(Preached on Sunday, August 8, 2010)
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not know where he was going.
-Hebrews 11:8
According to comedian Jerry Seinfeld, “Life is truly a ride. We’re all strapped in and no one can stop it. As you make each passage from youth to adulthood to maturity, sometimes you put your arms up and scream, sometimes you just hang on to that bar in front of you. But the ride is the thing. I think the most you can hope for at the end of life is that your hair’s messed up, you’re out of breath, and you didn’t throw up.”
Especially in light of the last few years that is not a bad description of life. For just about everybody life has become much more difficult and uncertain. Most of us human creatures don’t like such a life. We clearly prefer stability and stable security. Sure there are risk-takers among us, but the vast majority of people prefer stable security.
But life recently has not been stable or secure. For many, if not most of us, it has definitely felt like that roller coaster ride Jerry Seinfeld described. This makes it extremely difficult to remain hopeful and not become pessimistic about the present and the future. After all, the world is no longer filled with boundless optimism shaping our technologies and social systems. Increasingly it is filled with pessimism, cynicism, and distrust. This past week I heard a caller from Delaware to NPR declare that he sure didn’t trust that the seafood coming out of the Gulf of Mexico was safe, no matter what the Federal Government, NOAA, and FDA said. He thought they were all just conspiring with the Southern states to keep the rest of the country buying their seafood.
It is extremely difficult, though, to live without trust, without hope, and without faith. We need a foundation from which to operate in life. Most of us do not worry much about whether or not our heart will beat throughout the day. We take this fact of our physiology for granted. Likewise, few of us have anxiety that suddenly the laws of nature, for example the reality of gravity, will somehow change. Do you worry about whether or not the sun will come up or not each day? We could not live life without a certain element of faith.
We also cannot cope with the greater difficulties and uncertainties of life without a deeper faith. That deeper faith is what we read about in the scripture this morning. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
Our hope for the future is not a wistful longing. It is not a pathetic wish-list for the improbable or the impossible. Hope is not building imaginary castles in the air. It is not trite optimism. Hope is seeing what yet can truly come to fruition. It is sharing God’s vision and plan. Hope is affirming the glorious future which God has for humanity. Hope is turning to the promises of God and saying “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Hope for that childless couple, Abraham and Sarah, was daring to envision the Divine promise that through their descendants “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Hope for Moses was daring to picture and commit to the liberty of the promised land, “flowing with milk and honey,” at the time when his people were in miserable slavery in Egypt. Hope for Isaiah was a commitment to the vision; it was daring to see and preach the new world that would one day surely come to be: “Then the blind eyes shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongues of the dumb sing. Men shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor ever again be trained for war. For the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.”
For the followers of Jesus, hope takes on a special shape. It dares to look at a new world order shaped in the likeness of Jesus. He is the first born of the future race, the shape of the new humanity. He is the new creation, the future surging into the present moment. By hope we commit ourselves to doing things his way. Hope is daring to look at this future, seeing it not as a mirage but as a certainty. By hope an irrepressible longing, and a joyful commitment, enters in to the human soul, and becomes incarnate in our brains, our hands, and our feet.
It is faith which fans the embers of this hope, keeping it alive, and keeping us alive. This deeper faith is a commitment to the God of hope. This faith is actively trusting God’s future and doing something about it. It is saying “Yes!” by our actions, seeking to fulfill the vision God gives us. It is a willingness to live each day to its potential, utilizing those bits and pieces which fit the contours of the future. It is like reaching one’s hand into the future, plucking a bit of it, and planting it here and now.
Let me try to illustrate with a simple example. I believe that my wife would not intentionally deceive me. She might be mistaken, and she might forget. She might even tell me a small white lie to stroke my ego. But she would not tell me something she knew to be false that might hurt me and our relationship if I uncovered her deception or relied on the falsehood. In other words, if my wife tells me something, I believe it, or at least, I have some confidence that she believes it. She is honest with me because she loves me. I have faith in my wife’s word. Although I know that she, unlike God, if fallible, I can rely on what she tells me.
But I also have faith in my wife at a deeper level. I am aware that, in some sense, she holds my life and my happiness in her hands. I depend on her and her love for me. She has the power to hurt me deeply and to give me great joy. My faith in her tells me that because she loves me I can trust her, even when words are not exchanged. I can feel with some assurance that she has my best interests at heart and that she will try to make me happy, just as I will try to make her happy. But both my wife and I are flawed human beings; therefore, we will sometimes hurt one another. We have the capacity to violate the other’s trust. My faith in my wife is a deep trust in my wife. And it is a risk.
Thus, faith in God at a deeper level is complete trust in God. We place ourselves in God’s hands, not knowing what God has in store for us, but having a firm belief that whatever happens to us, God will not withdraw this love. God will be there with us even when we cannot see or feel our Creator. God will always act lovingly towards us.
This deep trust in God – this absolute abandonment of ourselves to God and unconditionally placing ourselves in God’s hands – is faith of the deepest kind. Complete trust in God is a matter of the heart and will. We give our lives and all we are over to God because we choose God above all else, and we decide not only that God is the highest goal of our lives, but also that God is supremely worthy of our trust. Yes, this involves a belief about God, but it involves a commitment and a choice that soars far beyond a belief.
That is what makes living by faith so risky, and therefore so uncertain and so thrilling. It is just like bungee jumping. When you bungee, you leave the safety of solid ground. You leave the safety of everything familiar and solid, everything that you have relied on for safety since the day you were born. You leave it. You step off a platform high in the air and you depend completely and totally on the elastic rope which is tied to your feet. You can’t go halfway in bungee jumping. You can’t keep one foot on the platform “just in case.” It’s all or nothing. You either trust the cord and jump, or you don’t go bungee jumping. It is extremely frightening. It is also extremely thrilling and enlivening.
Living a life of faith, trusting in God’s care and guidance, trusting that God’s way is truly the way to full and abundant life for all people is exactly like that. There are no guarantees; only promises. There is no surety, no collateral; only the experience of others, who never fully realized the promises in their lifetime either. But such actions make all the difference in our lives; such actions make all the difference between life and death.