Three friends are looking back over their long and eventful lives and reflecting on how they would like to be remembered at their funerals. One of them says, I want my priest to say, here lies a woman who was a good wife, a loving mother, and a loyal friend. The next one says, I want the pastor to say this man was a skilled worker, a respected professional, and an accomplished leader.
And the third friend says, well, at my funeral, I want the preacher to say, look, she's moving.
What would your epitaph be? Uh, probably the best ever written is by Paul In today's epistle lesson, the time for my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith from now on there is reserved for me, the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge will give me on that day.
I have fought the fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. It can't get any better than that. I fear the words I utter on my deathbed might be a complaint or a regret or a gloomy word about the dreams that had not come to pass. No, Lord, let it be this. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race.
I have kept the faith.
There are lots of traditions at St. John's that I love and one of them is that we don't like eulogies. At funerals, we are fine with the clergy preaching a short sermon based on the Bible readings and fo and focusing on the hope of the resurrection. But we are not into a long list of all the accomplishments and successes of the person who has died.
I love that because we are really onto something. When you are lying in a coffin, what actually is success? It's not a fancy education, a sparkling career, a really low golf handicap, or even swimming the English channel. Success in a coffin is simply this. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race.
I have kept the faith. Second Timothy May be the last letter Paul wrote, and even if it isn't, he thinks it might be, and he doesn't reflect on his life and say, I've planted 48 churches. I've taken the gospel to 30 countries. I've led 12,000 people to faith in Christ, and I still got home in time for dinner.
None of that, just: I fought the good fight. I finished the race. I kept the faith. And notice that he doesn't say that he won the race, only that he took part. He doesn't say that he won the fight knocking out his opponent in four rounds, only that he took part, and he doesn't say that he achieved breathtaking things for God.
Just kept the faith, ran the race, and fought the fight. If this morning you feel like you've let someone down this week or let yourself down or let God down, hear the word of the Lord, you didn't have to win this week. All you had to do was take part. You ran the race, you fought the fight, you kept the faith.
Something else Paul doesn't do is compare himself to anyone. He knows that this race, the Christian life, everyone receives the winner's crown, not just those who seem to be better than the rest. Now, that I think is a hard thing for us in our secular culture where winners get honor money and fame, and where losers get whatever the opposite of those things are.
Success for our culture is winning the competition, beating the opponent, being known as better than others, but real success, success that matters. The success worth mentioning when you are lying in a coffin is just this, I fought the fight. I ran the race, I kept the faith.
I want to be a good Christian, but also have my successes as a teacher, preacher, and speaker. I want to be a saint, but also enjoy the sensations of the sinner. I want to be close to Christ, but also popular and liked by people. No wonder that living becomes a tiring enterprise. I something I have to constantly work on in this age of megachurches and superstar pastors is that success for God is not about numbers.
How big the budget, how large the membership, how high the Sunday attendance. Jesus spent three years preaching and calling people to follow him. When he died, his followers numbered about a dozen, and most of them had given up. By today's yardstick, we'd have to dismiss the ministry of Jesus as a rank and embarrassing failure.
Wesley Taylor wrote: some say, success means being a winner. Jesus says, success is sometimes an illness, a rejection that puts you in touch with grace you didn't know was yours. Some say success is being able to lose your career without losing yourself. Jesus says, success is being willing to lose yourself to find yourself.
Some say success is taking good care of yourself. Jesus says, success is giving yourself away. Some say success is putting balance in your life. Jesus says, success is putting God first. Some say success is controlling your own finances. Jesus says, success remembers it is more blessed to give than to receive.
And some say success means knowing that everything has a price and knowing how much you'd pay for it. Jesus says success is taking up your cross each day and doing whatever is necessary to serve in humble love. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. This is an inspiring word, a dynamic word, an active word.
The boxer moves around the ring, avoiding punches and strategizing his own. The runner is never static. Oh, and while we're talking about fighting the fight, let's not lose sight of who our enemy is. Our enemy is not human. Our enemies are spiritual and they act often invisibly, always craftily. Your enemy is the urge to gossip, the impulse to sow discord, the reflex to shun and judge and harm.
Be the nimble boxer. Dodge. Weave. Avoid, and when you do punch, make sure that you focus your anger and your hate on the spiritual power, not the human being. Oh, I know. I know humans can look like our enemies, but they're not. Our true enemy is a shapeshifter. It contorts itself into the appearance of the next door neighbor or the person in the other political party, or even the brother or sister sitting a few pews away.
But that is not your enemy. Don't get in the ring with them.
Human beings have created some ridiculous sports. In England, the day before Ash Wednesday, they have pancake tossing races, and in Finland after the snow has melted, they compete. They compete at wife carrying it does exactly what it says on the tin. Contestants carry their wives around a 250 meter obstacle course, including a meter deep ditch of water.
You'll be pleased to know there are rules, uh, dictated by the International Wife Carrying Rules Committee. So there's a minimum weight limit for a wife of 49 kilos, multiplied by 2.2 to get pounds. The world championships. Yep. There are World championships take place in the birthplace of the sport in Central Finland each year.
Then there's stair climbing, like wife carrying the name says it all. Competitors climb stairs, lots of stairs very fast. It's also called tower running. Kristen Fry is a 29-year-old environmental scientist who turned to stair climbing after qualifying for the Boston Marathon 10 times. But then she got bored with horizontal running and took up vertical.
She's now hooked and she's good. She is now the best female US athlete in the sport, and recently ran a 24 hour endurance event in Jacksonville where she scrambled up the Bank of America Towers 42 floors repeatedly. By the time she was finished, she had logged 123,480 steps. That is 5,880 floors, the equivalent of scaling Mount Everest 200 half times.
She's run up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the Empire State Building. It's a tough sport. The recovery time for vertical running, at two steps at a time is twice as long as that of a marathon. She says, sometimes I'll feel sick for two or three days afterwards. A few times I've tasted blood near the top of a race, and I've seen spots in some races when I was just five floors from the top.
Once I passed the timing mat, I usually fall and will crawl out of other people's way, trying to catch my breath. I've stumbled when my legs are jello, but have never fallen, and I've gotten blisters on my hands from grabbing the rails. So I bought football gloves that protect the skin, but despite this stair climbing is among the fastest growing sports in the country.
The American Lung Association sponsors many events and the number has nearly doubled in the last five years from 25 to 57. So work with me here on this metaphor and let's see, tower running as the sort of race Paul had in mind when he wrote his famous epitaph. I have run the race, the vertical race.
Our eyes are upwards to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith to the promise of glory in his eternal kingdom. Sometimes the stairs are crazy and make no sense. If you have ever walked up the leaning tower of Pisa, you know what I mean, it's disorienting. At some points, you are walking downwards, but you feel like you are going up.
It's weird. Then there's the bridge stair in Switzerland, which is a staircase that spans about 200 feet over a deep chasm, and it rises 90 feet, scary, confusing. The race can sometimes overwhelm us. Some aspects of the race seem impossible. How can I go on? How can I make it like the spiral staircase of Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is constructed without the use of nails and has no apparent center support.
So run hard this week. Fight bravely. Keep the faith tenaciously. Be obstinate. Be gritty. Be a dog with a bone. And when you are fit to drop, as you probably will be, carry on. And when you are punched drunk and you feel your knees beginning to buckle, fight on, and when you think you can't hold on anymore and the weight is too much grip, even tighter.
Amen.