What follows is a sermon I wrote for a class, I presented it this afternoon, and it went fairly well. My tradition after I finish the rare speaking occasion is to just ditch the thing and say “on to the next one”, but I figure why not just post it here and see where it goes. It is written as though I were giving it to students as I am definitely more called to campus ministry than the pastorate. And I had just given a talk at LaRoche on Psalm 42, which worked very well for this one.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witneses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame and is seated at the right had of the throne of God.

Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.”

It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

Therefore, lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. ” Hebrews 12:1-14

So, apart from what I do here at Point Park, I also serve the CCO at my alma mater at LaRoche, and we’ve been doing this series that, when we were planning out became just “about relationships”, but it eventually transformed into the first half of the semester would be about what it is to serve God, and the second would what it means to serve others and what those relationships could look like. I got to open by speaking on being in a place of spiritual darkness, where it feels like no relationship with God exists. The passage that I landed on for that, was Pslam 42, which starts with “As a deer pants for water, so my soul thirsts for God, for the living God”.  It’s this deep place of spiritual darkness. Now, the Psalmist never surrenders his faith in God, the refrain, and indeed the conclusion is “Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him”. The passage that was given to me for today, is Hebrews 12:1-14. And in it I have noticed this fascinating mirror image. Psalm 42 is the story of a man crying out to God, beaten and exhausted. Our passage today sees the writer coming to a people in that position and trying to rekindle a flame of the Lord that is truly the only thing they have that could sustain them.

While our passage is a bit of a rallying cry, it’s important to point out the writer is not showing up to a downtrodden people with a message of “just have more faith and everything will be fine”. He recalls in chapter 10 verses 32-36, of times they were mocked or attacked for their faith. He is aware both of their trials and their exhaustion, and is reminding them of where their faith has led them to persevere. He goes through the letter affirming the supremacy of Christ as “crowned with glory and honor” saying “if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion”, (3:8) It is a long way of saying, in light of what you are going through, remember all these things you know, about God, and what has been done to sustain you in this life and to secure your salvation past this life.

We too face external and internal challenges to faith. Some of you, being in COPA here at Point Park have shared with us how hostile this place can be toward your beliefs. Surely, any of us know what it is to feel less than in our work, or our relationships. Some of us struggle with depression, and so on. Similar to this call in Hebrews,, when we gather here, it is in part to draw strength from each other as we look to Christ. If you’re new and you may be worried about this being some the sort of James 2 “I’ll pray for you, be warm and well fed” kind of lecture. Tell you a bit about myself, I am a bit of a pessimist, and I come from the Reformed world, I am pathologically and theologically incapable of such a giddy, vibes-based pep talk.

So, today we’re going to first look at the idea of a cloud of witnesses, and how we can view trials in this life. And then there are two points that will blend into each other. We will look at who Christ is how what he did will lead us to, “strengthen our weak knees” and “lift our drooping hands”, but we’re going to do that in a way that gives the pessimist and the skeptic a little more than “just have more faith”,

First, the cloud of witnesses. So, Hebrews 12, starts with “therefore”, so we naturally have to return to chapter 11 and figure out what the writer is talking about. And we find this list of people for whom their faith was the key driver to endure difficult circumstances, mockery, imprisonment, and even death.  Consider Moses and his people in the Exodus. In Chapters 3 and 4, Moses gives several reasons for why he is unworthy for the task God has set before him, but God shifts that conversation to His strength. For example, in Exodus 4:10-12, Moses says he is not eloquent, God says “I will be your mouth and will teach you what you shall speak”.  Later on, a reminder of faith, from Moses, is also what sustains the people after they leave. They come to the sea, yell at Moses for bringing them out into the desert and he says “see the salvation of the LORD, which he will work for you today.” And thus, the writer of Hebrews notes in chapter 11:29, “by faith, the people crossed the Red Sea as on dry land”. There is nothing but faith in God out there, and it is what sustains them until the moment comes where God delivers them from their captors.

Hebrews 11 could read an absurd list of specific examples. Except, all of this happened. What this is instead is a series of witnesses to the power of sustaining faith in God when there is nothing else left. “So great a cloud of witnesses” holds true because at a certain point, a series of stellar coincidences is actually a pattern. Frankly, if you’re a Christian, I’m not sure you can believe in coincidences.

