By Faith . . .

By Faith . . .
Hebrews 11:29-12:2;
Isaiah 5:1-7; Luke 12:14-56

“By faith....” That’s the watchword that the writer of the Hebrews letter has been stressing since the beginning of chapter 11. The writer’s understanding of faith is different from what most of us think on first hearing.

How many times have we heard someone say to us, “If you only had enough faith”? Perhaps we have said that ourselves. Faith is a gift from God. It is not something that we ourselves create. It is not something that can be added to by our own effort. It is not like a store brand reward card that guarantees us so many cents off a gallon of gas or $10 off our next purchase for every $100 we buy today. That understanding of faith is all about us. It backs God into a corner if we don’t get what we think we should be getting.

Faith is more like the air we breathe, it can’t be quantified. It just is. The writer of the letter has taken pains to introduce the idea that faith has to do with the courage to endure. This letter was written to a band of Christians struggling with hostility, ridicule, and shame laid heavily on them by the surrounding society. Yes, the community is thinking about themselves, but the writer suggests that they need to step back and see the larger picture. Faith can be understood only in terms of the larger story of promise that stretches all the way back to Abraham and Sarah — and more importantly, forever into the future.

One of the themes of the tradition is that God’s people have always been immigrants, aliens, strangers, pilgrims. The Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness struggling with trust or distrust of God. Even in the promised land the struggle went on. When things were going well, there still a gnawing doubt that God might not keep God’s end of the bargain, that God might not keep faith with the beloved community, that God might not be trustworthy.

The Hebrews writer is not naive about faith. But he is not going to be nailed down to a narrow definition. What he has outlined might be seen as very broad. Or it might be perceived as ambiguous. Some of the names listed are well-known. And some are not. If your Bible has the center column of scripture references, you are going to have to follow them back to the books of Joshua and Judges to refresh your memory about them. Some of the examples which are included led to amazing results. Some did not. These point simply to courageous endurance, even to the point of torture, persecution, and death. If we were to read the stories of the early church in the preserved writings from just beyond the time frame the New Testament, we would find that faith often led believers to martyrdom instead of earthly success.

Faith is not what happens. Faith is the act of perceiving the activity of God, whether it is in miraculous escape as the Israelites crossing through the Red Sea or whether it is in the courageous witness and endurance of martyrs. Faith is an against all odds kind of relationship with God, a no matter what attitude, such as Joshua asserted at the end of his ministry, “My family and I will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15); such as Jesus’ own comment, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24). We can’t serve faith and unfaith, trust and distrust, at the same time. Faith is the relationship with God when things seem to be totally messed up as well as when everything seems to be going well.

Remember that even though Sarah laughed at the thought of having a child in her old age, it was credited to Abraham and her as faith that they waited for the promise to be fulfilled. John Shelley writes that

“the promise is not simply an extension of the present, based on what seems possible at the moment. It is a new creation that invades our present reality and makes the impossible possible.”(1)

By faith...the impossible is possible. Shelley goes on to say that the problems in our lives of faith today are not because of a deficit of good will and good intentions. We are all well-meaning people. We were raised that way. But we were also raised to use our heads, our rational minds. We are children of the age of science, the age of the scientific proof which will conclusively determine what is and what will be.

Today’s problems are not from a success of thinking but rather from a failure of imagination. Think about some of the people in the Hebrews’ roll call of the saints. They were able to imagine God’s activity in the world. They could imagine and believe that God kept the promises that God had made over the course of divine history.

Lack of imagination leads to all kinds of things. People resort to violence because they cannot imagine a better way of dealing with conflict or with addressing issues of power or justice. People resort to greed because they cannot imagine that there is enough to go around to benefit everyone. They are ready to throw everyone off the island in favor of keeping themselves going. People resort to arrogance because they cannot imagine that knowledge is something to be shared for everyone’s good.

The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ call to be imaginative. “You have heard that it was said..., but I say to you....” Believers are called to imagine the reality of the kingdom of heaven and live it even though they may never see its reality in their earthly life. Courageous endurance is the product of faith, probably more so than miraculous, catastrophic interventions by God in the lives of believers.

This “by faith” power of imagination is what will set family member against family member. Those who are stuck in the present moment and cannot see, dream, imagine beyond this moment in time will be divided off from those who can. These are the not divisions between red state and blue state, between progressives and conservatives, between visionaries and historians. The division is between those who truly and thoroughly believe that God can do anything that God desires, even if people are unfamiliar with it, and those who cannot imagine doing anything different from what they have previously experienced. No matter how many times God says that God will do a new thing, they will decry the possibility, dispute the need for anything new, and even actively block it — all out of ignorance, fear, arrogance, sinfulness.

Sin: that’s a significant part of it according to the Hebrews’ writer. “Let us throw off any extra baggage, get rid of the sin that trips us up, and fix our eyes on Jesus, faith’s pioneer and perfecter.” We don’t like that word “sin” in the singular. We much prefer it as a plural. We can make up a list and add and subtract items from it. This is a sin, and this isn’t. Sin – singular – is a basic orientation of the self. It deals with presumption, pride, greed. All these are wrapped with an egoism that cannot allow other individuals to have the same status, value, and uniqueness that “I” do. That is active sin.

But sin can be passive, as well. It could be seen in despair, apathy, or a tendency to become mired in dealing with symptoms of injustice rather than working to remove the root causes. Passive sin could be the refusal to accept individual responsibility to neighbor, to God, or to God’s future.

Which was the bigger, more problematic sin for the readers of the Hebrews letter? Had they become lured away from the faith by worldliness and the sinful activities that so often go along with it? Or had they given up on God? Had they decided not to care any more? Perhaps. That kind of attitude was tempting. John of Patmos, perhaps a contemporary of the Hebrews writer, was dealing with fear and apathy as well as with hope and faith among the believers he knew. Had the readers of the Hebrews’ letter given up on ever seeing some big activity of God? Were they edging away from faithful and courageous endurance?

Often scripture uses growing images. Scattered seed, grain and weeds, and careful pruning. For grapes to be produced in abundance, the vines have to be carefully pruned each winter to encourage new growth which will bring the clusters of rich fruit. To the person who is unfamiliar with viticulture, the seasonal pruning looks severe and fatal. Yet a new growing season’s bounty will be great. God loves the vineyard. Pruning is God’s way of saying that by perseverance, by imagination, by faith the kingdom and all God’s plans for it will happen.

The cloud of witnesses are beneficiaries of all that has gone on and their witness benefits us so that we may dare to break out of the present and imagine with Spirit-filled fervor the future God will absolutely create. Ron McCreary puts it this way: “The church is not a walled fortress against change. The church is a launching pad into God’s future.”(2) At this table, the countdown begins. Bread and blood, loaves and life, grapes and grace.

Thanks be to God!

(1) John C. Shelley, “Hebrews 11:29-12:2, Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, Volume 3, 354.
(2) Ron McCreary, http://tinyurl.com/kcr73w3, Monday, August 12, 2013

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.