Grace Presbyterian Church
August 14, 2016, Pentecost 13C
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Faith: A Matter of Action
Something major
happened in the world of Major League Baseball last week. Ichiro Suzuki, now
playing for the Miami Marlins, got his 3000th major-league hit last
week by stinging a triple into the right-field gap against the Colorado
Rockies, becoming only the 30th player to achieve that milestone in
the 140-year history of the sport.
Ichiro’s case (and
yes, he’s called by his first name) is a bit different than most, though. Until
age 27, he played in the professional leagues in his native Japan, achieving
well over a thousand hits and renown as one Japan’s best players. He was also a
certifiable celebrity in his baseball-mad native country. By most definitions,
he had everything an athlete could need. But instead of continuing to play in
Japan and enjoying his fame and success, he maneuvered his Japanese team into
posting him as available to sign with teams in Major League Baseball, where he
finally signed with the Seattle Mariners. While a number of pitchers had come
to the US and had success, no position player (Ichiro is an outfielder) had
ever done so. Suffice to say that Ichiro broke that trend.
But why?
To say the least,
Ichiro had faith in his baseball abilities. He had faith (or, in deference to
last week’s sermon, he trusted) that
he had the talent and intelligence to succeed in Major League Baseball whether
any other Japanese hitter had or not. But he didn’t just have that faith or
trust, or even belief in himself if you want to call it that; he was willing to
back up that faith or trust or belief with action, putting himself on the line
to prove he was as good as he believed he was. This wasn’t what most observers
expected; many in MLB believed he might do o.k., but certainly most weren’t
expecting him to be the major star that he has become.
Ichiro’s
confidence in his abilities and willingness to back it up with action isn’t exactly like the members of the “roll
call” of the “heroes of faith” we resume in Hebrews today, but it’s not a bad
metaphor. Unlike Ichiro, these biblical examples of trust did not merely have
to trust in their own abilities; instead, their trust was in God alone, a far
more secure locus of our trust than anything we ourselves can accomplish.
The roll call
resumes in today’s reading after a little more elaboration about Abraham,
including that horrible moment when he was about to sacrifice his son Isaac at
God’s seeming command. It’s hard to know exactly what Abraham was about in this
case; was he trusting that God would indeed pull back from his command to
sacrifice his son, his one heir through whom God’s promise of a great nation of
descendents was to be fulfilled? Was he trusting that God would find another
way to fulfill that promise, and willingly giving up his seemingly innocent
son? It’s a hard story, a kind of “text of terror” that, if we’re reading
scripture with any integrity at all, should make us stop short and frankly be
offended by it.
Continuing, the
roll call comes to Moses and his leadership of the Hebrew people out of Egypt,
where we pick up a bit in the middle of the sequence. To begin anything with “By faith the (Hebrew) people … “ is actually a bit ironic,
since back in chapter three of this very same sermon those same people are
reprimanded for their lack of faith
for their rebelliousness in the wilderness, an event that happened after the crossing of the Red Sea that
is referenced in today’s reading.
There’s a warning
for us here. This faith, this trust to which Hebrews encourages us isn’t a
one-time thing. Since we’re in the midst of the Olympics right now I’ll borrow
a track-and-field metaphor; a hurdler doesn’t get to pull up and celebrate
after successfully surmounting the first hurdle. There are more hurdles on the
track, and the race isn’t over until the hurdler successfully jumps all of them
and crosses the finish line. Similarly, one act of trust isn’t the end of our
journey of faith; the journey continues, and we have to follow it to its end,
trusting God all the way and acting on that trust as God calls us forward.
This warning is
countered by the good news inherent in the inclusion in this roll call of
Rahab. Do you remember Rahab, from Joshua 2? When Joshua sent spies to scope
out the city of Jericho and its defenses, it was Rahab who sheltered those
spies in her home and hid them from the king of Jericho’s officers. After
sending them on a wild goose chase, Rahab sends the spies on with a rather
remarkable confession of Jericho’s fear before the Israelites and swears the
spies to safeguard her and her family (which they do in chapter 6). It’s a
pretty remarkable sub-story within the greater story, and her trust in this God
she would hardly have had reason to know, and her action upon it, is apparently
enough to win her a place in this roll call of honor.
