A Sermon for Proper 14 C

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. [1]

Over the years of my priesthood, people have come into my office to talk about faith, with questions about their faith.  In fact, they often come because they have questions.   “I’m afraid,” they say, “that because I have a question about this story in the Bible or doubt that doctrine in the Creed, I might be losing my faith.  How can I be a person of faith, and also have doubts and uncertainties?” 

Underlying such questions and the anxiety they raise is often a particular understanding of faith that is itself part of the problem: the notion that faith is a kind of spiritual certainty, a mysterious, almost magical way of knowing facts and ideas about God that can’t otherwise be known or proved.

The verse from Hebrews I’ve quoted might seem to support such a view.  Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.  But in fact the notion that faith is an assured way of knowing things that we can’t know in other ways is an idea much more recent than biblical times.  It only grew up in the past few centuries under the influence of the scientific worldview that has dominated Western thinking since the 1600’s.  For science, the most important question are about how we know the truth or falsity of facts and ideas about how the world works.

That scientific approach has shaped how we think of faith, too – making us imagine that faith means having no doubts or questions about the “truth” of certain “facts” about God. Curiously, it is Fundamentalists, who so often argue with science, who most reveal this semi-scientific approach to faith.  For them, the Bible is a divine textbook: a way to know certain “facts” about God and the universe – say, for instance, that God created the world in 7 days, approximately 6,000 years ago.  Defending the “truth” about such “facts” sadly often becomes central to their faith lives.

But the reality is that all of us, not just Fundamentalists, have had our approach to faith shaped by science’s approach to the world.  It has been part of the air we’ve breathed all our lives, and it shows up, among other places, in the people who have brought their questions about faith and certainty into my office.  We all have been affected by this semi-scientific view that faith is an assured way of knowing the truth of facts and ideas about God that we can’t know in other ways.

Biblical faith is very different.  In the Bible, faith is not about magical knowledge of facts or theological concepts.  Faith is about trust in God  and God’s future.  Faith is trusting in God’s promises or, better, trusting in the trustworthiness of the God who makes promises.  The author of Hebrews writes that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” – and the things hoped for are not seen because they are God’s yet-to-be-fulfilled promises. 

Abraham is the great Old Testament exemplar of this forward-looking, trusting faith, for Abraham trusted God and God’s promises for the future again and again.  He left his home for a land that he had been promised as an inheritance, and he set out not even knowing where he was going…  He lived in that land in tents, because he looked forward to that city whose architect and builder is God.  Most strikingly, he trusted that he would have an heir even though he and Sarah were well past child-bearing age, because he considered the One who had promised faithful. [2]  Abraham’s faith was trusting, forward-looking, future directed, and inseparable from hope.  Biblical faith looks forward in hope towards what God has promised.  And biblical faith hopes because it  trusts in the trustworthiness of the God who makes promises. 

Since biblical faith is trust in God, not certainty about religious “facts,” or concepts, embracing biblical faith can reduce the anxieties people have about having doubts or questions.  However, it doesn’t get rid of questions -- indeed, it often makes them harder.  The harder faith questions are the questions about whether God can really be trusted.  In fact, these second, harder, kind of faith questions are frequently found hiding under questions about doubts and uncertainties once those have been cleared away.  I’m mean questions like:

“How do I believe now that I’m facing troubles I hadn’t expected?”

“Will God be there for me in the pain I’m experiencing?”

“Can I trust God when my life is not working out as I had hoped or I’ve suffered some great loss?”

In these questions and their sometimes deep agony is the question of God’s trustworthiness.  Can we indeed trust God?  Can we indeed hope in God?  Does God able keep the promises we believe God has made to us?   For, like Abraham, we do believe that God has made promises to us, and for good reason.  Our ancestors in faith tell us that our God is a promise-maker, and that we can expect those promises to be for our good. The biblical God is the maker and redeemer of creation, the God one of whose names is Love.  How can we not expect good promises from this God?

