Today, our passage from the Letter to the Hebrews both helps assuage our fears and remind us of the pervasive nature of faith in God’s people even as some modern scholarship causes some of the very anxiety that is addressed by this instruction. Those of you paying attention, of course, have figured out I will avoid the OT and Gospel lesson again, in favor of a sermon on the Epistle. A few of you have shared your concern this week that I might focus entirely on the Epistles and Psalms going forward. I won’t. I do pray over the lessons and ask God to steer my focus. So long as I stay prayerfully attuned, God will certainly make sure that each of us will hear what we need to hear. And even if I do not stay properly attuned, He will still make sure we each hear what we need to hear, such is His faithfulness.
Our passage
from Hebrews today is perhaps the best known in the entire letter. Those who suffered through Confirmation
classes in their youth can often cite the first verse when asked to define
faith. I know when Larry led the Sunday
morning Bible Study class through Hebrews, way back in the time before the
pandemic, we spent several weeks just on that verse.
One of the
discussions we had was on the pervasiveness of and the need for faith in our
lives, and not just when it comes to God.
By way of example, think of those pictures of the Webb telescope. We are told now that astronomers can put
together a map of the universe. The
scale is impossible for you or I to comprehend.
When you look at the images on social media or on Google, you and I have
no ability to comprehend truly something that is 16.2 billion lightyears in
diameter. Our lives are measured in
decades, a century if we are really lucky, so how can we truly comprehend a
billion years? And, although all of us
are used to driving fast on I-65, as much out of self-protection or
self-preservation as our desire to get to places quickly, how can we ever
contemplate the speed of light? All of
us are Top Gun fans with a need for speed, but we cannot begin to comprehend
186,000 miles per SECOND, about the distance of circumnavigating the equator
seven times each and every second, or just south of 6 trillion miles a
year. Yes, I am rounding, but it is
close enough that we sort of understand my example.
The point
of that divergence, though, was to ask us how we know things like the
Gravitational Constant are truly the same in every part of that spherical
object we call the cosmos that is 16.2 billion light years across? How do we know the speed of light is even the
same everywhere? Get the problem? You and I accept on faith that such things,
we call them theories or immutable laws in physics, are true everywhere. We may not have been to Australia or Mars or
Pluto, let alone the edge of the known universe, but we hold on faith that
there are immutable laws like gravity and the speed of light and that the
experiences in those locations would be identical to what we experience here in
Nashville.
All that is
to say, faith is not a four-letter word.
We have faith in any number of things and people, regardless of our
faith in God. In Anglican/Episcopal
speak, we would say that we do not see a conflict between science and religion
because both are based on experience and lead to faith. Theologians would say it far more eloquently
than I, but I see some intrigued looks.
Let’s press on.
I said a
moment ago that we sometimes trust things.
All of us gathered here right now are of an age when we had a contract
of sorts with the companies for which we went to work right out of
college. Workers promised to work hard,
and companies promised to care for employees, in the form of pay and
benefits. That care extended into
retirement and even survived our death.
All of you grew up into that system.
If you went to work for IBM, as one example, IBM promised to continue to
pay you, so long as you did your work well.
When you retired, IBM paid the pension and healthcare, which you had
earned by virtue of your work. IBM even
offered to continue those benefits until the spouse died.
Starting
20-30 years ago, though, the contract was broken. Companies pawned retirement income off onto
the employees, even though wages were not raised to offset the real cost of
living for those “valued” employees.
Companies even turned the healthcare over to the government and Medicare. Why pay for something valued by the employee
when we can stick them with the government’s version? The effect was to save lots of money for
companies and to decrease real income for employees and increase anxieties for
workers. Who pocketed the savings? Yep, the execs. Sometimes the shareholders, but always the
execs.
One of the
sources of generational warfare is this example. Those of a certain age and maturity complain
that younger generations do not have the same loyalty as the older generation
at that age. I see nods. Younger workers don’t have the same drive to
stay late, cover someone else’s work, increase productivity without
renumeration. For their part the younger
generations think the older generation stupid or naïve. Why should I make sacrifices for an
organization that will cast me aside quickly?
Why should I save my company money when it does not pay me the equivalent
of what it paid someone doing my exact job ten, twenty, or thirty years ago? Why sacrifice today when the company has
already demonstrated it does not value my tomorrows? Corporate trust is not what it once was.
Neither is
our faith in our government. I can well
remember sitting in civics classes as a youth and listening to the way
government worked. We elected officials
based on our preferences how they should govern. There was always a difference between
Republicans and Democrats, but we thought the difference was a contest of
ideologies. Best of all, we had the
opportunity every 2, 4,or 6 years, depending on the office, to elect a new
person to govern in the way we thought best.
For their part, politicians were, this is now an oxymoron, civil
servants. They were elected to fulfill
the will and desire of the people they were elected to govern. Those elected officials had to reach across
the aisle to negotiate laws or ordinances.
