Race Across the Sky

September 15, 2019

St. John’s United Church of Christ, Union, Illinois

Hebrews 11:29-12:2

How many of you remember Usain Bolt from the last Olympic Games? He was amazingly fast. He practically strolled through world records. Watching him run was like watching a superhero.

Superheroes are big right now. There have been not a few films about superheroes in the past few years, with many more in the works. We enjoy watching superheroes. Perhaps it is helpful to imagine that our problems, or the world’s problems, could be solved if only there was one person, one gifted with super-human abilities, who had the courage to take a stand. Perhaps we like to watch because we can imagine being the superhero ourselves, if only for a couple of hours, and it makes us feel powerful.

The Letter to the Hebrews holds up some superheroes of the bible for us to remember. These heroes accomplished amazing feats of strength and courage by faith, by the power of God working within them. The writer lists several, but acknowledges there are so many that there is not enough time to tell about all of them. And that’s just the ones in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. Many more heroes and heroines could be added from the New Testament; and from the two-thousand years of the history of the church could be added millions more. What a great cloud of witnesses!

It is good to remember our ancestors, to repeat the stories of heroism from our common history. Yet, we must do more than simply recite the old stories. We need to understand how their lives, and their stories, impact our lives. There is a paraphrase of Hebrews 11:40 by Eugene Peterson that I find helpful in understanding the connections. “God had a better plan for us: that their faith and our faith would come together to make one completed whole, their lives of faith not complete apart from ours” (The Message). The story of their faith is not complete without the story of our faith, and ours is not complete without theirs, because we’re part of the same story.

We are part of The Story capital “S”, the big story that, for the ancients, began with Adam and Eve. For us it began with the Big Bang, or perhaps even long before. It is the story that is still being told. The bible tells some very important parts of that story, but it is not the whole story. And that is why we’ve been known to say “God is still speaking.”

Imagine a relay race. The baton is passed from one runner to the next. But this is not a sprint. This race is much longer, longer even than a marathon. It is like the “Race Across the Sky,” also known as the Leadville Trail 100 Run. That race is one-hundred miles of extreme Colorado Rockies terrain — from elevations of 9,200 to 12,600 feet. Or perhaps the race is more like the Olympic Torch relay, where the fire keeps passing from one to the next over thousands of miles. And like a relay race, other hands have kept the flame before us, and other hands will carry it on after us. And one day we will join that great cloud of witnesses.

The story of the faith of Saint John’s United Church of Christ in Union is like a marathon relay race. The story of the United Church of Christ is like the Trail 100. And the big story of the Christian faith, passed down through the ages, is like the Olympic Torch run. There are others running with us, some who have been running for a long time, and others who have only started to walk. Some cannot walk at all, and yet they participate in the race as well. That is the story of our faith.

In his book, Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope, Walter Brueggemann describes the story of the community of faith in which we share “a past of life-giving miracles, a future of circumstance-denying promise, and a present tense of neighbors in fidelity.” The stories of heroic deeds from the past, the stories of faithful people following the will of God, can inspire us today to be faithful to who we are, to keep on running the race, no matter what is happening around us, no matter how things appear. Our story is, as yet, unwritten, still unfolding, still being told.

Now, if the thought of trying to run 100 miles at 12,000 feet of elevation makes you want to faint, remember this: keep your eyes set on Jesus. Jesus ran this race before us, blazed a new trail, and set guideposts on the way. Jesus continues to run beside us. And Jesus will make sure that you don’t run this race in vain.

It might help to remember that those ancestors of our faith that are mentioned in the Letter to the Hebrews, they were not super-humans. They were human, just as flawed and failure-prone as the rest of us. Moses wasn’t permitted to enter the Promised Land because he had broken faith with God. Rahab’s life was spared, but her home, the city of Jericho, was destroyed. David didn’t get to build the Temple because of that business with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, whom David murdered.

It is encouraging to me to know that even these heroes of old were deeply flawed yet deeply faithful. Maybe there’s a chance for me yet. Maybe I need someone to remind me that it’s not by my own power – let alone super-power – that I endure or accomplish anything, or even live. I am able to do what I can only by the power of God working through me.

We don’t run this race in vain, and we don’t run it alone. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. We are joined on the journey by family and friends, fellow runners who can encourage us to keep going. And we have Jesus who runs the race with us, just ahead of us, guiding the way.

We are running in the big race, the Story with a capital “S”, and that means that what we do matters. It matters not just to us, but to those who have gone before and are now watching us as we continue the same race. It matters to those who follow us who will need examples of faith to fortify them as they, too, run the course. It matters to those who run alongside us, who fall and need a hand to get back up, and who reach out a hand to us in need. What we do matters because we will have added our own stories to those written long ago. Our faith story is not “apart from” the faith of our parents or our great-great-grandchildren. We’re part of something greater than ourselves, a bigger picture, an ancient story that is still being told.

As we run, we draw ever closer to the coming of God’s reign – the peace, and justice, and healing of God so badly needed in our homes and families and neighborhoods, and in places far away, like Iraq and Egypt, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Syria. We run a race which is long and hard, but with the knowledge that God will not let go of us when we stumble or fall, knowing that God will guide our feet, in faith we shall not fail to pass on the fire.  Amen.