Moving from Inertness to Contentiousness

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Psalm 81:1, 10-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14


Gray Temple writes that there is nothing on earth quite like North American religious congregations. They are centers of worship and the arts related to worship, such as music and drama. They are community centers. They serve as extended families for people. For many, they are the first priority for free time apart from family or work. The churches of childhood show up in our fondest dreams.(1)


But there is a lot of change going on in congregations. According to research recently published by Robert P. Jones, the median age of white Protestant as well as white evangelical congregations has risen in the last decade to 53 years while the median age of Americans has held steady at 46 years old. And the percentage of people in the youngest age cohort has decreased by nearly half.(2) If you look around you, you already know that our median age (the midpoint between the youngest and the oldest) is probably 20 years higher, with the average of all our ages adding another ten years.

We are a homogeneous bunch according to the demographics. In spite of all the backgrounds that each of us brings, we are a bland bunch. We are thankful for Sharon for adding a little spice to our mix. The few growing edges of the church in America are of the spicy kind. America is no longer a white bread society with some pumpernickel thrown in. The present trends predict that not only is white Christian America becoming a smaller piece of the pie of churched people, but the same is true for the makeup of the whole population.

That creates a lot of contention. Listen to the rhetoric of this year’s presidential campaign. Reflect on the increasing visibility of frayed relations between African-American and Euro-American communities. The presidential election eighty-eight years ago battled over Roman Catholic Al Smith running for President. That was less of an issue in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was elected. Four years ago evangelical Christians were tied in knots about voting for a Mormon. Today there still are people trying to claim that President Obama is a Muslim, even though he’s not, and he has preached very competently overtly Christian memorial service sermons that rival the best of Christian preaching.

We like to think that we are family. And we are. Like any blood family, there are folks who always do right as well as those who are the black sheep. There are conciliators as well as whiners. There are optimists as well as pessimists. There are people on opposing sides of every imaginable issue. As a rule we get along in a bite-the-tongue-and-don’t-talk-about-it way. There is tacit respect for differing opinions, even when someone else’s opinion is obviously wrong and mine is right. A recent Facebook post noted that if a person is 100% certain of what they believe, it’s not that they are right, they simply have stopped searching for the truth.

A radio preacher was once heard to cry, “When the devil fell out of Heaven, he landed in the choir loft!” Other landing locations could be committees and leadership teams. The natural tendency to think of church as “family” risks importing into the sanctuary or committee room all the strife we flea from when we leave home. We would like to keep everything bland and inert. Don’t make waves.

Contentiousness, however, is energy. As you know, energy is what makes things happen. It turns on the lights, it runs our cars, it comes from the food we eat to fuel our bodies. Centuries ago, Isaac Newton determined that a body at rest tends to stay at rest while a body in motion tends to stay in motion. More recent physics has shown that things aren’t quite as simple as that. But for our church purposes, Newton’s law works.

When there is inertness, nothing happens. A body at rest tends to remain at rest. An inactive congregation will remain an inactive congregation. A congregation that keeps its differences well-behaved and under control, not to mention under the surface, rarely achieves greatness. A congregation that struggles with its differences openly, a congregation that is in motion, tends to remain in motion. The energy of contentiousness, if properly used, can be transformed into adoration of God, loving respect for one another, and service to the needy world.

Far better to be contentious than to be inert. The energies that make our churches sometimes painful to occupy are actually signs of life.

Our reading from Hebrews 13 offers much that is essential for making our transition from inertness to contentiousness for the sake of God’s work in the world.

