For although they are dead and rest from their labors, they still live and move within us, and fight at our side with "holy boldness" as concealed comrades of Christ -- as we struggle now even in the precincts of despair -- against Pilate and the Good Friday forces that would try to delay Easter, and defeat the cause of Christ, and try to make God look ridiculous!

They fight with us, and at our sides, as we fight for justice and liberation and equality; as we struggle with God to build a world where there is peace with equality; a world where people can have bread with dignity; freedom with liberation; love with power and justice; and where a society is in face and not merely in empty promises: a kinder, gentler nation, a nation that cares about its children and youth and will take the guns out of their hands, and help them to have love in their hearts, and knowledge in their heads; a nation that will take care of its elderly, its widows and orphans and homeless, the unemployed, and the poor, and where no one will be denied health care, and allow them to die in and with dignity, crossing over standing up!

Those who have gone on before are part of the tie that binds, a part of the fellowship of kindred minds. They are one with our hopes, our aims, our fears, our cares. Though they be dead, they still live and move within us.

But without us their aims are thwarted; their dreams go unrealized; their ambitions are unfulfilled; their sacrifices become futile and of no account, and their faith bartered away to the whims of the world, and right-wing or left-wing political ideologies that pose under the guise of fundamental faith and pretend to be the heart of the church.

But these bygone generations are the makeup of the clouds of witnesses. They are the invisible onlookers. They are the ones who died in the faith still hoping for the promise. We dare not fail them by losing faith and allowing our zeal to flag. We dare not fail them by giving up the fight and shrinking from the struggle and tossing in the towel. We dare not compromise the imperatives of the gospel that accompany grace. We dare not sell "cheap grace" and neglect the cost of a suffering God on a cross, and make our God's gracious and costly act at Cal-vary come to look ridiculous.

And so we fight on, faithful, true, bold, energized by the salutes from all the saints, encouraged and enabled by the grace of God, the love of Jesus Christ, and the blessings and fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

And so we fight on, with all of the courage we can muster knowing that the race is not given to the swift or to the strong but to those who endureth to the end.

And so we fight on, laying aside the weights and sin that so easily cling so closely.

And so we fight on, and we run with perseverance the race that is set before us looking unto Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith.

We run this race with the spirit expressed in the song of my forebears: "Lord, we don't feel no ways tired; we've come too far from where we started from. Nobody told us the road would be easy, but we don't believe that He brought us this far to leave us."