The Great Cloud of witnesses - those before us and those after us

Rev. Harriette Cross
Rust and Englewood UMC
August 15, 2010
The Cloud of Witnesses and those who come after us
Isaiah 5:1-7
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
12th Sunday after Pentecost
Year C


What it takes to run a 4000 mile marathon

For 111 days, Charlie Engle, Ray Zahab, and Kevin Lin ran across the Sahara Desert. They went through Senegal, Mauritania, Niger, Libya, and Egypt until they reached the red sea. During the race of endurance, they faced 100 degree weather, freezing nights, sandstorms, tendinitis, sickness, aches pains and many blisters. In spite of all of that the hardest part for them was to find water clean enough to drink – it wasn’t like there was a water station waiting for them at any point. This was all a part of a 4000 mile marathon across the Sahara. This was quite an accomplishment.
I try to be a runner, but am in no means a ready to do a marathon. But I do know that running takes a lot of practice, endurance, and perseverance. Running a race is a lot like being a Christian, a faithful Christian. Someone who was able to keep the faith, serving God until the end. Church members who weather conflict and remain joyful, loving and faithful.
The epistles use the metaphor a lot of running a race who knows if Paul was a runner himself, but we know that running was an important part of the culture of the time. The Greeks were always running somewhere. Hebrews uses the running metaphor to encourage us to be ready to run the race before us.

What faithfulness does
As I said earlier, the message of Hebrews is for us to be faithful – to live faithful. But what does that mean. Before I talk about what faith means – let me talk about what faithfulness does. Faithfulness is loving, kind, understanding, patience, willing to wait, willing to endure. Faithfulness is the 7th of nine fruits of the spirit. Galatians list the nine fruits as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Fruit because these are qualities which take time for us to acquire, none of us are born with them, they develop as a faithful response to life circumstances.
Faithfulness waits, faithfulness is disappointed and hurt, faithfulness makes a decision to be loyal anyway.


The Book of Isaiah as an example of what faith does

That is the message in the book of Isaiah. It starts out as a love song – let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard. Any who heard those words would have known that a vineyard is a metaphor for a bride – someone worthy of being loved, looked after, and fruitfully enjoyed. They would be expecting a happy song about a love fulfilled, instead that get a lament about a love unfulfilled, and owner who took the time to loving grow a field, who cared for it tended it, and waited for the day when the field would give good fruit. Instead the fruit was rotten and not even fit to eat. The owner is angry and vows to destroy the field for disappointing him. Jesus even talks of a fig tree which does not produce fruit and must be destroyed.
The owner is so hurt that things did not turn out the way he was expecting that he vows to not only stop taking care of it, but to not rain upon it. The story reveals that the vineyard is the people of God and that God is the keeper who was expecting justice and found only bloodshed amongst his people. How is that a story of love? When the lover was hurt by those he loved? Because this is also a story of God. Love is the nature of God. Sometimes you have to love people enough to be honest with them, to tell them that they are wrong and to call them on their sin. People have to be reminded that no matter how much I love you, I can’t save you from the consequences of your actions.
Sometimes we have to be told that no matter whom you are, and how stuck your are in your sin, I may be hurt, but I will never give up on you or your ability to do the right things when held accountable. That God love for us – to love us just the way we are, through the good times and bad times, always patiently waiting for the good times.

A couple and their example of faithfulness

A husband, who was going through early onset Alzheimer’s disease – wrote a letter to his wife of his fear of losing her, of the day coming when he would no longer recognize her, or speak to her – he didn’t want to lose her that way.
She responded back to him in tears that I will continue to love you and care for you, not because you know me or remember our life, but because I will remember you. I will remember the man who proposed to me, I will remember the man who fathers and helped raise my children, I will remember the things he loved to do, the movies we watched and cried over, the times he held me hand, the times we prayed together. I cherish the obligation, commitment, and opportunity to care for you, because I remember you. And she did all throughout his illness. When he did forget her, he did forget his life, he did forget his own name and he eventually died. How is that a love story? That is a love story because that is a story of what faith does. It endures through it all.

What Faith is

That is what faith does – now let’s talk about what faith is.
In the bible, in both the Hebrew bible and the New Testament – faith and faithfulness are used interchangeably. The Greek word is pistos. The word epistle – is a letter of faith sent to the people.
Faith is to give oneself over to wholly to be loyal, to trust, and to be dependable. Faith for Christian means to have an insatiable appetite for god, to be in constant pursuit of holiness. To stay in the situation for the long haul- to endure.