Yet if we look with some care at what we think God has promised us, we may well see that our notions about God’s promises have been as heavily influenced by our present-day culture as was the semi-scientific view of faith I spoke of earlier.  Very often, the promise we Americans think God has made to us goes something like this: 

“If I am a good person -- decent, moral, and hard-working, caring about my family and doing my job well and honestly -- then God will see that my life works out in a basically good way.”    An updated version of this promise for younger Americans might run like this:   “If there is something that would make my life genuinely good and fulfilling, something that I really want; and if I want it badly enough and work hard enough for it -- being a good and decent person all the while, of course -- then God will see that I get it.”   

The frustration and anger that many feel in the midst of our present economic mess finds its source in part from this sort of belief in what God – or at least the American dream – is supposed to have promised, but has failed to deliver on.

And it doesn’t sound all that unreasonable, does it?  We want to believe God has made these promises because they are about the good things in life we hope God wants for us.  We presumed that God has promised to give us the good we want in the ways we want.

Well, my friends, I’d like to tell you that God promises that everything in our lives will turn out the way we would like them to -- that our economic and other anxieties will resolve themselves quickly in the way that we most desire  -- but I can’t, because it’s not true.  These are not promises that our forebears in faith tell us that God has made to us.  God has not promised that if we are good, faithful and hard-working that what we desire will come to us.  We need only look at Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and his suffering and death on the Cross to be reminded of that.   

The truth lies much closer to what the words of an old hymn say:

God has not promised skies always blue,

Flower-strewn pathways our whole lives through.

God has not promised sun without rain,

Joy without sorrow or peace without pain.

 

God did not promise that we shall not know

Toil and temptation, trouble and woe.

God did not promise that we shall not bear

Many a burden and many a care.  [3]

So then -- if God has not promised that if we live good lives and work hard we will be rewarded with what we want, what has God promised us?  In what promises of God can we put our faith and our hope?

One promise we can trust is the promise given in one of Jesus’ names -- Emmanuel, God with us:  the promise of God’s loving companionship with us, no matter what happens to be going on in our lives, good or bad.  The refrain of that hymn, which I left out before, puts that promise in these words:

God has promised strength for the day,

Rest for the laborer and light for the way.

God has promised help from above,

Unfailing sympathy and undying love.

The promise of God’s sustaining, strengthening, supporting, undying love --   that is the promise of God.  We can trust this promise, especially when things aren’t working out in the ways we want, knowing that the one who agonized in the Garden and suffered on the Cross shares our experiences of pain.  Being assured that we are not alone, that we are surrounded by God’s undying love, can be more than a little a comfort.

But God’s promises go beyond that.  I have said that biblical faith is faith that looks forward, forward to God’s promises for the future.  These promises are ultimately rooted in the resurrection of the same one who agonized and suffered and died.   For if God can bring new life out of death, if God can remake the creation out of the abject and miserable failure that was Jesus’ earthly ministry, then surely there must be promises for our future in which we can have faith and hope.

And, indeed, there are.  The author of Hebrews speaks of the promise of a homeland, a heavenly country, a divine city to come.   In today’s Gospel, Jesus assures the disciples that it is God’s desire, God’s good pleasure, to give us the Kingdom.  Those hopeful promises can be taken in many ways --  as pointing our life beyond the grave, to be sure, but also to our  lives here and now. 

I once wrote a friend going through a time of seemingly unbearable pain, trying to put into words what I believed – and believe – about God’s promises for the future, in both this life and beyond. 

“The best I can do,” I wrote, “is to repeat that somehow in the end it will be all right.  That statement is for me, in a sense, the bottom line of faith: that somehow, in the end, it will be all right.”

Dame Julian of Norwich, a 14th century English woman of prayer, who lived through the time of the Black Death, put it more poetically:  In one of her  visions, she heard God saying:

‘All shall be well, and all shall be well,

and you shall see for yourself

that all manner of things shall be well.’ [4]

This is God’s ultimate promise in the death and resurrection of Jesus: that even when at life’s hardest times, we can trust that “all shall be well.”

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

This is what we do not yet see.

This is what we hope for.

This is our faith:

That God keeps promises;

That somehow in the end it will be all right;

And we shall see for ourselves that all shall be well.          

 

 The Rev. Jack Zamboni

August 8, 2010