We need heroes and heroines.

I don’t know why exactly. It would seem to be enough for each of us to do our best and let it go at that. But then again, maybe that is the point: maybe we would not do our best if we didn’t have heroes and heroines who kept setting the bar higher, adjusting our aim upward, making it possible to see that more is possible in us and from us than we thought.

That seems to be what the writer to the Hebrews is doing in our text. He—and it probably was a he, although one of the more tantalizing theories about who wrote this unsigned book is St. Paul’s friend Priscilla, who, along with her husband Aquila, instructed the eloquent preacher Apollos in the true doctrine of the faith … just an aside worth thinking about … no charge—anyway, the author wants the persecuted Christians, who are holding on to their faith for dear life, to remember those who, for the sake of their dear faith, refused to hold on to their lives. Some things are worth living for, some things even dying for. And so he spends the whole of chapter 11 recounting the examples of heroes and heroines like Noah, and Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Joseph, Moses and Rahab. Then he gets down to the list of lesser saints on the Jewish calendar, naming Gideon, Barak (not Obama), Samson, Jephthah, David, and Samuel. He can’t stop there. He goes on to describe the many unnamed soldiers who endured trials for what they believed and lost so much in a cause so great that we remain in their debt still today.

Listen again to what they went through for their faith in God. They were tortured, refusing to accept release to save their lives because they trusted that God would give them back their lives through resurrection after death. They suffered mocking and flogging, chains and prison. Some were stoned to death, others sawn in two, still others run through with a sword. They had to wander about in deserts and mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground. They did it all because they had a larger vision of life and history than what dominated political news day by day. They were those, the writer says, of whom the world was not worthy.

Those unnamed soldiers of the faith remind me of another place of honor. I was in Arlington, Virginia, for a time this past week. If you’ve ever been to the national cemetery there, you know the feeling it evokes. You have the great lights there, of course—the graves of those like John and Robert Kennedy, along with other presidents, Supreme Court justices, war heroes, and explorers. You have also the thousands of little white crosses that row the verdant landscape and hallow the ground, each with names etched into the marker so that we would remember their sacrifice. The most moving of all to me, though, is the so-called Tomb of the Unknowns, also known as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It represents all those who valiantly served and gave their last best gift, though we have lost their names to history. They loved their country more than comfort and honor more than life. The changing-of-the-guard ceremony there will wet your cheeks if you have the smallest dose of patriotism in you.

But, what is it that makes us wet our cheeks? Is it not our admiration of those we know to be nothing more or less than we, yet who proved to be more than most of us and call us not to be less than they? In other words, they lift us up and make us prouder and stronger. They give us courage by their example.

The Bible is full of such heroes and heroines. So is Christian history. Reading your Bible and learning about heroic people of the church across the ages inspire you in just this way. It’s like reading biographies of ordinary people who became great by their faithfulness. We realize they are just like us, and if God could use them, then God can use us if we will but make ourselves available to God.

And yet there’s a danger here, too. We sometimes exalt heroes and heroines to such lofty status that we forget that every one of them was a flawed creature like the rest of us. They were none of them perfect. They were none of them by nature more exceptional than any of us, as if they came out of the womb with super-hero powers. Truth to tell, many heroes and heroines of the Bible and our times were and are surprised and embarrassed by their being called heroes and heroines.

Some of you know I was in the nation’s capital this week to run in the Marine Corps Marathon. More on that later, but the race ended at the spectacular Iwo Jima Memorial. The massive bronze work depicts the six soldiers who helped raise the American flag on that tiny but strategic Japanese island during World War II. Some of you have read the book by James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers, about the story of the men in that famous picture who did the deed that is immortalized now on that Arlington hillside. I saw the movie last week before the race, looking, I suppose, for some extra inspiration. I got it, but I got a whole lot more than that, too. And it’s that whole lot more that we all need to get.

