By Faith — And here's why

A sermon for Sunday, August 11, 2019

Would you pray with me?

God who is with us before, during, and after the great changes in our lives, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

These first few verses from Hebrews are astounding, aren’t they? “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

“Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.

“By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.”

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And we should have faith, the writer of Hebrews argues, because faith is how our ancestors in faith received approval from God. If we want to live life as God would have us live it, we need to have faith. Faith that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Faith that there is something more to this universe than the things that are seen. And faith like Abraham, who obeyed God’s call and who, because of his faithfulness, received an inheritance. It’s a powerful text, one that is challenging and dense with meaning.

As a student of physics, I love dense and challenging things. I am trained to break complicated things down into understandable pieces. Give me the parameters for a rocket launch and I will break that bad boy down into propulsion, air resistance, gravitational drag, wind speed, and orbital velocity. What I mean is that if you tell me where you want a rocket to go, I’ll look at every single thing affecting the rocket in order to make sure I understand what it will encounter along its journey. Not only that, but give me enough data and I’ll work on a theory that explains how every rocket launches.

So this dense and challenging passage from Hebrews fascinates me, especially since it falls in the same week in the lectionary as the Isaiah passage, one that contrasts it so completely. It brings up three questions for me:

· What does the writer of Hebrews really mean when he or she talks about faith?

· How can we break that down to find a definition of faith that works for both Hebrews and Isaiah?

· What does it really look like for us to have faith here today, in the world that we live in, in 2019?

I’d like to tackle these three questions this morning because I think that, if we get through them, we’ll have not only a better idea of what faith means but also what we’re doing when we read the Bible. We’ll explore more about how we read the Bible in next week’s sermon and in the week after that, where we’ll continue to look at some contrasting passages in the lectionary.

So. What does the writer of Hebrews really mean when he or she talks about faith?

Well, the first thing to recognize is that Hebrews, even though we call it a letter, is actually a sermon. It’s not like the letters of Paul, where he writes to address specific issues or situations in specific churches, like the church in Rome or Corinth or Philippi or Ephesus. Hebrews is meant to be a single theological argument about what it means to be a Jewish Christian living in Jerusalem, someone who has a deep connection to the Jewish scriptures and also believes that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one. The church in Jerusalem was being persecuted, as many of the early churches were, and the sermon is meant to encourage them to maintain their belief in Jesus.

Hebrews 11 and 12 is the climax of the sermon. It’s what we in the business call the Come to Jesus Moment. The author has built up an argument about how Jesus mediates between us and God, as a priest might, and that though Christ is no longer with us, we can still have faith in him and in our continued relationship with God. Faith, after all, is the conviction of things unseen.

And we know that we can have faith because we have seen what faith looks like in the lives of those who have gone before us. The writer of Hebrews leans into the story of Abraham and Sarah, and the other patriarchs and matriarchs, to show them as exemplars of what it means to have faith in things unseen. And it’s hard to find a better example than Abraham, who followed a God he could not see into a country he did not know in hopes of forming a family he didn’t think was possible. In all things, Abraham believed in what he had not seen, but what he hoped for.

Now, the writer of Hebrews is using rhetoric here to make a point. They’re telling part of a well-known story in order to get others to follow along with their point. The writer of Hebrews, writing to a persecuted community on the verge of losing faith, asks them to remember a hero of their faith.

But Abraham, as we all know, wasn’t always a paragon of faith. He trusts that God will give him an heir through his wife, Sarah, all the way until their journey led them to Egypt, where Abraham traded Sarah to pharaoh in exchange for his safety. (Genesis 12) He trusts that God will give him an heir through Sarah until Sarah reminds him that she is unable to have children and gives him her slave, Hagar, to make heirs with in her stead. (Genesis 16) Abraham trusts that God will give him an heir through Sarah until God asks him to kill Isaac, his son with Sarah. (Genesis 22) Abraham over and over again through his saga, fails to believe that God is faithful to fulfil promises and instead takes things into his own hands. Sure, in the end, he trusts God and, in the end, the promise is fulfilled, but along the way, Abraham’s faith falters, and Sarah, Hagar, and Isaac are hurt because of it.

Still, Abraham does have his moments and the promise does come through in the end, and so the writer of Hebrews uses him as an example. Abraham hopes in a promise that will be fulfilled, even if that promise has no evidential proof, and that, for the author of Hebrews, is faith.

Hoping in a promise without physical proof is a fine enough definition of faith, but the writer of Hebrews adds another stipulation into our theory of faith: We know our faith is true because it is confirmed with the faith of those who have gone before us.

Now, an easy way to test a theory is to push it toward its edges. We do this in physics by seeing how a model trends as it approaches infinity or zero. If there are problems with your equations or how you've conceptualized, how you've thought about, the problem, they might show up when you push a theory to its limits. And out of our lectionary texts this week, Hebrews and Isaiah are at opposite edges. Hebrews is meant to exhort people who are going through a difficult time into continued faith by making a dense theological argument. Isaiah is... yelling at the people with power because it's clear they're not doing what they're supposed to do.