In those days they called it sausage making because few ever got everything
in bills that they wanted. But both
sides recognized that elected officials from the other party had been elected by
their own constituents. If I asked for a
show of hands this morning, though, how many of us think our elected officials
really care about us? It would not be
many, so cynical have we become.
And if you
want to see another aspect of the generational divide in our country and
families, ask your grandchildren if they expect to see Social Security checks
when they retire. Sociologists have
noted that we GenXer’s, you know, they group Boomers and Millennials ignore in
their generational fights, were the first generation to believe that Social Security
would not exist for us when we retired.
That means most people my age believe we pay into the system and will never
see a penny, such is our faith in the government and the politicians who lead
it.
I have been
speaking of secular things, but the loss of institutional faith has happened to
the Church? Last week, I pointed out the
most recent story of a preacher being robbed at gunpoint during a service of
$400k worth of jewelry. By way of being
more accurate, in case you Adventers are conspiring to give me that much
jewelry, it was closer to $600k worth.
Visitors are wondering if I am serious.
It was a joke last week. Nobody
was really shocked by the story. No one
was surprised when I shared that church members were coming forward later in
the week, complaining how the pastor allegedly steered money they needed from
the church to his personal use. We might
like to throw stones at our sister institutions, but we should always be aware
our beloved church is no different. We
abuse people with the worst of others.
Heck, we avoid caring for those in need as well as any other
Church. We ignore our own calls, which
we claim is governance at GC’s, to sell our building in NYC and move to a place
with a lower cost of living and expenses.
Even in our BCP fights, we fight like it is a winner take all, but we
likely do that because such fights in the past have proven to be exactly
that. And then we lament that the Church
withers in our context, and we wonder why no one trusts the Church any more.
Heck, this
Epistle from which God has our attention today, is even a source of distrust in
some places in the Church. If you get
bored this afternoon or this week, go read some of the discussions about
Hebrews in the Church. When I was a
child, my Bible titled it “The Letter of Paul to the Hebrews.” I see almost everyone nodding. Now, it is just “The Letter to the
Hebrews.” Again, I see the nods. Literary Critics have convinced many in the
Church that Paul did not write this letter.
Many believe it was someone discipled by Paul, but that there are enough
textual differences to call its authorship into question.
As
Anglicans/Episcopalians, you and I do not focus so much on the question of who
wrote it. Could Paul have written
it? Sure. Do I think it likely that a disciple of his
wrote it? At least. But, I and we all accept that the letter was
God-breathed. Heck, we pray that Collect
twice a year to remind ourselves! That
means God caused the writing, the editing, and the collecting. We care less about the details of authorship
and more about the teachings contained therein, or at least we should. But, we recognize that for some of our
brothers and sisters in the wider Church, questioning the authorship is akin to
attacking their faith.
Our problem
with faith and its seeming decline are not new.
Thankfully and mercifully God caused the letter to the Hebrews to be written
and preserved that you and I might be reminded of the fact that there literally
is nothing new under the sun. And while
many preachers in our church today will focus on the faith of the individual,
and rightfully so, I will be pointing us toward another important lesson in
this pericope. Make no mistake, I
understand faith for us as individuals is necessary. That is a lesson in this selection, too. But there are other lessons for us in the
same lesson, and I think that was my job today to highlight one in particular.
Had I been
concerned with titles or mike drops, I would have said at the beginning of all
this that the author of Hebrews calls us to a corporate memory of God’s
faithfulness to those who came before us and of their responses and activity,
in recognition of His faithfulness. Put
more bluntly, the author wants to remind us that only One Person, well—Three
Persons in One Unity, if we want to be more exact—has proven Himself faithful
and worthy of our trust. Institutions
fail us. Human beings fail us. Even the Church can fail us. But God always is faithful!
Those who
lived before the Incarnation trusted in the LORD, Yahweh. Our examples today point us to various
figures in our ancestry. Abel, Enoch,
Noah, and Abraham trusted in the Lord.
Each demonstrated that trust in a different way, but each trusted in
God’s faithfulness, no matter how crazy their circumstances seemed. More importantly, each was blessed by God,
who credited their faith as righteousness.
Abel was killed for his faithfulness; Enoch did not die; Noah and his
family were delivered from the Flood, and God swore His Covenant to Abraham. The particulars are different, but each is
declared by God as righteous because of their faith, and you and I remember
them today because He presents them as examples, patterns of holy living, to
use next week’s Collect about Jesus.
Pick your favorite OT hero or heroine.
The same is true of them. God
credits their faith as righteousness and deals accordingly with them. And, to make their ultimate reward clear,
Jesus, the Son of God who was raised from the dead, teaches us that God is the
God of the living, that all those who believed in the Lord are alive!
Fast forward to the NT. The Incarnation, Jesus, lives His life the
way we are all called to live our lives.
He trusts completely in the commands of the Father to the seeming
end. Though He came to save us, and did
nothing that merited our rejection of Him, we put Him to death. Why?
He fed people; He healed people; He cast out demons; He reminded us of
our Father’s call on all our lives. We
chose Barabbas over Him. We even mocked
Him as He hung on the Cross. Still, He
had faith in the Father’s love and mercy.
