Active Faith That Lives Within

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

August 12, 2007

Text: Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16

I grew up at a time when it was thought that, if you just had the right kind of emotional experience in relation to Jesus, then you would have the faith that you needed to be saved----and it would be a kind of “insurance,” the payoff being life in heaven with Jesus when you died. There might be ups and down after that initial experience, but the goal was guaranteed. Much effort was expended by preachers and others to get you into the right place at the right time so that you would come to an experience of grace which yielded saving faith.

One problem that arose frequently was that the saved would “backslide.” (I always got the image in my mind of someone trying to climb a barren muddy hill in a rainstrorm.) Sooner or later, the saved person would begin to sin again, often in observable ways. Or, the saved person would begin to have doubts about God, would start asking questions, which would lead family and friends to tell them that they did not really have saving faith after all, and that they had better try again. This would often lead to another dramatic experience of accepting Jesus, sometimes followed by a second baptism. It was not uncommon for the same person to get “re-saved” and then re-baptized  summer after summer, always in the hope that the conversion and baptism would finally “take.”

Methodists with heart and mind

Even though we Methodists have always treasured a faith with “heart,” we have tried to balance heart with reason---- that a faith commitment has to be based on more than feelings. Our heads are, after all, attached to the some body in which our hearts (in the Bible, sometimes translated as “bowels”) reside. Our feelings are fickle: we have our ups and downs.

Our chief founder, John Wesley, struggled with his own fickle feelings most of his life--- He had been persuaded by German Pietists that, if he were really in a saving relationship with God, he would not be having so many doubts and fears. He longed for a passionate experience which would wash away all of his insecurities. He wanted blessed assurance of his salvation by faith.

It has been erroneously believed that, after Wesley experienced his heart being “strangely warmed” at a Moravian prayer meeting on Aldersgate Steet in London in 1738, he finally gained the assurance that he desired, and that he never slid back into doubt and fear again. Truth is, though Aldersgate was a crucial turning point in his life---for he gained more confidence in taking risks to reach others--- he struggled for many years afterward with feelings of having fallen from God’s grace.
In his later years, he began to see that there were, in fact, degrees of faith. Each and every person must in real time come to believe and trust in God in Jesus Christ for themselves----which initial faith does bring them into a saving relationship. But, faith in the long run can deepen and broaden as God works in our lives. He came to see that we may long for the “blessed assurances,” and God will give us showers of blessing from time to time.But our salvation does not come and go with our doubts, fears and shortfalls. We are saved by God through faith; it is not an achievement, it is a gift----a gift which keeps on giving as we yield ourselves in obedience to God’s work in and through us.

“I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew, he moved my soul to seek him, seeking me. It was not I on Thee took hold; but Thou, O Lord, on me.” (UMH) It is God who believes in us. It is God in Jesus Christ who has come to us.
HEBREWS: a LETTER FOR TOUGH TIMES

The Letter of Hebrews is especially important for us as we wrestle with what it means to have faith in God in stressful times. (I can remember when Dr. Van Harvey told us seminarians that some people think faith means believing seven impossible things before breakfast!)

The Letter of Hebrews was written to people who had believed in Jesus Christ, had trusted their lives to him, and it had not been smooth sailing. In fact, they were being abused and persecuted for their beliefs---or worse.  So the author of Hebrews writes to make a case for the truth of the Christian message, laying out an elaborate and brilliant defense of Christianity, drawing from the Hebrew faith-images which would have been familiar to Jewish people in the first century.

 His argument is essentially this:  Jesus the Messiah is the mediator of a new covenant, and as mediator, Jesus has represented us, in our misery, to God, and God, in God’s pure love, to us. (Mediators always have the difficult role of being in-between the parties at odds----and often get blamed by both sides.) Through Jesus we have access to God, who, though he is our Judge, is also our redeemer. So he is writing to encourage believers who are tempted to abandon their faith and return to their old religion, or none at all.

