The movie We Are Marshall tells the story of the tragic plane crash on the evening of November 14, 1970 that took the lives of nearly the entire Marshall University football team and coaching staff.   The “Thundering Herd” was returning home from a game against the East Carolina Pirates when the plane clipped a ridge of trees a mile short of the runway and crashed into a gulley.  There were no survivors.  

In the wake of the tragedy, Marshall University President Donald Dedmon decides to suspend the football program indefinitely, but the pleas of the Marshall students and especially the few football players who weren’t on the flight persuade him to change his mind.  Dedmon hires a young new head coach Jack Lengyel, who with the help of Red Dawson (the sole surviving member of the previous coaching staff), manages to cobble together a team by the start of the next season. They are aided by the NCAA's waiver of a rule prohibiting freshmen from playing varsity football. The new team consists of only a few returning players and a whole slew of freshman and walk-on athletes from other Marshall sports programs.

The players are young and inexperienced, and they get blown out in their season opener.  They limp off the field defeated and humiliated.  The campus and surrounding community want to be supportive, but everybody begins to doubt whether this was a good idea to keep the program going.  Even some of the players and coaching staff question whether this is really worth it.  Several of them are ready to quit.

Do you know that feeling?  You’re doing everything you can to stay in the game, to stick with it, but you’re tired. You feel beat up. You’re all out of stamina.  Maybe it’s time to call it quits.  After all, a person can only endure so much.

God’s people, Israel, knew what it was like to suffer hardship and be kicked around.  They knew well the temptation of giving up when the going got tough.  This was so much of their history, from the early days when they were beat down by Egyptian task masters to the time when this Psalm was written.  Nation after nation tried to bully them and take them out.  Psalm 129 begins with a recollection of how much adversity Israel has faced throughout her history.   “Often they have attacked me from my youth,” the Psalm recalls.  Or in the paraphrase of the Message: “They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young.”  Twice the psalmist repeats this reality.  

But that’s not all the psalmist recalls.  This is not a psalm that simply grovels in Israel’s hardships or sulks in self-pity.  It also recalls the way that, every time Israel was knocked down, she managed to get back up.  “Often have they attacked me from my youth, yet they have not prevailed against me.”  Or again from the Message:  “They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young, but they never could keep me down.”

I love that line:  They never could keep me down.  Israel learned to persevere.  She persevered because God was faithful to preserve her through every trial and adversity.  Even in the worst moments of her past, when “plowers plowed on my back, they made their furrows long,” God gave Israel the patience and the resolve—the resilience—to not give up.

If we’re going to make this discipleship journey—this “long obedience in the same direction”—then one of the most important virtues we also must learn is perseverance.  The reality is that life is hard.  Bad things happen.  Tragedies strike.  Disappointments come.  The road will be tough.  I don’t think there is a person in this room today who doesn’t know this.  Or if you don’t, you’ll soon figure it out.  You will get knocked down at some point, maybe many times.  

The question, then, is: when you get knocked down, will you get up?  When everything within you wants to quit, will you find the inner resolve to persevere?  Or will you stay down and give up?

The apostle Paul knew what it was like to get knocked down.  In several places in his epistles he catalogs all the ways he has suffered for the sake of the gospel (see 2 Cor. 11:23-29): beaten so many times he can’t remember the count, stoned once, shipwrecked three times, throw in prison over and over, threatened by death at every turn.  He knew exhaustion and sleepless nights and hunger and thirst and all sorts of other trials.  Add to all of this a mysterious thorn in his side that God chose to not take from him, though Paul begged God to do so many times.

And yet, time and again, Paul got back up.  Like Israel, you couldn’t keep Paul down.  “Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry,” Paul writes in 2 Cor. 4, “we do not lose heart….But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.  We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.”

The secret to perseverance, Paul says, is not self-determination and personal stamina.  It is about receiving this “extraordinary power that belongs to God.”  This is exactly what Psalm 129 tells us.  The cornerstone verse in the whole Psalm is this: “God is righteous.”  This Hebrew word that gets translated “righteous” points to God’s unwavering, covenantal relationship with us.  Even when we are not faithful to God, God remains faithful to us.  Even when we give up on God, God doesn’t give up on us.  The Message captures the heart of this word when it says: “God wouldn’t put up with it, he sticks with us.”

How do we persevere?  Because God sticks with us.  No matter what we face, God holds onto us.  Psalm 129 anticipates Jesus, God-with-us-in-the-flesh.  The extraordinary power that we receive is Jesus himself—his death and his life.  Jesus, who was kicked around, beat up, pinned on a cross, and buried in a tomb.  But not even the grave could keep Jesus down!

Several weeks ago, when we had that wonderful stretch of warm weather, my 3-year-old daughter, Abby, wanted to go to the park.  She insisted on being pulled in her green wagon.  We went out into the garage, and found it packed full of odd things that we were storing away for winter.  “Oh no,” Abby said with a concerned look. “My wagon is full of lots of heavy stuff!”  The look of concern was suddenly replaced with confidence.  “But I know you can lift it, Dad.  Because Jesus will give you his stronger-ness, right Dad?”

