August 15, 2010 | 8:00 a.m.

Faithful?

Sarah A. Johnson
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 8:1–2, 8–19
Hebrews 11:29–12:2

The promise [of faith] is not simply an extension of the present, based on what seems possible at the moment. It is a new creation that invades our present reality and makes the impossible possible.

John C. Shelley

It is not often that you find St. Augustine of Hippo and hip-hop group Outkast referred to in the same sentence. In the fourth century, St. Augustine wrote, “Our hearts, O Lord, are restless until they rest in you.” Augustine found himself searching for stability, for the source of life that would feed his soul and quench his thirst for meaning in a restless life. I think that Outkast writes about something similar in the song “Church” on their self-titled album, when they write, “Why are we here? Please tell me—what are we here for? / My life is going downhill like some cardboard in the snow / My bank account is froze, and I don’t think I can get out of this hole / Feels like a figure-four leg lock / Like the jury went away and came back deadlocked / I can’t move, I can’t eat, I can’t even breathe. . . . Why are we here? Huh? Tell me—what are we here for?”

Different times, different life circumstances, and yet they each, in their own way, articulate something important about the human experience. Namely, that universal human search for something we can trust. Who among us does not know the longing to discover that thing that above all else we can hold onto in good times and bad? Something where we ground our lives in the midst of it all, something steady, something worthy of our trust in which we can place our hope.

The Bible tells stories, a lot of stories, about this search for fidelity, about human beings and their struggle to endure. One of the most important characteristics of the Bible is that is doesn’t spend a lot of time theorizing about God. It does some, but it does not hypothesize much about God and God’s attributes. It isn’t interested in defining the nature of God or writing a theological treatise proving the existence of God. For the most part, the Bible tells stories about God’s interaction with God’s people. They are very human stories about men and women and children as they navigate their lives, as they intersect with the sacred.

This is no different for the book of Hebrews. The author of the book of Hebrews writes to a group of Christians who are struggling to find an anchor to hold onto amongst the chaos of their lives. They are, by all accounts, what we might call second-generation Christians. Thus they are well-versed in the faith, having been raised in it, but now as life continues on, they are beginning to grow weary.

So the author of Hebrews writes to them some words of encouragement.

Mainly, the author writes that it is by faith that we endure.

The Greek word for faith that is used here, Pistos, is best defined as “something believed in that is worthy of one’s trust.” Even in the midst of our darkest hours, our longest waiting, our deepest struggle, we can hold onto our faith in God as an anchor. Our faith, argues the author of Hebrews, gives us the courage to endure. And as evidence for this faith that we can trust, the author of Hebrews names a long list of people who have endured by this faith, culminating in the example of Jesus.

In doing so, the author of Hebrews has given us what I think are three important claims about our faith and the courage that it provides even in the darkest of hours. I want to offer them to you this morning.

The first is this: Remember, you are not alone.

Whenever we feel burdened or weighed down by the struggles in lives, feeling we have lost our way, the writer of Hebrews reminds us that we stand in the company of a great crowd of people who have come before us who have also endured by faith. The Bible talks about this as the great cloud of witnesses.

In his commentary on the book of Hebrews, Fred Craddock describes it as a great unbroken cord of people who, throughout the ages, held on by faith and that weaves through the sanctuary, a cord onto which we grab hold and take part.

If you have had the opportunity to serve as an elder or deacon or trustee in the church, you have felt the very tangible expression of this cloud of witnesses. A part of the ordination of elders, deacons, and ministers in the Presbyterian church involves the laying on of hands, in which those preparing to serve the church kneel at the front of the sanctuary while all those people who have ever served in an office in the church stand behind them, placing their hands on the shoulders of those being ordained or the shoulders of the person in front of them. The hands and bodies form a literal crowd of witnesses who have walked in faith and in hope before you and who strengthen you for the journey ahead.

I can still feel the weight of those hands pressing down on my shoulder from my own ordination, that same literal and figurative presence of all those who had kneeled in faith before me.