He was willing to endure for our sakes that physical and emotion pain we
call His Passion. The same is true for
all the other believers in the NT. While
they have the advantage of the fuller revelation, when compared to their OT
brothers and sisters, it is still Jesus’ faith, God’s faith, that saves them
all. Thankfully and mercifully, it is
His faith that saves us Adventers and all Christians still!
There is a
myth in parts of Protestantism especially, though my Roman brothers claim it is
alive and unfortunately well in their denomination, too, that our faith saves
us. Prosperity gospellers use that lie
or myth or subversion to their own benefit.
If you have faith enough to give me your last $1000, God will give
you more! If your faith is enough, God
will heal you. Brothers and sisters,
that is skubala! It is not of God!
All that we
do in worship, corporately or privately, is meant to remind us of God’s
faithfulness. It is meant to remind us
that when we were sinners and unwilling to do His will, He was willing to bring
His promises to fruition even in spite of our unfaithfulness. We gather to remind ourselves of that truth,
to immerse ourselves in that truth, to equip us to see His faithfulness in a
world that teaches us there is no faithfulness, that no one or nothing is worth
our faith and trust. God alone is
faithful. When we rebel, He allows us to
bear the consequences or sometimes punishes us, but only as a loving Father,
and just as He promised before we rebel or sin.
And when we do those things He has called us to do, He gives us
appetizers of the blessings He has in store for us. But He alone is faithful. He alone is worthy of our praise and
thanksgiving. And we recognize that by
gathering together to give thanks to Him for all that He has done for and
promises us!
To make
sure we understood His unique place in salvation history, God sent His Son,
Jesus, into the world to save us, and to demonstrate once and for all the
magnitude of His power to redeem. When
that stone was rolled away from that Empty Tomb and Jesus came out, our
predecessors and us learned that absolutely nothing can prevent God from
fulfilling each and every promise to us!
If death cannot separate us from Him and His blessings, what can? Persecutions?
Privations? The efforts of the
Enemy? No! One reason behind the Resurrection is that it
gives us perspective to see that, like Abraham before us, our focus should be
on our inheritance, even as our attention is on the world around us. All that we do in this life, in this place,
in this context, is simply done to mirror, however poorly we do it, the
heavenly homeland to which He calls each one of us. Like younger Abrahams and Sarahs, we can
trust He will fulfill each and every promise that He has made to us, even if it
may seem to this world that we lived foolishly, or blindly, or whatever other
scorn it would use to disparage our faith in His faithfulness.
The
Christians of Jewish ancestry to whom this letter was written were, in many
ways, just like us. They were, of
course, ridiculed by the wider culture and even those with whom they once
worshipped, for believing a Man could be raised from the dead. On top of the public and religious scorn,
though, they experienced true persecution.
As we read in Chapter 10, some had had their property taken from them,
some had been imprisoned, and some even lost their lives. Their persecution was real, not at all like
the skubala that some of our more boisterous brothers and sisters claim today.
Their
responses to all of it, though, should sound familiar. Some turned from the faith, as described by
the author in chapter 6. Some tried to
make the Gospel sound more attractive by watering down the miracles, especially
that of the Resurrection. Some decided
to quit attending worship as described in chapter 10. Others were not receiving the signs that they
mistakenly thought would confirm their faith.
That response describes some Adventers and some self-identified
Christians today, does it not? I told
you, well God told us, there is nothing new under the sun!
But the
glorious news today my brothers and sisters, the Gospel news, is that we are
saved by God’s faithfulness! He alone
has proven Himself worthy of such trust!
He alone has demonstrated the power necessary to keep every single
promise He has made us. Yes, we proclaim
our faith each time we gather. Each time
we gather we recite the Creed; we even remind ourselves that Christ has died,
Christ is Risen, and that Christ will come again as we partake in the Sacrament;
y’all even suffer through such teachings we call sermons in the Liturgy of the
Word, as part of that reminder, that it is God’s faithfulness that saves us,
that He alone is worthy of our praise, our thanksgiving, our loyalty, and our
trust. Some of us do it when we gather
joyfully; some of us sometimes do it through gritted teeth; still others of us
do it worried that it might not be true, that we might look foolish to those in
the world around us. I get it. Some days we seem closer to God, or rather
closer to understanding God, than on other days. So did all those saints about whom we
read. The author of Hebrews certainly
understood it, whoever that person was. Best
of all, God understands it, too!
All He asks
that we trust Him, that we put our faith in Him. All the hard work of salvation is up to Him,
and He has already accomplished it in the life, and in the death, in the
Resurrection, and in the Ascension of His Son.
Because of that faithfulness to His people, we know that He will
accomplish all His purposes and all His promises to us! It is a wonderful reminder to a people beset
by betrayal; to a people beset by natural disasters and even a pandemic; to a
people worried about where they will lay their head or how they will feed
themselves; in short, to a people like us and like all those to whom we are
sent each and every day of our lives in this place, in this land.
In Christ’s Peace,
Brian†
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