It all begins with worship: “So let’s continually offer up a sacrifice of praise through him, which is the fruit from our lips that confess his name.” When the New Testament churches thought of worship, they didn’t talk about making quick dash from page 48 to page 78 of the Book of Common Worship, while religiously hitting all the topics laid out in chapter 3, section 3 of the “Directory for Worship” in the constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and doing it in under 60 minutes. That approach offers worshipers all the spiritual scenery of a subway ride. That isn’t early church worship. They described it as “a sacrifice of praise to God.” Worshiping God is a happy occupation. The work of actually praising God – and meaning it – is transformative; it changes us.(3)

Gray Temple says that we come to resemble what we admire. People who admire money get green and crinkly (a polite way of saying obsessive). People who admire computers become user-unfriendly. People who actively and deliberately admire Jesus Christ come to resemble him as he actually was and remains today, unchanged from age to age: generous, merry, tender, fierce, courageous, somewhat mischievous, fully open to others after his self is sorted out. Real worship is the engine of personal transformation. When we create and participate whole-heartedly in worship out of love for our Lord more than out of love of respectability we move from inertness to vitality.(4)

The next thing about vitality as God’s people is where the author started this series of thoughts – fellowship. “Keep loving each other like family.” When we leave a worship service where everyone has actively admired and praised God, it is like coming out of a spa or a soak in a hot tub. We are relaxed, amiable, pliable like clay. The issue is, how will we set up? Will we revert to our normal routine and let ourselves be pushed once again into the world’s mold? Will we meekly accept as gospel what the next person tells us, as if it were pablum which we need because we can’t chew on the meat of the gospel for ourselves? That isn’t growth in faith. Far better to spend the fellowship time with someone who has the same wide-eyed wonder for God and share in a mutual transformation. “By doing this some have been hosts to angels without knowing it.”

And that moves us to ministry. Not church work, not paper shuffling and phone calling, not boring committee meetings or columns of mind-numbing budget numbers. You don’t have to have prayer to do that, even if the pastor does it. The Hebrews author uses the word “remember.” Just try to remember prisoners and people who are mistreated without an act of prayer. Just try to honor marriage, avoid relationship cheating, sexual immorality, and adultery without active prayer. Just try to avoid the black hole of greed without prayer to focus gratitude on the grace that you have.

Our Hebrews author says that all three of these things are essential. Not two out of three, not one, but all three.

Worship that does not melt the soul and lead to deepened relationships with fellow servants of our Lord becomes a museum of moribund customs, causing strife rather than a fresh way of directing our love to God. Fellowship that does not grow out of spirited worship and point into courageous ministry becomes boozy, gossipy, and incestuous, draining energy from a life with God. That is little more than circling the wagons on the congregation’s arid prairie. Ministry that does not grow out of friendship forged in worship becomes stale and sour, something to fight with others about, rather than something to invite them into.

Trevor Huddleston was an Anglican Bishop in apartheid South Africa. He was forced out of the country because he was an early opponent of apartheid. He said in a sermon: “The Christian, if he is true to his calling, is always an agitator....At the heart of our religion there lies a principle in absolute contradiction to the principles by which the world speaks and thinks and acts.”(5)

The Spirit of Christ always calls us from inertness to contentiousness. It began at the table which Jesus hosted and it is reaffirmed every time we break his bread and drink from his cup.

May it indeed be so.


(1) Gray Temple, “Hebrews 13:1-8, 16-16 – Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4, 14.

(2) Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 55.

(3) Temple, op. cit., 16.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Piers McGrandle, Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest (London: Continuum, 2004), 123; cited in A. N. Wilson, The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible, (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 79.

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

Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Truth in Advertising

Luke 13:10-17; Jeremiah 1:4-10; Hebrews 12:18-29


God spent six days in the work of creating and then took a day off on the seventh. God rested. The scribe of the Genesis account doesn’t use the word “Sabbath,” but all the scripture editors after that time assumed that “Sabbath” was meant. The word “Sabbath” doesn’t show up until the work of a later editor who wrote down in Exodus 20 the laws we know as the Ten Commandments:

Remember the Sabbath day and treat it as holy. Six days you may work and do all your tasks, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. Do not do any work on it . . . . because the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything that is in them in six days, but rested on the seventh day. That is why the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:8-10a, 11-12)

As the Exodus account unfolds, God tells Moses:

