The Reverend Richard R. Topping, Ph.D.
September 11th, 2011
Acting Dean of Studies,
Vancouver
School of Theology
Professor of Studies in the Reformed Tradition
Gracious God, grant us the gift of faith
so that we may understand
your promises to us and depend on them
through all our days:
In the name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“By Faith”
In a tongue and cheek article by Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick,
he tries to find the common high risk factor for heart disease.
He wants to discover it so we can avoid it.
He writes:
The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart
attacks than the British or Americans.
The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than
the British or Americans. The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer
fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer
fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. Conclusion: “Eat and
drink what you like. What kills
you is speaking English!”
Sometimes it’s difficult to find the correct
common denominator in a random list of things; to take just the right lesson
from the raw data. Look at our
text for this morning.
Abel makes a grade A offering.
Enoch walks into heaven.
Noah builds a really big boat. Abraham
leaves everything behind and strikes out for a place he has never seen.
He and his wife Sarah get their pension and child tax credit checks
in the same year. Abraham’s
first son is born when daddy is a hundred.
A large group of slaves exits Egypt by walking
through the sea. A prostitute
helps spies and gets spared. Israel walks
around a town for seven days and it falls over.
What’s the thread here?
What do these events and people have in common?
Well, the author of Hebrews tells us: ‘by
faith’. The thing they all have
in common is that what they all did, they all did by faith.
Today we walk through the Hall of Faith and what do we see: the
saints of old blessing and building and conceiving, staying and saying and
sacrificing.
Tom Long comments: “Hanging by just a
promise, a word from God, they move forward toward what is not yet visible
because they trust God. Our
preacher gives us a roll call of the faithful, names those in past
generations who swung out on the vine of God’s promises over the chasms of
life, trusting that the vine would hold.
Time and time again, the vine was secure, the promises of God held.”
(Hebrews)
The
common denominator among God’s approved people through the ages, one that
cries out for imitation in our own time is this:
They lived and worked and acted and
spoke ‘by faith.’
By faith Abel offered . . . by faith Enoch
was taken up . . . by faith Noah constructed an ark . . . by faith Abraham
obeyed, stayed, looked forward . . . by faith Sarah received power to
conceive . . . by faith the people crossed through, the walls fell down,
lions mouths were stopped . . .
it’s all by faith . . .
There is no doubt about the common
denominator in our lesson. The
thread here is obvious and the lesson plain: the faith of God’s people from
the past is a living example for God’s people in the present. They lived by
faith in God and it worked . . . live by faith.
But why imitate them?
Let’s face it, there’s good reason not to.
Look at the chapter – people did all sorts of risky things, strange
and odd things, weird things by faith.
Sarah had a baby at 90 years old -whenever we talk about this in our
Bible study group groans go up from all the women over 50.
A baby at any age isn’t easy, but at ninety, that’s crazy!
Read from a certain ‘safe’ perspective, faith - and the risky
ventures it pushes on us should be avoided.
It’s perfectly possible to get through life
without taking all these chances on purpose.
Like the common factors for heart disease, maybe faith in God and the
actions it promotes are best avoided.
After all, we can build a house without faith
in God, have a career without faith, can finish graduate school without
faith; we can get married without faith, have a family without faith; we can
even be a good citizens without faith; we can plan and organize, do commerce
and retire without faith in God.
Life is possible without the hazards faith
promotes so why take chances?
Why swing out on the strength of trust in God?
And aren’t we schooled against, insured
again, invested against, organized against big risks and blind ventures?
Look at these people who lived by faith their plans are long shots,
high risk, daring ventures. Their action plans have gaping holes in them.
As a culture we are big believers in
stability and security, predictability and calculated action.
And church people, well, we’re the
most careful of all people. We
are the conservative, safety-seeking members of the Western world
Presbyterians are noted for their moderate, conservative ways.
Presbyterians are known for founding insurance companies and
investment firms.
These stories of faith and risk, they cut
against our oaken grain.
My suspicion is that we sometimes go through
the motions to get the job done; we play it so safe and sound that we almost
know what is coming next in life.
Our routines are so well established that we can go on auto pilot for
quite a long while and no one notices.
Spiritually speaking, we yawn.
It a very slow process, almost imperceptible,
even to ourselves. It is an
odd, almost embarrassing thing to talk about, but we are bored in the midst
of success. Success without
significance is deadly.
Externally, everything looks just great.
Nice suit, great tie, full schedule.
And yet, underneath it all there is a low-grade apathy at work when
we’re honest with ourselves. We think to ourselves, “I really don’t have a
big emotional attachment to things and people around me; I’m not fully
engaged in a way that is hard to explain.
I don’t feel a thing.”
What is happening is that we’re not living by
faith in God but by the cold calculations of actuaries.
Doing what someone else told us was important.
We’ve been co-opted by cultural myths of success.
And it’s boring.
Tony Campolo, an American sociologist tells
the story of asking his first year sociology class, “how long have you been
alive?” They looked at each
other in a puzzled way. One
student raised his hand slowly, “19 years, right?”
Campolo said, “I don’t mean, how long have
you been breathing, but how long have you been alive?
How long have you been alert to the world and your place in it?
How long has getting up in the morning meant a new adventure in
significance? How long have you
reveled in walking and looking and breathing, felt at home in your skin,
believed your time in the world mattered.”
Another student answered, “about 15 minutes.”
Hebrews has this wonderful, PRECARIOUS, line
for us this morning: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the
conviction of things not seen . . .”
The example given is Abraham and Sarah who
lived out their lives with only a promise. God tells them, “Risk it all.
Leave it all behind and go to a new land.”
Where? God only says, “I
will show you.” They are old.