Still, though, you
can imagine some reader sidling up to the author of this Hebrews sermon and
saying, “But Rahab was … you know … she was a … a … a prostitute.” And our nervous nelly would not be wrong; Rahab was
indeed a prostitute in Jericho. From this take with you this good news; as long
as you still walk on this earth, it is not too late to trust in God – to place
your faith in God – and to act upon that trust. And we “good Christian folk”
had better realize that trust will not always be confined to our ranks. We are
in no position to judge the trust of another, or to place restrictions on where
that trust will show itself.
The good news in turn
is followed by another word of warning. Our preacher starts to wind up the roll
call by adding several more names without elaboration of their deeds, trusting
the readers to recall them. Some of the names are familiar to us, or at least
can be found in the Old Testament if you want to go looking, but some of what
our preacher describes isn’t that familiar. Beginning at about the midpoint of
verse 35, the fates of these heroes of faith take a rather darker turn, don’t
they? Up to then it’s all winning wars and conquering and shutting the mouths
of lions (sounds like Daniel there), but all of a sudden these fates turn a lot
darker. Mocking, flogging, chains, prison; stoning, being sawn in two (!!!),
being killed by sword; living in destitution, persecution, homelessness; again
these are the “heroes of faith” we’re talking about here!
Real faith –
genuine unalloyed trust in God and the willingness to act on it regardless of
care or consequence – does not always win us any popularity medals. Anyone who
tries to tell you that a life of faith is a “get out of trouble free” card is
not speaking truth to you, and if that’s what you’re looking for this isn’t the
place to find it. Nor does a life lived in trust in God seek to avoid them, but
to endure them, to surmount them like our hurdler from earlier, and to continue
to run the race. Again with the athletic metaphor! But now that metaphor is
about to break down.
We are about a
week into the Olympics now, and several “heroes” of the competition have emerged. There’s the amazing
gymnast Simone Biles, flying in ways humans shouldn’t be able to do. Or the
swimmer Katie Ledecky, winning races by margins that television cameras can’t
measure – they can either show her, or the swimmers behind her, but not both.
Or the men’s swimmer Michael Phelps, who by winning his thirteenth individual
gold medal across multiple years of Olympic competitions broke a record that
has stood since literally before the birth of Christ. There have been amazing
and unbelievable individual performances and team performances all over Rio de
Janeiro.
Our Hebrews
preacher, in 12:1, invites us to imagine a scene not unlike one you might see
in Rio. A “great cloud of witnesses” in the culture of the time might have been
a reference to the crowds gathered to watch one of the athletic spectacles of
the time, whether those ancient Olympics in Athens or other competitions in
other major cities of the Roman Empire. In this case, that “great cloud of
witnesses” is gathered to watch … us. We are running “with perseverance the race that is set before us,” in the presence
of those saints who have already run the race set before them.
But here’s where
our Olympic images break down. We don’t compete with each other. We run
together, so to speak, and I don’t “lose” and you don’t “lose” and if there are
any medals they’re all the same color. We run, only fixing our eyes on “the
pioneer and perfecter of our faith,” Jesus Christ. The only glory we run
for is the glory of Christ, the one whose run was one with its own
humiliations, dying a death of crucifixion that was about as opposite to the
glory of the stadium as it is possible to be.
All those saints
who have come before us, Enoch and Abraham and Moses and Rahab and all of them,
ran their race. Some of them didn’t even get to see the prize in their
lifetimes. Yet as our Hebrews preacher said in last week’s reading, they saw
the promises and greeted them from afar, looking forward to a “better country, a heavenly one,” a “heavenly city” God has prepared for them,
prepared for us. They ran, we run, others will run the race after us. We each
have our own race set before us, but we run together, all towards the same
pioneer of our faith.
Let us run with
perseverance. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns (from Glory to
God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):
#385 All
People That on Earth Do Dwell
#438 Rock
of Ages, Cleft for Me
#730 I
Sing a Song of the Saints of God
#543 God,
Be the Love to Search and Keep Me
Credit: agnusday.org. But we are surrounded by that cloud of witnesses...
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