Three boys are at the beach.  They see a lifeguard tower in the distance and decide to race to see who can get there first.  One boy is overly concerned with the sand and how difficult it is to run in it.  So he keeps looking at his feet and ends up weaving back and forth while he’s running.  The second boy is overly concerned with watching how the other two are doing and ends up tripping over a piece of driftwood.  The third boy simply looks straight ahead at the lifeguard tower in the distance.  He runs straight to it and wins the race.

 In our second reading today, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us of the necessity in our own lives of running the race of faith and “keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith,” while we do so.

 Running that race of faith really means living our lives in fidelity to the teachings of Jesus.  We keep our eyes fixed on him, both as the goal to which we are heading and as the model of how we are to run the race.

 What do these famous people have in common?  Al Gore, George W. Bush, Oprah Winfrey, Will Ferrell, P. Diddy, and Joe Strummer (the rhythm guitarist and lead singer of “The Clash”).  They have all run in, and completed, a Marathon – a footrace of 26 miles, 385 yards.  None of them “won” their race, in the sense of a first-place finish, but all of them were victorious nonetheless.  For each of them, victory did not consist in finishing first, ahead of everyone else.  Instead victory for them meant enduring and completing a most challenging race.

 The race of faith is not one we win by finishing in first-place.  The first-place finish has already been taken – Jesus won first place, for all of us.  Winning for us, victory for us, means taking Jesus as our model and enduring like He endured and ultimately completing the race.

 In any athletic endeavor, success depends upon several factors.  A person has to have at least some natural ability, but that’s not enough.  A person also has to train, but even that’s not enough.  To be successful, a person has to engage his or her heart and mind.  A person has to have heart – he or she has to want it.  And a person has to be mentally tough.  He or she has to endure – pain from aching muscles and joints and injuries, the feeling that one can’t get enough breath, setbacks, and difficulties.  A person has to endure and learn to overcome those things.  The desire and the mental toughness go together and work off of each other.  The power to be mentally tough depends upon the heart, the desire, to be a winner.  And the desire cannot be realized, cannot be translated into actuality, without the mental toughness.

 In the race of faith, we have to desire our goal.  We have to desire Jesus and desire to be with Him.  And that means we have to know Him.  Knowledge precedes love, as St. Thomas Aquinas says.  We know that from our own lives: the more deeply we know others, the more deeply it becomes possible for us to love them.

 In order to desire Jesus (to love Jesus), we have to know Him.  In order to do that, we have to spend time with Him.  Sometimes we forget that Jesus, that the Father, that the Holy Spirit are persons.  To know God and to love God means that we have to spend time with God, communicating with Him, talking to Him, listening to Him.  We call that prayer.

 What happens in a friendship when the friends stop spending time together, when they stop talking to one another, when they stop sharing themselves with one another?  What happens in a marriage when the spouses stop spending time together, stop communicating?  They drift apart.

 The personal time we spend with Jesus in prayer, especially prayer with the Scriptures, enables us to know Him better.  And knowing Him better, we become able to love Him more deeply.

 And loving Him more deeply gives us the power to be spiritually “tough” – to endure whatever we are called upon to endure in the race of faith.  What we have to endure as individuals can take many different forms.  Fidelity to God put Jeremiah in the position of being thrown into a cistern to die.  Fidelity to the Father put Jesus in the position of being scorned and ridiculed by His own people and finally being hung upon a cross to die.

 But fidelity to God also led to someone pulling Jeremiah out of that cistern.  Fidelity to God led to Jesus being resurrected from death.  Whatever we are called upon to endure – financial difficulty, sickness, loss, temptation to sin, pain, rejection, or whatever – God will see us through it if we remain faithful, if we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, our goal.

There’s one last thing that helps the athlete, something that I haven’t mentioned yet.  It is the fans who cheer him or her, who support, who encourage.  “we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” says the author of Hebrews.

 In our race of faith, we have fans who cheer us on, who support us, who encourage us.  One set of fans is the saints, who have already completed the race and who cheer and wave us on.  They are ready to help us.  The other set of fans are the brothers and sisters gathered here with us, the community of faith gathered in this church.  We come here to worship God, but we also come here to cheer one another on, to help one another, to support one another, to encourage another.

 If we are backbiting, gossiping, criticizing, and so forth, then we are not supporting and encouraging one another.  We are not cheering one another.  We’re booing.  It’s hard to win when people are booing.  There’s enough booing in the world – no one should have to find it here.