August 18, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

The Perseverance of Faith

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Hebrews 11:29–12:2

Run the race that is set before us. . . This passage is often preached beginning with an illustration about being in a race. A cross-country race, a bike race, a swim meet—the preacher gets to relive his or her glory days from high school athletics and then, hopefully, preach a sermon. I’m going to stay with that tradition—kind of, but I’m going to talk about a different kind of race. Last week I was riding my bike in Michigan. I was about an hour from here, by car, on “Lake Shore Drive” in Michigan. Lake Shore Drive in Michigan is perhaps even more opulent than Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. It’s a long stretch of road in the beautiful Indiana and Michigan dunes. Out to the north and west, Lake Michigan stretches as far as the eye can see; the views are breathtaking. People with the means to do so have taken advantage of this, so all along the road there’s a house below you, right on the beach, then the road, and then there’s a house above you, further up the dune, so that as many people as possible can see this amazing view. As you pass by on a bike, you think to yourself, “That house is amazing. . . . That house is even more amazing. . . . I can’t believe that house . . .” And it goes on for miles and miles, each house trying to be even bigger and grander than the next.

I rode along on my bike and realized that, even though I was the one moving, the real race was to the left and the right of me. I realized it most when I passed between two houses, a grand old home to the south, up the hill, beautiful and unique in every way, and below, to the north, a new construction where the homeowner had bought the prime, lakefront real estate and had built up, up, up, until they blocked the view of the old house to the south. The people to the south must’ve had a lot of money. But there’s always someone who has more, which has a way of reminding us that no matter how much you have, it can always feel like someone else has more and something is missing.

Keeping up with the Joneses—that’s the race. And it’s true for everybody, I think. If these people on Lake Shore Drive, all of whom are well within the 1 percent we hear so much about, if they are constantly in a race to have more, it must be true for the rest of us as well that whatever we have it is never enough. It’s so hard for any of us to feel like there is nothing more we need, nothing more we must do, that we have finished the race. No, we’re all still racing, and tonight I want to talk about the fact that we may be in a race we cannot win.

Last week I talked about faith and was honest in saying that I don’t know an easy answer about how to live faithfully in the midst of hard times. I don’t, and in some ways, that’s faith; faith is hard. The honesty in today’s sermon comes early: I think there are an incredible number of injustices in this life, be they economic, racial, national, you name it—plenty of reasons worth talking about why we don’t all get a big shiny car and a place on Lake Shore Drive. But regardless of those injustices, there is something we all share: I don’t think that anyone, rich or poor, old or young, living now or in years past, has ever found that they have “enough” or that nothing is “missing” in their life. None of us ever really finds “fulfillment” in this life. I think “fulfillment,” “wholeness,” “completeness” is a fantasy, framed for us by storybooks and advertising, and I think that many of us could be a whole lot happier if we could figure out sooner that feeling whole or complete or finishing the race is not a promise for this life. This life is about running the race. Importantly, it’s about making sure that we’re running the right race, that we are not wearing ourselves out trying to accumulate more earthly security when there is no evidence that we will ever be able to get enough.

That, I think, is what tonight’s passage is saying to us. You might have gotten lost in the list of biblical names and stories that began the passage—that’s OK. All of the people who are mentioned are Old Testament characters. All of them have some kind of special relationship with God. And they are from many different walks of life. Some of them are great generals and judges; others are prophets; some are prostitutes and criminals. The point seems to be that all of us, no matter who you are, where you live, what you do for a living, no matter what side of Lake Shore Drive you live on or if you’ve never even seen the lake: you are a person who was created by God and has a special relationship with God. And the fact that you haven’t figured it all out yet, the fact that you haven’t defeated the Joneses, the fact that you haven’t found wholeness or finished the race doesn’t diminish the relationship you have with God. Because that feeling of incompleteness—that’s what we all share, and we share it with all of these biblical people who have gone before us. It never ends here on earth, the feeling of incompleteness. It will only go away when we go home to God.

Do you know any of these stories?

