Prayer calls the same three parts
prayer, study and action. No matter how you phrase it, the principle
remains true.
Each
of us needs to fuel our Christian race with daily prayer, and with private and
corporate worship. We need the sustenance that can only be provided
by intimate contact with our Lord. It is our Power Bar, our Cytomax, and even
our GU.
We
also have to study. We need to be firmly grounded in knowledge of
the Holy Scriptures and other inspirational writings of those who have run the
race before us. You have a perfect opportunity in front of you in
the Education for Ministry program starting again this fall. I
would urge you to take advantage of it, as I did years ago. I
realize that a lot of you are looking at the length of the study, four years,
and are thinking that it's too long of a commitment to make. Remember,
the race you are running lasts for your entire lifetime! What are
four years compared to that?
Finally,
you need to run. You need to engage in ministry. You need
to feed the poor, clothe the naked, and heal the sick. You need to
bring the joy of a life in Christ to all those with whom God puts you into
contact. We train for ministry by doing those ministries. And
through training we gain discipline, we gain endurance, and mostly, we gain
faith. When you begin training for a marathon, the 26.2 miles looks
to be insurmountable, but as you progress through the regimen, as your weekly
endurance runs get longer and longer, the insurmountable becomes achievable. Our
ministries work in the same way, as we find that God really does empower us for
ministry, that our faith really can move mountains.
Lastly,
there are the spectators. The writer of Hebrews began
this passage, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of
witnesses . . .” In any race there are spectators, but I cannot
think of that “cloud of witnesses” without remembering the New York City
Marathon, which I ran in November, 2000. You start on Staten Island
and run across the Veranzano Narrows Bridge into
Brooklyn and Queens . After
15 miles, you cross the Queensboro Bridge onto Manhattan Island Bryan
This
is the communion of saints. Our cloud of witnesses consists of all
those who have run the race before us and won the victor's prize; all the
saints, the martyrs, our mentors, our friends and relatives, all those who have
finished the race and are now standing in the presence of God.
They
watch us and cheer us every step of the way, encouraging us to persevere, to
continue on. And all the company of heaven joins their voices as we
cross the finish line and fall into the arms of our Lord. Then we
see the smile on his face, and the pride in his eyes, and hear him say,
"Well run."
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