How can we relate to this? Firstly, we see we’re not the first to struggle with it. I don’t know what kind of comfort the phrase “you’re not alone” really provides to you, but when you look at what happened in the Old Testament, faith in God is what sustains people through particularly difficult circumstances. And the thing that is perhaps unsatisfying to our modern ears is that sometimes they didn’t see, shall we say “earthly fulfillment”. Some were imprisoned, or killed. And yet, God is faithful in his promises of redemption. 11:39-40 says that this came to pass “since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect”. The Eerdmans commentary notes that this wasn’t a result of some failure of their faith, but that it was a matter of trust in God’s timing, for when Christ was to come into the world”[1] The truth of God’s faithfulness does not hinge on our circumstances, whether they are good or bad. I’d like to ask if you’ve known someone who maintained their faith when enduring a terminal illness, or through brutal mental health struggles or some other trial.

Read with me near verse 7. “It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline”, and so on. I feel the need to mention here if by chance your relationship with your father is in fact painful, that doesn’t negate the rest of the passage about God, the Heavenly Father, specifically. God’s discipline is truly different, and we see that in the rest of Scripture. We may think of discipline as punishment for something we’ve done wrong, but I think this is something different entirely.

When you are in a training regiment for example to get healthier, it is wrong to think that you are going to stop eating like garbage to punish yourself.. The discipline is found in the removal of the things that hinder you from achieving your objective. In the same way, discipline may appear to us as the removal of something that is good, but has become ultimate. Or something that causes us to lash out when it doesn’t look exactly as we intended. This has hit home to me in the last two years.

I had made a specific kind of community a priority in my life. I had been the initiator in every friendship I have, but I was also the teardown guy at my home church and I was the guy that helped move people. When you’re a powerlifter with a truck, you probably have brought that on yourself. That started to become my identity in the church, and I started to see even my truly beautiful relationships in that light. Because I wasn’t reached out to for anything but moving things, and had to start every conversation and make every invitation. And that became exhausting and ultimately, I became quite bitter about it. And I did talk to the session and some friends about it and this went on for a while, I never do anything without at least 4-6 months of contemplation and overthinking. But the dynamic didn’t change. So I left. And I mean I didn’t even go to lunch with the folks from the church on Sunday. I was angrier than I realized. I go to another church, and they’re fantastic, and I’ll talk about them in a second, but I realized about a year into this saga that church membership means virtually nothing to me, I don’t feel like a member of my “home” church, and I don’t think I belong at the other.

So the good news is, I’m not the mover, that part of my identity is completely gone. And yet, everything else feels like it’s gone too. So I’m in a place of intense loneliness, a profound disconnect from the idea of a church as a covenantal community and eventually I lose the desire to reach out to people at all. You’ll notice that eventually, I’m just being carried by God at this point, I wake up, I serve at the ministry, kind of, I make plans to get together with people on super rare occasions, but I expect them to work and I only really try once. Then this summer, things got interesting. A very close friend, , has been kind of inching to pull me out of this, and encouraging me to stick around a bit longer than I want to. We had talked, even after I left, about me driving down to see her at her childhood home in Georgia, since I was already driving to see my brother in Atlanta. And I spend the weekend, July 4th, actually, kind of getting blasted with a joy I didn’t think was possible. While her and her family were packing up the home because her parents were selling it, she didn’t factor me and my truck into her calculus. I was there as a friend.

For sake of time, I will mention a few quick things here. She and I started talking after we finished here and that’s when things started to normalize, basically. My pastor, who is never one for subtlety, jumps on this realization that things might be changing and observes quite simply, that I had made being “the mover” as my identity, and when I got tired of that, I also assumed that “the mover” is how other people in the church I’ve known for a decade see me as well. So when that got stripped away, I lost sight of being a friend, being a fellow congregant, I was someone who loved two friends  enough to move a lot of stuff and help build their wedding, and I had lost the sense of my identity being in Christ and this congregation almost completely. Everything was subsumed by feeling like “I’m the mover, and because that’s how I see myself that’s the only way you all see me as well.” For sake of time, I will simply say we just had 17 people at my mom’s house Sunday for a birthday.

Now, did God allow everything that happened, including what I was made to feel, and everything I didn’t have time to tell you in order to teach me that specific lesson? I can’t say. But He did show me that I had thought too much of what I am called to do, to the detriment of my relationship with Him and the people He has put in my life who, at my core, I truly love. It is only because of His faithfulness that I’m able to come out of the other side of all that with even a fraction of what I thought was possible, let alone several very important relationships. Would God have been faithful if it hadn’t worked? Yes, but the point is whether it’s two years, five years, however long our Hebrew friends here had to endure, God’s faithfulness will be made apparent, in this life or on the other side of eternity.

