Hebrews 12:1-2a
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
November 17, 2024
To be the church is to be part of a family that’s also a relay race team that spans the globe…and all time. We who follow Jesus today belong, not only with each other, but also with fellow believers of the past and of the future. All of us are members of the same team that, moment by moment, keeps moving on with the gospel baton in Christ’s long, ongoing marvelous mission.
We who now carry the baton are the legacy of other believers, most of whom a lot of us have never met (partly because so many of them have gone on to glory): faithful folks like George Johnson and Tom Dean, Mary Welch and Bill Welch, Katie Lines and Etta Williams.
Not all of these to whom we owe our place on the team did we get to know. But we all get to know, through faith in God’s word, that they’re supporting us now: prayerfully cheering us on as we run our leg of the race and do our part to move things forward in a common mission of service to Jesus and His concerns.
Today’s scripture from Hebrews begins with the celebration of how we’re “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses”. Imagine a sports stadium whose stands are filled with believers of the past, from Abraham and Moses to Martin Luther King and Cindy Kuhns. Those exuberant believers in the bleachers are shouting out their heart-felt encouragement of us who today run the earthen track below them – working for justice, showing compassion, bearing witness to Jesus. Their shouts of hope from the stands fill the air and rise up and onward to the clouds. And, though we cannot see them, we can, trusting in God’s word, count on their cheering us on every step of our way.
It’s somewhat like what happened on Friday, October 25, at Crypto.com Arena during a basketball game between the Lakers and the Phoenix Suns. With 4:23 left in the third quarter, at a point when nothing remarkable was happening on the court, that packed house of fans suddenly erupted into raucous shouts of joy for no apparent reason. On the court, players, coaches and officials looked at each perplexed until people tracking another game on their phones told them that an injured Freddie Freeman had just hit a miraculous grand slam in extra innings to save the Dodgers from defeat and to win the 1st game of the World Series.
What we see never tells the whole story, or even the most important story. Jesus has written us into His story. It’s a story that’s always more than meets the eye – one that involves a God who’s ever bigger than we can see and involves more people than we can see. So we run our race by faith and not by sight, supported and sustained by an unseen great crowd of witnesses. Their prayerful and steadfast cheering us on inspires us to defeat discouragement and despair and to keep investing our time and money to cross at last the finish line of victory.
Hebrews goes on to say that, for the sake of running our leg of the race, we are to “lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely” – that is, to let go of what hinders our running well for Jesus and of what distracts us from keeping our eyes on the prize. In other words, we are to practice the self-denial, the cross-bearing and the following of Jesus’ example in His self-sacrificial love – that He declares defines discipleship.
Some folks hesitate to follow Jesus because they realize it might mean giving up certain activities to which they’ve grown attached (say, spending a lot of money on entertainments) or taking on certain moral duties they’d just as soon avoid (say, giving money for the sake of the needy).
Yet, if there really is the God we think is there for us, a God who will fill our life with goodness, glory, power and peace, does it make any sense to hold back from walking with Him as He leads us because it requires the loss of something that doesn’t offer as much benefit as He? Tim Keller notes that, if we act like that, we act like a fool who has a fatal disease but refuses to take the medicine the doctor swears will cause him to stay healthy to a ripe old age, as soon as he hears the doctor say that chocolate counteracts the medicine’s effectiveness and he will have to give up eating any the rest of his life. Wouldn’t it be crazy to rebel against the loss of chocolate if that rebellion led to the loss of life itself?
To act wisely, we are to let go of misplaced priorities and to go along with God’s prescriptions whatever the cost. We’re also, Hebrews continues, to “run with perseverance the race that is set before us”. We are, for the good of the team and for the honor of the “Coach”, to run the full length of our relay leg, and to keep to the route laid out before us. Our relay leg may be so hard and painful we’d never have chosen it; but it’s not our race, and leg of it begins where the baton is passed on to us and ends where the next runner waits to receive it. We run as best we can even if we feel we’re getting nowhere.
A century ago, missionary William Leslie moved to Africa to minister to the Yansi people of a remote corner of the Congo. Fighting tropical diseases and hangry jaguars, Leslie taught the Bible, doctored the people, improved public health and established the first Yansi school system. But, after 17 years he returned to the US a discouraged and defeated man who believed he’d failed to make much of a lasting impact.
Fourteen years ago, a missionary team entered Yansi land expecting to have to start a ministry from scratch. Instead they found a network of vibrant, spiritually reproducing churches glittering like diamonds in the dense jungle across the Kwilu River from Vanga, from which Leslie had launched his wide-ranging efforts.
Leslie had left Yansi land unable to see that his seemingly fruitless mission field was not a dormant field, unable to see how the seeds he was planting were growing underground out of sight, unable to see the harvest that would come eventually and, most tragically, unable to see how big was the God He served and how big was the relay team of which he was but a part.
We run our race by faith and not by sight. With the physical eye, we can see neither the cloud of witnesses cheering us on day and night nor the God working the wonders of His love day and night. But with the spiritual eye, we can see the miracles of God’s grace. That vision encourages us to run our race with hope. It also enables us to keep “looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” and to keep following His example of giving one’s all – while trusting God to supplement our meager contribution with His own powerful help and the help of a community that spans generations and that gives us the momentum to ever move forward in the Master’s marvelous mission moment after moment.
Jesus is the life of each of us and of all of us together. He makes us a part of a very big story most of which is hidden from our view. But He is in fact with us now, and always has been, and always will be. He is the start and the end of the story, its author and finisher, its pioneer and perfecter. Let us be as faithful and generous in our giving, as He is in His!
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