I have a sermon today, but I have a little thing I want to say before I get into my sermon.  I had a journalist from The Wall Street Journal call me this week and interview me in part because they’ve noticed that there is a lot of disagreement in churches about what may or may not end up to be war in the Middle East.  And they were asking questions of different people about how congregations are handling that diversity of opinion.  What I want to say will reinforce something I said a couple of weeks ago.  I am proud to be a mainline Protestant.  I’m proud to be a part of a denomination that does not claim that the Word of the Lord is found solely in its pastors, in its leadership, or in any individual member.  But as part of the Protestant heritage, in which we are a part, we are to study scripture, we are to look at the tradition of the church which goes back over 2000 years, and we are to pray to seek God’s guidance in our lives.  It really is the responsibility of every individual—not just the pastor—to be the priests of this world.  It is all of our responsibilities to seek God’s will for what may come in our lives.  There are many people who feel strongly that a war against Iraq is a sin, and there are just as many people who feel like it would be a moral error to not have a war.  What I want to say to you all today is that we need to respect that difference of opinion in our community of faith.  As your pastor, I will continue to pray that God’s will may be done in this world and that God’s peace may be with all of God’s people.  I will be proud to be part of a congregation in which we can live with those differences that each of us feels passionately about, because ultimately what we do is put our trust in God.  Our God has given none of us the Word of the Lord, but He has called each of us to seek it. 

Now I want to move on to my sermon. One of my favorite movies is Chariots of Fire.  I wonder how many of you have seen that movie.  It came out in the early 80’s, and for me it has special meaning.  I think the first summer that I saw it was the first summer that I also saw a woman who later became my wife.  So I have a lot of emotion tied in with that movie.  I also was a pretty regular runner up until a few years ago, so I know that there’s discipline involved in running, and that discipline that I think you see in that movie is very powerful.  The movie is also a true story of two men in Great Britain who were Olympic hopefuls in the earlier parts of the last century.  In that movie both men were outsiders in many ways.  Both of them were outside the elite magistracy of England of that day and that time, yet they were outsiders in very different ways.  One of them was a Jew, and he had just seen in his own life, as well as the lives of many other Jewish people, the first hints that Jews might be allowed places like Oxford.  For the first time Jews may have access to places where they had previously been denied and discriminated against.  But the main character was well aware everywhere that he ran that part of what he was doing was trying to prove himself to that bigger world that rejected him.  He also ran for his people who had also been rejected. The other runner, which the movie centers upon, was a Scottish missionary from a Scottish missionary family.  Our organist, Evelyn Moore, tells me that she was in a Bible study class with this particular runner’s widow a few years ago.  This runner struggled constantly over the gift that God had given him in running.  He puzzled over his gift and wondered whether or not it was something that could give God glory or if it was something that would merely feed his own pride.  He constantly tried to figure out how to take the gift from God and use it in a way that would see to it that God finally got the glory.  He wanted to remain true in that racing world to the convictions that God had given him.  The movie moves on, and the true climax of the movie comes when the Scottish missionary is asked to run on Sunday, which for him is the Sabbath.  According to his convictions and his faith, he cannot run on Sunday.  The problem for the Jewish fellow is that this is his one chance to run in Great Britain and to finally prove himself to be good enough for the society that has said he is not good enough.  As the story plays itself out, we find even the Prince of Wales showing up to pressure this young Scottish missionary to just give up what his values are and run for his country.  In the end he decides that the goal of his running is not even to please the future King of England, so he refuses to give up his convictions.  He does hold to the goal of his running, which was that God’s glory may foremost be known.  He renounces the secular world as he gives up his opportunity to be in the Olympics simply because his faith demands that he go another way.  By the way, he was later to die in the mission field.

This morning, as we look at Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, we must remember that this letter was to a group in a church in which there were divided opinions about many things.  As Paul moves toward the latter end of that letter, we see him deciphering some of the issues.  He tries to help the Corinthians all come together in some coherent way as they struggle with these issues.  He also reminds these people that to live the Christian life is not an easy task.  Living the Christian life requires the strength of athlete.  Now I want to tell you about Pam and me.  Pam graduated from different a different graduate school, Carolina at Chapel Hill.  I completed graduate school at Duke.  Anyone who knows anything about those two schools knows that there is a lot of competition between them when basketball season rolls around.  This compliment I’m about give comes with a lot of squalling on my part.  Probably the greatest basketball player I’ve seen on the basketball court is Michael Jordan, who by the way played for Carolina.  I’ve often said when I see him on the court that he reminds me more of a deer running than he does a basketball player.  But Michael Jordan has is such a grace to the gift and talent of basketball.  I’ve never honestly seen another basketball player who has turned the sport into such an art form.  I’m also reminded that often when we look at people like Olympic athletes, and as we watch and see the Olympic games, what we see are these world-class athletes.  Unfortunately, we do not catch the whole picture until the very end.  When I think about Michael Jordan, I don’t think just about the great accomplishments that he made when he had a career in basketball.  By the way, he ran a lot longer than most basketball players.  I think of this young boy in North Carolina who took up basketball, and with the encouragement of his father, worked at it until he got good at it.  Did you know that when he was in junior high that he got cut from this junior high basketball team?  Some coach has egg on his face over that one, I’m sure.  We don’t really see all the work and the effort and the determination that produced this basketball player of all basketball players.  I was reading a book this week, interestingly enough about pastoral integrity.  The author of this book was writing about the real need for pastors to be more concerned about their prayer time and their Bible study and spend less time worrying about whether or not they were good administrators.  Ultimately those two things—Bible study and prayer time—are what make good pastors.  The book touched on the amount of discipline that it takes to hold ourselves to that when there are so many responsibilities pulling and tugging at us.  What the author said was that a good prayer life is not something that comes on a whim.  A good prayer life takes discipline and hard work, and the fruit of such a prayer life will not be evident for quite some time.  Too many people give up too early in that process.  The author quoted a man by the name of Westerfield.  Westerfield said that if an anthropologist comes 1000 years from now and studies the modern world that we live in, he or she would look at our world-class athletes in this day and would be shocked.  A future anthropologist would be shocked at the demands that we place on the bodies of these athletes.  These demands are designed so that the athlete can be a mega second faster.  It is wild to think that the difference between the first person in the Olympics and the fifth person in the Olympics is only measured in mega seconds!  We have truly pushed our athletes to the point where what we ask from them is incredible, and what their bodies produce at this point is the outer edge of what our bodies can do.  There are many people who like to preach an easy Christianity.  They say that if we become people of faith, then all will be well.  They preach that life is easier because we are Christian.  But what Paul reminds us in his text is what all good athletes know: If we are to keep our mind on the goal for Christianity—that Kingdom of God that Jesus preached—then that goal will not come easily.  Our goal is not one in which we seek to get things from God, but our goal is that we must give discipline and hard work.  When the time comes for each of us take our last breath and we move from this life to the next, then may we know that we have finally come to the prize and know that we have run the race, which we have been called to run, well.