© 2023 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video of the entire service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 22:00.
At 8:00 in the morning, on the first Sunday in November, the first competitors in the New York City Marathon set off up the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in Staten Island to begin their 26.2 mile trek through the city’s five boroughs. By 11:15, all the winners will have crossed the finish line. Nine hours later, long after the sweep busses have come through to pick up anyone who wants to quit and needs a ride to the finish, hours after the streets have been reopened to traffic, the last finishers, who have been sharing the sidewalks with ordinary pedestrians, will cross the line, and every one of them will receive a medal.
Every one who finishes the marathon receives a medal. Hardly anyone can tell you the names of the winners, but everyone who walks around the city that night wearing their medal is greeted with congratulations and words of acclaim by total strangers. For those finishers, in a way, the city, whose people normally keep to themselves, suddenly becomes a small southern town, in which every resident is eager to greet you and wish you well—and not because you were fast, not because you set a personal best, not because you won your age group, but simply because you finished the race.
Every time our family drives through the Bobby Hopper Tunnel on I-49, our children hold their breath. To be honest, I usually do, too. I grew up across the bay from Mobile, Alabama, and, whenever our family drove through one of the two tunnels that go under the water, we always held our breath. When I was little, I struggled to make it to the end until my father told me that you can hold your breath longer if you breathe out along the way. It turns out that the alarm signal your brain sends to your lungs has less to do with a lack of oxygen and more to do with the build up of carbon dioxide in your body. If you can teach your brain not to panic, you can train your body to go without taking in a breath for five, eight, maybe even ten minutes.
But what happens when we can’t tell how long the tunnel will be? What happens if traffic comes to a standstill? What happens if we get to the finish line, ready to collapse, only to discover that we have to keep on running? How can we make it to the end when we don’t know where the end is?
Jesus says to his disciples, “They will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; you will be dragged before governors and kings…Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.”
Those are terrifying words of warning, but, if we listen closely, we can also hear within them words of great comfort and encouragement. Jesus addresses these words to the twelve—to the company of disciples whom he sends out to carry the good news of God’s grace to the world. But he’s also speaking to us—to the church in every generation. He wants us to know that, as people who belong to God through Christ, our lives are not measured by what we do in the face of struggle but by our willingness to remain rooted in him no matter how long those struggles last.
Notice what Jesus doesn’t say to the disciples. He doesn’t tell them to take the high road—to make a great, public display of their unwavering faithfulness even if it costs them their lives. Instead, he tells them to be as “wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.” There are no other examples in the Bible of anyone being encouraged to act like a snake. There are no parables or prophetic utterances that say anything positive about serpents. They are, from the very beginning, the embodiment of guile and deception. Yet Jesus tells his disciples that, when a situation calls for it, they are supposed to be as slippery as snakes.
Although there are no examples found in the Bible, Jesus wasn’t the first rabbi to use this analogy to instruct the faithful. Ancient manuscripts show us that other religious leaders told their congregations to act like cunning serpents in the face of Gentile persecution but to behave with the singlemindedness of doves when surrounded by their own people. Jesus was passing along this piece of practical advice but expanding it to encourage his followers to recognize that sometimes artful dodging is necessary even when you’re in the midst of your own people. Jesus wasn’t telling his disciples to seek out martyrdom. He was teaching them to avoid it even if it meant putting on a spiritual disguise from time to time.
Notice also that Jesus doesn’t tell his followers to practice their lines so that they will be ready to give an impressive speech when they inevitably get hauled before magistrates and rulers. Instead, he tells them to trust that God will give them the words to say when the time comes. That’s good news because sometimes I don’t know what to say in an important encounter. Frequently, I am at a loss when hardship and heartache come. I need to hear Jesus tell me that it will be ok no matter what I do or do not say. Isn’t it encouraging to know that God isn’t judging you on the words that come out of your mouth when the time comes because it isn’t your job to say anything at all? That’s God’s job. God is the one who speaks through us in that moment.
The faithfulness that Jesus invites us into isn’t a radical, self-destructive showiness or a martyrdom debate contest but a strange sort of simply and persistently belonging and trusting in God. Jesus doesn’t tell us that our persecution, suffering, and struggles are a part of God’s plan, yet he makes it clear that God will use them for God’s own purposes. Even if you try to escape, there is no way to avoid hardship in this life, yet God refuses to allow our suffering to be empty.
You will not have the right words to say when the critical moment arrives, but you need not worry because it is our belonging to God that God uses as a witness to others. God will speak through our circumstances in ways more powerful than any elocution. We are even powerless to win over our own families—those closest to us, whom Jesus acknowledges sometimes turn against us—but God does not abandon us because of our limitations—because of what we cannot do. Isn’t that the kind of encouragement—God’s abiding love through even our most difficult struggles and failures—that we need to keep going no matter how long the race is? Then we can hear and believe the good news that it is the one who endures to the end who will be saved.
We do not belong to God because we say the right words or do the right things when the moment of truth comes. We are not loved by God because we have lived a good life or because we have brought others into the faith. We do not share in the inheritance of the saints because we have stood up in the face of persecution or because we have weathered the trials of this life without breaking down. We are God’s beloved children because we belong to Jesus Christ. He is the one who has reconciled us to God. Because of him we are received by God and given a heavenly crown whether we finish first or dead last. All we need to do is finish the race. The one who endures to the end will be saved.
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