Turns out the true story of the raising of that flag on Iwo Jima is more mundane and complicated than the glorious legend that has come from it. The flag that was raised by those six men was actually the second flag put there. The first men and the first flag were all but forgotten because the camera didn’t catch them in the act. The second flag-raising was not so much staged for the camera as necessary, because some muckety-muck officer wanted the first flag as a souvenir. Symbols matter, or we wouldn’t have such things as flags at all. The officer who wanted that flag knew that and wanted to preserve it for posterity. What happened instead was that the replacement flag became immortalized in the photograph, and that flag inspires the nation and reminds us still of their valor.

Bradley tells the story of the six men who raised the second flag. The author’s father, John Bradley, was one of them. A Navy corpsman, John Bradley never talked about his wartime experiences to his son. Only after his death did the son begin to piece together the story of his father’s life, along with that of the other two of the six men who survived the war. Like many World War II veterans, Bradley did not want to talk about the war itself or what had happened. It was too painful to remember, too horrible to picture again and again. Some of you were there, and you know the mixture of emotions that goes with your memories: pride and humility in equal doses; gratitude over surviving and guilt over surviving, while some of your buddies did not. It’s easier not to think about it all the time.

Bradley had another story to tell that should interest us. The three surviving men of the flag-raising were sent on a national tour to help sell war bonds. They were marketed as heroes and made to be bigger than life. They knew better. They felt used. They considered themselves just men who did what they were supposed to do and yet were not nearly the heroes they were made out to be. The heroes of Iwo Jima, said John Bradley, are the guys who didn’t come back.

And these are the guys that inspired me to finish the race that ended at the grand Iwo Jima Memorial—they and some other heroes and heroines I ran with along the way.

Hebrews 12:1-2 was in my mind as things got tough in my first marathon. A great cloud of witnesses surrounded me—both visible and invisible, those alive around us and those who live in our hearts. There were times when I believed dropping out would be the wisest thing to do, but my mind would go to those who would not give up under any circumstances. I realized that this wasn’t a matter of life or death for me, and if others had persevered for greater purposes even unto death, then for a lesser purpose as this I could at least persevere to the end.

So I crossed the line. That’s about all the good I can say about my performance. And for all the congratulations many of you have given me, I know mixed emotions, feeling that I do not deserve too much praise. For one thing, my official time was 5:56:55. For the uninitiated, that’s not really good. Think Clydesdale pace. I knew I was slow when the guy with palsy passed me. Part of the embarrassment was also the encouragement: I knew a lot of you were following my progress online. Another reason to hate technology, don’t you know?! So, yes, you saw that I started fine, the first ten miles or so. What you didn’t see was that I got sick to my stomach for reasons I still don’t understand. You didn’t see me on all fours at mile 18 puking up my guts. You didn’t see me straddling a concrete median on the 14^th Street Bridge, trying to stretch my back for the home stretch. It was pretty bad. It wasn’t pretty.

But what you also didn’t see was Kim, Rhett, Cameron and her fiancé, Garrett, showing up at three or four points along the way cheering me on. You didn’t see Cameron jump in and run with me for four miles when I was struggling. You didn’t see Rhett run the last full mile with me before the final push up the hill. You didn’t see my running mates, Millie Winston and her son, James, who sacrificed their own race to wait for me and coax me in. My friend Millie and I had trained together here in Dallas. Her son is a 23-year old Marine officer in great shape who obviously believes in the “no soldier left behind” slogan and in the Semper Fidelis—Always Faithful—Marine motto. Hurrah. These are all my heroes and heroines. I could not have gotten to the end without them or without you. I only thought this was my race; turns out it was our race.

The writer to the Hebrews knows this. Which is why he tells us to run with perseverance the race of faith that is set before us. We have the flags of our fathers and mothers to inspire us, but more than that, we have the faith of our fathers and mothers. And more than that, again we have the faith of the faithful one himself—Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

We most often think of Jesus’ role in saving us as something he did as the divine Son. We must also remember that he saved us by being our human brother. As the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, he ran and won the race we also run, and he thereby opened up to us the possibility of crossing the line after him and receiving the same prize God has in store for each of us. He is the only true superhero.

On this All Saints Sunday we also thank God for those other heroes and heroines of the faith who keep us going, who run alongside us, who cheer us on, and who see to it that we do not quit before the finish line. As Winston Churchill put it, Never, never, never give up!