Now there are more comprehensive definitions of faith, but in this letter, the author wants us to hear about faith for the tough times, faith in times of doubt and fear.

After giving us lots of “let us” advice in chapter 10, he begins his long eloquent speech on faith with these famous words:  “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for.
He is telling us that  by faith we can “possess in the present what God has promised for the future.” We are given confidence that “God’s promises of peace, justice, mercy and salvation can be trusted…[and to illustrate what he means, he gives a ] “roll call of those who courageously swung out on the vine of God’s promises over the chasms of life, trusting that the vine would hold.” ( Tom Long, Luke) In other words, he calls to mind those from the Hebrew tradition who made the leap of faith, trusting in God’s faithfulness and watch-care over them.

Abraham, for example, “set out” for an unknown destination. Faith is “setting out” when you do not know where God is leading. You believe that God will give you strength for the journey, and that the enterprise you are engaged in will foretell the kingdom of Shalom in its fullness. And if you die before the kingdom comes, God will provide for you a place in his presence until the Day when all creation is re-created.

And “faith is the conviction of things not seen.”

In faith, we discern realities that are not visible to the naked eye. Not things that are not visible yet, but things that are by nature invisible. “We walk by faith, not by sight.” (II Corinthians 4:18 and 5:7) We see from a new perspective. “To the eyes of faith, the universe is not a swirl of energy and matter but a creation, an expression of love of God sustained by hidden providence.” (Long)

Carl Michaelson wrote that God, as Creator, is the possibility of everything else. Pythagoras, a pre-Socratic philosopher, liked to ask his students, ‘what is the greatest number, 1,2,3,4, or 5? They would leap to the conclusion that 5 is the greatest. Then he would ask them, ‘What would 5 be if not for 1?” So it is with God, who is the basis of all other possibilities.

St. Augustine in the fifth century gave us an analogy for God’s hidden presence. He would state that “we see each other by virtue of something we cannot see.” If we want we can sit and look at a light bulb but that is not what light is for. The point of light is to “let it be there as the source and possibility of our meaningful experiences of everything else.” (Michaelson, The Witness of Radical Faith, p. 64-67)

The writer of Hebrews says that persons of faith live with at least one foot in God’s future, always looking ahead for what God has promised (even if we have to use parables and metaphors to express it: a New Jerusalem, a New Creation, a heavenly city, a grand banquet, a realm in which all swords have been beaten into plowshares and people can dwell together unafraid---and where the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. And, we will live as those who see with eyes of the heart hints and rumors of divine presence and activity.

WHY BELIEVE THIS AT ALL?

But, I have asked more than once in my lifetime, why would anyone believe and live this way? Is faith just a blind leap in the face of the evidence to the contrary? We risk looking like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, or like Haley Mills from the movie “Pollyanna” who has somehow drifted off her movie set and landed in the latest “Die Hard” movie! We can and do appear to many people as hopelessly idealistic or naïve. What would lead one to make a decision to believe in a God who is leading us into the good future and giving hints of his current redemptive presence?

The only answer I can give is that faith can come as a gift when we encounter Jesus of Nazareth and discern in him the hidden and invisible and holy and mysterious God. God does not come out of hiding by being revealed in Jesus; he re-hides himself in Jesus. “Who would ever have thought to look for God there? I mean, God on the breast of Mary, God in a carpenter’s shop. God at the back of a fisherman’s boat. God on a cross.” (Michaelson, page 72) God surprises us with Immanuel, God-with-us. Encountering Jesus does not make faith easy, as it did not for people who met Jesus in his earthly life. Most turned their back on him. But God is yet revealed as we read and listen and imagine Jesus of Nazareth as witnessed to in Scripture. And we are free to decide if he is Truth.

