Run
1 Corinthians 9:24-27

February 15, 2009


It’s all a matter of how you look at it. Sitting in the stands at the Penn Relays track meet in Philadelphia with several track friends, the younger man was remembering when his new wife came with him to her first track meet. They had met in graduate school and now being a university professor, she could never understand her husband’s passion for track. So she went out to do some field research.

“Wasn’t that a great meet?” he asked his wife afterwards, for he had been an official at the event. “Are you kidding?” she responded incredulously. “They all ran around and around in this circle and ended up right where they started. They never went anywhere!” Does that remind you of what we just heard Paul say, “I do not run aimlessly”?

One could say incredulously the same thing about our worship services here. Each Sunday we go around somewhat the same laps - praying, singing, announcing, reading, hearing, preaching, offering - and where are we when we complete our laps? In the same pew, and next week we come back to the same place and do it all over again and never go anywhere. Only the children and their teachers seem to go somewhere. Yes, we do go out into the world and perhaps it is there we wander aimlessly until returning next Sunday to run our liturgical laps and know where we really should be.

Any of you who have competed in a track race know that the runners do not run aimlessly, but precisely monitoring and controlling their energy to accommodate the distance they are running. You are going somewhere, even if in slightly less than four laps of the oval 1500 meters is as much a mental trip. Of course, your body reminds you that you have gone somewhere, perhaps even a little too far.

In worship, our minds and spirits travel quite far, to heaven and back again, even if physically we have not moved outside of our section of the pew. The Spirit reminds you just how far, how high, how low you have traveled in this hour staying put worshiping God.

Running is the key word, and many of wish we still could run, or perhaps are pleased we no longer have to run. It is not the act of running itself that Paul is pushing, but keeping ourselves disciplined and in shape to be able to run effectively. Runners become faster, stronger, more enduring the more they run regularly and pay attention to the little details of fitness. In the very same way, the more we worship God, the better worshippers we become, the more we hear, the more we sense the presence of God and where that presence leads us once we have departed through the doors of this sanctuary.

In some ways we are pretty soft as worshippers in our standard one hour services, sort of like sprinters who do not possess the endurance and fitness to go longer than one lap. If you have ever attended a Greek or Russian Orthodox liturgy, it often lasts several hours, not just one, depending upon the occasion - and there are no pews. Standing on the Promises is not just a hymn.

The earliest churches in the history of the predecessors of the United Church of Canada - Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists - usually had an hour glass besides the pulpit for all to see before clocks were common. Typically, a young boy’s job was to keep an eye on the sand and when the hour glass ran out, he had to come up and turn it over. When the glass emptied out the second time the preacher was supposed to stop preaching.

The most famous church in the world this past year is Trinity United Church of Christ in south Chicago where Barack and Michelle Obama were married, baptized both their children and attended regularly as full members until that heralded and regretful conflict between Obama and the pastor Jeremiah Wright, Jr. Let me make this clear - Barack Obama did not leave Trinity because the preacher preached too long and the service went on beyond its scheduled time, as some people threaten in United Churches! No, the average length of the principal worship service at Trinity is at least two hours. You have to be in shape to worship the way this President worships!

There is a famous story about a 19th century Russian Orthodox pilgrim who wandered through Russia and Siberia, visiting monasteries and shrines and seeking out startsi or the spiritual fathers and directors. He wandered, though not aimlessly, in search of whoever could help him discern what the Apostle Paul meant by “praying unceasingly.” He carried with him a string of rosary beads by which to count his prayers. One spiritual father told him the best prayer was the Jesus Prayer - “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me, for I am a sinner” (prayer of the tax-collector, Luke 18:-14) - and suggested he say it exactly 3000 times a day.

How many things do you repeat 3000 times in a day? More than you realize. At any rate, just like you and I would be, he was aghast at this heavy requirement. Yet he started praying, counting the beads as he went along, taking him several hours to complete the assignment. At first it was a physical and mental struggle, but soon he found that when he stopped, he naturally wanted to continue praying.

He went back to his starets and like many a coach the father increased the regimen to 6000 times a day, precisely. Now he had to double the hours he spent praying, but rather than becoming more difficult, it became not only easier physically, but a more joyous task. After ten days, the starets came to see him and inquire about his progress. “Now you have become used to the prayer,” the spiritual father told him. Pray the Prayer 12,000 times daily and let’s see how it goes.

The pilgrim at first had to get up early in the morning and barely completed the number by late evening. Gradually, it happened with less strain, though at first there were many physical strains: bleeding lips and a sore jaw - this was not silent prayer! - a bruised thumb from fingering the beads, and even rosary bead tendinitis in his wrist. When he stopped praying, the prayer didn’t stop. It was as if instead of him praying the prayer, the prayer had developed a life of its own and started praying him. Rather than being a nightmarish irritant, it became to the Pilgrim a heavenly joy that never seemed to run out and be depleted. Rather than being tired out by all this repetition and discipline, this Pilgrim is energized to do more, and what’s more, his vision of the world became larger and larger, not ignoring its evils, but having compassion on those who like him need the mercy of Jesus.

I am not intending to preach much beyond an hour or extend our worship hour to two or three hours, nor do I believe that 12,000 Jesus prayers is the method for a healthy spiritual life. But like Paul, the point of all these examples is that faith is not some ephemeral activity, personal opinion, set of feelings about the next world by and by. Faith is so crucial, that we can ill afford to allocate only a few minutes a week to its practice. We have to train at faith as a serious endeavour, a skill worth developing and keeping strong, to keep us on the right track, without running aimlessly. What is most remarkable is that when your faith is in good condition, you will see and understand the world, the real world if you will, the way it is really meant to be seen and lived.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan