The Assurance of What We Hope For (Hebrews 11:1-3, 6)

I have never known anyone who departed from the faith in an hour of trial. There are, of course, people who have been so troubled or angered by what they interpreted as the silence or absence of God that they gave up on the Christian faith. But I have only heard or read about them; I have never known such folks. But there are many others who have given up, not on the faith, but on the church.
In a recent newspaper column, Leonard Pitts quoted the famous author Anne Rice, who said, “Today I quit being a Christian. I remain committed to Christ as always, but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome , hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous group.” Rice once called herself an atheist, but returned a decade ago to the Roman Catholic church of her youth. She continued, “ For 10 years I have tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.” Ms. Rice, whose books about vampires have sold over 100 million copies worldwide, posted her manifesto on the Facebook site on the Internet, where more than 101,000 people have responded positively to her declaration. She also was interviewed on the ABC Evening News program last Wednesday evening.
Rice says she has not lost her faith, but she has simply “had it up to here” with organized religion. “In the name of Christ,” she wrote, “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science.” Pitts observed in his column that Rice is hardly the only one who feels as she does.
He notes a 2008 study by Trinity College that shows that religiosity is trending down sharply in this country. The American Religious Identification Survey found that the percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians has fallen by 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86% to 76%, while the percentage of those who claim no religious affiliation has almost doubled, from 8% to 15%.
Closer to home, Presbyterians lament the steady loss of membership in our denomination and cry aloud that we must be doing something wrong--if not everything. Those who cry the loudest usually ignore the fact that membership decline is afflicting every--every--mainline denomination in America. They do not recognize the fact that religion in America has always experienced cyclicality, right from the arrival of the Mayflower. And they don’t want even to talk about a peculiar Presbyterian problem, and that is that we don’t produce enough babies to replace ourselves numerically when we die.
Still closer to home, there are those Presbyterians who simply drift away from their churches. Where do they go? They don’t go anywhere. Careful research has established that the great majority of people who quietly leave Presbyterian churches do not go to other denominations. There are exceptions, of course, but generally we lose people to nothingness, not to other denominations. They just stop going to church. Surveys for years have found that more than five million people in the USA identify themselves as Presbyterians. Church rolls add up to only half that many members. What happened to the other half who call themselves Presbyterians?
Most of the departed whom I have known simply wandered away from faithful participation in the church. They slipped way gradually, without ever consciously deciding to do so. But just as unused body muscles will gradually become smaller and weaker, so it is with spiritual muscles. A faith that is not regularly exercised will become atrophied, like the biceps on an old preacher man. We live in Lake Arrowhead, where I notice that the great majority of the plentiful automobiles are never moved on Sunday morning. When faith becomes atrophied, it becomes easy to stay home on Sunday morning.
A condition of spiritual atrophy prompted the writing of the Letter to the Hebrews. The danger that aroused the writer of this letter was not such definite and grave heresies as imperiled the churches at Galatia and Colossae, nor such vices as imperiled the church at Corinth. Rather it was a gradual, unconscious, growth of doubt and weakening of faith that dulled hopes and slackened energies. This was happening everywhere among the young churches, since the second coming of Christ had obviously been delayed, and the Letter to the Hebrews was not written to one particular congregation, but to all Jewish Christians everywhere in the world of the pre-adolescent church.
Many of the people in the young churches had been in them long enough to grow out of the first flush of enthusiasm. They had begun lapsing into the mental and spiritual condition of many people in every age of the Christian church, including our own: a condition of languor and weariness, of disappointed expectations, deferred hopes, and conscious failure. They had begun to experience a practical unbelief that relegated the active practice of Christianity to the background of their lives and put many other things ahead of it.
I.
All pastors brood about those members of the flock who just don’t seem to care. They wish they could restore in those members the boldness of hope and the intensity of faith that should characterize their calling as Christians. Pastors long to have all their people see that there is another dimension to life that is more than working hard to achieve material goals and taking recreation breaks on weekends. They long to help them see that a life lived with little or no consciousness of the spiritual dimension is only half a life. They want to see people draw nearer to God and stop giving to the appearance and shadow of a materialistic culture the value that really belongs only to the great reality of God in Christ.
And so we pastors exhort our flocks to have done with lesser things and draw nearer to God, believing that God exists and that he rewards those who seek him, as we read in one our text verses.
It sounds like a simple thing. For who among us does not believe that God exists? But that is not the rub, Christians. The problem for all of us--all of us--is to believe that God is what the Bible says God is: one who loves us and wants very much to be included in our lives. The problem is to believe not only that God was explained to us in Jesus of Nazareth, but to believe wholeheartedly and enthusiastically that this can make a difference in our lives.
I believe a lot of things. I believe, with my brain, that when I flip the switch the light will come on. But whether it does or does not has no real, lasting effect on my life. The problem of faith is not merely to believe with our heads, but to believe with our hearts, to the point where our lives are changed by this belief.
I have encountered several responses to the challenge to believe in this heartfelt manner. The first and most often heard response is simply, “Of course, I believe.” But this quick answer is often followed by one of several additional responses.
One says, “Of course, I believe,” but that may be followed with a quick, usually unspoken, “Now leave me alone.”
