Tenth Sunday after Pentecost-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
10th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 15C
August 14, 2022
After a long summer hiatus, I started
back running this week. On good days,
there is nothing I love more than a good treadmill-run. I show up at the gym like I plan to; I crank
up my running playlist in my headphones, and run/walk exactly as I had planned
to run/walk that day. As someone who has
run off and on, her whole adult life, I am quite familiar with the
pattern. For whatever reason, my first
run back after a hiatus (assuming that I have set reasonable expectations for
my level of physical fitness—which isn’t always the case), is usually a
dream. It’s easier than I think it will
be; the time flies by; I end my workout optimistic about getting back into
running shape. But the second run after
coming back, that’s the one that always gets me. Best case scenario: I make it to the gym; run the course I had
planned, and it is 10 times harder than my first run back. My muscles are sore and I’m tired. My mind tells me that I can always just stop
and walk or even just get off the treadmill—no one will even know, and so I
often have to dig deep and push through to finish my planned course. I’m not always successful.
So it has intrigued me this week that
the writer of Hebrews, who is writing about faith in this week’s passage and in
last week’s passage, talks about how faith, the life of the faithful is like
running—entreating the followers of Christ who are suffering by saying, “Let us
run with perseverance the race that is set before us.”
Hebrews Chapter 11 is often known as
“the hall of fame of faith.” It begins
with a familiar verse: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the
conviction of things not seen.” Last
week’s portion goes on to talk about Abraham and Sarah-how they trusted God and
set out for a new promised land; how God made them promises that they did not
live to see fulfilled, but how we as the people of faith know that God came
through for them. This week’s reading
name drops more of the faithful throughout our scriptural history and it is
full of action: “By faith the people
passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land, but when the Egyptians
attempted to do so they were drowned. By faith the walls of Jericho fell after
they had been encircled for seven days. By faith Rahab the prostitute did not
perish with those who were disobedient, because she had received the spies in
peace.” Faith inspired the followers of
God to conquer kingdoms, administer justice, obtain promises, shut the mouths
of lions, quench raging fire, escape the edge of the sword, win strength out of
weakness, become mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight….
For so many of us, faith has come to
mean a sort of intellectual set of beliefs or even an emotional connection to
God and each other, but in this chapter of Hebrews, faith is a physical
response to the call of God to go to new places, to step out into the unknown
because God tells us that is where we need to go. As another writer puts it, “The texts
describe the faithful as people who set out for new places, anticipate new
arrivals, wait for big changes, and search for new homelands. In these texts, the faithful are nomads. They wander.
They contend with a holy restlessness…They work for the transformation
of this world even as they yearn with all their hearts for another.”
She
continues, “Faith as it is described in Scripture is not, in other words, a
destination. It’s not a conclusion or a
form of closure. Faith is a
longing. Faith is a hunger. Faith is a desire. Faith is the restless energy that pushes us
out the door and onto the road in pursuit of the inheritance God has
promised. Faith is the audacity to
undertake a perilous journey simply because God asks us to — not because we
know ahead of time where we’re going.
Faith is the itch and the ache that turns our faces towards the distant
stars even on the cloudiest of nights. [She
concludes,] Faith is the willingness to stretch out our imaginations and see
new birth, new life, new joy — even when we feel withered and dead inside. Faith is the urgency of the homeless for a
true and lasting home — a home whose architect and builder is God.”[i]
This
chapter of Hebrews also makes it clear that a life of faith, this response to
God’s call to step out into new places, isn’t always smooth or easy. The passage details all the ways that the
faithful hall-of-famers suffered in faithfulness, in their stepping out into
the places God was calling them. In our
gospel reading for today, Jesus talks some about this, too, offering a
description (and not necessarily a prescription) of what his disciples may
endure as he makes his way to Jerusalem.
So
where is the good news in all of this? We
come here looking for peace and solace, not more stress and difficulty in our
already fractious, stressful lives! Why
go back to the gym when we know that 2nd run back is going to be so
much harder than the first?
Years
ago, I heard a remarkable, true story about phenomenal grace under pressure,
about faith and patience in the face of extreme persecution and stress. It’s a story that aired on This American Life
about a group of Girl Guides (the rest of the world’s form of our Girl Scouts)
and their leaders who were taken prisoner in a Japanese concentration camp
right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
The leaders and the girls were at a school for the children of American
and British missionaries and workers in China, and the children were taken,
without their parents to the concentration camp.
But
here is what is remarkable about this story.
They never stopped acting like Girl Guides. The leaders promoted cheerfulness and service
to the girls for the entire four years they were captive. They had competitions (based on the thing they
needed for their survival) that served as their merit badges, and they continued
to sing throughout the whole four years the Girl Guide songs, songs of faith
and optimism and hope. One girl
remembers how they would frequently sing the song: “Day is done. Gone the sun
from the sea, from the hills, from the sky. All is well, safely rest. God is
nigh.”
The
leaders were not foolish. One is
recorded as having written about her hope that when they were finally to be
taken outside of the camp to be killed, she hoped she went first so she
wouldn’t have to watch it. Yet, in the
midst of incredibly stressful circumstances, those leaders chose to have hope,
to do what they could to protect those children, and to be faithful in their
calling.
The
narrator of the piece says it well: “There probably aren't many places on earth
where you have less reason to be cheerful than a concentration camp. But it
turns out, in a place like that, being able to be cheerful, to have a positive
outlook, it's not dopey or silly. It's how you survive. How you tell the story
matters.”[ii]
Every
time I show up at the gym and run on the treadmill, I become a runner. And every time we show up and break bread
together in this place, asking for forgiveness for our sins, reaching out our
hands and our very souls in supplication to be fed by the body and blood of
Christ, asking to be transformed more into the image and likeness of the God
who created us, and then accepting God’s call to go out into the world once
again to share God’s love with a desperate and needy world; every time we
choose mercy over taking offense, we choose doing what is right over doing what
is easy, we choose kindness over meanness or indifference, we are practicing
our faith, becoming more and more those people who step out in faith in response
to God’s call. We give ourselves and our
lives over to something bigger than our own self-centeredness. We participate in the story of all the
faithful, being mindful that we need each other, in order for the fullness of
God’s promises to be fulfilled.
[i]
From Debie Thomas’ essay: Called to Restlessness. First published on Journey with Jesus blog in
2019. Full text can be found here: https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/3420-called-to-restlessness-2
[ii] From
a sermon I preached at St. Columb’s Episcopal Church, Ridgeland, MS. 13th
Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 13C; August 14, 2016
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