Hi there, friends--
This is a short sermon I gave at our August 2024 worship session, which we kicked off in CMU's new Highmark Center for Health, Wellness and Athletics. I thought I'd share it here for those of you who didn't get a chance to be there. May the Light of God bless these words to your understanding and wholeness.
“And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds…”
Hebrews 10:24
“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.”
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12
A couple weekends ago my wife and I had the unique honor of helping a dear friend do a hard thing: run 50 miles in a day. Not kilometers… miles. The course was through the northern woods of my home town in Marquette, Michigan and featured mountains that I had climbed as a kid every summer. But when I was climbing those mountains we did them as day hikes. Our friend Andy was going to run up them.
The race started at 5:30 in the morning with the pines and poplars covered in a drizzly mist. A big storm had moved through the area the day before and the course’s rock faces were expected to be slick. After the countdown the racers were on the move, headlamps bobbing off into the forest. From there Sarah and I met up with Andy throughout the day at aid stations available as his designated crew. When you crew for someone doing an ultramarathon like this one you carry all your racer’s extra gear and clothing, plus their fuel foods of choice, and meet them along the way to cheer them on, rehydrate them, replenish the small packs they carry on the course and let them know how their pacing is going. Essentially even though you’re not the one racing you commit yourself to the goal of getting them across the finish line, which is an incredibly rich experience. It can be a little nerve wracking waiting to see their number trotting out of the woods at every station but when you recognize them in the pack it’s euphoric.
Andy has always been one of those people who is very clear about who he is and what’s important to him. You can see it written all over him, from the way he reads and works to how he listens to you when you speak to how he runs. His values are clear to me. Tonight as you moved around the prayer stations in this space you may have noticed that they were all beckoning you to reflect on your own values. One asked you to find a picture of someone, some place or some time that formed your values; another asked you what your values are now after reading the words of Wendell Berry. Another asked you who it is that you wanted to be in this coming year and encouraged you to express this in images rather than words. We asked you these questions, provided you with these prompts tonight because what you believe is important is not at all separate from spiritual community. Yes, what we believe is often dictated by our belonging to spiritual community, but what I’m getting at here is the way our values are actually held by one another.
We asked you to reflect on your values tonight because a big part of spiritual community is being there to hold each other to the things we say are important to us; to support the good work we say we’re about. Being in spiritual community is crewing a race for each other, altogether, all at once because it was the thing you set out to do. Mutuality in striving is often how callings are birthed. If we are to be God people in this world then how are we to do this without beckoning forth God in each other? Sure, you could go it alone and a lot of people do. Plenty of people run ultras without a crew, I saw them myself. But friends, it’s a lonely road and some of our dreams are too big to carry on our own. And that’s not to say you should have smaller dreams. Reach for the calling that has been bestowed on you, but let a friend give you a leg up.
So, if you meet me at the next aid station in the great journey of my life, I’ll carry your granola bars for you until you make it to the one after that. When we get there we’ll re-evaluate and you may find that you have run enough for one day or you could keep going. Either way, we will have enabled each other to live out the ideas that make our hearts sing in the wilderness for longer than we thought possible on our own.
By the grace and love of Christ may it be so--
Erin
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