The Race of Our Lives

Fr. Geoff delivers a compelling sermon on the spiritual journey of life, drawing on the Scriptures and personal experiences. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining focus on Christ and the eternal crown beyond life's finish line.

Transcript

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I just realized I haven't put my glasses on, so I better do that.

Today, I'm going to talk about the race of our lives. At the beginning of the year, the church has given us some very challenging readings when you put them together. The Gospel according to St. Mark is different to the Gospel of St. Matthew and St. Luke. Both Matthew and Luke start with the infant narratives that talk about Jesus in his early life. But Mark dives straight in when Jesus is about 30 years old, and we begin with John the Baptist in the wilderness, preparing the way for our Lord to start his ministry. So the reading this morning quotes from Isaiah 40, where Isaiah said, "Behold, I send my messenger before your face. Who will prepare your way before you? The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight."

So this is John the Baptist with a message to warn everybody to prepare everybody to start the race. The Gospel is coming. And then we have St. Paul, and he has a different message. He's talking about the end of the race. He's saying, I'm being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I've kept the faith.

And so here we have this is how I see these two readings coming together today. One is the start of the race, where St. John announces the coming of Christ and the beginning of the Gospel of Christ on earth. And then St. Paul talks about the end of his particular race, which we're all in, and we will all one day end as well, reach the end of the race too. The feast of the nativity has ended, and next week we have the feast of the theophany next Sunday. So we're right between the two feasts. In the early church, this was one feast. It was called the theophany, and both things were celebrated together. But in the 4th century, they began to come apart, and they are the way they are now have been ever since. So we're between the nativity and the theophany.

Racing the race of our lives. I'm sure all of us have done some racing. My first race, I remember my very first race before I'd even started school. We were on a troop ship going out to Malaysia. My father was in the British army, and they decided to have a boat race along the side of the boat, a troop ship. So they set up the race. It had the end of the finishing line at one end of the deck, and they put us all at the other end, and they said, "Ready, steady, go." And as I looked up, I saw my mother holding a bag of lollies.

And I thought, I get this race. I took off, and I was ahead of everybody. I was the fastest. I was miles ahead of everybody. I don't know how I did it, but I did it. And I went straight to the mom, I was way ahead of the pack. The only trouble was she was standing in front of the finishing line. So everybody else rolled past after me, and I didn't get a prize.

And there's a lesson there for us in this race that we're in, the race of our lives. Because if we have our eye on the wrong thing, we may not pass the finishing line. Behind the finishing line is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ with a crown waiting for us. But he's on the other side of the finishing line, not this side. And we're after bags of lollies sometimes—bags of lollies, money, whatever, anything to distract us from the true goal. So that was my first race.

The second race I can remember or was thinking about when I was thinking about this race of life was when I was at school. I was in a relay race. I was number, I think I was in the third leg of the relay race, and our team, for some reason, I always pick the bad teams. We were running last, and anyway, I got the bat, and I thought I can do this, and off I went, and I caught the others up. I remember hearing the crowd, the crowd cheering, and I thought this is great. I love this cheering. And I've never forgotten that in this race of life towards the goal of our crowns in heaven, we probably won't hear much cheering. And if we do hear cheering, we might be going the wrong direction.

So we have to be very careful. If you hear cheering, stop and think, am I doing the right thing here? Is this pleasing to God? Am I going in the right direction in the race or whatever? So those are my first two races I thought of as a child and then at school, and they were kind of fast sprints.

But then later in life, when I got when I joined the British army, I ended up doing the toughest life race that I can remember ever doing. Some of you may have heard of it. I don't know. It's called the 10 tours race in Devonshire over the Dartmore wilderness, and over one weekend you have to walk 55 miles, which is 88 km, and you have to carry all your food and your sleeping gear, everything. And boy was that demanding. And there's all these teams racing against each other to try and win the race. And you have to go to the top of 10. The tours are hills. It's a sort of southwest of England name for a hill. And you have to go to the top of these 10 tours and sign in, and if you miss any of them, you have to be reading maps and having compasses and everything as well as racing. It was very demanding. And of course, the weather in England is interesting. At the best of times, people have actually died on this race. It's so demanding, and many people drop out.

But we made it. It's the toughest thing I ever did. I remember we went back to the army base, and I got off the bus. I could hardly walk, and I was just sort of seized up. But the thing that kept us going, there were six of us in the team. That was one thing that kept us going. We were encouraging each other, and I learned from that we need fellowship. But the other thing was it was just sheer hard dogged endurance. We just had to push ourselves. And this race, I think, is more like the race of life than the other two. The Christian life is not a short sprint. It's a long slog. It's more than 88 km. It's more than a weekend. It's a lifetime of slog. And there's all sorts of things that are going to get us to try and pull us off track to trip us up to take us away from our focus.

I was thinking of Hebrews 2 which said St. Paul here says we have to let us run with endurance the race that is before us looking unto Jesus. We have to keep our focus on Jesus all our lives. If we start getting distracted on other things, we're not going to get to that finishing line, the bags of lollies, and so on. And we need to get to that finishing line if we're going to get our crowns.