Another says, “Of course, I believe, but…. The “buts” are several. “But what has that got to do with my life?” Or my career, or my business, or the problems I am experiencing?
Another says, “Of course, I believe. And I’m certainly going to do something about it, very soon.”
But teaching and preaching the faith is not always disappointing. We still encounter some people who respond, “Yes, I believe--and thanks for reminding me.” These are the ones who minister to the minister by making him feel that perhaps his task is not such a thankless one after all.
And there is still another response that touches the heart in a different way. This is the response of the one who says, “I believe; help my unbelief!” Recall the story, in the ninth chapter of Mark’s Gospel, of the father who brought his epileptic son to Jesus and said, “Help me if you can!” In one breath, he confessed both his belief and his doubts. His honest confession of doubt was perfectly acceptable to Jesus and he did help the man. The lesson in this story is for all of us who may be inclined to think that faith must be in perfect, apple-pie order to get the attention and sympathy of God. It does not.
I would be remiss if I did not speak of the plaintive voice of those who cry out, “I believe, Lord! Why won’t you help me out of this trouble?” To this question, I can only quote the answer in the letter to the Hebrews: in this, too, God’s love will be revealed. In this, too, God’s love will be revealed.
II.
There was a time in my life when some of my very real questions and wonderment seemed always to be answered by the admonition to “have faith.” I thought it was a little silly on the part of some people who ought to have known better to tell me to do the very thing I was asking how to do. But it wasn’t silly; they were just doing the best they could to help a perplexed young man. Although neither they nor I understood it at the time, the biblical admonition to “have faith” means quite simply, “Accept the gifts of God.” John Calvin, bless his stern old heart, said that faith is “…a steady and certain knowledge of (God’s love for us). Faith is a steady and certain knowledge of God’s love for us!
Faith is not an act of the will in which you decide to believe and act in a certain way. Faith is something God gives to those who simply admit to God that they don’t have enough. (REPEAT)
To the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, faith is a hope that is certain that what it believes is true and that what it expects will come. It is not the hope that looks forward with wistful longing. It is not the hope that is pinned on a perhaps. It is the hope that is founded on a solid conviction.
Your beloved old KJV says that faith is the substance of things hoped for. The RSV uses the word assurance, rather than substance. Both of these words are attempts at the translation of a Greek word, “hypostasis,” that had a technical meaning in the business world of the first century. It was used to refer to documents that were evidence of ownership.
About 2,000 years ago, a woman named Dionysia lost in a local court a dispute about the ownership of a piece of land. She appealed the case to a higher court in Alexandria and sent her slave to that city with all the pertinent documents in a strong box. On the way, the slave was killed in a fire that destroyed the inn in which he had stopped for the night. For about 2,000 years, the sands of the desert covered the ruins of the inn, the charred bones of the slave and the strongbox. In our time, archaeologists uncovered the ruins and the remains. In the box, they found the legal documents. The letter to the judge in Alexandria said, “In order that my lord, the judge, may know that my appeal is just, I attach my hypostasis. It was the title deed to the piece of land, the evidence of her ownership.
This throws a bright light on this teaching regarding faith. Faith is the title deed of things hoped for. It is the substantial reality by which we Christians live. The act of exercising faith--as one prays or as one leans on the resources of God--is itself the title deed or evidence that we already posses the things we hope for.
When I bought my car and drove it away from the dealership seven years ago, I believed and felt that it was my car. In actuality, the legal title to it was held by the bank to which I made payments. When I made the final payment, the bank gave me the title document. Just so, some things we may hope for may be still in God’s hands, awaiting the proper time of delivery, but they are ours. We may be absolutely certain that God will honor this title deed--this guarantee of his love for us.
III.
This faith does not just pop up full-grown in our lives one day. It is something we grow into. Certainty may elude us--all of us--at times. Paul and John Calvin and whoever wrote the Letter to the Hebrews do not seem to have had any uncertainty. Rather, I think it more likely that in their role as teachers, they just never put any uncertainties down on paper. They and a million preachers who have followed them have felt that they had to write and preach and teach with authority and assurance and they could never, ever express anything less than total certainty.
But I am not like them. I will not tell you that I have gone through my spiritual pilgrimage or my ministry completely untroubled by any doubt or uncertainty. I don’t think anybody does--or can. (There are in the religious world some deluded people and some people who lie to themselves, of course.)
Our spiritual lives are, I think, like the pendulum in my grandmother’s clock that sits on the mantle over our fireplace. The pendulum swings from one extreme of its arc to the other. But it is always trying to come to rest at the center of its arc. My spiritual arc has a center, a still point that is God, the ground of my being. But I am not still. My life swings back and forth from perplexity to peace, from joy to sadness, from boredom to excitement, from belief to unbelief. And there are days when I must pray, “O God…if there is a God.”
And so will you, if you are honest. And I am here to tell you that the God I proclaim finds this honest admission completely acceptable. The ultimate gift of God is that God is just as sympathetic to our doubts and our confusion as to our faith, so great is God‘s love for us. (REPEAT)
God’s great gift to us is to accept us and love us as we are, not as we hope to be someday. To grow in faith is to grow in this understanding of God. Amen.




Sermon preached by Chuck Swann, Faith Presbyterian Church, August 15, 2020