Isaiah1:18,19 ; Hebrews 11: 1-3; 8.9,10

Revisiting Faith

Today our lectionary brings us the beautiful texts In Hebrews about faith.  It contains one of the most stunning lines ever written about a subject that have ever been written.  In good writing you will occasionally find a line that is timeless. It is simple and profound and never has too many words.  I read an editorial in the New York Times just the other day about racism. It was written by an African American writer about her childhood in Mississippi.  Jesmyn Ward explained why slavery is connected to today’s undercurrent of racism (she calls it “cold current”) that we see in the Trayvon Martin case.  This is what she said: living in a country where one group of people owned another group of people for some 250 years yielded a culture where one person is worth less than another.” Wow, talking about putting your finger on something.  Now this writer does not belong in the Bible but reminds us how great the words of the Bible can be. Sometimes we are just too familiar with them or maybe we have heard too many bad sermons about them or have heard them manipulated in an attempt to get one person to have power over another.  “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Let’s see what other people have said about faith. E. Stanley Jones, the famous missionary to India said:”Faith is not you merely holding on to God, but God holding on to you.”  The great reformer John Calvin, indirectly the founder of the Presbyterian tradition said this about faith:”faith is not a distant view, but embrace of Christ.  The greatest theological influence on modern Catholicism, Thomas Aquinas said:” faith has to do with things which are not seen and hope with things that are at hand.”  The ancient church father Clement once wrote:”faith is voluntary anticipation.”  This means that with faith you make a decision to wait for something great.  A woman tells the story her husband shared with her about of the intellectually challenged youth he works with.  He was teaching him and others like him to repair a toaster.  One morning the boy showed up at the workshop with a broken toaster.  He had carried it under his arm from home.  He had so much faith that the toaster would be fixed that under his other arm he carried half a loaf of bread. He chose to anticipate great things, in this case a nicely toasted piece of bread.  Even bigger Church father Augustine said:”Faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward of faith is to see what we believe.”   Whittier said: the steps of faith falling the seeming void and find the rock beneath.” That is an act of faith. How do you know there is a rock beneath there?  If our faith is worth nothing, than all we do is step in holes with no rocks in them.  We will just sink in and hurt ourselves. Several days before moving to the US from Holland when I was twenty years old I was playing soccer in a large park between my house and the Amsterdam airport and I ran full speed and stepped into a rabbit hole. So when I arrived to report for my studies I came in a big cast that later burst in the Texas August heat.   The ligaments never quite healed.  But you don’t stop running across the field.  You don’t stop living because you think there may be a rabbit hole where you are stepping.  You are going where the ball is.  You keep the faith that you will get to the goal with the ball.

One more rephrasing of our verse: every couple of years I have to quote the great Irish poet Seamus Haney who won the Nobel Prize for Literature:”History says: don’t hope for this side of the grave, but once in a lifetime, that longed for tidal wave of history can rise up, and hope and history rhyme, so hope for a great sea change on the far side of revenge, believe that a further shore is reachable from here, believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.” So friends, all these great people had a way of saying what faith was, but none of it said it better than our verse:” faith is assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” All they do is provide a frame for the picture that this verse paints.

This leaves us with one major question:” how do we get faith and how can we keep it.” The author of Hebrews reminds us of the people throughout the Old Testament that kept the faith like Abel and Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Jacob, church fathers and mothers almost all of them.  They were unusual people but they weren’t perfect and there have many people throughout history whose characters were flawed, but their faith was strong.   Friends, we have to remember, and I have said this on many occasions, that faith is not something you could make happen.  Faith is in essence a gift from God.  You cannot make yourself believe the way you flex a muscle or hold your breath.  What it does take, however, is a willingness to look where you cannot see, to listen where you cannot hear and to hope in the unlikely. We all have that ability.  We are all capable of acts of faith, of opening ourselves up to a future that others think is nonsense.  So be open to God and faith will come.  Thanks be to God.