Pentecost 13 (8/19/07) “Running the Race”

Lectionary 21/Proper 15 Hebrews 11.29-12.2

We had a great time at Confirmation Camp this year, Johanna and I and eleven of our confirmands. A couple of us had to come home a night early, which is too bad because we missed one of my favorite last day activities at camp: “Tag Olympics.” The camp is divided into teams, and each person on the team is assigned a particular event. There are a wide variety of possibilities—swimming, running, three-legged race, eating Saltine crackers and trying to whistle. Each event takes place at a different site. You complete your event, then you run to the next site and tag your team member, who then goes to work on his or her event. But almost everyone, as soon as they finish their event, runs over to the swimming pool, which is where the race ends. The pool is surrounded with cheering and screaming kids, all trying to encourage their team member to go just a little faster so that their team will win the prize—which in the olden days at least was the opportunity to throw some pastor of their choice into the pool!

It is a similar image that the writer to the Hebrews places before us this morning. The Christian faith, he says, is like a race, with people crowded around the finish line, cheering you on. He concludes with one of my favorite New Testament quotations: “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 . . .” The Christian faith is like a race. And into that simile, there is packed so very much about what the Christian life is all about!

Like a race, the Christian life has a definite aim and purpose. Someone in a race isn’t just running through the woods in a random direction; there is a direction, a goal to be attained. And that is true of the Christian life as well.

Of course lots of different people have lots of different aims and goals in their lives. It is an interesting question to consider—just what is your goal in life? For some, it is to accumulate things. Our preacher last week mentioned that bumper sticker that says, “The one who dies with most toys wins.” It is so expressive of human nature! For others, the goal may be status, or fame. Others have less ambitious goals—to live to be 90, or to have enough money to retire comfortably. Some goals are downright altruistic—to see that all my children go to college, or even just to have a secure and happy home.

Selfish goals, unselfish goals—but the Christian goal is something else entirely. It is to glorify God—that’s what one of the old catechisms said, and it’s not a bad answer. Paul might say it a different way; his goal is, he wrote in Philippians, “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.” Or it was put another way by the English saint Richard of Chichester: our goal is to “see Christ more clearly, love him more dearly, follow him more nearly.” All these different ways of expressing it have one thing in common. They place the emphasis, not on me or anything in my life, but on Christ. And that is the key for the Christian race. The goal is to be with Christ, to glorify Christ, to be transformed into the image of Christ.

All the other goals we might mention, no matter how good they sound, are nothing compared to that. And you see, having that goal always in view is important, because if we do not have it in view, then we will not reach it. A person who sets out to go nowhere in particular will end up going exactly there. That is true in life; that is true with the Christian faith. We must be heading toward a goal, and the goal is Christ.

Then a race always takes place on an appointed path. When you are running, you don’t get to take short cuts or go by whatever way you choose; rather you follow the course that has been laid out for you. Maybe it’s not what you would have preferred; but it is what you have been given.

The Christian life is like that, too. I don’t want to sound too deterministic or fatalistic here; it is a mistaken notion to think that every detail of your life has been determined ahead of time by God. Often people do think that way, when they speak of “fate.” If you follow that to the logical conclusion, it doesn’t leave much room for human decision or choice.

But we can say in another sense that the course of our life is marked out by God. It is by God’s grace, God’s choice, that you were born into the situation you were. It is God who has led you along your way, given you certain gifts, certain challenges. Your life in at least its general contours didn’t depend on choices you made, but on the path God opened before you.

So we might say that part of the Christian life is accepting what God has given, and working with it faithfully. We don’t always get the situations, the gifts, the opportunities that we would choose for ourselves. But we get the ones God gives us, and faithful Christian living is following the course as it is, not as we’d wish it to be.

Then we might mention that in running a race, it’s important to make progress. The wonderful story of the tortoise and the hare reminds us of that. The tortoise wins the race by making progress, slowly but surely, never stopping, always moving on at his own speed. The hare lollygags and relaxes, thinking he can make up the difference any time he wants; but of course he never does.

The Christian life is like that. Sometimes our progress is pretty good, fast enough to notice in ourselves. Other times it seems we’re stuck, and not going anywhere. But if we are to reach the goal, progress must be continual. At no point in this life do we reach the place where we can say, “I don’t need to grow any more. I don’t need to learn any more.” And yet it is common enough for people to do that! “I went to Sunday School all through childhood; I’ve learned enough about the Bible for one lifetime!” “I go to church every Sunday, and that’s enough praying and reflecting and Bible reading for me!” Doesn’t work that way, friends! There is a constant need to be growing in our faith and understanding. Our faith is like any living thing: the minute it stops growing, it stops living.

Another thing we can say about a race: It’s hard work! It requires some effort! It’s strenuous! And isn’t faith that way, too? In the 16th century, Ignatius of Loyola wrote a spiritual masterpiece called the “Spiritual Exercises.” I love the title! “Exercises!” You see, it reminds us that we don’t reach spiritual depths and heights just by wishing for it! Now any Lutheran must hasten to say that we don’t reach it just by striving for it, either; it has to come as a gift of God. But here again the athletic image may help us. A runner has been given the gift of speed; there are some of us who couldn’t win a race if we trained for years, because we just don’t have the basic equipment to do it. But the runner who is wise takes the gift and cultivates it, works on it, enjoys it, uses it, perfects it. It is something like that with faith. Faith is the gift of God, offered to each of us; but it is left to us to work with that gift, use it, exercise it. That’s what the Christian life is about—not just believing in the abstract, but consciously trying to live that trust, that faith each day. It isn’t easy!

Finally we might say that in the Christian life, as in a race, one of the greatest sources of encouragement is the witness of those who have gone before us. They are like the crowd, gathered around the finish line, cheering us on, telling us by their very presence that we can do it, we can run this race!

Who are these witnesses, who cheer us on so ceaselessly? Look around you, and you will see them! They are your fellow Christians, who by their very lives bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. We all know them. Those who suffer with great faith; those who give with such generosity; those who share God’s love so effortlessly and kindly . . . you can put faces and names to those descriptions.

And they are beyond this room, as well. Those who have gone before us—the famous saints like Augustine and Luther and Bonhoeffer, those who have faced trials and troubles beyond our imagining and yet have finished the race; the anonymous saints, the ones you know who had such an impact on your life. “So great a cloud of witnesses . . .” “We are treading where the saints have trod . . .”

And nowhere is our sense of that more profound than at this table of the Lord. Here we say those words: “With the saints on earth and the hosts of heaven, we praise your name and join their unending hymn . . .” Here we gather around with each other, and here behind us stand that great cloud of witnesses, that great cloud.

The Christian life is like a race. And therefore, dear ones, “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, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross . . .”

--Pastor Richard O. Johnson