Rector's Reflection—11 Pentecost, Proper 14
August 8, 2010

The 8 AM Sunday service at All Saints' Chapel in Sewanee was a favorite of many local residents and a good number of faculty members, whether active or retired, undergraduate or seminary. It was not a crowd that you wanted to make a mistake in front of, as one college student learned when, as a lector, he began the epistle reading with "A reading from Paul's letter to the Hebrews." You could have heard a communion wafer drop.

Now the congregation was a reverent and godly one, so no one leapt from the choir stalls to correct the young man, but at the end of the service—right after the "Go in peace to love and serve the Lord" part—the scene would have reminded you of throwing chum to sharks. I would bet that the young man never made that mistake again. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he had run off to a monastery and taken a vow of silence.

No one really knows who wrote the letter to the Hebrews. Scholars aren't even sure who wrote some of the letters that are attributed to Paul, but lack of certainty about authorship does not diminish the value of the letter to the Church. And this morning we hear from Hebrews, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen..."

Funny thing, faith... It can only be a noun, and you sort of have to have faith that there is such a thing as faith. You certainly cannot avoid it in Holy Scripture. Paul uses the word some 35 times, just in the letter to the Romans! But it's not a Christian invention. The Greek word for faith is pistis, and it is firmly rooted in Greek mythology. Remember when Pandora opened the box? Well, Pistis was one of the spirits who escaped and fled back to heaven, abandoning this world forever.

The letter to the Hebrews addressed a community that seemed to believe that Pistis had left the building. They had had faith that Jesus would return pretty quickly after the resurrection, but with each passing day, that hope was harder and harder to defend. The writer reminded his audience that there had been lots of people who had faith, and their faith was not a response to results. "By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain's"... with a tragic outcome. "By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called...," going to a great land only God knew where, but the only land Abraham ever possessed was a small family burial plot near Hebron. For 40 years, Moses led the often grumbling and truculent Israelites to the Promised Land, but all he got was a glimpse. "All of these [and then some!] died in faith without having received the promises..." Even the words from the cross—"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me"—are heard by some as a crisis of faith.

I think every generation can relate to the Hebrews situation. There is a very human tendency to reward an answered prayer with faith rather than gratitude. Faith, however, must stand in the face of the non-materialization of things hoped for, or probably more to the point, the non-materialization of things specifically requested.

I have a cartoon pasted on my door showing a little girl remarking that sacrifice would be a lot more popular if it didn't involve giving up something. The same can be said about faith. There'd probably be a lot more faith if only we had tangible proof of it or if we had some advance knowledge of the place where God is leading us.

You know what? It's tough to follow God when you're not sure where he's taking you. It's tough to be faith-full when it appears that God, along with Pistis, has escaped back to heaven. You hope that God is paying attention...

And there it is: "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen..." We can hope for all sorts of things, but faith is trust that God has our best interests at heart, that God is faithful, and that God doesn't make promises he doesn't intend to keep.

In the gospel of Luke, where Jesus eleven times either commends people's faith or regrets the lack of it, at the end of the parable of the unjust judge, he wonders, "...when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"

The media have been covering lately what is called a resurgence of religious fervor. I wonder if that translates into faith?

Susan+