February 15, 2009 - Epiphany 6 (RCL)
It happened every two years,
a competition that rivaled the Olympics,
attracting competitors from all over Greece.
For many people
it was what Corinth was known for: the Isthmian games,
where the most successful competitors
would be awarded
a crown of pine needles.
And so when it came time
for the apostle Paul
to write a letter to the church that had just begun in Corinth,
probably the games
were one of the things
that came first into his mind.
He’d been struggling to put into words
what it was like to be a Christian,
not just the first enthusiasm
when people heard the story of Jesus,
his life, his miracles, his teaching, his death and finally his resurrection,
that first enthusiasm
when they rushed to their evangelists
begging to be baptized,
not just that, but the regular everyday business of being a Christian,
following Jesus,
loving the Lord their God with all their hearts and minds and souls and strength,
and loving one another
as they loved themselves.
It was new territory this,
working out how to be believers in a new faith
that had none of the temples and priests and traditions
that all the other religions around them had,
just a small group
meeting in a house
and trying to work out
how to follow Jesus.
And what came into
the apostle’s mind
when he was thinking about it all
was the Isthmian games.
When it came to competing in them,
you couldn’t just decide one day to enter a race,
and expect to crowned with the pine wreath and honored as an athletic hero.
Like any sport, the athletes needed to prepare.
To train, beginning slowly, and gradually building up speed and endurance. Eating the right kinds of food. Getting enough rest.
Stretching and building and training, pushing their bodies to the limit,
until they were at the peak of their performance.
And then maybe they’d get through the heats and into the finals
and maybe, just maybe, have the honor
of the pine needle crown.
And a few hours later
the whole process
would begin over
again.
Being an athlete
took hard work, discipline,
but to those who made winning that crown their goal
it was worth every minute.
That’s what the Christian faith is like says Paul.
You can’t just make a decision one day
and expect to get the crown of everlasting glory the next.
It isn’t enough
just to begin right.
You’ve got to keep on with it.
Day by day by day,
living as Christians, training yourselves,
looking towards the everlasting crown
of life with God.
And the best way he can think of
to explain what’s like
is with the metaphor
of training as an athlete.
It’s kind of like being chosen for a team.
Being chosen
is great,
but once you’re chosen,
you don’t get to just lie back and enjoy the glory.
You have to work at it.
You train,
you watch what you eat,
you get your head around plays and plans and the idea of winning.
Otherwise, when you get out on the field, you’re going to be annihilated by the other team.
Because when you’re chosen for a team,
you're pretty much just a huge ball of raw potential. Sure, you can play well, you have a lot of promise,
but without work
all that promise and potential
is worthless.
And of course, it’s not just sports that require discipline. On Friday I was talking on the phone with my 5 year old niece, who has just started music lessons, and she told me how she has to practice every day.
It brought back memories of sitting in front of the piano, every day, first 15 minutes, then half an hour,
until finally I was getting up at 5am to get in an hour practice before school and another hour afterwards. I used to try to read while I was doing scales, but it didn’t work so well.
Some things
you just can’t skimp on. It takes work, and practice,
to develop any sort of mature skill.
It takes discipline.
So, if we are going to be on God’s winning team,
what sort of preparation do we need?
Three things come immediately to mind.
First, we need to read the bible.
It’s kind of hard to train for God’s team, if we don’t know much about what God is like or what God wants.
You can get some of that from sermons and books, but really the best way,
the most reliable way
is to read the bible for yourself.
Because the bible tells us the story
of people’s interactions with God
through thousands of years,
and is the best clue we have
of what God has in mind for this world, and us in it.
You might want to start right at the very beginning with Genesis. But I have to warn you,
it gets to be tough going
somewhere in the middle of Leviticus,
with a whole list of laws, and then Numbers
where it gives you the details of a census.
A better place to start is the gospels, the story of Jesus.
That way we learn about God through the one who knows him - and us - best. Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God with us, our Savior.
But what then?
Well, one way to help us get disciplined about reading the bible
is to follow a guide, that gives us a daily reading, and then has some discussion about it. Forward Day by Day is one - we have it available at the back of the church - and we’ll also have a special program of daily readings for Lent available at next week.
But while reading the bible for yourself is important, it’s also really good to read it with other people. That way, you can ask questions and struggle with the meaning and work out how it might connect in practical ways.
In two weeks time, we’ll be starting our annual Lenten series, where we’ll be looking at the Lord’s Prayer as it’s found in scripture, and working out how it relates to us today.
And if you’re looking for more in depth bible study, there is a long running bible study that runs here every Thursday morning, and always welcomes new people,
and we’ve just started an evening study as well.
Every week I come away
with more knowledge
and a real sense of being blessed both by God and by the other members of the group. Please talk with me if you’re interested.
So the first sort of preparation for being on God’s team is reading the bible.
And the second
is praying.
There are all sorts of kinds of praying.
Last week in our gospel reading
we heard about how, after he had healed Simon-Peter’s mother-in-law and a whole bunch of other people, Jeus went off into the countryside to pray.
He needed time apart, in a place where he could be quiet and wouldn’t be disturbed.
We don’t know what he prayed about,
but there are two kinds of praying for starters.
One is praying silently, contemplative prayer, where you just focus on being in the presence of God, open to what God has to say to you.
For that sort of prayer, you need to be somewhere quiet, somewhere you can just open yourself to God. Some people find it helps to have a candle burning, or a cross to focus on, or prayer beads. Those things help to keep our minds from wandering.
Though of course they will.
One moment, you’re totally focused n God,
the next you’re thinking about what you need from the store,
or whether the kids have done their homework, or a disagreement you had with somebody.
And when that happens, you just have to kind of pull your mind back, let those things be, sometimes even write them down so you’ll remember later,
and then re-focus on God.
For some of us, it means that the best time to pray
is really early in the morning, before everyone else in the family gets up, or last thing at night, when the house finally goes quiet.
Another kind of praying
is praying with words.
That's what we do with the Lord’s prayer, and the prayer book.
You can just open up the prayer book to page 136
and there are prayers for different times of the day. You might even decide to do them around the dinner table each night.
Even just saying grace before meals
is part of the discipline of praying,
and something that helps our children to learn to pray.
And technology can help us - there are a number of websites that have daily prayer services for you to read along with,
and I just read an article this week of someone who uses twitter to remind her to pray. It sends her a reminder and a different prayer every single hour.
And here in the parish you can join with others in praying, by praying for the people on the prayer list in the bulletin each week, and by joining the prayer chain, where we share specific requests for prayer all through the week.
So the second sort of preparation for being on God’s team is praying.
And the third is self-control. Choosing to live according to God’s standards, rather than just doing whatever we want. All through the first letter to the Corinthians, Paul talks about different sorts of self control - in how we eat and socialize, in our relationships, in how we act at church. All ways of loving God and loving our neighbors.
Reading the bible, praying, exercising self-control. All part of training to be on God’s team, training in faith. Just like sport, becoming fit, getting our bodies and minds and souls ready for the work that God has for us to do,
the work of reaching out to others withe the good news of God in Christ,
the work of serving one another in this community that we call the church and in the wider community of our world.
Training, working, exercising discipline,
and knowing that every minute of every day
God is alongside us, supporting and strengthening us,
and promises us that at the end, for each and every one of us
an everlasting crown will be ours.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2009