Speaking of trusting in God’s faithfulness to us fittingly brings us to Christ as the founder and perfecter of our faith. He is the One we can draw an inexhaustible strength as we run this race of the Christian life and specifically the trials that come with it. Christ is the one who “for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of God”. Despising the shame and enduring the cross for the joy set before Him. That joy is found in His love for the Father, and what the accomplishment of His mission meant for us; that reconciliation to God. He despised the shame, and endured the Cross, none of this was pleasant. But the fulfillment of His mission, the redemption of His people and His love for them and His father meant that even what he had to endure would not stop Him. At the risk of being platitudinous or a Sunday school answer, we know that story of That redemption, secured by faith is what should push us to endure the trials we are facing. This is not to say that suffering mental health struggles or serious illness is easy or good. It is to say that what is set in front of us is greater.

Now like the Hebrews in our text, we likely do not have Christ’s single-minded devotion to whatever is on the other side of this trial, you just want it over. So, what does it mean for us to run the race with endurance, to lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees? Some translations use the word “patience” in place of endurance, others “perseverance”, but I want to focus, at least initially on the second part of this section, on the idea of “lifting and strengthening”, before we take a look at the full arsenal we have at our disposal. The thing that is not being said is “pretend you’re not tired” or “pretend you’re not scared”, bring who you are to this text, to God.

In May, I was with another church, which meets up the street from my home. The bishop of the Pittsburgh diocese (they’re Anglican, it’s different over there) was leading worship that Sunday. The Anglican church is very liturgical. There is a moment leading up to communion that is a call and response that goes, in part, “The Lord be with you” “and with your spirit”, “Lift up your hearts” “we lift them up to the Lord”. And just before we came to this part of the service. Bishop Alex invoked a brief aside that, as easy as it is to say “we lift (our hearts) up to the Lord.” There may be days you come to church and you don’t feel like it. He observed that for some, “lifting up one’s heart”, can be a bit like taking a very heavy weight and struggling to lift it to the Lord.

It was a refreshing pause that acknowledged we are not always in the perfect position to lift our hearts to the Lord like we’re picking a baseball and holding it aloft. In our text, the command to strength weak knees comes after the establishment of a support system, and the prime example. The cloud of witnesses, looking to Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith, who doesn’t stand apart from our suffering, but rather went through worse suffering than we did. And we can look at not just the people mentioned in Hebrews 11, but also the people around us whose faith endured through difficult times and helped them endure those challenges. So when it says “run the race with endurance, looking to Christ”, it is not a matter of telling you to pretend nothing is wrong, or that you’re not tired or even that you’re not doubting when you might be both of those things. It simply a call to keep moving in that direction, with what you do know about who God is and what Christ has done sustaining you.

And we have an insane number of things available to us now. We have centuries of theology, but I would say something more accessible is that, of course, we have the Scriptures, and the stories of those around us who have endured through faith when they had nothing else left, and we even have those stories in our past. All of this points us to Christ in our current struggles if for no other reason than there was nowhere else for them to go and there’s nowhere else for us to go. As a group, the Hebrews’ well was running dry. Individually, we will come to a place where we run out of energy as well. Looking to Christ is the only thing that can sustain us because He never leaves and His power may be all we have in a given moment. And so, as Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians we do not “grieve as those who have no hope”. The pessimistic, beaten-by-life view of the world is incomplete.

I want to close by truly marking a middle ground between the blind optimism I attacked at the beginning, while making space for the cynicism I came to Christ out of and the despair that trials can bring about. One journalist that was a literary hero of mine once observed that a cynic is someone who when he smells flowers looks for a coffin. If something is going well, I am missing something. I’ve lived that life, before I was a Christian and even a few years into my time knowing God, I was even proud of that perspective. The problem with that, however, is that the cynic is one who generally does not believe redemption is possible. The dead stay dead, the situation is either openly bad or secretly bad, and good is an accident. The writer of Hebrews, the witnesses of the Old Testament, the witnesses in our lives, know where the coffins are, they have seen a lot of coffins. And yet, they maintained faith in God that He would bring death to heel. And through Christ, those coffins will one day be empty. What we endure in this life does not allow for this sort of happy-clappy, just have more faith kind of optimism, what Christ has done means that darkness does not have the final say over your life.

I am not saying, that now that you heard this, never think sad thoughts again. Never go back to that hard time in your mind. Rather, when those moments do come, keep Christ at the forefront of your mind, and second to that, look to those around you who can help you look toward Christ as you endure whatever it is that you are facing.

[1] This was not due to some failure in their faith; it arises from the timing of the unfolding of God’s purposes for the world. To trust God is to trust that he will provide what is “better” (Gk. kreitton) than all human aspirations in God’s own way and in God’s own time. “The reference to God’s final action is deliberately vague so as to suggest in an inclusive fashion the results of Christ’s sacrifice” See Thiselton, Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible, ed. James D. G. Dunn and John W. Rogerson (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003).