August 11, 2013 | 8:00 a.m.

Made of Faith

Matt Helms
Minister for Children and Families, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 33:12–22
Genesis 15:1–6
Hebrews 11:1–3, 8–16

There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others, . . . and I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.

John Green
The Fault in Our Stars

The beginning of this Hebrews passage is among the best-known passages of the Bible: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” It is a beautiful definition of faith and perhaps one of the most descriptive; it challenges us to hold true to something that we can’t actually grasp in our hands or see with eyes. I have a plaque in my office with this verse engraved upon it, and every time I see it, I’m reminded of one of my deepest convictions: that there is indeed more to life than what we can see, hear, and touch. There is, of course, no empirical evidence for this conviction—at least not in the way that we would prefer to test it—but I’d imagine that many of you feel a similar way: that there is something greater than ourselves at work in this world.

Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been thinking about imagination, faith, and hope as I prepare for Vacation Bible School this upcoming week, but studying this scripture passage from Hebrews reminded me of a story about the power of a child’s faith. In the Christmas season of 2011, a five-year-old girl who lived in Seattle was doing what many kids in this country do: dreaming of presents. She didn’t end up with a long list, but there were things on there that you’d imagine that any little girl would want: a doll, a tea set, a new pair of shoes, and a new pair of pants. Once she had finished her list, she brought it to her mother so that they could take the list to Santa. But as they read over the list together, her mother realized that she wouldn’t be able to afford any of these things for her daughter. Her mother had not been able to find work for the last several months, and they barely had enough money to get by. But rather than tell her daughter that she wouldn’t be receiving any of these things this year, the mom thought back to a tradition that she had growing up: she would write a letter to Santa and then tie that letter onto the string of a balloon. So she sat with her daughter, wrote out what she wanted, and together they went to the park with two pink helium balloons. As they were preparing to let it go, I’d imagine that little girl with filled with a sense of hope—some would even say faith—that the note was going to get where it was meant to go. I’d also imagine the mother had quite the opposite feeling, knowing all too well the realities of what would happen to that balloon—and knowing that there wasn’t even any place they were trying to send it to. But together they let go of the pink balloons and watched for a minute as this letter floated up into the sky, and then they turned around and heading back to their home.

We live in a time when faith has acquired a sort of bad connotation—a sense of a willingness to suspend reality, and perhaps even fly in the face of it, for the sake of creating an illusion for ourselves that we want to believe. I’m sure you have heard arguments to this effect before, but some of the major names like Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins have quotes that I think sum up the viewpoint rather well. Russell said, “Where there is evidence, no one speaks of faith. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence.” Dawkins offers an even harsher critique: “Faith is a process of active non-thinking. It degrades our understanding of the natural world by allowing anyone to make a claim about the way things are based on their own thoughts and perceptions.”

This level of cynicism about faith is somewhat unprecedented, but it certainly has bled into many other arenas of life than just the religious. I can’t imagine many of us have faith in the state of politics these days, just as many people are losing faith in the American Dream—whatever it is that means. But having faith is often written about as a crucial piece of being a Christian, particularly in our Protestant tradition. So what is the role that faith is meant to have in our lives? And does that mean flying in the face of what we can perceive and quantify?

Two Sundays ago, I preached a sermon about prayer and how prayer often means engaging in a struggle rather than receiving an easy answer. It was a sermon asking what promises we have during this life, a question that is connected to this sermon about faith today. One of my favorite books from last year—The Fault in Our Stars, written by John Green—deals with this very question of the promises that we have in life and the struggles that we will face. Hazel, the seventeen-year-old protagonist, begins the story with terminal lung cancer, and the book follows her over the course of several months as she finds love and hope for the future, even as she remains all too aware that her time on earth is finite.

The author, John Green, was actually a former hospital chaplain and was enrolled at the University of Chicago Divinity School before going on to be a writer, so he brings a keen awareness of how caught between worlds Hazel would be, but he also manages to show how much hope a person can have even when the future is uncertain. The quote on your bulletin cover comes from one of Hazel’s final speeches in the book—a reminder that even when the future is uncertain, there is still a hope and a promise that remains regardless of whatever comes next, a forever within the numbered days, as Hazel puts it.

Even though there are several thousand years in between the fictional character of Hazel and the historical character of Abraham, it is amazing how similar the plot of The Fault in Our Stars is to the story from our first lesson today. Abram and Sarah have an uncertain future—they are both old, well past when they would expect to have families—but they receive a promise from God: there would be a forever even out of their numbered days. God invites Abram to look out into the night sky and the seemingly infinite number of stars. “Count the stars, if you are able to count them,” God says. “So shall your descendants be.”