We meet Jesus in all the ways in which God seeks to reach out to us: in story, in music, in art of many kinds, and in serendipidies which cannot be planned for. When we are found by God in Jesus Christ---and we own up to being found and not to having achieved this relationship, when we know ourselves as a sinners redeemed by the mercy and love of God, on a par with all other persons who are sinners in need of redemption--- we begin to be assured of God’s trustworthiness, and in the heavenly Jerusalem coming down from heaven as a bride adorned for her husband: the city of God. And we begin to see life differently.

And we hold on for dear life! We keep on getting up and setting out; we do not rely on our fickle feelings. (Frederick Buechner has said that faith is shown by which direction our feet are pointing.
 
Honestly, faith as Hebrews states it can best be described as “stubbornness, hard-headedness, perseverance, determination, endurance, even in the face of despair, weariness and disappointment.” We are empowered to have steadfast hearts, not consumed by anxiety, not put at risk by every threat or rumor or piece of bad news. (Texts for Preaching)

In the long run, how do we keep such faith inwardly alive? Thank God we do not have to walk this way alone.  Hebrews tells and illustrates a faithful response to discouragement and disappointment.

We “approach” God “with true hearts,” hearts like children, knowing that we are all supplicants and pilgrims, not matter how long we have been on the road. We rehearse the “confession of our hope,” and for me, this means feeding our souls with God’s favorite language, which I am convinced is music. We do a lot of singing of “nevertheless” hymns---such as “Amazing Grace,” and “O God Our Hope in Ages Past.” (Long) And we keep on meeting together and hearing the stories of our balcony people, all of the faithful who have gone before. The Bible tells us that the earliest Christians survived week by week by doing the simple things faithfully: gathering, breaking bread, listening to Scripture read and expounded, instructing new believers in the teachings of the faith, and serving their neighbors in their varied needs.

Did these faithful who have gone before always have warm feelings that God was with them? No. Did they always do the right things? No. Did they always go in the right directions? No. But they kept on getting up in the morning and putting one foot in front of the other. In the ordinary world, they kept bearing witness to the God of the Covenant. They held fast, always clinging to the divine promise and the divine presence.

The threats to our faith are real. “The world greets the church’s witness with either derisive scorn or a polite, secularist yawn. We [in this nation] are ignored more than persecuted.” (Will Willimon in Word and Witness, 1979) “      

Because we are reminded, minutely and repeatedly, of all of the evil in our world, we are tempted to live lives of stoic resignation or cynical rejection of responsibility; or we go shopping for an easier religion.  And when it comes to our spirits, we would like to gain a blessed state sooner rather than later. We want quick dividends on our religious investments.

 But faith rests on the graciousness of God, the Triune One, trust that God cares infinitely for us. “We must learn to throw ourselves on the mercies of God as sailors throw themselves upon the mercy of the seas.” (Michaelson, page 91) And, I would add, join with others in rowing the boat or setting the sails to catch the winds of the Spirit. We don’t get to choose which era we live in. We can choose what we give our lives to in the time we are here.

HOW IS IT WITH YOUR FAITH?

“How is it with your faith?” Frederick Buechner, when he was visiting Wheaton College, was astonished to hear students asking this question, or other similar ones, when they greeted each other.   I think that this is how early Methodists would have greeted each other, often as not. Not “How are things going” or “How are you doing?” Lord knows, many days, if we stop to reflect on the answers to these questions, we will be driven to despair!  But “How is it with your faith?” This question gets at the heart of the matter doesn’t it? Are you trusting that God is moving this whole world to be a Holy City? And do you believe that progress doesn’t all depend on you and me? And are you “seeing” things that others are blind to? Are you awake to see the signs of God at work in  your life, and in the larger world--- the signs of hope?

Sister Corita Kent was a Roman Catholic nun in the later 1960’s and 1970’s. She painted a poster with these words on it, words which I have often called to mind:

“The secret [of the faithful life] is to risk disaster, hope for triumph, and describe the forms of the incarnation.”

I need you to help me remember to hold on to faith, to be stubborn and steadfast in my trust in God’s future and God’s accompanying grace.