Psalm 26; Hebrews 11:1-2, 12:1-3
5th Sunday in Lent
I’m
going to give a respectful nod to the late Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes fame by
asking this – have you ever noticed that we usually talk about faith like it’s
an object? We speak of it more as a
noun, as a thing we have. Kind of like
saying we have a Swiss Army pocket knife in our pocket – a useful tool at our
disposal for all kinds of situations.
Or it’s kind of like saying we have a car. But what’s the main reason we have a
car? For action, right? To be in motion. To move us from one place to another. So we talk less about having a car and more
about our driving. It’s more helpful
talking about the verb.
All
this is to say how strongly I appreciate the following words from Presbyterian
pastor and author Fred Buechner – “Faith is better understood as a verb than as
a noun, as a process than as a possession. It is on-again-off-again rather than
once-and-for-all. Faith is not being sure where you're going, but going anyway.”[i]
Being
faithful, then, is an active state of being.
When any of us say “I have faith” or “I’m a faithful person” we aren’t
labeling ourselves as if we’re statues in a church museum. We are expressing that we are people of
constant action, people on the move with God, guided by the assurance of things hoped for and conviction of things not seen.
A
single panel comic strip was passed around at last week’s Men’s Bible
breakfast. It was created by the wry
witted Wiley Miller in his comic titled “Non Sequiter.” In case you aren’t quite sure or need a
reminder, a non sequiter is a concluding statement that doesn’t make logical
sense. (W.C. Fields, the funnyman heavy
drinker, had a rather perfect non sequiter when he said, “If I had my life to
live over … I’d live over a saloon.”)
The comic by Wiley Miller does indeed seem to be a non sequiter about a
famous happening from the Bible.
At
the center of the comic stands Moses.
Take a moment to picture him as he’s commonly been depicted. You see an old man with a full beard (he was
probably about 80 years old). He’s
wearing a robe tied with rope around his waist. Where’s he standing? Right at the edge of the Red Sea, of
course. And what’s in his right hand? A stirringly symbolic shepherding staff. His arms are outstretched. On both sides of him, towering high, are the
giant waves caused by God parting the just over 200 mile-wide body of water.[ii] This
is, of course, the most famous moment of the Exodus, of God's chosen people
being miraculously liberated from their Egyptian enslavers. But
in this comic, we have to pay attention to the word bubble above and to the
side of Moses head. He’s speaking to a
young man passing by him in the parted waters. We’d logically expect him to say something
like “Go! Flee to be free!” He instead
says, “I don’t think you completely grasp the seriousness of the situation
here, Caleb …” What makes this a non sequiter to smile at is because Caleb,
you see, is in his swim trunks and carrying a big surfboard! Down with the Pharoah, but surfs up dude!
We
chuckle because we know Caleb wasn’t supposed to dillydally there in the middle
of the divine deliverance. That's not
the best faithful response. He was to keep
going faithfully forward toward the promised land and not pause to play on the
great waves and therefore risk being drowned or captured. But I think it would have been even more
truly a non sequiter if this Caleb had pitched a tent there in the middle of
the water walls. Then we could have
identified with the folly of sitting out or sleeping through God’s powerful,
rescuing love at work opening up a way out of every enslaving power of sin.
We
are surrounded, preaches the ancient writer of the Book of Hebrews, by a great
cloud of witnesses. These are the
forebearers who followed God with faithful integrity, who constantly moving
ahead with a foundational, formative trust in God’s plan of salvation. We are especially reminded of the lives and
leadership of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Samson, David and
Samuel.
These heroes were mentioned because the early
Christian community who heard this sermon had been in the midst of considerable
suffering by the society surrounding them. They had “undergone great hardship,
including public ridicule, confiscation of property, and imprisonment
(10:32-34).”[iii] Many had all but drowned under such
pressures. They had stopped attending
worship, or worse, abandoned their faith completely (6:4-6). And
so this community was strongly exhorted to endure, to hold fast to the
assurance of things hoped for and keep conviction about things unseen.
Hebrews,
therefore, is very much a sermon about healing and recovering broken
faith. It reminds us that this is not
something we can ever muster up for ourselves.
It’s not an object that we can update or replace. It’s not a rusty Swiss Army pocket knife or
car. Faith is always an active spiritual gift. The capacity within us to be faithful -- to
keep moving ahead believing in the Gospel witness to God’s plan of rescuing us
from sin – at all times “comes to us at God’s own initiative.”[iv] It is given and facilitated by our Lord Jesus
Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit opening up our hearts and minds to
holy truth in every situation we experience.
The faithfulness of God, then, is what empowers us to live with
hope-filled responses to God’s promises.
It was Almighty action that nudged, pushed, inspired and emboldened every
faithful person in the great cloud of witnesses we read of in the Scriptures
and know of in our personal relationships … in the faithful friends sitting
behind, before and right next to you this very moment.
As
faithfulness is freely and graciously gifted to us by God, we are able to make
“visible” what would otherwise remain “invisible.”[v] We witness in word and action God’s new
creation in Christ breaking into our everyday lives. One way humans have always done this, is
through song. And what a strong witness
we sang together at the start of this worship service today. Did
you know the poetic words of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” were penned by a New
Jersey insurance salesman? Thomas
Chisolm, who was launched into this life in a Kentucky log cabin in 1866, wrote
them when he was fifty-seven years old.
At that age, he’d been a faithful Christian for thirty years. He’d briefly served as a pastor, but poor
health led to early retirement and, eventually, to the somewhat related work of insurance sales. He kept writing over one thousand poems,
however. And after this particular poem
was set to music, it became famous through George Beverly Shea’s singing of it
at Billy Graham crusades.
This great
hymn is one way the Holy Spirit continues to activate our faith by reminding us
of how God’s faithfulness is constantly being revealed through Scripture, all
of Creation and through our lives. It
indeed helps us to have strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow. Turn to it if your faithful heart is heavy
laden by suffering of one sort or another today. If you find yourself feeling stuck, unable
to actively follow the example and eternal hope we have in Jesus. If you are waiting for waves of woe and hope-drowning
doubts to crash down around you instead of moving forward with steadfast belief
in the greatness of God's unwavering faithfulness to you.
We
are all now passing through to the end of this Lenten season, with our cries of
hope and palm waving cheers for victory as well as our wails of doubt and
fearful denials. May we fervently pray
to be filled with greater faithfulness to the incomparable greatness of Jesus,
who as “the exact imprint of God’s very being” (1:3) is the “pioneer and
perfecter of our faith.” (12:2). Amen.
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