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| St. John's, Athol |
My sermon text is Hebrews 11:29-12:2, although I've also included Hebrews 11:23-28,
Last weekend, I was with the
good folks at St. Stephen’s in Pittsfield. I know that my friend, the Rev.
Nancy Strong, was here. In fact she shared her sermon with me, which I thought
was a good one about trust. She covered all the readings
but I want to remind you about the middle one. Last week was the first of four
weeks in a row that we are reading from Hebrews. Last weekend we heard these
words:
Now faith
is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that
the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from
things that are not visible.
Our stories intersect with
God’s Story and in some real sense they are the same story, since God’s Story
is an ongoing saga about forming a people after God’s own heart. And I think
that is what the writer of Hebrews 11 means to convey. We are surrounded by a
great cloud of witnesses, not only on All Saints’ Day, but every time we gather
to remember the Story and break the bread.
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| St. Paul's, Gardner |
I don’t believe that faith is
best understood as listing the seven doctrines you need to affirm to be counted
as “in.” In fact, I don’t believe that faith and belief are synonyms. This is
not to suggest that beliefs don’t matter. But beliefs change over time. Sometimes
very sincere people tell me that they aren’t sure they are really Christians
because they either don’t believe (or maybe don't understand) what it means to say
that the Son was “begotten, not made and of one Being with the Father.” But it
is a serious misunderstanding of faith to think we have lost our faith when what
we are in fact doing is questioning our beliefs.
Rather, faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things
not seen. Faith, in other words, is about trust. As you heard last weekend from Mother Nancy.
So today, that litany of
saints continues – and there are a lot of names that we heard. I want to focus
on two of them. Moses and Rahab. Actually, poor Moses got cut by the lectionary
committee because we skipped over the verses that are all about
his life. But it’s in the Bible, in chapter eleven of Hebrews, even if not in
our reading today. You can look it up at your leisure. And I assume that most
of you here today are pretty familiar with him already. By faith, Moses was hidden by
his parents; by faith, Moses (when he was grown up) refused to be called son of
Pharaoh’s daughter; by faith, he left Egypt unafraid of the king’s anger, by faith
he kept the Passover, by faith the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea…
Whether we first heard the
story from The King James Bible or Good News for Modern Man or from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible,
most of us know something about Moses and the Exodus. It’s a story immortalized
on film by Charlton Heston in The Ten
Commandments and for another generation in The Prince of Egypt. A new
Pharaoh arose in Egypt who didn’t know Joseph, the dreamer, and that Pharaoh
became nervous about an uprising. He did what dictators always do when they get
scared; he flexed his muscles and started coming down on hard on the Israelites
until finally he started ordering the deaths of male children. The people cried
out to God and God heard and saw their misery. And then God called Moses. You
remember at the burning bush, how Moses turned aside and encountered I AM, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob? God said, “I’m sending you to tell old Pharaoh to let my people go.” And
so the story goes...
We learn something about God
in this story: God cares about the plight of human beings, especially people who
are being oppressed. God cares about justice. God intervenes on behalf of those
without access to political power. So while all lives most definitely matter to
God, God takes the side of the most vulnerable lives. It’s not that Egyptian
lives don’t matter; it’s that slave lives need someone to advocate for them. But
God doesn’t do these things by waving a wand. So we also learn something about
ourselves, about what it means to be human—because God does these things by
arousing the concern of people like Moses and Aaron and Miriam. They become
instruments of God’s peace. God hears and
God sees, and then God sends.
The story of the Exodus and
the subsequent time in the Sinai is a long one. In fact, it takes up four of
the first five books of the Bible. All those plagues and Pharaoh’s hard heart,
a heart that would not be softened with reason. An escape filled with intrigue
and followed by forty years in the wilderness. Faith isn’t a short-term fix,
the story seems to suggest, but a long-term commitment. It’s a story passed on
to children and grandchildren, a story re-lived by every generation. Faith like
Moses and those Israelite refugees takes the long-view and requires patience
and courage. And trust.
