Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.The Apostle Paul lived at a time in history when physical prowess was exalted, in soldiery, in the original Olympic games, and in idolatry. Not that much has truly changed if you ask me. Historians and early Church fathers allude to the fact that Saul of Tarsus, renamed Apostle Paul, wasn't the most physically gifted man in stature or appearance and yet something about the achievement of the sports arena of his day caught his attention, gained his admiration, and fueled his metaphors and analogies. He routinely encouraged us to beat our bodies into submission, take our thoughts captive to obedience, run the race with discipline, etc. 1Cor9:24-27 comes to mind. The author of Hebrews likewise gives us this picture in the first verses of chapter 12, reminding us that we run in the public witness of spectators fans and rivals, as well as experienced witnesses listed throughout chapter 11 who have walked the road before us and are standing all around us with eternal patience to see what we do in our time with what we are given.
Hebrews 12:1-2
I was awoke about 90 minutes before my alarm this morning to talk about passing the baton. To talk about our receipt of the Abrahamic covenant, specifically the summation of Genesis 12:1-3 in the phrase "blessed to be a blessing." This covenant, perhaps more importantly than any other, weaves it's way through the whole of Scripture from the first book to the last. I once set out to catalog all the numerous allusions or rewordings of this principle and stopped shortly thereafter, realizing that even when the words aren't explicitly written, the Holy Spirit bears them out through the story line written for our admonition. These rewordings and allusions to this covenant make it quite clear: "IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT YOU." Two of my favorite reiterations of the Abrahamic covenant are these:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.The book of Esther mentions only the religious practices of prayer and fasting, not even specifically tying them to Judaism except for Mordecai and his cousin Hadassah, whom we know as Esther, being noted as Jewish captives carried to Babylon. The book of Esther was a contentious inclusion in the Canon of Scripture because it completely lacks exposition of even one of the names of God. And yet, His hand is seen throughout.
2Corinthians1:3-4
For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from some other place, but you and your father's house will perish. Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?
Esther 4:14
Mordecai wouldn't have seen the events of being exiled from Jerusalem and carried away captive as a blessing. Maybe that happened before his birth and he grew up in Shushan. Maybe he and his relatives were deported later, after all it didn't just happen in one mass captivity exodus, there were several waves. Mordecai wouldn't have seen the events that took Haddasah/Esther's parents lives away as a blessing. Esther's father was Mordecai's uncle, do you think he ever missed his uncle? His aunt? Would he have considered their deaths a blessing? Did them passing leave Esther as his only familial tie in this foreign culture? These are questions and thoughts and considerations that might lend perspective and depth to the "stories" you read in the pages of Scripture. The Bible does not stand with the primary purpose of relating history, though it is historically accurate. The Bible is many things actually, but the thing I want to drive home this morning is this: it's the real story of people just like you and me, faced with extraordinary every day life and working out how best to show God to a watching world - to spectators, fans, rivals, haters, and co-laborers who realize that there is a bigger story of which they are a part.
Mordecai was a cultural rule keeper, and his refusal to bow to a king's official precipitated an edict that nearly killed his whole race. The back story between Mordecai and Haman goes back centuries. Mordecai's cousin Esther turns out to be the hottest woman in the kingdom, and she almost missed her destiny caught up in the trappings of what her beauty afforded her. Kind of like Sarah in Abraham's time.
Both Mordecai and Esther were blessed to be a blessing and ended up passing on the batons of faithfulness that they had been handed. My wife and I were talking on the way home from a Church business meeting the other night. We don't do well with passing on the baton in today's Church. I was talking about this just yesterday with a Church planter whom I am supporting and probably going to go with here in the near future. And the problem isn't always that we don't do well with passing on the baton, Lord knows many of us are running breathlessly in the exchange zone ready to slap it down into the waiting hand of a co-laborer, BUT THAT CO-LABORER ISN'T READY. They are stunned from their exchange jog to stand there with their mouth gaping when they realize you've been pushing and training them all along to receive the baton and run their leg. Or they're still looking around at their activities thinking that's good enough not hearing the charged breathing and rapid foot falls approaching behind them with an arm extended to hand off the charge.
Then there's the Church body that doesn't even frame their efforts around building up the priesthood of all believers. There are some legitimate reasons and concerns intertwined with this one, which I won't delve into here today. And I won't allow those legitimate concerns to obscure the point I'm making either, that the Church is not the building or the denomination, it is the people who have heard the clarion call of Jesus Christ to repent of their futile broken ways and submit the the loving, gracious, cleansing Spirit of God moving them beyond their brokenness and into the Kingdom which has come among us and is now breaking in and trying to usher in complete newness of life where the enemy of our soul seeks to deal in death and brokenness and defeat. We must pass the baton.
