Let’s Redefine Faith

Hebrews 11:1 -12:2

Earlier this week I met with a friend who struggles with faith after being in church for decades and then leaving the church; he couldn’t find his way back because he came to reject many of his church’s doctrines. I said to him: you know you can be an agnostic and still have faith. His eyes widened! That soon initiated the subject of what does it mean to have faith? What is the meaning of faith?

I came realize that there are many ways to define faith, but not all definitions are constructive.

One of the definitions, we find at the beginning of the 11^th chapter of the letter to the Hebrews: (1) “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see,” which traditionally has been understood to mean: having trust despite having no guarantees. I personally find this interpretation problematic, because it sounds impossible to someone who’s looking from the outside, someone who doesn’t have that confidence or assurance. Believing in that sense sounds unattainable and exclusive for a select number of people.

A second definition: many believers and denominations define faith as the intellectual assent to a set of doctrines and believing them to be true. But again, faith traditions are many and they’re sometimes mutually exclusive. So that’s one problem with this definition. The other is that the opposite of faith in this sense would be doubting or questioning parts of those doctrines. But isn’t it the case with any thinker today? So I don’t like that definition either because skepticism shouldn’t be seen as opposite to faith.

A new definition just became clear to me as I wrestled this week with the scripture selection in Hebrews. Before the passage we heard, after defining faith, chapter 11 continues like this:

³ By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.
⁴ By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did.
⁵ By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death
⁷ By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, built an ark to save his family
⁸ By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went,
¹¹ And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children
¹⁷ By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice.
²⁰ By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau in regard to their future.
²¹ By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of Joseph’s sons,
²² By faith Joseph, when his end was near, spoke about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt
²⁴ By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.
²⁹ By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as on dry land;
³⁰ By faith the walls of Jericho fell…

What is happening here? It’s a retelling of the stories of people’s journeys with God all the way from creation, to Abel, to Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses … and where does it end? Well it doesn’t, the passage continues like this: “yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.” Friends we are invited into the story. We are invited to journey with the people of God whom the author of Hebrew calls “a cloud of witness” that surrounds us.

Do you know what it means to be surrounded by a cloud? Next time you travel by plane, pay attention shortly after departure or on top of descent, there are few minutes when the plane starts shaking; that’s when you are passing through clouds. Where the air is dense and the water vapor is not spread out evenly, and there is a movement of warm air, hit by another of a lower cool air, which results in pockets of air lifting the wings in unpredictable patterns. What you feel as a traveler is turbulence, and depending on the thickness of the cloud it might be a oh-my-heart-just-dived-into-my-stomach kind of turbulence!

So when I read: “surrounded by a cloud of witnesses,” I think of all those people with their different journeys and paths, failures and successes, moments of trust and moments of doubt, all those different densities and temperatures… And what it means to be surrounded by those, is for you and I to be put in the mix of that chaotic blend of hot and cold air. It is by no means an invitation to be holy or blameless but an invitation to walk faithfully with God through that turbulence. For who are those “witnesses” we’re invited to resemble?

Abel –poor thing- didn’t live to tell. Samson was fooled by a gentile foreign woman. David killed for a woman. Abraham gave his wife to Pharaoh to save his life (talk about chivalry), Sarah laughed at God’s promise, Jacob lied to his father and degraded his older brother, Moses disobeyed and rebelled against God… and so on … friends none of these examples represents a blameless person. They are all stories of being distant from God and then finding the way back to God. But we are told that by faith all of these were part of the covenant.

So friends, according to today’s Scripture, faith is not an individual path but a journey in a company of other disciples, broken like us, with success and failure stories like ours, with whom we can, together, work toward wholeness and healing.

Faith won’t silence our questions or doubts. You can’t believe your way into what does not otherwise make sense to you, just as you cannot doubt your way out of what is true. And faith won’t magically wipe away all of our pains. God knows you and I are as broken as the rest of those whose stories we just recalled. We suffer, we experience failures, illnesses, disappointments, pain, anxiety, confusion, feelings of self-denigration and personal letdowns, betrayal by others, and even abandonment by God.

But despite the doubt and through the pain we choose to believe. We choose to identify with those whose stories were not only healing to them but are also awe inspiring to us today and continue to sustain us. Not because of how heroic they were but because of how earthy and ordinary they are.

For by faith Abraham made his home in the promised land, by faith Moses’ parents hid him for three months after he was born, and by faith the prostitute Rahab, welcomed the spies and was not killed.

And by faith you and I will get through our trials, by faith we will conquer that new job, by faith we will be able to have a hard conversation through that long-term family dispute, by faith we will carry-on through our losses and pain, by faith we will believe science and still lean on God, by faith we will continue to walk with our hurting brothers and sisters, by faith we will continue to challenge unjust systems and lean on each other for support. By faith we choose to come together as one community to affirm values that have become obsolete to the world. By faith we find healing and wholeness in the community even through each other‘s weaknesses, by faith we know that God has found us first and claimed us as children although we flunk and we stray, we struggle with life and wrestle with God, we continue to hold on by faith.

Faith is then, not about feeling superior because of what we believe or inferior because of what we do not, it is not the ability to always trust God and never ever have a moment of doubt, nor is it the blind consent to everything the church teaches. But it is about seeing ourselves as participants with believers and non-believers, people from inside and those from outside the church, in one journey that starts with creation and ends with redemption; that starts with God and ends with God, and where God is not simply the destination, but one who walks the journey with us.

It is claiming as ours the assurance that we don’t have to try so hard to be accepted by God because God accepts us just as we are, wherever we are on our journey.

Friends, The story is God’s story, bigger than we think or imagine, it is one of a big holy messy cloud, and by faith we are part of it. Amen.