That’s right.  Jesus gives us his “stronger-ness.”  We are able to persevere because Jesus gives us his very strength—a strength that is made perfect in our weakness.  When Paul asked God to remove the thorn from his side, the Lord said, “Paul, my grace is sufficient for you.”  In other words, my strength is enough to help you persevere in spite of the thorn.

Psalm 129 calls us to remember the ways that God has been faithful to give us his strength in the past.  God has helped us get up before—do you remember that time?  And he will do it again now, as you face this present adversity.  

But there is another part to Psalm 129, a part that may initially surprise us.  The second part of the psalm is a prayer that God would put Israel’s enemies to shame.  “May all who hate Zion be put to shame and turned backward.”  The psalmist goes on to pray that they would be like grass on the housetops that withers before it grows up.  This is a rather vindictive prayer!

Wait a minute! Is it okay for us to pray these kinds of prayers?  Prayers seething with raw emotion and asking God to humiliate those who oppose us?  I thought Jesus called us to pray for the good of our enemies and those who persecute us?

Psalm 129 (along with so many other psalms) teaches us something very important about prayer: What matters most to God, it seems, is not the kind of prayers we pray but the fact that we pray. We don’t have to be in the right mood or have the right motives or get our prayers all cleaned up before we can offer them to God; rather, God invites us, even with raw emotions like anger, to direct our prayers to him.  God invites authenticity.  When we get angry, it signals that we care deeply about something.  God is perfectly capable of handling our anger and frustration and disappointments.  C.S. Lewis counsels us to “lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”

The act of prayer is one of the primary practices that keeps us from losing heart.  People who pray persevere, and people who persevere pray.  Real prayers.  Honest prayers.  God takes our anger and transforms it into renewed faith, hope, and love.  Prayer—no matter what kind it is-- keeps us depending on God, who lovingly picks us up when we get kicked down.

I began this morning with the movie We Are Marshall and all the adversity the young football team faced in the wake of a terrible tragedy.  My favorite sequence of scenes in the movie comes after that humiliating defeat in their season opener.  During practice that next week, frustrations are high among the players.  Some of the players get into a fight and Red, the assistant coach, snaps.  He’s been bottling up his grief for too long and this pushes him over the edge.  Red explodes in anger and knocks a player down.  Feeling shame for what just happened, Red walks off the field and into the tunnel towards the locker room.  He’s had enough.  He is ready to quit.  Jack runs after him and tries to talk him into staying, but Red can’t bear it anymore.  

“What are we doing here, Jack?” he yells in frustration.  “How are we honoring the memory of those who died?  You didn’t know Rick Trolley [the deceased head coach], but I did.  The last thing he told the players before they boarded the plane that night is that winning is everything and nothing else matters.  Jack, we’ve put together a team that doesn’t win, that can’t win, not this week, not this season, not ever!  We’re not honoring them, Jack, we’re disgracing them!  I’m done.”  And Red walks away.

The next day Jack finds Red sitting in the sanctuary of a church—the same church where the memorial service took place for the victims of the plane crash.  Jack sits in the pew behind Red.  It is just the two of them.

“He’s right, you know.” Jack says after a long silence.  “Winning is everything and nothing else matters.  I’ve said that so many times myself, I lost count....Any coach whose worth a darn in this business believes those words.  But...” Jack paused. “then I came here.  And for the first time in my life, suddenly it’s just not true anymore.  At least not here, not now.  You see, Red, it doesn’t matter if we win or lose, it’s not even about how we play the game.  What matters is that we play the game, that we take the field, that we keep this program alive.  You keep [taking the field] and playing the game and Red, I’m tellin’ ya, not today, not tomorrow not this season probably, not next season either, but one day you and I are going to wake up and suddenly we’ll be like every other team in every other sport where winning is everything and nothing else matters.  And when that day comes, well that’s when we’ll honor those who’ve died.”

Marshall would go on to win only two games that year, and they would lose more football games in the 70’s than any other team in the nation.  But every Saturday, they suited up and took the field.  And the program remained.  In 1984, Marhall had its first winning record in twenty years.  They followed it with eight conference titles, five straight bowl wins, and two national championships.

But none of that ever happens if they would have quit when they were down.  None of that ever happens if they stop suiting up and don’t take the field.  A few weeks ago we talked about how God wants us to thrive, not just survive.  But in order to get to that place of thriving, we may have to go through seasons of just surviving.  When everything within us wants to quit, we have to make the choice to suit up and take the field.  

A life of faithful discipleship—a life of radical obedience—is less about setting up monuments and more about leaving footprints.  William Faulkner explains the difference:  “A monument only says, ‘At least I got this far’ while a footprint says, ‘This is where I was when I moved again.’”

Make a footprint today.  Let today be a moment when you look back and see the footprint and say, “This is where I got up and took one more step, even though I could have quit.  That is where I moved again.”  

“Let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely,” writes the author of Hebrews, “and let us run with perseverance the race set before us, looking to Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith, who for the sake of the joy set before him endured the cross.” (Hebrews 12:1-2).

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.