August 11, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

The Substance of Hope

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 27
Hebrews 11:1–3, 8–16

Tonight’s scripture passage is about faith. In order to explain what faith is, it reminds the reader of the story of Abraham. I’m going to be retelling part of that story tonight in order to make the point that faith is not easy. In fact, faith is best understood by looking at the story of a person who experienced life mostly as a series of deep desires that were not accomplished on the schedule that he would have chosen. And that is a story to which most of us can relate.

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When I was in college, I lived in east Tennessee one summer, building houses as part of a flood relief program. The foreman, Bill, was an evangelical Christian who had this trick he loved to do. He had a game with a little wood block, the kind of thing you pick up in the gift shop at Cracker Barrel, that involves some kind of sleight-of-hand magic trick. Bill would walk around with that little game, showing it to people, hiding the secret of how it worked, and while he did it he’d quote Hebrews 11:1: “Now, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

I always think of Bill fondly when I read Hebrews 11:1, but the older I’ve become, I realize that story is representative of an interpretation of this passage that I disagree with. Faith isn’t about hiding the truth, and faith is not about some trite formula where you believe things that you don’t know or can’t prove. Faith is about finding a way through hard times, times when you want something very, very badly and you can’t seem to get it. Faith is about the way people continue to function when they can’t find a job or a person to spend their life with; it’s about parents who maintain hope when their errant children can’t seem to get on track, and it is about couples who want children and can’t get pregnant. Faith is about how to live when answers do not come and when prayers seem to go unanswered, because faith is not an answer we have to find. Faith is a way of living; it is a mature understanding that sometimes the answers we want are not there when we want them. Finally, faith is the realization that the unsettled place where you are may still be okay.

In order to understand all of this, you have to read the rest of the passage from Hebrews and think back to the story it references from the book of Genesis, the story of Abraham and Sarah.

Abraham and Sarah are considered to be giants of this thing called faith, but not because their story indicates that faith is easy and not because they were without doubts.

Their story is told at great length in Genesis, but today I’m just going to highlight a few parts of it.

When we first meet Abraham, God visits him and makes him a promise. God tells Abraham he’s going to be the father of a great nation and that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky. In order for this to be true, Abraham is told that he must take his wife, Sarah, and move to a new homeland, a place called Canaan. If you’ve ever left home to strike out on your own and try your luck in a new place, you know how he must have felt. Abraham, presumably because he is a giant of faith, goes, but when they get to Canaan, a horrible drought is going on, and they doubt God’s promise, so instead, Abraham leaves for Egypt, where he gets in trouble with the king and eventually gets kicked out. Back to Canaan they go. But there the frustrations continue, Abraham can’t seem to get Sarah pregnant, so he goes out and finds another woman named Hagar and gets her pregnant, and they have a child named Ishmael. This causes plenty of predictable unrest in their home, so soon God visits Abraham again to remind him that it is Sarah with whom he is to have a child and start a great nation. Abraham doesn’t believe it and neither does Sarah, because by now they’re too old, but lo and behold, God is right, and Sarah gets pregnant, and they have a child and name him Isaac.

Those of you who know your Bible stories will remember that Isaac eventually has a child, Jacob, and Jacob has twelve children, and it is from those twelve that we get the names of all of the tribes of Israel. Here’s the problem: remember the promise about descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky? We all know it came true because we know what happened with Abraham’s grandson Jacob, but in Abraham’s lifetime, he never got to see it. You see, this is a story of a man, a couple, really, who believe in a promise God gives them about what their life is supposed to be. But there are twists and turns in that story, lots and lots of waiting, several times when Abraham gets frustrated with the plan and tries to take matters into his own hands, and finally, at the end of the story, a major part of the promise that, as far as Abraham was able to see at the time, seemed to be unfulfilled. This man is the father of our faith.