In his commencement address to students at Andover Newtown Theological Seminary, professor and theologian Herbert Gazork spoke these words: “You will be lonely, but never forget that you are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses and stand in noble succession of prophets and priests of the Most High. And may you in your darkest hours hear that voice from the ramparts of eternity, ‘Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.’” Gazrok had himself known many difficult days. He had been persecuted and pushed out by colleagues and trustees at the conservative university where he had served as a professor of religion, pushed out for views they deemed unacceptable to their orthodox teachings. Gazork wanted to remind his students you are never alone.

The second is this: Remember to remember.

In the midst of struggle, we remember there is a bigger picture, a larger story in which God is present. The author of Hebrews reminds us that faith can only be understood in the context of the larger story of God’s continual interaction with God’s people. Sometimes we forget about what God has done in the past or what God might be doing in the future and we become focused only on “God, what are you doing for me right now?”

Faith in God does not only rely on what seems possible in the present. There is a history, a greater story.

This upcoming week will start this church’s annual session of Vacation Bible School. It is a great week in the life of the church, in which hallways are full of loud outbursts of laughter and the constant pounding of little feet as they navigate to and from the various sessions. Each year there is a theme that goes along with a particular story from the Bible. Donna Gray, our Minister for Children and Families, and her team work hard transforming spaces into exact likenesses of those from the biblical story. Last year I wandered down to the kitchen in search of a cup of coffee and instead found myself in the middle of the Israelite wilderness and parting of the Red Sea, with former pastoral resident Joann Lee wrapped in cotton batting as God’s presence in the pillar of the cloud. All you could see were her eyes.

It’s an entire week devoted to telling children the stories of our faith. They learn the characters, the songs—all reminders of God’s long and faithful interaction with God’s people.

I like to think that perhaps there ought to be a Vacation Bible School for adults. Kind of like summer camp, where we all took ourselves less seriously, but more importantly a place where we gathered to remember to tell the larger story of God.

Where we gather to remember that God is faithful through it all.

And the third thing is this: Faith finds its greatest courage in hope.

In hope that is not to be confused with optimism—a blind, cheery acceptance that everything is OK—but rather, as the writer of Hebrews reminds us, a perseverance born of suffering and grounded in the person of Jesus Christ, who suffered as we do and who, by dying and rising again, conquered the very real powers of sin and death.

Peter Gomes, professor of Christian morals and minister of the Memorial Chapel at Harvard, has written a wonderful chapter on the meaning and purpose of Christian hope. “Hope is not merely the optimistic view that somehow everything will turn out right in the end if everyone just does as we do,” Gomes writes in The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good about the Good News? “Hope is the more rugged, the more muscular view that even if things don’t turn out all right and aren’t all right, we will endure through and beyond the times that disappoint or threaten to destroy us. “

This hope requires work, effort, and expenditure without the assurance of an easy and ready return.

This kind of hope has often sustained the African American community through nearly four centuries of exploited experience in the United States. Ironically, it is a hope born of a gospel that was used to enslave them. No easy optimism would do here. Only the hope that Paul spoke of in his letter to the Romans: “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Romans 5:3–5).

Throughout their long history of suffering and frustration, Jews have long endured by hope: hope that people will behave better—namely Christian people—but their ultimate hope is in God, who promised never to abandon them.

The rabbis tell us that when a wise man was asked what he would do if he knew that the world was soon to end, the man replied that he would plant a tree. There is no more hopeful sign in the world than a tree planted in faith by one who will likely never see its maturity but whose experience, however limited, is sustained by hope grounded in God and nourished by suffering.

Hope works where nothing else does. We endure through faith nourished by hope.

“Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
“Why are we here? What are we here for?”

When all that surrounds us seems to falter and fail, the writer of Hebrews reminds us, our faith will provide us the strength to endure, knowing that God is with us and for us in all circumstances and God’s promises can be trusted. This is good news. Good news indeed.

All thanks be to God. Amen.