An Athletic Faith
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
6th Sunday After the Epiphany
12 February 2006
To see the glowing faces and the muscled bodies of the world’s finest
athletes as they gather in Turin is to witness a collection of stunning
prowess and potential that you and I will never possess. There
are people in this room who are exceptional athletes. Some of you
have won tournaments, run marathons, gone to school on athletic
scholarships, competed at very high levels. There are some
outstanding athletes here. But, to my knowledge, there are no
Olympians among us. Grammy winners, yes; Olympians, no.
And though we have our share of great golfers and spectacular softball
pitchers, the truth is, the majority of us are spectators. We say
things like, “Think we can make it to the finals again this
year?” When what we mean is, “Think the Detroit Pistons can make
it to the finals again this year?” We say things like, “We can’t
let Ohio beat us again next season.” When what we mean is, “The
Wolverines can’t let the Buckeyes beat them again next season.”
Few people ever achieve the kind of glory that goes with Olympic
gold. We are not elite athletes; we do not compete on the world
stage. So it’s a bit of a stretch for some of us to be instructed
this morning not only to be like athletes, but to be like the ones who
win.
The Corinthian Christians would have been quite familiar with the kind
of superior athleticism to which Paul referred. Every two years,
the Isthmian Games, one of the four games of the Olympiad, second only
in prestige to the Olympics themselves, were held just eight miles up
the road from Corinth. The games were staged in honor of
Poseidon, god of the sea and the major civic god of Corinth, and the
games consisted of foot races and boxing, along with various other
events. The winners received not medals, but wreathes of pine or
wilted celery.
It is against this backdrop of athleticism and competition, and against
our own (which is much the same), that Paul makes his appeal.
“Don’t you know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one
receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it.
Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a
perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run
aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I impose
discipline on my whole life, and bring it under strict control, so that
after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.”
And as inspiring as we sometimes find sports and sports stories and
sports analogies, Paul’s earnest urging feels somewhat alien to many of
us. As usual, he sounds like someone edgier and more zealous
about his faith than people like us might want to be. We like it
when he talks of grace and freedom. Those concepts have nice soft
curves, blurry boundaries, expansiveness, openness, gentleness, rest,
easing of burdens. But here we get nothing but the hard stuff,
and it’s stuff we’re not even sure we believe. Paul speaks now of
competitions and prizes, discipline and disqualification. Have we
been given a gift of grace, or not? And if we have, then what
more is there to win?
It’s true, Paul does teach that we’ve already been given a free
gift. That truth is at the core of our faith. Grace is the
first and last word, and freedom is what it gives us. Nothing
Paul says here changes that. It only clarifies it. We have
been given grace, but toward what end? We’ve been set free, but
for what?
Let me ask the questions in another way. Do you believe that
there’s a point to living a human life? Or that there should be a
point? Or that there can be? And if you do believe that
there is, or should be, a point, do you believe there are certain
things we should do, certain practices we should seek, certain
disciplines we should employ to grow nearer to that point in our
lives? So that when we reach the end of our lives, we will have
fought a good fight, finished the right race.
The truth is, most of us spend our whole lives in pursuit. Some
of us can’t even name what we’re chasing. We just sort of stumble
forward, lurching towards whatever we vaguely think will satisfy our
longings. Others of us have an idea of what we desperately desire
– security, affection, power, prestige, happiness – and we spend our
days scrambling for it.
Paul knows what he is after. For him there is a higher goal worth
submitting his whole life to, higher than any temporary gain.
That goal is the gospel – not that he needs to win salvation, which has
already been given, but that, having been given such a gift, his life
should be characterized entirely by its claims. The goal is a
gospel life, a life shaped by love and grace, a life lived in
submission to God and service to others, a life given back to the giver
of the gift. The prize is a realized union with God, a lived-out
love for others, and the spread of the good news to people who are
still in need of the grace and freedom that Paul has already
found. What he now pursues is less tangible than a winner’s
wreath, but it doesn’t perish.
It is difficult for many of us to lay hold of the zeal Paul had for the
goal of a gospel life. We are happy, or we think we are, to
settle for less lasting but more tangible rewards. We are not
even certain we believe in any rewards beyond the tangible ones we can
get for ourselves. C.S. Lewis once wrote, “We are half-hearted
creatures fooling about …, when infinite joy is offered to us, like an
ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he
cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”
We have a failure of imagination and a failure of hope. And the
only way beyond such failures is through God’s grace, which can awaken
our souls to the reality of the joy that is being offered, if we could
just trust for a minute that it is out there, if we could just trust a
little that there is a higher point to our lives.
Paul trusted. The clarity of his purpose brings an urgency and a
strength to his motivation. Like an athlete who intends to win,
he will do anything, give up anything, and go through anything to lay
claim to the ultimate goal of a fully lived gospel life. This is
what you do if you know what you want and you want it bad enough – you
undertake any means to get it.
The word Paul uses for this undertaking is not one we automatically
embrace. “Self-control,” he says to us. “Athletes
exercise self-control in all things.” An athlete determined to
win disciplines himself toward his goal, and this discipline affects
all areas of his life. Grueling practices, long hours of hard
work, enormous sacrifices, the laying aside of other pursuits in order
to follow just one dream. The first battle any athlete must win
is the one against himself – he must assert his will over his body, so
that when the alarm goes off at 4:00 in the morning, he gets up even
though his body wants to sleep; and when the coworker brings in
doughnuts, he passes, even though he loves the jelly-filled ones; and
when his legs feel like they couldn’t go another mile, he presses on to
go two more. Every day, he has decisions to make about whether to
keep pursuing his goal or to give in to distractions and other
desires. Sometimes the decisions are large ones, seemingly heroic
ones. Much of the time they are smaller and more ordinary.