Tell the Israelites: “Be sure to keep my sabbaths, because the Sabbath is a sign between me and you in every generation so you will know that I am the Lord who makes you holy. Keep the Sabbath, because it is holy for you. Everyone who violates the Sabbath will be put to death.... Do your work for six days. But the seventh day is a Sabbath of complete rest that is holy to the Lord....The Israelites ... observe the Sabbath in every generation as a covenant for all time. It is a sign forever between me and the Israelites that in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day the Lord rested and was refreshed.” (Exodus 31:13-17)

The curious thing is that there is no mention of sabbaths in all the accounts of events from the creation until Israel’s arrival at Mt. Sinai. Apparently none of descendants of Adam and Eve or the patriarchs knew anything about Sabbath-keeping. 

The first mention of Sabbath was in reference to the gift of manna. Collect it every day for six days (it won’t keep overnight), but on the sixth day collect two days worth which will keep the second day. The seventh day is “a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord” (Exodus 16:23). That is when the weekly Sabbath apparently becomes as a day of rest from ordinary secular labor. Ever since then the Sabbath has been a problem.

Some of you may remember when the only places open on Sundays were churches. No grocery stores, no gas stations, no restaurants. Sometime in the early 20th century one of the controversial issues before a Presbyterian General Assembly had to do with Sunday newspapers. They shouldn’t be printed on Sunday or delivered on Sunday. It wouldn’t surprise me if a few diehards said they shouldn’t be read on Sunday.

Let’s get practical. Every farmer knew that they couldn’t take a day off from milking cows or feeding and watering livestock. The circadian rhythms of biology don’t take every seventh day off. Life goes on.

There as a time, however, when strict practitioners of Judaism prepared the food for the Sabbath the day before. And ultra-strict observers of the Sabbath Law hired non-Jews to do necessary work on the Sabbath, including turning lights on and off and tearing toilet tissue.

That kind of overly-slavish approach to the observance of the Law was picayune in the eyes of Jesus. It was right up there with counting out the tithe of dill seed, lest one too few or one too many seeds be set aside for God. Observing the Law to that minute a degree wholly loses the intent of the Law, which was to glorify God.

The religious leaders had evolved a code of many actions that were forbidden on the Sabbath, including any type of work. They regarded healing as part of a doctor's profession and thus was work. Practicing one’s profession on the Sabbath was prohibited. The synagogue leader spoke to the people rather than to Jesus. He could not see beyond the law to compassion which Jesus had shown in healing this disabled woman.

The leader had concluded that if Jesus wanted to heal people, he should reserve his healing work for one of the other six days, any day but the Sabbath. If Jesus had stopped healing on the Sabbath he would have been endorsing the many petty, human-derived laws that had grown up around God’s basic laws regarding Sabbath observance. Jesus could not abide by those laws because they did not fulfill God’s intention for the Sabbath and were burdensome on the people.

What “work” had Jesus done? All he had done was to reach out and touch her. That wasn’t even as much work as was required to lead an ox or donkey to the water trough. Yet the synagogue leader and others like him – “hypocrites” to Jesus’ way of thinking – could not see past their laws. They hid behind their sets of complex and confusing laws and avoided the obligations which love entailed. As Paul reminded the Corinthian church people in his second letter, “He has qualified us as ministers of a new covenant, not based on what is written but on the Spirit, because what is written kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

On another occasion Jesus addressed a deputation of Pharisees, saying,

“You ignore God’s commandment while holding on to rules created by humans and handed down to you. . . . Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and ‘The person who speaks against father or mother will certainly be put to death.’ But you say, ‘If you tell your father or mother, “Everything I’m expected to contribute to you is corban (that is, a gift I’m giving to God),” then you are no longer required to care for your father or mother.’ In this way you do away with God’s word in favor of the rules handed down to you, which you pass on to others.” (Mark 7:8-13)

People today can use the letter of the law to rationalize away their obligation to care for others (for example, by tithing regularly and then refusing to help a needy neighbor because that would take them beyond their tithe). Jesus declares that people’s needs are more important than rules and regulations. Our Lord commissions us to take time to help others, even if doing so might compromise our public images.

