Something Better
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16, 39-40; Luke 12:32-40

August 12, 2007


It is not very often that we read and hear from the Letter to the Hebrews, though there are a few select verses we hear frequently, perhaps none more than the 11th chapter’s first verse: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Faith is a huge word, an idea typically beyond our comprehension and grasp. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews attempts to be an elephant eater. How do you eat an elephant, something so large? The answer to the riddle is eat one piece at a time. The piece to start with is when the Letter was first read.

It used to be thought that Paul wrote Hebrews and some older Bibles still have that attribution, but even in the early Church they knew differently. There were a lot of theories about who wrote it, but none really stuck. One of the major ideas is that it was a woman who wrote Hebrews and that would certainly be something very important in itself besides the ideas in the Letter.

Whoever the author was he or she was quite a preacher and basically this is a long sermon preached to a congregation that was really beleaguered. You would wonder how the congregation could endure such a long discourse, but remember that there was no TV or radio or movies and not many books, and worse maybe 10% of the population could read. Sermons for a lot of churches throughout history have been a form of entertainment. A two hour sermon was nothing that remarkable. Our Congregational and Puritan forbearers were infamous in this regard. A young boy was often given the job of watching a big hourglass of sand and when it emptied out to turn it upside down so that it could begin again. When the sand ran out for the second hour then the minister could stop preaching. Thank God!

The author wanted to give this congregation encouragement and support in a day when Christians seemed to be losing to everyone. They were losing members back to the pagans, losing some members to the Jews, and in some cases, losing them to the lions. Things were getting pretty dim - they seemed to be able to do nothing right, were considered inferior intellectually, socially, and certainly spiritually to all their rivals. The church had fewer and fewer members, less and less power, disappearing hope for the future, little self-esteem. It was a sad time to be the church, but the author knew they still had faith.

The 11th chapter is the high point of the whole sermon. It is not hard to see how the preacher, like one in a black church today, built up the excitement in the early part of the chapter, then went at rapid speed citing each of the saints of yore - perhaps call and response - to bring his congregation to a peek of emotion and intellectual commitment. After all, when you are committed to a certain cause, you can only really do it well, render it an excellent cause, when you get excited about it.

A good part of the Letter attempts to argue that Christianity is superior to Judaism, not in an anti-Semitic way, but in order to insist that our way of looking at the world has something significant, unique and important to say. If it is that unique that we are attracted to it, then for those who have faith as a result of Jesus Christ, let’s not mince words: for us Christianity is the only way to go.

Now the author has come around to the practice of faith - which in itself is not exclusively Christian and all of his examples are the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Old Testament Hebrew Bible. Faith is in the first instance a trust in God, the King of the Universe, the title one hears at the Passover Seder meal.

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, which always to me has the danger of falling into the wish list category, not a reality. Some, however, have insisted upon another translation for “assurance” which is directly from the original root of the word - “substance.” Faith is not the thought of the bye and bye, but something tangible in its own way, substantive, something to be counted upon, “a conviction of things not seen.”

“By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.”

Not magic, but in faith we are aware of the realities of life that are not immediately visible to the eye, but irrevocably shape who we really are.

Faith is always nice when things are going well, but when a church and its faithful are struggling against insurmountable difficulties it is difficult to take seriously the power of faith. When its members were being persecuted physically at times and socially and politically at others, when if you were a member of the Christian you were despised as an outcaste to society, an uneducated person because you believed such nonsense, then the idea that faith could help you now is just a nice and useless idea.

The author knows this and launches into this wonderful chain of instances in which faith sustained someone who was not going to be rewarded in the immediate present. Matters looked pretty bad, nothing was going to work, that magisterial plan of God was falling apart, and still they had faith and in God’s time things worked out in a manner beyond their imagination. That just doesn’t sound like a first century church and its despair; that does sound like a twenty-first century congregation for whom despair has become its middle name.

“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 knowing where he was going.”

It is always harder to get where you are going when you don’t know where you are heading. Abraham had very few clues of the direction he should head and so he ended up somewhere that turned out to be the best place.

Canada formed a new territory a few years ago, Nunavut, and its capital is Igaluit. On the outskirts of town there is a new development of housing. The road going through that development has two names on the sign, in English and Inuktikuk. The English name is “Road to Nowhere.” The southerners who come to administrate things notice that the road just leads into the great barren regions with only the North Pole as its end. The Inuktikuk name, however, is a much longer one which translated roughly means, “the road that goes between the two lakes.” All we can see is nothing. The Inuit people see a lot more possibility, there is a lot more on their road than nothing.

In our lives and especially in our church we seldom know where we are heading, but it is a pilgrimage, so how we behave and think and love along the way molds the shape of our destination.

“By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.”

So by faith and not much else Abraham sojourned in his promised land - the place he knew God had sent him to live - yet he was a resident alien, a stranger in a strange land. It has become all the more apparent that we are living in the tent of our churches, a clear minority in today’s society which either ignores us or is offended by us. We are resident aliens, but by faith we continue on the road to nowhere which is really headed for the promised land.

“By faith he received power of procreation, even though he was too old - and Sarah herself was barren - because he considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.”

By faith again when the promised did not come to pass, Abraham kept on being faithful. The promise was a nation of descendants, infinite grains of sand, but that requires one man and woman to begin simply with one child. Now they were well beyond anyone’s expectation of having simply one child, and the author says it as bluntly as possible, they were as good as dead. But God does work in ways far beyond our explanations, so the promise did come through even as Sarah laughed, and Isaac became for the two of them and for the church still today the “substance of faith.”

“All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.”

None of these people, and so very few of us, received what they were promised before they died in faith. They had worked all their lives on the pilgrimage to reach the promise, but could only be strangers in search of a real home, a better country. God is not ashamed to be called their God and remained faithful to us.

“Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.”

Something better is to be provided for us, the substance of faith, and God will take care of the timing. We always want to see things happen now according to our schedule and plans as a direct result of our labour. We keep wanting to replace God as the creator of all good things. Maybe that’s why we always seem to have to wait, because as talented as we may be, we tend not to be very good creators. Something better, despite our disappointment and discouragement, is the final profit of our faith. We are not on the road to nowhere.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
at Summertown United Reformed Church
Oxford, England