Travails of the Faith Pilgrimage

Travails of the Faith Pilgrimage
Hebrews 12:18-29; Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 13:10-17

Lanny Peters, a Baptist pastor from Georgia, tells the story about a class of youth exploring believer’s baptism. The class is similar to what Presbyterians and others do for confirmation. The class members were asked at the informal initial meeting to share their reasons for seeking to be baptized. Each of the members shared in their own way their desire to know God better, to be a disciple of Christ, and to be a member of the church.

One class member, Tim, said that he was looking forward to the experience because he had lots of questions. The first one, he said, was, “Why does God in the Bible act as if God had a split personality?” Sometimes God is really kind and loving and forgiving, but then God gets angry and wants to punish and even hurt people.(1)

Sometimes we get that impression of God when the scriptures are interpreted. The passage from Hebrews today is a case in point. The author talks about two very different mountain experiences with God: Mount Sinai and Mount Zion. The Israelites in Exodus were told not to touch the mountain, even to stone any animal that stepped on it. God was terrifying, someone you wouldn’t want to run into in broad daylight, let alone in a dark alley. Even Moses trembled in fear.

Then the Hebrews’ writer contrasts the fearsome encounter of Mount Sinai with a “party-hearty” festival on Mount Zion. There are all the heirs of the kingdom, the firstborn, the registry of all the folks whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life, to borrow an image from John of Patmos. All these folks have been made perfect. It’s like going to an Academy Awards after-party. God is there and so is Jesus, whose shed blood is a whole lot more beneficial than that of Abel, the first human being who died.

The Hebrews’ writer hasn’t gone all Wolfgang Puck. Just when we are ready to nosh, the tone changes. If you thought the God of Sinai was terrifying, pay attention to the God of Zion, because if you don’t, heaven as well as earth will be shook for all they’re worth. Worship God rightly, for God is a consuming fire.

We’ve heard “hellfire and brimstone” sermons and rants from preachers across the Christian spectrum. Fire means punishment. That’s what we want it mean or that’s what we have been told that it means. But is that what it means? When Moses encountered God the first time at Sinai, the bush was not burned up. More often than not, on both sides of the Testamental divide, fire means refining. Metals are refined. The impure ore is heated up to such a temperature that impurities burn off or separate from the pure metal and are skimmed off the top or allowed to settle to the bottom. The smelter melts the gold or silver ore until it is liquid and then skims off the dross until he can see his own face reflected in the molten metal.(2) What a wonderful and appropriate image that is. When God refines us, God wants to see God’s own image reflected in us. When John of Patmos reports that the devil was thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10) it was refining and not punishment going on. Perhaps the lake of fire was like an autoclave sterilizing the devil so that the devil wouldn’t pollute the earth.

What is that pollution? What could it be other than sin? Grey Temple asks, “How can God’s fire purify anyone from sin without frying them to a crisp?”(3) Think of some of the behaviors which we normally call sin: drunkenness, embezzling, lying, cheating, adultery. Think of the some of the human attitudes that are really offensive: greed, arrogance, uncontrolled anger, lack of compassion. How would God’s fire make the person different who did those things or presented herself or himself in one of those ways? As Temple says that you would simply be the same old rascal with third degree burns.

To be an image that carries meaning, the fire of God must consume something in each of us that goes deeper than our sins. Temple says that God’s fire must purge away the “false self” which is the fertile ground for our worst sins. The self that God created can emerge only as the self that each of us constructs to retail to others is consumed.

That’s an interesting concept. By building up an unreal self to present to the world, we are polluting the image of God that was imprinted on us at our birth. We take fig leaves and hide our natural self, the self that God gave us, the self that is supposed to reflect God when God looks at us.

Perhaps that was what God was getting at when Jeremiah tried to beg off from doing the ministry God was calling him to. “I don’t know how to speak because I’m only a child.” Isn’t that the unreal self that Jeremiah is trying to present. We might accept that from him, but God knows better. “Don’t say, ‘I’m only a child.’ ... Before I created you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I set you apart.” Or how about Moses and his first meeting with God. He had a litany of excuses and fears — lack of confidence, limited skill, insecurities about personal identity, and fear of rejection (Exodus 3–4). Isaiah’s excuse was a profound sense of personal sin (Isaiah 6).

We all have excuses. We all rationalize why we don’t do things or do things we know we shouldn’t. We all create fictions about ourselves, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes by default. For a long time my internal image of myself was somewhere in my thirties. I haven’t been thirty something in a long time, and there is no way that I can live up to that self-image. I’m moving it forward slowly, and maybe someday it will be close to my chronological age.

It’s a self-deception. We do it all the time. Physically it is Botox, nips and tucks, “Just for Men Touch of Gray,” and erectile dysfunction medicine. Mentally it is believing we are someone other than who we are, believing that we are self-made, that it doesn’t matter who we really are, just who we get the world to believe that we are.

Sometimes religiousness is part of the false front we present the world. People conform to a particular religious group – its dress, vocabulary, belief, even political opinions . They don’t ask questions about why certain things are the way they are, they accept them, and as a result they become objects of loyalty, gods in the place of God.

It’s a DIY – Do It Yourself – world, except when it comes to salvation. God’s purifying fire will consume all the false, fictitious, pretentious, puffed up impurities that we hide behind and that we allow to pollute, dilute, and destroy the God-given person we are.

All that falsehood increases rather than decreases the burden we carry around during our lives. Like the woman with the 18 year affliction that Jesus encountered, we are stooped over and cannot stand up straight. And the religious leaders were more concerned with the sanctity of the Sabbath than they were with the sanctity of the holy image of God that was supposed to be in that woman. Jesus said, “[I]sn’t it necessary that this woman, a daughter of Abraham, bound by Satan for eighteen long years, be set free from her bondage on the Sabbath day?”

That was a precursor to a very special Sabbath not all that far in the future from the encounter with the woman. It was the Sabbath that Jesus inaugurated by his resurrection from the dead. He threw off the falsehood of death and its fear, terror, and penalties. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

We come through the travails of pilgrimage to faith, not be smacked down, but to be refined, purified, made glowing so that God can see God’s own self in us.

May your life be a reflection of God.


(1) Lanny Peters, “Hebrews 12:18-29, Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 376, 378.
(2) Grey Temple, “Hebrews 12:18-29, Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 378.
(3) Ibid.

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.