So we get caught between who we want others to think that we are and what we are under the facade of our public images. We proclaim grace but cling to law. Jesus called that sin. The personas of all of us together as the church make up a ragout of mixed messages when we try to say what we are about as the church. The church is not the community of the sinless. Rather we are the community of recovering sinners. We aren’t perfect. Often it’s one step forward and two steps backwards.

When the church gets all huffy about the minute intricacies of law and ritual rather than being hot and bothered about injustice and wholeness, the image is off-putting to the very people who desperately need the message of healing which Jesus was always proclaiming in word and action.

Eugene Peterson once said, 

“There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except the church. There’s sin in the local bank. There’s sin in the grocery stores. . . .Frederick von Hügel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There’s no life in the bark. It’s dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows and grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it’s prone to disease, dehydration, death. So, yes, the church is dead, but it protects something alive.” (1)

Yes, we are sinners. Individually and collectively. No, we will never make ourselves perfect by our own efforts. Thanks, be to God that Jesus Christ makes us perfect in the final accounting. The ultimate truth to be advertised is not our adherence to the subsections and subclauses of law made up by sinful human beings. Our truth in advertising is that through God’s grace in Jesus Christ is that we are set free from the spiritual sicknesses that disable us. That makes every day a holy Sabbath to God!

Thanks be to God!


(1) Homiletics, August 22, 2010.


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

Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Holy Arson

Luke 12:49-56; Isaiah 5:1-7; Hebrews 11:29-12:2


Good literature, drama, or cinema draws the reader or watcher into the action. We have all read a book which we couldn’t put down, or seen a play or movie that had us glued to our seat until the last climactic action took place. The very best actors, authors, dramatists, screen writers, cinematographers, and directors can make it happen for us. We may be able to see what the characters cannot see and know what is going to happen long before it actually happens. We can feel the tingle in our nerves, we can cut the tension with a knife.

Luke records that same kind of tension in today’s gospel reading. Jesus knows that he’s on a road that leads to conflict and to death. Now that he’s chosen his path, he just wants to get there. He can feel the pot simmering; he wants it to boil. It is agony for him to know that his message has not been accepted by the religious authorities. He wonders, when will they’ll come to get him, who will turn him in, how many days has he left to work. He doesn’t want a few warning sparks, he wants a blazing fire. In the midst of this tension, Jesus talks to his followers about conflict and about the price of the way they’ve chosen.

He starts by talking about peace.“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, I have come instead to bring division.” Now, peace was what Jesus most wanted to bring to the earth. At his birth, angels had announced, “Glory to God in heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors” (Luke 2:14). As Jesus taught and healed, his followers began to catch a vision of what that peace might be.

The prophets had spoken of a life that was full, of a peace that included enough for everyone and an end to exploitation. Jesus spoke the same message. Peace was more than a political absence of war. It was more than feeling good or being nice. Living by a vision of peace meant you had to choose where you would place your trust, how you would spend your money and time.

I imagine that somewhere along the way, it became apparent that the general public wasn’t buying the message. People weren’t eager to stop storing up their wealth in barns and start sharing it with those who have less. “After all,” they said, “we might need it someday. And, why should we trust someone else to share with us?” It’s the age-old human propensity to live out of fear of scarcity rather than gratitude for abundance. Whatever we have, we always want more, whether it’s paper money or paper clips.

Jesus’ hearers weren’t ready to trust the community over their own ambition. People might have been tired of the old ways, but they weren’t about to change the power structures even when they saw how destructive they were. In the end, Jesus would stand over Jerusalem and weep, “If only you knew on this of all days the things that lead to peace” (Luke 19:41). They had heard the message from the prophets and from Jesus himself, but they didn’t know how to live by peace, or how badly they needed it.