Those who have come before us
The writer of Hebrews reminds us that faith is not just about us – it is about those who come before us. Our role models, our teachers, our parents, our mentors, those who hung onto the faith throughout the ups and downs of history. Especially in African American culture, we know that many of those who fought so hard for us to get where we are had to make a lot of sacrifices. Many of them never saw the world they were hanging onto – and we are the fulfillment of what some never saw for themselves. And yet through it all, they hung onto faith for something in the future.
We can learn a lot from those who run before us. Someone once said that as we get older, running the race of faith means being determined to run no matter what, sometimes we have to be urged to lift our drooping arms, finding strength to move our aching knees and being determined to find a straight and flat course to run so that we don’t have to struggle to get up the hills in life. Running the course of faith is not a short dash to glory, but endurance and perseverance to the make it to the end.
We are never alone in our race – because we have those who have gone before us, always cheering us on being an example for us. Hebrews says the our greatest example of faithful endurance is Jesus Christ, who went to the cross on our behalf, confident that one day we would understand and follow his in his journey and his example.

Setting a faithful example for those behind us

Our most important task in the race called life is to remember the example we set and the path we pave for those behind us.
I volunteered for the Chicago marathon last year, the only way to get a jacket and a hat was to volunteer on Sunday. My job was to stand at the front of the starting line before the race. My friend criticized me and said that I should have been running, I explained that if I had run, I would have been at the back somewhere struggling all day knowing good and well that I was in over my head and would not finish.
But instead I was at the start line in front of 30,000 people. With that many people in order to prevent a stampede, you have to order the runners, and put the very fastest in the front. Our job was to form a human chain so that no one started too soon, and as soon as you heard the buzzer, to get out of the way and watch the wave of humanity cross the start line on the way to finishing a race.
What an amazing feeling it was to channel the energy of the fastest people on earth – a lot of people choose to run in the Chicago marathon because it is a straight flat race, where you don’t have to strain yourself to run.
But to watch that energy and power go forward for that moment believing that anything is possible and that they can conquer anything in life was amazing.
My point is that there 30,000 saints or more in the race who have gone before us and shown us the way. But there are 30,000 saints after us looking to us for an example of faith.
God is always faithful to humanity, God is always going to understand, god is always going to call people, and God is always going to be present in the lives of the people.
When we look around the room we may ask, but where are these people- how is God as work in their lives, How is Christ bringing salvation to their lives – it is a matter of faith for us to realize that they are out there, they are coming, they are discovering faith, and they are joining the race.
We don’t have to step aside; the we have to step forward to lead to run the race of faith that has been set before us. Let us pray….. Amen.

