Things Unseen
Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16
When I was a kid and my mom was tired of answering the myriad questions that I would pose, most of these questions were “Why?” (I asked that a lot), she would end the inquiry with a response that would stop me my tracks and infuriate me beyond belief. She would say, “Because I said so.” Since then I have learned that this is a tactic used by many parents and even Jeremy’s dad Tom would end his endless line of questioning with a loud shout, “Because!!!” And this because would not only stop the questions but get them all laughing so hard that they nearly forgot what the question was. While this approach often makes sense in parenting, it hasn’t ever quite worked for me when it comes to the life of faith.
When I was just beginning to wade into the water of Christian Discipleship as a child, I never much liked it when I asked about faith and adults would crush my curiosity with the clichéd and uncreative response, “You just need to believe.” I have heard similar stories from some of you who were thrown out of CCD classes or not allowed to be confirmed for asking questions or from those of you who, even as children, couldn’t quite swallow the notion that following Jesus means covering your eyes and covering your ears and closing your mind.
And yet there is something about faith, something about what it means to put trust in a being that we cannot see that bristles against our intellect and even sometimes our dignity. Faith, by most accounts, is a bit reckless because it requires us to take the leap and then grow, even when what we want most deeply is the strength and courage to grow enough to take the leap. Rarely are we invited to find our footing before God shows up, instead we are asked to step out when we can see very little and for some of us it is simply too much. In his poetic translation of the Bible called, The Message, Eugene Peterson rewrites the scripture in Hebrews this way, "The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It's our handle on what we can't see.”
And most of us are not good at that. We want some kind of evidence that God is real, some way to verify that if we are to stake our lives deeply in this God, then He or She owes us a little something. How about a miracle or a sign? How about a voice in the night or an encounter with an angel? We might even want to shout out to God, “Alright if you really want me, if you really want my heart, show me something!” But, that is the thing about faith. It is almost as if God wants us, as if God wants us to give in to love, to surrender to that which we cannot see before we can ever know what faith really is. If we received the miracle the way we wanted or experienced a sign right when we needed it or heard a voice or saw an angel, then the trust that faith requires is based on something we can verify, instead of something on which we are invited to trust. If we had it our way, then there is hardly room for God to have it Her way.
In the Letter to the Hebrews, the author speaks of Abraham’s faith, a faith that was strong enough for him to set out to a place he didn’t know, in search of a life in God he could not see. He stayed in the land that God told him about, living in tents and awaiting on a child that he was told would not come. By most accounts, his choices were reckless. If he had a Committee in the tents, I am sure they would have advised him to wait until there was enough money in the coffers and more of a plan before they moved ahead with what he told them was God’s hopes for them as a people. But, if he waited for them to have it their way, then there would have been hardly enough room for God to have it His way.
There is so much uncertainty in our country, in our world and even here in our church, it would be easy to say that faith is a joke- that it is anti-intellectual and silly to trust in a life force we cannot see, especially about important things like restructuring the church or calling a new pastor. And even some among us, have decided that there is too much uncertainty to be a part of what God is doing here right now, but it is in times like these that God seems to be most present. Just because we cannot see it, it does not mean that it is less real. Just because we do not know what lies ahead, does not mean that it is not in the hands of God. Just because we cannot describe it, in terms that the world would understand, does not mean that it is not filled with God’s Spirit.
In his book, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, Frederick Buechner writes, "By faith, we understand, if we are to understand it at all, that the madness and lostness we see all around us and within us are not the last truth about the world but only the next to the last truth….Faith is the eye of the heart, and by faith we see deep down beneath the face of things – by faith we struggle against all odds to be able to see – that the world is God's creation even so. It is he who made us and not we ourselves, made us out of his peace to live in peace, out of his light to dwell in light, out of his love to be above all things loved and loving. That is the last truth about the world." Not that the lostness and uncertainty will have the final say, but that the faith we have in God will lead us to the right place.
Each of you are a part of a long line of hungry, doubting and yet believing hearts that stretch all the way back to Abraham and all of those who have gone before us. Like them, in the words of the Book of Hebrews, we dare to live with “assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen.” This does not mean that we always know for sure where we are going, but that we believe that the power of love, that the life force that is our God, is worthy place to invest our hearts. Like a torch passed on, this faith from Abraham, is now held by all of you. You are the stewards of that promise, you hold that faith together, when you doubt and when it is hard and when the promised land seems nowhere to be found. Because of what you have promised together, because of your longing to follow Jesus, you will hold this unseen thing, this invisible strength that is our faith in God, which invites us as a church to embark on adventures that are only possible with God.
Many church people forget this core tenet of the life of faith. Churches don’t exist simply to exist, we are here to follow God and to do what Jesus did, which means that we are invited to do that which is only possible with God, otherwise we are not much different from other non-profit organizations that exist to care for people. Churches exist to follow God’s Spirit, to let faith lead us. With all that you have done and all that I know God is calling you to become, it isn’t worth doing if you can do it without God. Playing it safe, staying comfortable is rarely the time when you will get to see God, for real. Abraham yearned for a new reality, a dream that was beyond the wildest imaginations of those who walked with him, it was conviction of things unseen. And as you walk together through all of the unknown, through all of the uncertainty that is ahead, through what may feel like madness and lostness, know that faith in what we cannot see, while it might feel reckless, is “not believing without proof but trusting without reservation”…faith takes us beyond what we already know and ends up giving us more than we could have ever imagined. Without faith, without daring to live with “assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen” we would never really know for sure what God looks like and we would never know what it is like to be fully alive. Amen.