It was an unbelievable promise, one that would have been quite easy to scoff at. Taken together, all the evidence that Abram and Sarah had did point towards an inability to have children. Why should they believe that they would have descendants outnumbering the stars? In a similar fashion, all of the evidence that Hazel had said that she was dying, so why should she believe that she could find love and life in that moment? The answer, it seems, was faith. Genesis records Abram as immediately believing the Lord in that moment, something that the author of Hebrews writes about as the defining example of what it means to have faith. This faith—pistis in Greek—is defined as a deep-seated trust that something will occur, even when left unseen.

The historical context to this Hebrews passage is that the epistle was written sometime towards the end of the first century, well after the time of Jesus and likely around the time that the Gospels were being written. This would have been the time when a second generation of Christians was coming into existence after the work of the apostles during the middle part of the century, and there seems to have been some disillusionment that the world looked awfully similar to the way that it did when the disciples began. Rome was still the power of the day; Christians were still a marginalized group that was unfortunately being met with persecution; and most people had never even heard of Jesus.

It was into that context that the author of Hebrews wrote that faith was the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. It was a bold statement in a world where all of the available evidence pointed to the demise of this early Christian movement. And yet, amazingly, Christianity managed to grow beyond its uncertain beginnings, outlasting Rome and growing towards all corners of the globe. Dawkins and Russell would no doubt have characterized the statements being made in Hebrews as ones that were made out of emotion rather than evidence, and they would have seen them as flying in the face of our understanding of how the world works. They are not, I think, completely wrong in that assessment. And yet, as we have no doubt discovered, the unexpected happens all of the time. Paradoxes abound in this world and stories like The Fault in Our Stars or Abraham looking up to the stars remind us that there are questions in life—big questions—that do not follow set paths. They are not questions that can be solved or even quantified, no matter how much evidence we try to gather. They are questions of purpose. Questions of why? Questions about the future and our place in it. Questions that can only be answered with faith.

The earliest Reformers—Luther and Calvin—believed so strongly in the importance of faith that it became a hallmark of the Protestant church along with the understanding of God’s grace. Without faith, they reasoned, we would be unable to be the people that God called us to be. We are not defined by what we do, although that certainly matters to the day-to-day lives of those around us. Rather, we are defined by our belief and trust in God and our belief and trust that there is more to life than our experience of it. We are a people who are made of faith, made to forever dream and aspire, to find and grasp for infinity even within the confines of our limited days on earth. To be alive is to be able to have faith—a faith in others and a faith in God. As the psalmist from our psalter lesson today said, “Our soul waits for the Lord; he is our help and shield. Our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name. Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us, even as we hope in you.” We may not feel that level of faith in God—and what God is calling us to do—all of the time, but I believe we do experience faith consistently in our lives each and every day. And it is from that openness, that conviction of things not seen, that we can begin to find the infinity within our numbered days.

After that five-year-old girl and her mother attached her Christmas letter to two pink balloons and let them go at a nearby park, the balloons did what any balloons filled with helium do. They floated and floated. Caught by the unpredictable gusts of winds high above Seattle, that letter began a 700 mile journey down the Pacific Coast before settling in the middle of a farm located in northern California. There were many possibilities for the deflated balloons and the letter attached. The highest probability was that it would have gotten shredded by a piece of tractor equipment without the farmer giving it a second thought. After all, how many times have we seen a popped balloon or tattered piece of paper on the side of the road and dismissed it as trash? But on that day, the farmer and his son happened to be out riding through their land on an ATV when they came across the deflated balloon. Rather than leave the garbage there, they decided to pick it up, and they noticed the letter attached to the front. After reading the letter, the two men went out to the store and bought everything the girl had asked for—a new doll, a tea set, a new pair of shoes and pants—and shipped these items to the address that had been scrawled on the front so that the presents could make it there before Christmas.

I’d imagine that there are many who would dismiss this story as mere chance, an anecdotal story about a little girl’s hope and faith that was rewarded in a way that no one would have believed. But I have a hope, a faith, that this was far more than chance, that there is something far greater at work in this world than what we can measure. This hope and this faith is fundamental to who we are as people, and I hope no amount of cynicism will ever shake that from us. There are so many questions in life that do not have easy answers—that will require us to struggle—but there are also moments of beauty, moments of love, that transcend the world we are used to and remind us that there is so much more. Thanks be to God for this gift and challenge of faith—the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of all the things that far too often go unseen. Amen.