The people who did try to live by his vision found that their lives weren’t very peaceful. Many of them had experienced healing, and many had changed their priorities. Maybe they expected their private lives to improve, even if the outside world was being torn apart. But conflict in their families increased when they started on this new way. The older generation felt rejected when the younger folks turned away from their traditions. And we thought that was a problem new to our own times. The established people felt criticized and insulted by Jesus’ sermons. In other families, the younger ones felt abandoned when the elders went off with Jesus, or maybe they just resented their inheritance being squandered by people who always had seemed so responsible before.

Life with Jesus was anything but peaceful. Maybe the new disciples had accepted that they weren’t going to convince the whole Roman empire of Jesus’ way, but they probably thought their own families would understand what they were talking about. It must have been painful that the people closest to them didn’t share enthusiasm for this new preaching, this radically different view of God, of life, of responsibility.

When the tension was ready to explode, Jesus said some new things about peace. Jesus said he had not come to bring peace, rather he had come to start the process of peace — to show a new way. He said that his way involves making choices — choices about priorities and money and loyalties. Division always results from making those kinds of choices. Division was the only way to peace. When they decided to follow Jesus, they had to expect conflict. They didn’t have to be ashamed of it. They weren’t bad disciples because of it. Conflict happened. Peace would come, but only through walking a hard road and enduring hard conflicts on the way.

These words remind me of the wonderfully bucolic painting style of Thomas Kincade. His pictures are filled with heaps of flowering plants and everything is well-manicured. Nothing is out of place. The life Jesus lived and the lives his followers lived would never have fitted into a Thomas Kincade picture.

What do Jesus’ hard words say to us? They acknowledge that Jesus and his disciples had family conflict, as we all do. Having a perfect family life was not a required trait for disciples in the early church. You could be a good disciple or even a leader of disciples, even if it was all torn up at home.

Most of our conflicts at home are not about the lofty things Jesus was talking about. We don’t argue about basic life choices, like security and values and ultimate loyalties. Yet those values and choices underlie a lot of what we do argue about. Core values can make for wonderful common ground within which we can hassle out the less lofty points. The distance can also be terrifying when the values themselves don’t meet. Jesus’ disciples must have experienced the terrifying distances when they chose to follow him. They left their livelihoods, their tools of the trade, and their families, too.

What Jesus says is not just about families of kinship. The hard choices that we sometimes have to make are also part of those larger families of church and community. Too often we gloss over our differences and try to keep everything under control. That kind of peace is a lie. Or we go out of our way to accentuate the differences, always bringing them up and highlighting them so that they never get worked out in an acceptable way. We dig at old wounds and keep them festering. That is far from the peace of Christ and farther from the dividing that is the beginning point for the process of making of peace.

More than talking about families, blood-related or not, Jesus seems to be telling us again that the choices we make about what we believe and what we value and how we spend our time are important. They have consequences in our relationships at home, at work, in the community, in the clubs and organizations we join, in our cultural and political lives, and in the church. Jesus invites us to risk choosing what brings peace in the end, even though it may bring division in the present. Following his way, we may feel the heat and experience the tension which builds to an explosion.

What do we do in the mean time? We do what Jesus talks about over and over again. We take heart from those who walk the path with us and who have gone before us; we support one another in trying to live by values that will bring wholeness to this world. We trust that peace will come. We put the process of Christ’s peacemaking in his hands. We keep walking the paths of righteousness, justice, and compassion, even as the tension keeps on building. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. Michelangelo had to chip stone off the marble block in order to create the Pieta. The woodcarver has to whittle bits of wood away to make a carving. The etcher uses acid to eat away a bit of metal to make plate which will print an etching.