Where is Your Faith? - August 19, 2007

Imagine, you are on a camping trip. It is nighttime, and the perfume of pine forest is all around you, You have left your cabin for a peaceful walk. Your leaders for the trip take you up the steep hill behind the cabin. You are led to the middle of a forest clearing, and you are instructed to lay down on your back and to watch the night time sky. You are told that if you wait and watch, you will see an unbelievable surprise. You wait for what seems like an impossibly long time. You keep quite still as you watch the glory of stars undimmed by the presence of city lights. You watch and wait, and it seems that nothing happens. You begin to think that you have been trapped – that this is some kind of joke. But you faith in your leaders, keeps you waiting and watching. Then suddenly the sky is filled by a wondrous blazing meotor show. You silent waiting is replaced by awe filled voices, as you and those you are with rejoice in the wonder that you have just saw. You had honestly questioned this whole experience, but in the end you received a reward for waiting in faith, a reward beyond anything that you could have made up in your mind.
Perhaps we can do this exercise when we go on our church camping trip. Getting away and just watching the night sky always brings the reward of awe. There is always something going on in the stars.
And yet this is a representation of our life as faithful people. God is our ever present leader on a journey. God tells us that there is a wonderful surprise in life coming up, it will be something that is greater than anything that we can imagine. We wait and we look forward to this wonderful surprise, but nothing happens. We get doubtful, we start to think that perhaps God does not know what anything. There is no surprise in life, there is nothing to look forward to. There is only the day grind of things that need our attention, things that we need to get through. Life just is, most of the time there is no reward.
That was the attitude of the people of the new church- they were told that Jesus was coming soon – that there would be a reward for a hard life. Moments passed, as a matter of fact, by this time years have passed and nothing has happened. There are no signs of Jesus. This fragile church that Paul addresses in Hebrews is made up of both Jews and gentiles. They have been able to overcome their differences to become a united church. But they have also found that they are being teased by others in their community. People are telling them that they are wasting their time. There is no need to wait for a Jesus who is not going to show up. It just doesn’t make sense to believe in something that you cant see. Paul reminds them that just because you cant see it, that doesn’t mean that it is not there. Afterall, the stars in the sky put on a wonderful show each and every night, but how many of us really take the time to pay attention to actually watch it. God speaks to us and gives us a vision all of the time. Most of the time we are so caught up in our doubt and cynisim that we forget to listen to a positive message from heaven.
Paul uses the of Sarah and Abraham as an example of faithful living. He is 98 and she is 90. together they are almost a quarter of a millenuim. Today they would be living together in a nursing home. They have no children to take care of them, so they are reliant on the staff for all of their care. And all of a sudden they get a vision to leave the safe care of the nursing home, and to go out into the desert into a new land. They are encouraged to take care of themselves and to listen to that voice of God calling them forward. The nurses at the home are especially concerned about this strange disappearance of Sarah, because her blood test show something strange. They have never had to do a pregnancy test on any of their patients, but for some reason they did and found that she is pregnant. In the midst of the worst of circumstances, when they thought that all hope was gone, God made a promise the Abraham and Sarah, and god fulfilled on that promise. God promised that they would have a family so large that its number would be like the stars in the sky. Over 5000 years longer, we can marvel at the fact that god did fulfill on that promise. But what must it have been like to follow a promise that makes no sense, and has nothing to do with reality. God has made each of us that same promise, but how many of us have a faith to wait for that promise to be fulfilled? How many of us are even still enough to hear God make that promise to us?
When the church in Hebrews was discouraged, Paul went back into history. And showed that many who had come before had followed God’s voice in their lives. They committed to living a life of faith, some times they never saw that faith fulfilled, but the generation who came after did. It reminds us to think of our ancestors and the dreams and visions that they had for the world. Having an education was very important for my grandmother, but it was something that she was denied. She always encouraged me to do the best that I could in school and to take advantage of every opportunity that I was given. When I got to college we were told the story of racism on campus in the sixties. We were reminded that we were free to get an education because of the many who sacrificed their education to sit in and demand equal education for all people regardless of their skin color. It is that reminder of the past that inspires to create a future for generations to come. To create a world that doesn’t exist today. It exist only in our faith and God’s vision. Who are the people in your past, who created your world, who fulfilled God’s promises so that you can live. Paul reminds us that we all have faithful ancestors and in times of doubt, we need to remember their stories.
A father and his five year old daughter were sitting around together talking. As he was reading his paper, the conversation went to dolls. The father promised his daughter that he would build her a doll house. The next day, he noticed that the daughter started to gather all of her dolls, and to collect all of her little tea pots, and all of the other things that you would out in a doll house. He asked wife what she was doing. The wife responded that she had been promised a doll house, and that she was making preparations to move in. the husband immediately put down his paper, and ran to the garage to build that house. It was important to fulfill the plans of his daughter. He wanted his daughter to believe in him. God is a lot like that father, God wants to fulfill our visions. God will do anything to fulfill the promises that have been made to us. It has been said that it is not a great faith that we need, but we need faith in a great God and the great promises that God will fulfill.
Jesus puts a new spin on being willing to watch and to wait. He tells us that being a child of God is the most wonderful gift that we could ever receive, but that it also comes with a responsibility. Our watching and waiting is to be filled with disciplship. Waiting is making a choice to be obedient to God. God is steadfast in God’s promise to us, so we must be steadfast in our faith. Jesus tells two stories one of those we are able to wait in steadfast faith and one who is not.
First he tells of servant who wait for their master – and when he comes he puts on his apron and serves and feeds the servants. Jesus is the one who will serve us, who feeds us all that we need to get through life.
Then he tells of a man who falls asleep while guarding his house – and thieves break in and steal his possessions. For those who don’t expect it – Jesus Presence is like a thief in the night, that steals our life away from us. When we are expecting one thing – Jesus makes another happen. It all depends on how we formulate our priorities - is our life about what we want – or what God has called us to do?
We have no way of knowing when Jesus will return, but we can be sure that he will. What will he find us doing when he comes? When we are waiting as a faithful disciple, there is not need to be anxious over uncertainty. What we hope for in the future, affects how we choose to live our life today. When we die, we cant take our finances with us, but we can take our character. So are we building up our possessions or our faith? When we talk of our self worth are we talking about how much we have or how much God values us. In God’s eyes, we are worth more than you ever know. Shouldn’t we respond by faithful living?
Isaiah sums it waiting in Christian discipleship very well when he says – Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, remove the evil of your doings, cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan and plead for the widow.