They are leaving the safety and security of their familiar world to
venture out. They put their
nest egg on the line. Cash out
all their RSPs and go. It’s a
risk, but they leave. Faith is like that.
People here this morning know more about this
than we are aware. When I ask
most people to tell me the story of their lives, most of the time they
relate one or two events in the past where they made choices, or when things
they would not have chosen were forced upon them and it all pointed in a
direction for life. And that’s
when the tone is animated.
In your own history here at
Richmond, think for a minute of the vital, exciting
moments. When this church building rose up from invisibility, somebody or
somebodies took a chance. Or
when people and clergy came out from the old country to
Canada
to live and work and minister in a country they hadn’t seen, trusting in the
call of God.
They didn’t play it safe.
Not everyone agreed when they moved forward.
Often there was disagreement, a serious argument or two.
But still they trusted, they moved ahead, in the midst of difficulty,
hesitation, cautious advice, they had faith – the assurance of things hoped
for, the conviction of things not visible to the eye . . .
They believed God for what was not yet in existence.
Acts of faith are a step forward into the
unknown future. In those
moments of stepping out we come alive, the church comes alive.
In moments of trust in what God has promised we are connected,
tingling, animated.
It’s impossible at these moments to stand
back from the situation and look at the whole picture dispassionately.
Some do this and call it being realistic, like putting God to one
side to contemplate a thing is realistic.
But who wants to survey dispassionately from the balcony when the
action’s on the road.
But what makes people want to do it?
I want to remind you most of the people who
are drafted into the adventure of faith in the Bible aren’t any more
religious than anyone else. Abraham and Sarah?
Ordinary old people.
Joseph and Mary? The kind of people we don’t usually hear anything about.
Moses, David, Ruth, Rahab the prostitute? In every case, there is
nothing about the biblical stories to suggest that they were more pious,
prayed harder, or had some unique divine connection we don’t have.
The Bible seems to go out of the way to
suggest just the opposite. They
were just trying to get on with their lives -like the rest of us, when
suddenly, in quite an unanticipated way, they are called to make a decision,
to open a door to the future, to take a risk and go for it.
And they did it.
Reluctantly sometimes.
Occasionally they argue with God and with other people.
But they do it. And
suddenly, life is interesting, challenging, purposeful, meaningful.
I suppose the other, even more important
reason, our fore bearers lived by faith is found right in our text: “Without
faith it is impossible to please God.
For whoever comes to God must believe that he exists and that he
rewards those who seek him.”
A lot of things are possible in life without
faith; but we can’t please God with it.
The book of Hebrews takes it for granted: the
people of God want to please God.
Gratitude to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ takes the
form of living by faith.
It is a question of credibility.
For people who know the love and constancy of God, what he has done
for the world in Jesus of Nazareth, we can do no other than live to please
God.
It is surprising that our text doesn’t say:
“Without a committee meeting, or without good looks and good taste or a
proper demographic study we can’t please God.”
These are factors without which we can’t please and impress and
motivate each other. Our text
is insistent that it is faith -trust in the reliability of God for what is
not yet visible – without which we cannot please God without.
Faith is the utter assurance, just as God has
been with us in the past so God goes before us into the future.
“Faith, writes Old Testament Walter
Bruggeman, “is the willingness to trust our lives and our future to God,
even when God does not appear to be as reliable as other more immediate
supports. Faith is readiness to
risk life on the promises of God without holding back.” (Bruggemann,
Inscribing the Text, 147)
We live under the promises of our Risen Lord
Jesus Christ, who said: “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall
not prevail against it” and “Lo, I am with you always even to the end of the
age.” What demographer takes
that into account when reporting the probabilities for the future of the
church? On Christ’s promises
not dire forecasts about Church attendance – we place our bets.
We believe that He is and so we shall be.
It’s wonderful to defy the odds of one dimensional (atheistic)
forecasts about the future of the church; for where such defiance is ‘by
faith’ it pleases God.
What does faith mean for you and for this
church in our days?
One thing is for sure.
It doesn’t mean just repeating what others did before us.
It is not our work as God’s people to shellac and preserve what
others have done.
You will notice from our reading in Hebrews,
all the people in the chapter lived by faith and no two did the same thing.
Each lived by faith, believed God; but they each had their own work to do.
Moses did not build an ark. Noah and his wife
did not have a son in their old age.
Please note: being faithful to God does not mean repeating what those
who went before us did.
I think we betray our forebears in the faith
if we repeat what they did.
What we want to imitate is their faith not carbon copy their actions.
What was faithful action in their time is almost certainly not
faithful action in ours.
Times change, and so God’s people are called
to new sorts of actions and reactions all made in faith. Cardinal Newman
once said, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead.
Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”
God has work for you to do in this time and
this place. By faith we are all
called to venture out and do great things, small things, God pleasing
things. Who knows what they may
be for you? What is it that we
can only behold on tiptoes, just glimpse on the horizon in this time and
place? What might be that is
not yet?
The peoples of the world are coming to us in
Vancouver?
Does our faith in God call us to welcome them as God in Christ has
welcomed us? Our denomination
struggles across our country and in this city?
Does faith in God mean we all have a leadership role to play?
Profound misunderstandings of Christian faith, and militant atheism
circulate in our day? Does faith require that we deploy our resources so
that this church plays a part in lucid expression of the faith?
And for individuals it may mean being
summoned from safety behind the desk to follow God’s leading into some new
work, or even more profoundly, to go back to the work you do by and in
faith. By the grace of the Holy
Spirit, may it be said of this church in the years to come that whatever it
did in our time and place, you did it by faith . . .
Let us pray:
O living God,
grant us the gift of living faith
that we may take up the work
of worship and witness
in this our time and place
to the glory and honour of your name;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
The Reverend Richard R. Topping, Ph.D.
September 11th, 2011