The peace that Jesus seeks to bring is when you and she, and he and you, and you and I whittle, chip, eat away at the things that separate us from God and from each other. God started all this by sending Jesus as flesh and blood to be flesh and blood alongside us, to suffer as we suffer, to dream as we dream, to struggle as we struggle. God knew that it was an incendiary mix. Something was going to happen. And God chose to do it together with our ancestors, with us, and with the generations which will come after us. There is an African proverb that says it all: “If we want to go fast, go alone. If we want to go far, go together.” God wants to go far with us. And if it takes a fire to make it happen, then God will send the Holy Spirit to light the kindling.


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

Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Is God Ashamed of You?

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16; Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Luke 12:32-40

“Faith is the reality of what we hope for, the proof of what we don’t see.” Who of us hasn’t heard and heard that verse from Hebrews 11. It is so cliched that it doesn’t get caught by our brains as it speeds between our ears.

Scottish New Testament scholar William Barclay begins his study of this passage this way:

“To the writer to the Hebrews faith is a hope that is absolutely certain that what it believes is true, and that what it expects will come. It is not hope which looks forward with wistful longing; it is hope which looks forward with utter certainty. It is not hope which takes refuge in a perhaps; it is hope which is founded on a conviction.” (1)

Frances Taylor Gench, professor of biblical interpretation at Union Presbyterian Seminary, notes that the word faith is found twenty-four times in Hebrews 11 alone, and more than in any other book in the New Testament. She contends that what the word means for this unknown author is best described as faithfulness. 

“It speaks of faith as active obedience. It is that characteristic of the Christian life that enables one both to persevere even in the midst of difficult circumstances and to step out into the unknown with the courage to live in a risky and vigorous way.... It enables believers to live by a vision of the realities of God and God’s purposes for the earth, a vision that is not yet present or visible to the eye. It empowers believers to move into the future with trust and confidence, knowing that the future belongs to God.”(2)

We are often caught up with the Hebrews author in calling people of faith sojourners through this life. That’s a nice thought, but isn’t it a rather pessimistic escapist approach to living faithfully in the world? If we take it at face value, then it seems to deny the view that God intends to redeem the whole of creation, a creation that is groaning in the drudgery and hopelessness of it all. Does our Hebrews author mean that God intends to save only those who are faithful and to effect this salvation by removing them from the wickedness and destruction of the world? Does this theological version of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk’s command to his engineer, “Beam me up, Scotty,” aid and abet the millennialist notion that some will be raptured and the rest left behind? Does God really intend simply to transfer those spiritual ones who have faith from this “vale of tears” to a “sweet and blessed country,” a “sweet by and by,” the home of God’s elect”? 

Scriptures can be used to go either way with this. And to do so is really to miss the mark. We have a variety of viewpoints represented by the writers of the scripture, all trying to be true to what they know of God in their time and situation. I’m not belittling them, but on the surface, scripture could almost seem like the English composition class project of tag-team writing a novel, with each successive student adding another chapter until a conclusion is reached, often in a most roundabout way.

So we have to step back and broaden the viewpoint. The author of Hebrews does this to some extent. In our reading today, some verses and people were omitted. And more follow where we left off until we get to the end of the section where the author celebrates the great cloud of witnesses.

The Hebrews writer starts with the classic case of Abraham and Sarah. In the biblical narrative, those two people carry a lot of weight. Abraham and Sarah this and Abraham and Sarah that. They sojourned. They waited. They never got what they were promised, barely a whiff of it. Over the course of it all they stayed fairly true to God. But they didn’t really have any notion of what God was doing with them and for them, where God was leading them. 

It’s difficult to follow God when we aren’t sure where God is leading. It’s all right for a while, but we get antsy, impatient, chomping at the bit to be in control, to do it on our own. It’s a lot like the focus of a cartoon I saw recently. A sales clerk was talking up a new GPS unit designed particularly for men. It gives a few directions, then turns itself off so the man can be comfortable wandering around without a clue.

