Who do you say He is?
I went to boarding school with a guy named Andy Sudduth. Andy was a very likable guy, with a curly mop of strawberry blonde hair, a quiet but engaging personality and a big smile to go with it. He grew up in Exeter, New Hampshire where dad was a doctor. They were Episcopalians and lived right next to Christ Church, where his family attended occasionally.
I met him when I went to boarding school in Exeter. He was a day student, and he grew to use my dorm room as his locker room of sorts. He’d drop his back pack or whatever in my room, which was only ¼ mile from his house. And despite the fact that he was hopeless at playing catch with any sort of ball, he was a world class athlete.
Our senior year, after I’d gotten cut from the varsity football team for the 3rd time, Andy coaxed me to join the crew team. I was able to make the varsity, on the 3rd boat, while Andy led our first boat. With Andy’s leadership we won the New England championship.
Andy was also extremely bright. He went on to row at Harvard, where he won a national championship. He went on to win 2 silver medals in the Olympics, a gold medal in the Goodwill games, and competed for world championships in various rowing events for over a decade. He was named the amateur athlete of the decade in rowing for the 1980’s.
He also earned a degree in computer science at Harvard and had a highly successful career in that field. He was a man of extraordinary talent and achievement.
Andy married and had two daughters. For various reasons his marriage failed and he sunk into a depression. During this dark time a trusted friend invited him to an Alpha Course, which we are running at Good Shepherd right now. In that course Andy’s childhood faith awoke. He came to know Jesus in a personal way, and it made all the difference.
He left a witness, which I’d like to share (click here)
Andy remarried and was able to maintain healthy, peaceable joint-custody with his daughters. Then tragedy struck. Andy’s testimony was from his deathbed. This world class athlete, who was always extremely careful about his nutrition and exercise, died of cancer at age 44, a little over 15 years ago.
I thought about Andy as I pondered the two vital themes of Mark’s Gospel that come to such clarity in today’s passage. Mark answers two key questions; Who is Jesus and What is Jesus doing?
Andy knew the truth of who Jesus is; he knew Jesus. He had an extraordinary life filled with world-class achievements and renown in his field. The New York Times wrote an article about his death. But none of that mattered in the end. It was his relationship with Jesus that made all the difference in Andy’s life and in his death. That’s who Jesus is, and that is what Jesus is doing.
Peter naturally didn’t want his rabbi, mentor and friend to suffer and die, but his natural desire was rooted in earthly concerns. Jesus came first and foremost to give himself up as an atoning sacrifice to save Andy, to save you, to save me, to save all of us.
“For those who lose their life for my sake and the sake of the Gospel will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”
This all comes to us today very much in the shadow of 9/11, 20 years ago yesterday. We recall the utter senselessness of it; what did they think they would accomplish? I think of a secretary getting her second cup of coffee and, with no warning, suddenly she’s just gone. We face so much evil, senseless violence, accidents and tragedy in our world. And so these two questions are always very present for us. We should ponder and reflect on them day by day, take to heart again and again and again.
Who do you say Jesus is? Are you able to grasp what he is doing? In you? In the world?
It makes a difference. All the difference.
Amen.
An Andy Sudduth Story
Swazey Parkway winds a mile and a half along the Squamscott River from Exeter, New Hampshire to a railroad underpass. Beyond, the road rises steeply another quarter-mile to Route 101.
In the spring of 1979 our Phillips Exeter crew team finished practice on the water and took our regular run out to the railroad underpass and back. Once we got out there, the coaches asked us to run to the top of the hill. We did and then walked back down. They asked us to do it again and again, five or six times.
