It’s not very often that all of our lectionary readings – Old Testament, Epistle and Gospel – all focus so closely on a single topic or theme. More often than not, there’s a close relationship between the Old Testament and the Gospel lesson on any given Sunday, but since the Epistle lessons tend to be sets of continuous readings from letters written by St. Paul and others, they don’t always have an obvious tie-in to the other two readings. But not this week. All of today’s readings – and we need to widen this to include the words from Psalm 147 that we sang in our Introit – can be summed up by one simple five-letter word: faith.
Today’s Epistle is from the Book of Hebrews, which is lumped in the category of “general epistles” in our Bibles. Hebrews is a really interesting book for a number of reasons. First, we don’t know who wrote it. Of all 27 books of the New Testament, Hebrews is the only book where the author is not identified either by name or by tradition. We can tell that it definitely wasn’t written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter or any of the other known New Testament authors because the actual writing style is substantially different than any other book of the New Testament – and if you’re a student of Biblical Greek, the writing is far more difficult to read and translate. Based upon its structure, it appears that all but a few verses in chapter 13 actually represent a single sermon that was written for or delivered to Jewish Christians. Since the author is unknown, some Biblical scholars have argued over the centuries that it should not even be included in our New Testament Bibles. Yet evidence from as far back as the early years of the Christian Church indicates that it has almost always been considered to be the Spirit-inspired Word of God.
Our Epistle begins with these words: “Now faith is the assurance of things hopes for, the conviction of things not seen.” The subject of faith can be really confusing in our modern culture. Today most people use the word faith without supplying any kind of context. You hear phrases like “have a little faith” or “you gotta have faith” – but the question becomes this: Faith in what? Faith in whom? The object of this faith is left up to the hearer. It would be just like if I were to stand here and say that Jesus died for your. You’re left wondering – for your what?
When you say that you’ve got to have faith but don’t say where that faith is to be placed, it starts to sound like this fuzzy faith can make everything turn out your way – not matter what. And that’s probably how most people look at it today. Today it seems like so many people think that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe in something and that your faith in that something or anything is sincere. Believe whatever you want to believe – and as long as you have faith, then everything will turn out the way you want it to.
Let me give you an example. When I was young I had a 78 rpm record – and I realize that probably no one under the age of 50 will have the slightest inkling of what a 78 rpm record actually was – but for the sake of our younger members, let’s just say that it was an early and very primitive version of an MP3 player or an IPOD. This specific record was one of my favorites, because it was a recording of a story known as “The Little Engine that Could.” The original version of “The Little Engine that Could” was written in 1906, and it tells the story about a very long train that must be pulled over a very high mountain. A number of large and powerful railroad locomotives try to pull the train up the mountain but aren’t able to make it. Finally a very small blue engine is given the chance to pull the train – and since the big engines have already failed, everyone knows that the little engine has no chance of making it to the top. But the little engine keeps repeating this phrase: “I-think-I-can, I-think-I-can.” It slowly begins to move – and when it finally reaches the top and starts going down the other side of the mountain, it proudly proclaims, “I-thought-I-could, I-thought-I-could!”
The story of “The Little Engine that Could” is seen by many to be a great lesson for young children on the value of optimism and hard work. But as harmless as that story seems to be, it also teaches children at a very young age to trust in themselves more than anything – or anyone – else.
The problem is that is that we can never be saved by the strength of our faith – we are saved by the object of that faith. Prominent Lutheran author Gene Edward Vieth, Jr. explains it this way: “Faith is not mere intellectual assent to certain beliefs. Faith for Lutherans is certainly not a ‘decision to accept Christ’ as it is described by later evangelicals. Faith itself is considered … to be a gift of God, created in the human heart as His action through the Holy Spirit. Faith has to do with trust, with conscious dependence on Christ, the assurance that, in fact, He will do it all. Properly speaking, it is Christ on the cross who saves. Faith is simply dependence on that sacrifice.”
An understanding of faith as a free gift of the Holy Spirit reveals some of the true meanings of Hebrews chapter 11. Today we heard only the first 16 verses of that chapter, but I’d invite you to read the entire chapter sometime this week at home. What we see is that Hebrews 11 is a lot more than just a list of some of the great heroes of the Bible. What’s really going on is that Hebrews 11 praises the God who worked such great faith in those men and women of the Old Testament, some well-known and some not-so-well-known. People like Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Gideon, Samson, Samuel, David – even a woman known as Rahab the prostitute. In Hebrews 11 we see a God who is actively at work creating faith in the hearts of His chosen people and then working through that faith in the history of the world. The only difference is that these Old Testament saints looked forward to the arrival of the Messiah, while we look both to the past and to the future because our faith is in Jesus of Nazareth – the Messiah, the Christ, the anointed one, our Lord who will return in glory on Judgment Day.
One of the great things about Hebrews 11 is that all of the saints that are mentioned were – just like you and me – sinners. On two different occasions Abraham was afraid of two powerful kings, so he told those kings that his wife Sarah was actually his sister – and he gave Sarah to those kings so that they could take her as one of their wives. Samson broke his vow with the Lord and sinned with Delilah. David committed adultery with another man’s wife and then had her husband killed to cover up the fact that she was pregnant with David’s child. And, of course, the very name of “Rahab the prostitute” really tells us everything we need to know.
If any of these sinners had to rely on their own character – on their own righteousness – on their own behavior – on their own faith – nothing would have happened. Every one of them would have been doomed. But the Holy Spirit worked faith in them, just as He has worked faith in us.
Martin Luther said that “faith is the ‘yes’ of the heart, a conviction on which one stakes one’s life.” Think about those words for a second. The “yes” of the heart – a conviction on which one stakes one’s life. Our Epistle lesson began with these words: “Now faith is the assurance of things hopes for, the conviction of things not seen.” Hebrews chapter 10, which was not included in today’s reading, also includes these words: “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.”
The word “faith” and variations on it appears in more than 400 verses of the Old and New Testaments, and included in your bulletin today is an insert listing just a few of those verses. If you were to sit down and read all 400+ of those verses, you would realize that Christian faith focuses entirely on the God who is faithful to us – and the faith in Him that we have been given by God. It’s never a faith in someone or something else. It’s never a faith in itself. We can’t see it, we can’t touch it, because it truly is “the conviction of things not seen.” But it is real, it is powerful and it will never fail us. For in the words of praise so beautifully written in Psalm 111, the works of God’s hands – our faith – a “are faithful and just; all his precepts are trustworthy.”
May the peace that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in faith in He who alone is faithful to us – Jesus Christ. Amen.
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