Most races start with "ready, set, go." Or somebody fires a pistol, bang, and off you go. But this race starts, if we listen to St. John, it starts with one word. Repent. That's it. Repent. And what does repent mean? Well, if you if I use an army illustration, sorry, a lot of army stuff coming out this morning. If you're on the parade ground and you're marching along like this and somebody says to you, "Repent," you turn around, go the other way. In other words, it's turning away from doing wrong things and turning toward doing what's pleasing to Christ. This is the message that John brought. This is the message we need at the beginning of 2026. Happy New Year, everybody. This is the message. Repent. Make sure that we're going in the right direction. If you're hearing cheering, you're probably going in the wrong direction. Make sure you're going in the right direction. That's the beginning of the race.

So, let's listen to what St. John said. He said, "Repent." And then he says, "For the kingdom of heaven is at hand. It's not coming. It's at hand. It's here. It's always with us. It's always ready to come and enter into us. The only question is whether we're ready to enter into it and to accept it within ourselves. The only people that will end up outside the kingdom of heaven are not those who have made mistakes, committed terrible sins. It's just those who never really wanted to be connected with the kingdom. We're all welcome. This is the gospel. Christ died for all. The message is for everybody. The only people excluded are those who don't want to be there.

So the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And every day at the beginning of the year, every year, every day, every hour, we should make sure that we have this right attitude. We want the kingdom of heaven to be in us. We want to be in the kingdom of heaven. We want to be on the right racetrack, running the right race, the race of our lives.

And then we look at what St. Timothy said. He said, "But you be watchful in all things." Be watchful. We have to be watchful because if on the 10 tours race, if we didn't look at our compasses, we'd end up going to the wrong tour, or we end up in a swamp or something. You have to use your map. You have to use your senses. You have to be watchful all the time. And it's the same in this life. In this race, we have to be watchful. What's the best way of being watchful? Well, here we are. First sermon for the year had to come out. Cafes, confession, almsgiving, fasting, Eucharist, reading the scriptures, reading about the saints, serving others, all undergirded with prayer. This is how we keep ourselves watchful. Keep these disciplines, these ascetic disciplines in our life.

But then St. Paul says to Timothy, "Endure afflictions." He says that to Timothy. Of course, St. Paul was just about to have his head removed by Nero. This is in about AD67. This is why he's saying to Timothy, you know, endure afflictions. Life's not easy. Keep at it. And then he says, "Do the work of an evangelist." And I think this applies to us all. Do the work of an evangelist. What is the work of an evangelist? It's spreading the good news. How do we spread the good news? Well, we have to know what the good news is. That Christ came into the world to save us. And he didn't just come in and say, "You got to do this, this, this, this, and this, and then leave us to it." He also gave us his Holy Spirit to help us to do it. He's given us all that we need to fulfill what he wants us to do. But also, we have to live the life, the Christian way. It's a way. In the early church, the church was called the way. They were called the people of the way. This is a way of life along this race of life. I always remember St. Francis of Assisi saying to his disciples when he sent them out with the instruction preach the gospel, and if necessary use words.

So what he's saying is go out and serve people, live the life, be Christian, and if you have to use words, then use words.

So at the beginning of this year, at the beginning of this path leading us from the nativity to Pasca, the church reminds us that every day and for the rest of our lives, we must start with repentance and with determination to seek the kingdom of God. The church also reminds us that Christ is always with us, that the kingdom of God is always near us, and that it depends only on us whether we shall attain that goal and whether we follow this path to its end and receive the crown that the Lord Jesus has prepared for everyone of us behind the finishing line. Not this side of the finishing line.

We are not alone in this race. God baptizes us with the Holy Spirit as well as with water. And each Sunday when we come, we renew this filling of the Holy Spirit. Listen to the liturgy. We ask the Holy Spirit to come down upon us all during this liturgy every week.

The only way the church in the western world is going to recover her courage will be not from shouting louder but by living in the kingdom in the power of the Holy Spirit, standing firmer against the pressures being put upon us to run in the wrong direction.

We Orthodox need to be the front-runners in this race because, sad to say, much of the western church has lost its way and its confidence in the gospel message. This missionary calling to be an evangelist is never given in a season of comfort. It's always given when we need a reminder of who we are and why we're here. And it's not Christianity against our culture. It's Christianity in front of our culture. So they can see us. They can see what it's all about. And they are drawn to it. And they want to be part of it.

A nation like ours that forgets its spiritual inheritance does not become neutral. Secular is the word they use. It doesn't become neutral. It becomes hollow. And a church that refuses to speak to the nations doesn't become humble; it becomes irrelevant.

So we need courage, we need perseverance, we need endurance in this year and every year if we're going to do our job. You know what our aim is? We want to share the truths, the treasures of orthodoxy with English-speaking people in Australia, which is the majority of Australia. That's why we're here. It's not going to happen just by us coming to church and being Christian on Sundays. We have to be Christian every day, every hour, every moment. May God help us by his Holy Spirit to achieve what I believe he's called us to do. Amen. Christ is born. Glory. Amen.