I have heard it said that discipline is remembering what it is you
really want. An athlete faced with a decision big or small must
ask herself, “Do I want to win, or do I want to get a little more
sleep, eat a little more junk, have a little more fun?” She must
remember what it is she really wants.
According to Paul, this is no less true for the Christian life.
The self-control he exhorts us toward is in all things. “I make
my whole life a slave,” he says, “and bring it under strict
control.” No part of life is exempt. All of life is to be
placed under the yoke of the gospel, under the obligation of love,
under the call of a real relationship with God and with others.
Every day, we have decisions to make about whether or not we are going
to keep running in such a way as to lay hold of the prize of a
gospel-shaped life. And just as for the athlete, sometimes the
decisions are dramatic and daring – we quit a job or a relationship or
a habit, because it is compromising us, or turning us into someone we
don’t want to become, or it is sucking the life out of us. But
usually the decisions are smaller, more ordinary, and daily. Do
we get up and pray or not? Do we greet our spouse or child or
roommate with kindness and warmth, or not? Do we approach the day
with openness and gratitude, or not? Do we look the beggar on the
street corner in the eye, or not? When we have a conflict with a
friend or a colleague, do we stop and try to see her point of view, or
not? When the day gets long and hard and we get tired, do we take
it out on those around us, or not? Do we tell anyone what our
faith is and what it means to us, or not? When we’re asked for
our money or our time or just our loving attention, do we choose to
give it or not?
In a thousand daily ways, we have the opportunity to run in a way to
win the prize. Every day we get to decide all over again whether
or not to keep training ourselves in the discipline of following
Christ, where or not to keep dying to self, laying aside
self-indulgence and self-interest and self-deceit. Every day we
get to choose to remember what it is we really want and whether or not
we are going to live like it.
The discipline is shaped by our focus, and the focus itself is fed by
the discipline. If each day we pray to God in the morning, “Help
me die to myself today,” not only are we exercising the discipline Paul
calls for, we are sharpening our focus on the prize of the gospel
life. If each night we pray again, “God thank you for the gift of
this day; help me to live and love more faithfully tomorrow,” we
are exercising spiritual discipline, but we are also honing our
concentration on what really matters. Most importantly, such
disciplines are a way of opening ourselves to the Spirit of God to come
into our hearts and do its work.
The movie Chariots of Fire is based on the true story of British
athletes competing in the 1924 Paris Olympics. One of those
athletes was the “Flying Scotsman” Eric Liddell, a devoted Christian
with an unorthodox running style. He ran with abandon, head flung
back, mouth wide open, knees lifting high towards his chin. When
someone once asked him how he could run like that and still know where
the finish line was, he answered, “The Lord guides me.”
In one scene of Chariots of Fire, a number of people huddle in the rain
on the track following a race to hear Liddell offer his testimony. He
tells them:
You came to see a race today. To see someone win. It
happened to be me. But I want you to do more than just watch a
race. I want you to take part in it. I want to compare
faith to running in a race. It’s hard. It requires
concentration of will, energy of soul. You experience elation
when the winner breaks the tape, especially if you’ve got a bet on
it. But how long does that last? You go home, maybe your
dinner’s burnt. Maybe you haven’t got a job. So who am I to
say believe, have faith, in the face of life’s realities?
I would like to give you something more permanent, but I can only point
the way. I have no formula for winning the race. Everyone
runs in her own way, or his own way. Then where does the power
come from, to see the race to the end? From within. Jesus
said, “Behold, the kingdom of God is within you. If with all your
heart your truly seek me, you shall surely find me.”
If you commit yourself to the love of Christ, then that is how you run a straight race.
Liddell brought home Scotland’s first gold medal, and then went on to
become a missionary to China. From that point on, he ran a
different kind of race, one that was not on the world stage and did not
come with any medals. His motto was “complete surrender,” and he
lived it. He ministered in difficult and often dangerous
situations, sometimes making extraordinary sacrifices, eventually being
forced with Americans and other Brits into a Japanese internment
camp. When he died in the camp of a brain tumor at the age of 43,
his last words, spoken to a camp nurse were, “Complete surrender.”
Is it possible for people like you and me to subordinate everything to
the gospel, to subject every aspect of our lives to Christ and his
calling? Is that kind of full-out commitment, complete surrender,
possible for ordinary folks who struggle just to believe and to live
faithfully? It seems like far too much, this daily dying to self,
this call to discipline and endurance.
It is what we pledged when we were pushed under the waters of our
baptism – to die to self, to live to Christ, to walk (or even run) in
newness of life. To be no longer spectators but athletes,
disciples under a discipline. To live gospel-shaped lives
committed to the simplest, truest things we know – faith, hope, love.
The question really isn’t “can we?”, because it isn’t us who does any
of it anyway – we simply choose once and then choose again each day to
lay down our lives, and then Christ works the rest in us. The
question isn’t “can we?” but “will we?”
1-http://www.intouch.org/myintouch/mighty/portraits/eric_liddell_213688.html
2-Chariots of Fire.
3-http://www.intouch.org/myintouch/mighty/portraits/eric_liddell_213688.html