Why is Abraham the symbol of faith? The answer I can give you for that may not be completely satisfying, but it is honest and practical, and it has to do with people like all of you. I think most people know why Abraham is a symbol of faith, because of what people in congregations do, over and over again. People visit me in my office because they want to talk to a pastor, someone who is supposed to know about faith. They come with lots of different stories, but what all the stories share in common is that they are Abraham and Sarah stories—they are stories about not getting what you want when you want it and wondering why. People do visit me with good news. To be sure, people love to introduce me to their new significant other and call me when they have a baby. But many more people come to visit me when they cannot seem to find someone to share their life with and have begun to feel terribly alone, and couples come talk to me when they can’t get pregnant and have spent thousands trying every technique available and needing help because the stress of that expectation is tearing their marriage apart. People let me know when they’ve received a raise or a promotion or when the business they started is finally taking off—I’m always thrilled to hear it. But the more important conversations we have come when they are lamenting their present job or agonizing over if they will ever get promoted and wondering if it’s time to leave. I have been present with older adults who are basking in the good things that life has brought them. But more often, I talk with older adults who tell me about how much seems left unfinished, about relationships that remain broken and dreams that never quite came to fruition.

I have come to believe that when people talk to their pastor about these things, it is because they already know something about faith: faith is not intended for the times in life when dreams are achieved or when plans move along just as you intended. Faith is for the in-between times, the waiting times, the yearning-for-something times that last a lot longer than the successes and victories in our lives. These times of waiting are what connect us all to the father of our faith, who, according to the passage we read today, “died in faith without having received the promises.” As I said, it may not be a satisfying message, but it is deeply honest and practical.

Faith is what we need when life does not give us what we want. That was true for Abraham and is true for us and has been true for everyone in between.

Emma Bovary, the protagonist in Flaubert’s great novel Madame Bovary, is described this way: “Before marriage, she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love never came. She must, she thought, have been mistaken. Then Emma tried to find out what one meant in life by the words happiness, passion, and rapture—words that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.”

Flaubert goes on to tell the story of this young woman, Emma, on her unsuccessful quest for happiness, making every wrong turn, trying in every way she can think of to produce for herself the happiness she read about it books, happiness and adventure and life that she thought she deserved but could never seem to find.

I talked with a Bible study group here at the church this week who agreed that this illusive quest is true for most of us. We walk through life thinking, for instance, that happiness and contentment will arrive when we meet the right person. Many of us meet that person only to discover that it doesn’t fix everything. Having met the person you were looking for, you soon begin to have other problems. You think that the problems in marriage will get easier when you have a baby and can focus on that together. Then you realize that children are expensive, so you seek a promotion that will provide what you need—which eventually leads to the realization of how disconnected you are from the good family life you want so badly but can’t have because you’re always at work.

Where does it end? I wanted so badly today to find an answer to share with you all—a positive prescription of faith that tells you exactly how to live through hard times. I sat at my desk pouring through my sermon files, staring blankly at my bookshelf, and wondering why I couldn’t find the perfect illustration of how to live a faithful life. Then I read the story again and what it said, that Abraham “died in faith without having received the promises.” I finally concluded that the most important thing for me to do is to be honest with you and to tell you that living faithfully often means waiting and keeping hope alive when times are rough.

The Bible does something that is very challenging but also very beautiful, because it is honest. When the Bible talks about faith it does not provide trite stories about easy happiness. When the Bible talks about faith, it tells challenging stories of people who have real problems and wait a long time, often never getting the answers they want.

The good news is that you may be waiting to accomplish something, but God is not waiting for that. God loves you for who you are already. Even though you and I try, like Abraham and Emma Bovary and everyone else, to make our own luck and to find our own shortcut to happiness, and even though from where God sits watching it all, our errors and striving probably seem quite foolish, the God who made you and who knows all the places where you’ve gone astray loves you even in the deeply flawed condition you are in today.

When Craig Barnes, the President of Princeton Theological Seminary, writes about the difference between what we think will make us happy and what God wants for us, he does so with a story that is quite simple: When you were a child and someone asked what you wanted to be when you grew up, you were trained to give answers describing all you would do: “a fireman, a teacher, a doctor, an astronaut.” Instead, suggests Barnes, it seems like God’s hope for us is that, when asked about what you’d like most to be, you would learn to answer, “I’d like to be myself” (Craig Barnes, Yearning, p. 81).

Whatever you are waiting to have happen in your life, whatever doubts you carry, whatever impatient desires are eating you alive from the inside, know this: God is not waiting for you to accomplish something in order for God to think that your life has value. What God is waiting for is for you to think about what you want to be and answer, “I’d like to be the person God called me to be. I’d like to be myself.” Amen.