Series: February 2026
Speaker: Rob McClellan
Today's Sermon
“Endurance Training: On the Road Series Finale"
Endurance Training – On the Road Series (Finale!)
It is our final sermon in a series we’ve done in two installments now over the last half year: On the Road, exploring the journeys of faith and life. In the fifth chapter of Romans, the Apostle Paul writes this about what happens when we face the tough parts of the road well.
Romans 5:1-5
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
As I shared once before, the day after Bethany went on sabbatical, this message appeared atop my calendar, “Bethany Away, 1/100” as in 1 of 100 days. I’m not one for hyperbole so I’ll just say this was…an existential crisis. Of course I was glad for Bethany to get a long overdue study break, but I wouldn’t have chosen to go solo (with some extra help) that summer. Yet, without a doubt it made me better. I had to stretch, step into some new areas. I had to be on top of certain matters usually not in my purview. It made me sharper, more well-rounded. That is what a challenge should do for us.
We don’t and we wouldn’t choose many of life’s challenges, but we can grow from them. David Richo, psychotherapist and teacher steeped in both Catholicism and Buddhism, contends that much of our suffering comes from trying to avoid struggles rather than accepting them. We turn to magical thinking: If I only do this or don’t do this, then that won’t happen.[1] That kind of formulaic, God-bargaining, faith almost inevitably falls apart. A few lead charmed existences, but most people get hit with a cold dose of reality that magical thinking cannot overcome—Someone hurts you. You suffer loss. You simply suffer, or someone you love does with no rhyme or reason. When you come off the mountain, the valley gets real.
Richo says our energy is best spent in acceptance not avoidance. We say “yes” to all of life. That’s not to condone or excuse hurtful behavior or abdicate our responsibly to make things as safe for people as we can; it’s merely to acknowledge what undeniably is so we can show up to it compassionately. It seems to me this is a pretty good summary of the way of Jesus—see with clear eyes what is, particularly suffering, and respond in compassionate love. You can’t respond lovingly to a situation you won’t acknowledge.
Richo says there are five unavoidable givens of human life and relationship:
- Everything changes and ends
- Things do not always go according to plan
- Life is not always fair
- Pain is part of life
- People are not loving and loyal all the time.[2]
Those may be tough pills to swallow, but they are medicine for the soul. Taking them in puts us in a position to step out faithfully. It’s like any endurance training, where practice matters, but you’ll never get good at climbing a mountain you won’t admit exists. The more we move through these tough realities with love, the better and stronger we become.
Paul writes, “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character.” That’s a bar/line. If we navigate our tough stages well, which doesn’t mean perfectly as much as it does persistently, then we come out stronger, stronger and of stronger character. This is why resilience is all the rage in childhood development. Allow young people to face appropriate and appropriate levels of struggle so they can build those muscles. What is character? It’s the ability to show up as we should to whatever particular situation arises. It is to hold fast to good values when things get bad. Character is what’s most exposed by adversity. We learn so much about people, about ourselves, not when things go as we would like, but when things go awry.
You’ve no doubt heard the cliché, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” I hate that saying because it implies the strengthening happens automatically. Not everything hard makes us stronger. Sometimes what’s hard or hurtful scars us, traumatizes us. Sometimes in the face of a tough road, we take an exit ramp prematurely. What makes us stronger, what gives us more endurance, is when it’s not too much and we stick with it. We draw on the right resources and persevere. Richo says life’s challenges simply give us “opportunities to practice mindfulness and loving-kindness.”[3] We have to choose.
Paul, remember, was blinded on the road, a disorienting even frightening moment he did not choose. He took it as an opportunity to reevaluate his life. Presumably, he could have doubled down on his ways. Instead he made it his life’s mission to support and grow the faith he once persecuted. In the face of rather dystopian scenes on the streets of Minneapolis in recent weeks, I saw a couple videos of demonstrators gathered outside the hotels where ICE agents were staying and they were merely singing. In one such video they sing cheerfully:
It’s okay to change your mind.
Show us your courage.
Leave this behind.
Leave “this” behind, this way that disregards humanity not to mention the law. Those demonstrators were attempting to sing people back to their own humanity.
In the second instance, a more somber, but still warm song rang out:
Put down your weapons
and sing your part.