David, the good guy. Well, everybody thinks he’s the good guy, but the pressure to be the good king is incredible, and so he cheats on his wife and messes up his life. He wishes he could have realized how good he had it, he wishes everybody would remember the story of David and Goliath, but everybody that knows that story also knows the story of David and Bathsheba. Mighty King David is broken and incomplete.

Samson: he seems to be the one who has it all figured out—good life, great body, strong willed; he’s a hero of his people. Until he meets Delilah, and she cuts off his hair and he loses his mojo; he loses everything. Mighty Samson, as weak as any one of us, is broken and incomplete.

David, Samson, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Jephthah—these are the people who went before us in faith, who lived complicated and incomplete lives, and who never in this life ceased to be broken and incomplete. They all share with us that deep need to finish the race and go home. In this world, we can’t get there.

If there is no wholeness, completeness, full satisfaction in this life, then where is it to be found? The answer to that, I believe, has something to do with what people of faith call heaven. At times it has been said that the church has been so heavenly minded that it’s no earthly good, that we spend so much time talking to you about heaven that we don’t offer the present real world enough of our energy. At times that accusation has been right. But I think that, for the most part, we err in the opposite direction these days. We spend so much time in the church talking to you about finding what is best and right for you today and neglect the bigger picture. The truth is that, at some point, the effort to give you a bunch of answers for today puts the church in a rather uninspiring and generic position. If all we do is give you answers for today, that essentially means the church is not much different than some combination of a social service agency, a self-help section at the bookstore, or an advertising firm, trying to give you a recipe for the good life, a path to wholeness and satisfaction. But as I said at the start, I believe that in this life those kinds of promises are a lie: you can’t get all the way there in this life, and the Bible never says you can. This life of faith is not about finishing the race; it is about running it. And I believe the distinctive role of the church is to be a place that is honest about that reality and is a place and a body of believers who help one another to keep running the race and running the right one.

So what about “heaven”—that place on the other side where we do find wholeness? What does it look like? Well, the reality is that, for all the energy some Christians devote to talking about heaven, the Bible actually says precious little about it, and what it does say is steeped in metaphors and symbols that use the things of this world just to try to approximate what heaven might be like. What we do seem to know is heaven is home. It is the finish line. It is the place where the race is over, nothing is missing any longer, and whatever seems lost in the life you have now is finally found. It’s where we find peace.

This idea brings us back around to where we started: that road where I passed between the beautiful houses on Lake Shore Drive in Michigan. The temptation, when looking at all of those beautiful houses, is to assume that they are “homes” in a sense that they really are not. The temptation is to look at the towering facades, the fast cars in the driveway, the beautiful people out walking their purebred dogs, and to assume that they are “home,” that they have somehow figured it out. Like many of us, if you asked them, they might even tell you that they are “home” for the most part, that life is good and there are no major problems, that they are blessed beyond measure. But it is frightening how quickly that story can begin to fall apart. A lost job or bad investment, a substance abuse problem, an extramarital affair or just a marriage that seems to have lost its intimacy, a sudden illness that takes away a loved one. No matter who we are, what we have accumulated, or how hard we work, these things threaten to quickly undo us and to expose us for the vulnerable and broken people we all really are. Theologian Craig Barnes looks at these seemingly perfect but honestly imperfect lives we lead and remarks that many of us are “good at living but clueless about how to make a good life” (Craig Barnes, Searching for Home, p. 172).

That truly good life is found when we admit that what we need in order to heal our brokenness is God. Only with God do we truly find our way home. And there are signs of that, here, at church, so that while we are still not permanently at home, we can be reassured of the promise that a home exists for us. This is God’s house, figuratively God’s home on earth. So inside of it, we find a table, a place where all of us can gather and are invited to be fed as if we are coming home. Here, because none of us are complete or whole, because all of us are broken, here God comes to us in Jesus Christ, who says, “Take this bread; this is my body broken for you.” Out of God’s wholeness, Christ becomes broken like us, so that the incomplete pieces of our lives can come together and be matched up with the broken life of Christ, and in this incomplete life, we can receive a taste of what it means to be in unity with our Creator, the one who waits to welcome us home. This is the place where we can taste the promise of what it is to be whole. You are invited to this table tonight. Welcome home.

Amen.