In some ways that’s exactly what the church has been doing more and more for the last fifty years or so. The good news is that it won’t last forever. The bad news is that we are only about half way through this cultural, social, technological, theological upheaval. The good news is that God will meet us on the other side. The bad news is we are going to have to ride it out, and in order to do so, are going to have to jettison a lot of the cargo we’ve always thought we couldn’t do without. The good news is that despite appearances to the contrary, God really is in the midst of it all. 

This is not new to the church. According to Phyllis Tickle, this is at least the third time the church has gone through this. It happened in the sixth century as the collapse of the Roman empire was complete and the church took refuge in the monasticism that carried it for the next five hundred years. 

Then in the eleventh century, Islamic political supremacy threatened much of Mediterranean Europe and the response was the Crusades which helped usher in a whole new era for the church as a political and military power and all the trappings that went with that. 

That era became the fertile ground for the Renaissance which paved the way for the 16th century, the rise of feudal lords and nation states, and the Reformation guided by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and countless others who used the burgeoning resources of movable type to move a world. 

Now the democratizing information explosion of the 21st century is the hotbed of what Tickle has called “the Great Emergence,” the next great era of the church. 

Tickle, in her book of that title, doesn’t do much to work farther backwards in time, but I think that the case can be made that the ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ, and the following apostolic age, was the previous point in time when heaven was busting out all over (or as it usually appears to anyone in the midst of it, all hell is breaking loose).

That’s the situation that the Hebrews author was describing. The writer was trying to keep the people focused on God and their Christ-gift of salvation. They had been living thinking that Jesus would return any day, that everything would be all right and that it was just around the corner, on the sunny side of the street. But patience was running out, keeping a stiff upper lip and a raised chin was wearing thin. It was getting harder and harder to perceive God’s activity in all the stuff that looked like inactivity. Sound familiar?

The Hebrews writer is telling the people not to blink all at the same time. That’s when something will happen and they will miss it. Isn’t that the gist of what Jesus was trying to say to the people to whom he was speaking. Be alert. Be watchful. Be vigilant. Don’t be weighted down. Nancy Price tells of a Dr. Wise, a retired Methodist pastor, who spoke gently, but with peaceful conviction of the reality in his life: “The farther up the hill you get, the less you want to carry.”(3)

Faith matters. Our faith gives assurance that God has our best interests at heart, knows what we hope for, and holds our future — a collective future as God’s people. John Calvin certainly believed in God’s ability to deal with the hopes, the dreams, the untried and untested realities of what we know nothing about. There are more words dedicated to faith in his Institutes than any other subject. Calvin thought of faith as “the firm knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us,” the conviction, the certainty, that God cares about us all.

We think often of home as somewhere we come from, and where often, after time, we cannot go back to. The Hebrews writer turns that around. Home is where we are all headed, circuitously, at varying paces, and through so much stuff that it makes John Bunyan’s pilgrim, Christian, look like a whiny wimp as he progresses.

The Hebrews writer throws in a curious thought as this section closes out, the idea of God not being ashamed to be called the God of those who live by faith. The only other time shame is used in this way is in Luke and Mark, where Jesus says, 

“All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me. All who want to save their lives will lose them. But all who lose their lives because of me will save them. What advantage do people have if they gain the whole world for themselves yet perish or lose their lives? Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Human One will be ashamed of that person when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.” (Luke 9:23-26; // Mark 8:34-38). 

Is God ashamed of you? Is God ashamed of your life of faith or your journey of discipleship? Is God ashamed of your wrestling with the reality of what you hope for and the proof of what you don’t see? God is bigger than everything we face. Surely our lives are in excellent care, though the seas roar and the mountains quake, physically, socially, culturally, even theologically. God has prepared a homeland for us and wants to be proud to be our God.

And through Christ, God will be proud of us.

(1) William Barclay, Daily Bible Study: The Letter to the Hebrews. (Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press, 1955), 144-145.
(2) Hebrews and James [Westminster Bible Companion Series]. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 63.
(3) Nancy Price, www.midrash.joinhands.com, Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 11:31 AM. 

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.