Our pastor is preaching his way through the Gospel of John to start our year. Two weeks ago we peeked in on the "Conversation of a Lifetime" between Nicodemus and Jesus in chapter three. This Sunday we watched the potentially scandalous conversation of Jewish Jesus with a Samaritan woman of checkered past at a well which historically brought them to common ground through Jacob. The conversation was strange in both chapters. Jesus was speaking in metaphor more real than the 'reality' that Nicodemus and the woman were living in. Nicodemus lived in the reality of a knowledge filled religious life not truly centered on the Spiritual aspect of God, while the woman was struggling with making water easier to fetch so she didn't have to suffer the withering heat of the sun or the condemning hostility of other women. They were both looking for tools to make their day go smoother, while Jesus was offering a cooling breeze to blow through and freshen our stale world and an eternal spring that would well up within them and effortlessly spill out to water a thirsty world struggling to survive.
You have the professional religious leader holding a clandestine night time meeting with the controversial Jesus in chapter 3. You have the beautiful woman who was always being used and discarded, and had set herself up for failure once again in chapter 4. You have the clean cut, educated, successful man of respectable stature in Nicodemus; and the racially despised, tawdry woman of bad reputation. Pastor Steve likened them to a business class traveler who noticed the church bulletin sticking out of your purse on a 4 hour flight and wanted to talk about Jesus, and the inappropriately dressed woman showing too much evidence of all the wrong things plopping down next to you on the public bus and wanting to talk about Jesus because she too noticed the church bulletin sticking out of your purse. How do you handle those two totally different conversations? How do you be all things to all people as Paul alluded to in 1Corinthians 9:22?
Both Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman gave their hearts to Jesus. We don't see the immediate evidence with Nicodemus, not really until he shows up to help Joseph of Arimathea with the body of Jesus after the crucifixion. He spent some serious time counting the cost - can you truly blame him? We see the rapid evidence of the Samaritan woman's conversion though. How ironic is that? Maybe long term Nicodemus planted solid trees that grew into fruition and brought more than the woman's entire village to faith, maybe.
My wife and I reached a conclusion in our conversation about the comparisons that were drawn: "the professionally minded Church would hire Nicodemus in a heartbeat - but never allow the Samaritan to teach Sunday School even after years of showing a changed, faithful life." We're full up with Samaritans that have no roots refusing to sit under the leadership of a Pharisee who has given his heart to Jesus, and full up with Pharisees who won't ever bring themselves to trust the Holy Spirit to have changed the Samaritan that's been hanging around for years. Oy vey.
We won't willingly pass that baton. We demand it be wrested from us. We fulfill the prophetic nature of the Kingdom being taken hold of by violence in that sense.
Some of us are jogging along with our hand held out behind us awaiting that exchange, only to find that the one who was meant to run a relay has instead turned their leg into an independent marathon. You ask Paul to tutor you as Timothy and he doesn't have the time for Samaritans.
Some of us run breathlessly to the exchange point willing to release it, only to find the person we've mentored to be distracted from what they were being prepared for and confused that you really intended to have them run anywhere with anything. You ask Timothy to take seriously that the time is short and you as Paul will not be with him forever, and he balks under the chafing constraints of Nicodemus.
Nicodemus needed to repent of his religious ways and realize as Paul did, that he came to the Kingdom at such a time as this in order to dig around the budding trees of faith and nurture them with his deep knowledge and religious experience rightly transformed through the knowledge of Christ. The Samaritan woman needed to reposition herself to have influence with someone other than men, by repentance and a changed life that showed the fullness of what Jesus did for her that day, realizing how much she truly has to learn from that Jew down the road.
What do you need to do? How have you been blessed to be a blessing? What horrible circumstances would God redeem in your life if you would stop your private marathon and pass the baton of brokenness into the waiting hand of Jesus? What amazing opportunities and experiences could you capitalize on investing in others if you realized they weren't given you simply for your trophy shelf and prideful pleasure, but as batons you must pass on? If God will use Mordecai and Esther's personal tragedies and professional successes to save the Jews, He'll use yours to rescue those who are perishing.
You aren't alone, that's a lie the enemy of your soul would love for you to believe, but the Truth is otherwise. You stand surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and many of them have experienced a piece of your story in their own life, and your faith in Jesus, your testimony in how He has redeemed (or is in the process of redeeming) that circumstance might be the very thing that causes them to run down to their village and bring everyone else back. Do you remember what they said after the hottest woman in the village brought them to hear Jesus?
...Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.
John 4:42
The baton shouldn't have to be jerked from our hand, nor should we think there is just one leg in one relay race.
We need to remember with Paul:
...you are not your own...For you were bought at a price...We are all, each of us individually and all of us corporately, blessed to be a blessing. And if you want to have God's promises fulfilled in your life, you're going to have to teach others in the family to do the same thing Jesus said of Abraham:
1Corinthians6:19-20
...I have chosen him so that he will command his children and his house after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is right and just. This is how the LORD will fulfill to Abraham what He has promised him.Genesis 18:19 (HCSB)
He has chosen you. Will you choose someone to pass that blessing to?
I just passed on to you four and half hours of my life that I will never get back. Don't let it be in vain. Jesus hung on the Cross for hours, despising the shame, don't let it be in vain.
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