CAN I GET A WITNESS?
Isaiah 43:1-10, Hebrews 11:29-12:2
As a preacher, it surprises me how difficult the process of selecting the scripture passages for any given Sunday can be. There's always the easy route of course: just go to the daily lectionary and see what happens to pop up on the calendar for Sunday, August 30th.
But sometimes, after reading the given texts for the day, something just doesn't feel right. No matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to feel all that convicted by the pre-packaged Word of God that's been slapped onto my plate by the powers that be.
But then there are other times....
There are times when the stories and letters and images of Scripture practically jump off the page and into the rawness of life--times when you can almost feel the flickering flames of the Holy Spirit grab hold of your heart...and your mind...and your imagination with hardly any effort at all.
Well, something like this is what happened to me when it came time to select this morning's passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews.
* * *
About a month ago now, I had the tremendous privilege of traveling down to Montreat, North Carolina for a fabulous week of Christian fellowship and community building with 14 of our youth and several of the adult advisors from this congregation. We gathered with about eleven hundred other Presbyterians from all over the country to study Scripture, to worship God, and to have more fun together than you can possibly imagine--(and if you don't believe me, then go ask any of the youth who went!)
The theme of this year's conference was World on Fire, and each day we spent time exploring what this image might mean for us as young Christians living in a postmodern world. We talked about our ever-increasing global concern for environmental destruction and overpopulation, and we discussed loaded social issues like immigration and our country's healthcare crisis...and believe me, if you had been there, you would have been very impressed with what these teenagers--your teenagers--had to say.
But what made this conference unique wasn't so much what we were talking about, but rather the context in which all of our strong feelings and disagreements were able to roam: we had gathered in Christian community to discern how we, as Christ's disciples, might act in the world in our ongoing pursuit for justice.
On Thursday of that week, the verses from Hebrews that I read earlier became our Scripture passage for the day, and that evening, four of the youth from our group used this text as the focus of our end-of-the-day reflections and time of prayer. They posed two simple and intriguing questions that prompted hours of conversation afterwards and ended by birthing the sermon for today: Who have been your witnesses in the faith? and Who have you been a witness to?
With this in mind, listen again to the end of the eleventh chapter and beginning of the twelfth, this time from Eugene Peterson's paraphrase translation:
By an act of faith, Israel walked through the Red Sea on dry ground. The Egyptians tried it and drowned. By faith, the Israelites marched around the walls of Jericho for seven days, and the walls fell flat. By an act of faith, Rahab, the Jericho harlot, welcomed the spies and escaped the destruction that came on those who refused to trust God.
I could go on and on, but I've run out of time. There are so many more--Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, the prophets....Through acts of faith, they toppled kingdoms, made justice work, took the promises for themselves. They were protected from lions, fires, and sword thrusts, turned disadvantage to advantage, won battles, routed alien armies. Women received their loved ones back from the dead. There were those who, under torture, refused to give in and go free, preferring something better: resurrection.
Others braved abuse and whips, and, yes, chains and dungeons. We have stories of those who were stoned, sawed in two, murdered in cold blood; stories of vagrants wandering the earth in animal skins, homeless, friendless, powerless--the world didn't deserve them!--making their way as best they could on the cruel edges of the world.
Not one of these people, even though their lives of faith were exemplary, got their hands on what was promised. God had a better plan for us: that their faith and our faith would come together to make one completed whole, their lives of faith not complete apart from ours.
Do you see what this means--all these pioneers who blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on? It means we'd better get on with it. Strip down, start running--and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we're in. Study how he did it. Because he never lost sight of where he was headed--that exhilarating finish in and with God--he could put up with anything along the way: cross, shame, whatever. And now he's there, in the place of honor, right alongside God.
* * *
One of the reasons I like this Epistle, or Letter, to the Hebrews so much is because it's not some lengthy theological treatise or series of fanciful stories. It's simply a plain old letter written to the early Christians in an effort to motivate and encourage them to persevere in the faith amidst violent and deadly persecution.
"There is no other document that represents the mounting of so strong an effort by a pastor to save a church," one commentator has said,1 and I think he's right. Whoever it was that authored this letter--and most likely, it was a group of folks--whomever he or she or they were, they certainly had a pastor's heart, and if you ask me, some pretty phenomenal gifts for preaching as well.