Isaiah was written during one of the most crucial and chaotic periods in the history of Israel: the Babylonian Exile. The whole book is actually likely by three different authors, with the first writing before the Exile, the second during, and the third after the return from exile.

Now, how many of you have heard of the Babylonian Exile before?

I didn't hear about it until I took a Hebrew Bible class in college, but it's deeply important for understanding the Old Testament. A quick history:

· King David unites all the disparate tribes in Israel into one kingdom. That lasts through his son Solomon's rule, and then Israel splits into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.

· All is fine, more or less, until the northern kingdom of Israel is taken over by the Assyrian Empire but the southern kingdom of Judah still stands.

· However, having just seen Israel conquered, people in Judah are able to see the signs of history repeating itself, only this time with the Babylonian Empire instead of the Assyrians. (This is where our passage comes in today.)

· Judah ends up conquered by the Babylonians and the elite are taken into exile in Babylon. Most of the Old Testament is written, organized, or rewritten during the Exile.

· Eventually, the Persian Empire comes in, defeats the Babylonians, and allows the exiles to return to Israel.

(For a full timeline, with links to descriptions of some of these events, click here.)

The Babylonian Exile is a tragedy that affects the whole Old Testament. It'll come up again and again as we seek to understand the biblical authors, which is why we’re talking about it now. But our passage this morning comes from before the Exile, as Isaiah is seeing the signs that tragedy might happen again.

And so, Isaiah speaks a word from the Lord to the people in charge: don't think you're comfortable because you have the faith of those before you to rely on. The living faith that Abraham had is, in the time of Isaiah, reduced to ceremonies at the Temple in Jerusalem. The most vulnerable amongst them, the orphan and the widow, aren't being cared for. And Isaiah tells those in power that God is weary of what they’re doing. God despises it.

Here's the thing about Isaiah: in Isaiah’s tine, they have the land. They have the inheritance. The promise that Abraham was holding onto faith for, it's completely fulfilled on their time. And Isaiah thinks they're squandering it.

For Isaiah, it's not just enough to "keep the faith" of those who went before. It's not enough to do the right things in the ceremony. (As a pastor who just preached for a month on liturgy and how we do our ceremonies, I feel convicted right now.) You can't just believe right and worship in the temple right: you have to live right.

Our definition from Hebrews needs some refining. Our faith is not only hope in things unseen, confirmed by our having faith like Abraham. We must have that hope and work to make it a reality.

See, Isaiah still has a hope for things unseen. Isaiah is speaking by faith about faith for his time, just as the author of Hebrews is for theirs. In Hebrews, the author tells her or his audience to have faith, that they might see what it's like when God reign is on earth as it is in heaven. Isaiah is hoping for that same kind of future, where God's peace reigns over all creation and all promises are fulfilled. For Isaiah, though, we don't have to wait for those promises to be fulfilled. We don't have to wait for anymore restoration. We can choose to live now as if God's reign were already here.

(To be totally fair to the writer of Hebrews, he or she also believes that our actions matter, but there are other, more immediate concerns for that community.)

So, then, faith is believing in things not seen, specially trusting God to fulfil God's promises. The faith we have is the type of faith evidenced by those who came before us in the faith and lived out in our lives. By faith, we play a part in God’s promises coming to life.

Where does that leave us, here today?

Well, I think it opens some doors for us to look our lives and the lives of others in a more complicated way. Our theory is more robust, we might say. Because we expanded our definition, it can apply to a wider variety of situations in order to help us understand them. We can see other Christians living out their faith differently than we do and still trust that they have the same faith we do.

Sometimes, faith looks like clinging to promises. Sometimes that's all we can do. When life is overwhelming, when the world has taken more than it gave us, we hope for and trust in God's promises as we endure, as the early church in Jerusalem did.

But sometimes, faith looks like action. By faith, Abraham went. By faith, Abraham followed God to a land of promise, not just for him, but for the people who came after him. And no, he didn't always get it right. He wasn't always as faithful as we would hope that he would be. But he acted. And, if we're listening to Isaiah, action looks like caring for the least and calling for leaders to do the same.

Both are faithful paths. Sometimes God comforts us and sometimes God challenges us. But the paths are faithful to God only when the thing unseen that we are hoping for is the reign of God, where justice, goodness, and wholeness are the order of the day. Centuries apart from one another, Isaiah and Hebrews look toward that same future, when no one can claim domination or supremacy over another, when all are restored to their promised inheritance, and when everyone loves God, their neighbor, and themselves. They respond to their faith in that future however they can, either simply in hope because of their need or in action because of their ability.

There will come a day when, as Julian of Norwich says, “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” It is not here yet, but we have faith in it, hoping for this thing unseen, working for the day that it will be visible to all.

Amen.