I wasn’t a fast runner but had endurance. That day I had enough even to keep up with our team’s best rower, Andy Sudduth. Andy and I were good friends, and misery loves company, so we took this hill together repeatedly. On the last climb Andy began to race me. I stayed with him. He went faster. I stayed with him. Faster still, but I wouldn’t give up. Every part of my body was screaming for me to slow down, but I wouldn’t. We ran faster, step for step, side by side, sprinting up that hill. Finally, with about a third of it left, I lagged a half-step behind him. Soon he was a few yards ahead and then waiting at the top with a big smile beneath his shock of strawberry blonde hair.
We patted each other on the back, too exhausted to talk, descended the hill and ran together back to the boathouse.
Years later we shared a laugh about that day, and he remembered as well as I did the very moment he finally pulled away. He said, “If you had gone one step further you would have had me.” That was nice of him to say. His constant humor and encouragement made him a good friend. But even if he thought it was true, it wasn’t. Had I gone another step he would have gone two. Had I gone 10 he would have gone 12. Andy never gave up. He never gave in. He never rested, never stopped training, and never lost focus. That’s what made Andy a champion.
I’ll always remember the day I came to know first hand that lion’s heart. I can bear witness to him as a friend, as an athlete, as a champion, and best of all as a devoted follower of Jesus Christ.
Fr. Tim Nunez
Andy Sudduth, 44, Top Harvard Oarsman, Dies
New York Times
Published: July 20, 2006
Andy Sudduth, a leading American oarsman who captured Olympic and world championship medals and rowed on a powerful Harvard heavyweight crew in the 1980’s, died Saturday in Marion, Mass. He was 44.
Associated Press
Andy Sudduth in 1988.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Ruth Kennedy Sudduth.
Performing largely out of the public eye in a highly demanding sport, Sudduth became one of the most accomplished rowers at Harvard, long an imposing presence in the sport.
“There’s no way to compare different people from one era to another, but he’s certainly one of the very best that we’ve ever had,” Harry Parker, the Harvard coach, told The New York Times in 1985, looking back on nearly a quarter-century of coaching the Crimson. “It’s not just that he’s strong. He utilizes his strength very well. He has a natural sense of what it is to make a boat go.”
Sudduth won a silver medal in the eight-oared shell with coxswain at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics; the United States boat lost to Canada by 42-hundredths of a second.
He switched to single sculls and nearly scored a huge upset at the 1985 world championships. He was leading in the final 200 meters when he dropped one of his oars, and Pertti Kappinen of Finland, a three-time Olympic gold medalist, swept past him, leaving Sudduth to settle for silver. That was one of four medals he won in world championship events.
Sudduth finished sixth in single sculls at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.
He captured the singles championship at the Head of the Charles regatta in Cambridge, Mass., from 1984 to 1988.
Sudduth, a native of Baltimore, began rowing at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He was a member of the 1985 Harvard heavyweight boat that won the Eastern Sprints, the Yale-Harvard regatta, the national intercollegiate championship and Henley’s Grand Challenge Cup.
Having studied computer sciences at Harvard, he later developed innovative technology, most recently for Cisco Systems. But Sudduth’s dedication to rowing at times conflicted with his computer career.
In the late 1980’s, Mitsubishi was interested in hiring him with the understanding that he would go to Japan to learn about the company. Sudduth said that would be fine if he found a place to row.
As he told The Boston Globe: “They said, ‘Well, there’s a lake a couple of hundred meters wide in front of our building.’ ” But he needed a few thousand meters of water, so “I told them, you don’t understand.”
All those grueling hours of training fascinated Sudduth.
“If you train really hard, it’s a fun existence,” he once said. “There’s something really neat about putting a lot of effort, single-minded effort, into one pursuit.”
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughters Zoe and Sophie, from his marriage to his first wife, Saiya Remmler, of Lexington, Mass.; his mother, Charlotte Sudduth of Marion; his father, Dr. S. Scott Sudduth, and his stepmother, Gail Sudduth, of Newfields, N.H.; his brothers Matthew, of Portsmouth, N.H., and Rob, of Marion; and his sister, Jennifer Sudduth Walsh of Newton, Mass.