“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.
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