We walk the same ground.
We’re being torn apart.
“We walk the same ground.” Interesting choice of words. We share a landscape that includes suffering and what we see all the time, including now, is people making very different choices about what to do with their suffering or their perceived suffering.
If we choose to face our suffering in faith, in love, then the road will produce endurance, endurance character, and what’s the next line? Hope. Character produces hope. Why? Because if we can show up to challenging times while maintaining high character, we show it is possible. Despair is when you believe it’s impossible. If we can endure once, we can endure it again, and if we can maintain our character, our moral and spiritual composure, we will only increase in our capacity to do so. Conversely, those who sacrifice their character when things get tough and take their pain out on others only grow less tolerant of hardship. The problem is the hardships will always come—it’s one of the unavoidable givens—so they simply become less and less able to cope with reality. They lash out or collapse in on themselves because they don’t have the strength of character. (It’s that old science experiment where you heat up the can of liquid, cap it off, and when things cool off it crumbles in on itself).
Right now, we are in the middle of the Olympics, this captivating display of human performance. Maybe what captures us is the excellence. Maybe it’s the beauty of the craft of sport done at the highest level. Maybe it’s the drama of competition. I suspect, though, what really pulls us in is that we know these athletes have arrived at mastery of their craft through their ability to endure suffering. All that grueling training, repetitive, monotonous, lonely. It produces world class endurance. This is why competitors often embrace afterward. They know the ones they just competed with are the only ones who truly understand the amount of suffering and sacrifice it took to get to where they were. Our endurance is our hope too. Martin Luther King, in a moment of incredible social challenge, said, “be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.”[4]
As Christians, we tend to say part of what gives us that ability to suffer is God. Well, what of God? After all, this is a church. I was at my desk drafting this when I looked out over the parking lot. It was a familiar drop-off scene for the preschool. At the back of a car was a grandmother crouched down, arms wrapped around a toddler, while the mother gathered her baby. I stopped and watched, having this sense that an image for God was about to appear. At first, I thought, “That’s God, holding us, surrounding us with this ancient wisdom and love, grandparent love which sometimes comes a little purer than parental love.” Then I thought, “She’s going send the girl to do the walk on her own, while walking behind watchfully, or maybe she’ll hold her hand the whole way. That works too. God holds our hand.” But in that moment, that image fell flat. God may be with us every moment, but it doesn’t always feel like it. The Bible has plenty of incidents of people crying out God has abandoned them, even Jesus.
Then it hit me. In that scene in the parking lot, I wasn’t seeing God as the grandmother. I wasn’t seeing God as the mother. I wasn’t seeing God as the child. God was the road, the landscape where all of it takes place. Whether the road wills the bumps or just has them is immaterial. All we know is they come, just as the vistas and views and streams and shade. And, we have everything we need to go well on this road because we have the ability to accept it, do something loving with it. We have the ability to rise to the occasion and we have the ability and, deep in our souls, the inclination to lift others up too.
The last and lasting lesson of the road is you don’t have to look for God. God is the very ground on which we stand. I learned what I did, grew how I did when Bethany was away, as trivial an example as that is, because the road taught me. You may have a more significant challenge than “Bethany away 1/100”. We may all be facing a far more daunting and dramatic one, but no matter the grade, the road can be our teacher. We can conclude “We’ll never survive this,” or we can say, “I wonder what I will learn from this? I wonder how much stronger I can grow from this. I wonder what endurance I can build from this. I wonder how I will creatively maintain my character through this, and in doing so multiply my character.” That’s how we generate hope.
Since, then, we are standing on holy ground, we should pray…You are the ground beneath our feet, the breath within our lungs, the light birthed out of darkness. You are the hidden bonds that draw us together. We say “Yes” to you. We say “Yes” to all that is that the best of us may arrive here. We do say “No” to what is false, masquerading for what is, “No” to what tries to tear us apart, “No” to the internal shouts that we aren’t strong enough to walk this road. God, we take off our shoes that we might feel you beneath us lifting us up and propelling us forward. We step out in faith because we trust it can make us better.
Amen.
[1] David Richo, Take Heart: The Ways of Love, Free of Fear and Ego 2024), 7-8.
[2] Ibid., 5.
[3] Ibid.