How are saints like a cross-country team? (Horizons 9)

By the time we got to the Letter to the Hebrews, we had been together as a class for seven months. Our small group of 12 people had journeyed through much of the Bible using “Disciple: Becoming Disciples Through Bible Study.” We had laughed, offered insights and shared concerns. We’d already encountered Paul writing to the “saints” in Corinth. Certainly, the Corinthian church was no paragon of virtue. They were mixed up, struggling people who often got it wrong. But they were saints because Christ has redeemed, loved and forgiven them into a new community of disciples.

We got to the incredible litany in Hebrews 11 of those who have lived by faith, living with the “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Having read of Abraham, Moses and Rahab, our study group shared those in our lives who had lived by faith. We talked about parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, coaches, teachers, friends, scout leaders, pastors and Christian educators. For us it was not the giants of the faith, like Moses, who had made a difference in our faith journey. It was the ordinary people who trusted God with their lives at home, at work and in the community. Here were the saints who taught us to pray and to trust that God listens to prayer. Parents had embodied compassion and giving. A granddad had a huge garden, which the grandchildren helped nurture and harvest. Granddad always filled boxes of produce to take to people who had to stretch every dollar. A mother made her son include the unpopular kid in his birthday party, with whom he remains friends as an adult.

The “saints” are not exemplary people but garden-variety Christians who love Jesus Christ and seek to follow as Jesus’ disciple. Who are the people in your life who were or are the saints who have shown you how to be a Christian disciple?

Hebrews 11:39 reads: “Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.” This is an astonishing statement. All those who have gone before us, and who live faithfully now, are only made complete, made whole, made perfect as we continue to run the race of faith. The saints of the faith are like a crowd in a huge stadium, row after row, shouting, clapping and urging us to keep on running. “Surrounded then as we are by these serried ranks of witnesses, let us strip off everything that hinders us, as well as the sin which dogs our feet, and let us run the race that we have to run with patience, our eyes fixed on Jesus the source and the goal of our faith” (Hebrews 12:1-2a, J.B. Phillips translation).

My grandsons started running cross-country this year. They are both well acquainted with being at the back of the pack. At a cross-country meet, I stood towards the end of the track to clap and to cheer. As the last ones struggled to complete the last eighth of the two-mile course, there was a boy who fell and did not get up. The team coach saw him, helped him up and told him to simply walk for a bit. “Now jog,” she said. As the people on the sidelines saw what had happened, they started to cheer him on. “Come on, you can make it. … Just a little further. … Way to keep at it.” The boy’s face lit up and he did pick up his pace slightly, and with his coach beside him made it to the finish line.

All the saints are like a cross-country team. It is not who finishes first. The team only wins when every member of the team finishes the race. And it is an accomplishment just to run the miles.

We are the saints, the ordinary yet vital people of faith. We are needed to teach and live out Christ’s love, mercy and justice. Of course, for us, it is a marathon of our whole lives. It can be a struggle to make it up the steep grade towards forgiveness. Sometimes we fall exhausted from caring for loved ones and strangers. But we can make it.

We make it by laying aside what hinders us. We leave regret and guilt behind because we are a forgiven people. We leave blame behind because all it weighs us down. We outrun the sin that dogs our heels because we are keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, who cheers us on with all the saints.

Rosalind Banbury is the interim pastor of Tinkling Spring Presbyterian Church in Fishersville, Virginia.

You can purchase the PW/Horizons Bible study book through the PC(USA) Church Store.