Pilgrimage by Caravan (Living By Faith: Week 2)

Hebrews 11:29-12:2

During August we’re reading from Hebrews 11, 12, and 13.  So I encourage you to spend a little time reading and praying either through the whole letter, or just through these three chapters.

Our reading today ends by picturing the life of faith as a kind of race.  Run with perseverance, we’re told.  The Bible is full of athletic images.  The writers often used analogies with games and sport and competition to illumine what it feels like to live by faith, to trust God across a lifetime, to live with intensity and purposefulness, to be willing to make choices that have costs, so that we can also experience the joy of being loyal to God’s new world that began with the raising of Jesus from the dead.

So run your race with perseverance.  Compete in the games like someone who has prepared and trained.  Approach your life with disciplined focus so that when the challenging parts come, you can stay on course. 

Have you been watching the Olympics in Rio?  It’s on about 37 different channels, so I have a hard time figuring out where I can watch what I want to see.  Our family has watched lots of swimming and some gymnastics.  And I’ve been watching lots of men’s and women’s soccer. 

There are some events where I don’t even understand what’s going on – women’s field hockey (they run around, bent over, with short little sticks – get these women some longer sticks!), rugby (I heard commentator mention that five women on Fiji’s rugby team have been playing rugby less than a year!), men’s handball (looks like a game kids made up in gym class), water polo (the goal seems to be to kick and punch and drown your opponent), fencing (which happens so fast you can’t see what happened until the slo-mo replay). 

But no matter the sport, all the athletes wear a uniform that gives them the freedom and flexibility to be competitive.  The divers and the women’s beach volleyball players wear next to nothing at all.  The swimmers and track athletes wear very streamlined uniforms that won’t cause any friction or drag. 

It would be silly for an athlete to compete in the games burdened by unnecessary gear, or wearing clothing that restricts their movement.  And yet that’s what many of us are doing in our own lives.  The Bible talks about “sin” in lots of different ways.  But here the point is that sin slows you down.  Sin is a rope that tangles your feet.  Sin is a heavy wet coat when you want to run unobstructed and free.

And you run your race as part of a team that is much larger than just you.  We live by faith with others.  We travel with friends.  We are all on a pilgrimage, but we’re doing it together with the rest of our village.  We’re in a caravan, you might say.

Hebrews invites us to imagine our lives connected to other people of faith.  We’re invited to take the wide angled view of who’s on our team.  We’re reminded that we have the company not only of those friends, family, and others in the congregation; we’re also running the race surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses” – people who have already run their race and now live in the presence of God who is their true home. 

The word “witness” here doesn’t mean spectator.  So the point isn’t so much that you’re running in an Olympic stadium and have all these folks watching and cheering for you.  The word “witness” refers to people who have lived difficult lives but persevered.  They lived by faith in ways that were costly and painful, but they endured.  These faithful friends from the past now surround you as you run your own race.

Now we need to back up, because most of our reading was a quick, summary list of some of the faithful people from the stories of the Old Testament.  It is offered to us as a kind of ancestry.  These are people who lived with faith.  And we can draw strength and inspiration from the family tree.  But if you pay attention to the specific people and situations mentioned, you’ll see that something odd and curious is happening. 

There are some successful people on this list.  There are impressive victories and clear signs of God’s favor.  The Red Sea parted.  The walls of Jericho fell.  Many military contests were won by Israel when the odds were stacked against them.

But clearly this list of faithful people cannot be read as a list of winners and success stories.  Some were tortured, chained, and imprisoned.  Others were stoned or sawn in two.  Their villages overtaken by foreign armies, they became poor refugees, wandering the desert, taking shelter in caves and in holes in the ground, living like animals.  Now if you don’t recall some of these details from the Old Testament, it’s because the writer has in mind Jewish literature that was written in the Maccabean period, in the century or so before Jesus, when the Jews suffered terribly under the Syrian Empire.

I hope that this list of the faithful can broaden our view of what faith can look like.  Occasionally, faith might look like radical trust in God for victories against all odds.  But more often than not, faith will look nothing like that.  It will look like people who don’t give up when their world crashes in.  It will look like people who hang in there in the face of terrible pain and heartache.  It will look like people who keep trusting God even when their faith comes with significant costs – politically, economically, and personally. 

If you remember nothing else from today’s sermon on this reading, remember this: you can never observe faith simply by looking at the outward circumstances of someone’s life.  Sometimes, trusting God and being loyal to God’s new way of life in Jesus Christ will be accompanied by visible success in life, accomplishments, and achievements.  But not usually.  Usually living by faith will look like perseverance under difficult circumstances.  Which means that usually faith will be easy to overlook, almost invisible.  But it is everywhere, because God is able to sustain people even through the most difficult challenges of life.   

The list is not meant to be exhaustive.  These people are just examples of some of the many ways that people have lived by faith.  And perhaps the list is meant only to be a kind of spark for us to name our own lists of faithful people who have inspired and encouraged us to hang in there.  Who would be on your list?

• ·      My list would include people who live with disabilities and still find a way to be joyful.
• ·      My list would include people who have faced terrible injustice but remained hopeful and engaged.
• ·      My list would include people who have suffered deep personal loss, wrenching grief, but keep showing up, making themselves available to others.
• ·      My list would include people who are brave and courageous peacemakers when they could have become angry and vindictive.
• ·      My list would include people who do their work gladly, with no worries about whether anyone else notices, because they don’t need status or prestige.

Your list might be different.  You have been influenced by another range of wonderful, inspiring people who live by faith.

But even though our lists will look different, the first person on the list will be Jesus.    Jesus heads our list of faithful lives because he is truly a “pioneer.”  He opened new territory.  He discovered new lands.  His life opened up new possibilities for us that we had not before imagined.  He showed us what unflinching faithfulness to God can look like. 

And let’s remember the kind of life he lived.  First of all, he lived the great majority of his life in utter obscurity.  He was an unimportant Jew from an economically unimportant village in a territory ruled by others.  He never married or had children.  He was a common laborer; he worked with his hands and never earned much money.  He lived his whole public life wandering around outside, by lakes and rivers, through fields of wheat, sitting in village squares.  He told stories mostly.  He gathered a small following, but most people thought he was dangerous or crazy.  And he died like a common criminal.

His life was no obvious success or victory.  And yet God raised him from the dead as a sign that this was a faithful life.  This is what loyalty to God’s kingdom looks like.

Your life doesn’t have to look exactly like his.  Faith takes all different kinds of shapes and colors.  That’s what you discover when you travel in a caravan.  That’s what you discover when we travel together, so that we can share our stories, so that we encourage one another when we get tired.  By being here, by sharing our lives and our faith, we’re saying to one another, “Let’s keep going.”