Perhaps not everyone here knows
who Rahab the prostitute was. After forty years in the desert, after the death
of Moses, his assistant, Joshua, becomes the new leader in the sixth book of
the Bible, appropriately named the Book of Joshua. Joshua’s ministry is very different
from that of Moses. Moses led the people out of Egypt; Joshua will lead them
into the Promised Land. Their gifts are different and their leadership styles
are different because the work they are called to do is different. Joshua will
fight the battle of Jericho because as it turns out, the Promised Land isn’t an
empty parking lot; there are people living there (the Canaanites) and it turns
out they like living there. So the long battle begins, a theological and
political conflict that has still not been resolved thousands of years later.
Whose land is it? The theological answer the Bible gives, of course, is that it is God’s land and at best humans are called
to be stewards of it. But nonetheless, the writers of the Bible believed that
God promised the Israelites to take care of it, not the Canaanites. And so they
take to battle because when you want something that someone else has it doesn’t
usually work to tell them, “God said you should give it to us.” Before Joshua
‘fit the battle of Jericho, there is reconnaissance work to be done. Even if
you believe God is “on your side” that doesn’t mean you forsake good military
practices. So Joshua sends some Navy Seals into Jericho to see what they are
looking for.
And they head to the home of
Rahab, the prostitute. Now somebody sees them and calls the police, who promptly
show up at Rahab’s door. She’s smart and she sees which way the wind is
blowing. So she lies to the police. She tells them that the men were in fact
there, but they’ve left and if they head out really quickly they might be able
to catch them. But in fact she has hidden the spies on her roof. (Now having
spent some time in the Middle East, let me just add that middle eastern roofs
are not sloped because they have no worries about snow; they are flat and often
have little terraces where you can go and sit and drink and smoke.)
But the main point here is
that if Rahab is caught, she is guilty of treason. She has hidden two enemy
spies who are in her city doing reconnaissance work, spies who intend to destroy
her city and conquer it. She tells them all she wants in return is for her life
and the life of her family to be spared. She tells them the whole city is
worried, but she heard about their God and about what he did to the Egyptians
and she’d rather be for ‘em than against them.
By faith, Rahab the prostitute did not perish with
those who were disobedient, because she had received the spies in peace. With no disrespect intended to good old Moses, I worry
a bit about hero worship that paralyzes ordinary people from being faithful in
ordinary ways. When we turn people into superheroes we tend to worship them,
rather than emulate them. I love St. Francis but he is the most revered and
least emulated saint in the Church. Don’t forget that before he started talking
to birds he stood stark naked in the public square and gave away all of his
money. In our own day, Martin Luther King gets a holiday, no doubt well
deserved. But King was like Moses, and if that’s the case then maybe Rosa Parks
is something like a modern-day Rahab, an ordinary woman who just got tired of
being told where she could sit. She wasn’t a superhero; just someone who said, “enough
is enough already.”
Now I don’t want to push the
comparison too far. But I do want to push the notion that you can find saints
anywhere you choose to look and if you are only looking for Moses and Martin
you will miss the most amazing people who cross your path every day. You can
meet them at work or at school or at tea (or over coffee.) And sometimes even
at Church.
Faith compels us to better
learn the story of God’s people, not only Abraham and Sarah and Moses but Rahab
and Gideon and Judith and Hannah, a list much too long to tell on a summer
weekend. We cultivate faith when we pay attention to the births and marriages
and deaths that are part of our extended lives in community. When we pay
attention to that first day of college or the last. And better still, all those
parents’ weekends in between and the challenges with a roommate and the
giddiness of a new romance. When we pay attention to changing a diaper or
teaching that same child to hit a golf ball or to drive; when we unload the
dishwasher or take a long walk along the beach or pick up our kids from summer
camp and can see it in their eyes, they have been changed somehow. And by God’s
mercy, so are we.
We are part of a pilgrim
people—a communion of saints, a great cloud of witnesses. And I think the
journey itself is home, which is to say that it is along the way that we
discover the God we seek. By faith we, too, do the best we can and by faith we
sometimes even do great things. But more often faith is about doing the small
things, things that at the time it isn’t even clear make a difference.
By faith we do the work God gives us to do. By faith we press on, even when we feel tired or
bored or fearful. Because people like Moses and Rahab and so many countless
others were lights in their own generation, we pray that by faith we might
allow God’s light to shine through us in this time and in this place, so that
the next chapter of the story—of God’s Story—may continue to unfold here, in this time and place.
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