And did this Preacher ever have his work cut out for him...his congregation was in terrible shape! They were tired, exhausted, and absolutely weary to the bone--or as Tom Long, one of my preaching mentors, has put it:
[The congregation to whom the author of Hebrews writes] is tired of serving the world,
tired of worship,
tired of Christian education,
tired of being peculiar and whispered about in society,
tired of the spiritual struggle,
tired of trying to keep their prayer life going, tired even of Jesus....
The threat to this congregation is not that they are charging off in the wrong direction--they don't have enough energy to charge off anywhere!...
[They] are tired of walking the walk.
Many of them are [actually] considering taking a walk, leaving the community, and falling away from the faith.2
And we know something of what this feels like, don't we?
More than any other book in the New Testament, the Letter to the Hebrews speaks of "faith," using the word twenty-four times in just the 11th chapter alone! (Now can you see why the leaders of the Montreat Youth Conference might have chosen this book for us to focus on?)
The particular kind of "faith" that the writer or writers describe might be closer to what we understand to be "faithfulness" or "active obedience": it is that characteristic of the Christian life that enables people to both endure--or to persevere--even in the midst of the most difficult circumstances and then to step out into the unknown with courage.3 Faith--in other words--means that there is more to this world than meets the eye, as God is ushering in a new world according to the person and work of Jesus Christ.
It is faith that enables us to live by a vision of the reality of God's purposes for Creation--a vision that is neither complete nor observable to the naked eye, but a faith that nevertheless enables us to move forward with trust, hope, and even confidence that the future--our future--belongs to God.
But thankfully, the masterful Preacher who writes this letter to the Hebrews, includes the part about not being left alone--about having a support group that abides with us in our times of greatest struggle and rejoices with us in our times of deepest joy--a group that hangs with us, no matter what, cheering us on as we endure the race that is our life. The prophets...and the kings...and the great Christian martyrs...and our grandparents...and our friends have all gathered as a cloud of witnesses to testify to what they have seen: God's goodness. Life's pain. Hope in the midst of despair. And most importantly, the reality and the understanding that wholeness and redemption are possible through Jesus Christ, the perfecter of our faith.
* * *
So I will ask you the same questions that the youth asked us that night in Montreat: Who have been your witnesses in the faith? and Who have you been a witness to?
Who sits in the stands of your life's race, cheering you on as you round yet another turn?
Is it your grandmother who gave you your first Bible, or your grandfather who modeled what it meant to seek justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God?
Is it your mama who offered you protection and encouraged you to make your own music, or your daddy who assured you that girls are powerful and that boys can be beautiful?
Is it your childhood Sunday School teacher, or your youth director, or your pastor from long ago? Or your son or your daughter whose budding faith inspires you to become more active here at this church?
Is it the peacemaker like Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, or Nelson Mandela? Or the dreamers and the civil leaders like the late Senator Teddy Kennedy who made it his life's work to restore honor and dignity to the disenfranchised and to be a roaring voice on behalf of the voiceless among our nation's most prominent power-players?
Whose faces do you see among the great cloud of witnesses that surround you?
And whose lives have been affected by your testimony? Whose stands do you sit in as a mentor in the faith?
* * *
Brothers and sisters, these are questions to not only think about but to talk about with your family and your friends over lunch, at the dinner table, while you're waiting in the carpool line or sitting in stand-still traffic. Why? Because the Scriptures make it perfectly clear that we need each other, and I believe that these words from Hebrews can serve as our wake-up call.
Like the early Christians who were tired and worn to the bone, we too know what it's like to feel burned out and exhausted by the demands of the Christian life: we know what it's like to toy with idea of walking out on it all.
But our call is to persevere and to listen to the cheers of the saints who surround us. The saints who remind us that our wholeness does not lie behind us, but rather ahead of us in the company of the One who made us,
who dwells with us,
who in all things and in everyway is eternally for us,
and "who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God."
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1Fred B. Craddock, "Cloud of Witnesses" (Hebrews 12, May 25, 1985) in Recorded Sermons of Fred B. Craddock (Atlanta: CST Media, c.1986).
2Thomas G. Long, "Hebrews," Interpretation (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1997), p. 3.
3PCUSA. Perspectives. "So Great a Cloud of Witnesses Bible Study." August, 2006.
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August 30, 2009
Grier Booker Richards
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