Will you pray with me: “God help us to trust in you even more. AMEN.”
When was the last time you really stepped out in faith?
Maybe it was when you made a huge purchase, like a house or a car, and you said a quick prayer as you scribbled on the dotted line.
Maybe it was taking a new position, maybe a position that got you here, that allowed our paths to cross.
Maybe it was inviting a family member, an aging parent perhaps, to move in with you, changing your whole dynamic. All of these, not knowing how it would end.
For me, my most recent outstep in faith was putting Micah on an airplane by himself last Monday. Going to visit Grandpa and Grandma in Houston. First time. I kissed him, and watched him walk down that plank all by his little self. I looked at that pilot drinking his coffee while they waited for their turn amid the morning air traffic…closed my eyes and gave it to God...
I’ve been saying a prayer often as we embark on our big building project here at Shepherd of the Valley. I’m not exactly sure where it came from. I know it’s been called the Lutheran Prayer of Courage. I put it on our front sign…
Lord you call your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Grant us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us, through Jesus Christ. AMEN.
This prayer is based on our reading today from Hebrews. We enter a new book of the New Testament today, here in the dog days of summer. The heat, it almost seems, can have an impact on our spirituality, on our religious fervor. A certain lethargy can set in here in August. So books like Hebrews can serve as nice pep talk. But we do well to remember that the author/s of Hebrews was way more invested than that: their lives were on the line for the trust they put in God, through JC.
Calling to mind the faithfulness of Abraham and Sarah -- who truly set out, not knowing where they go, but only that God’s hand is leading them and God’s love supporting them -- Hebrews drives home our call to faithfulness in God. (This is always rooted, btw, in God’s faithfulness in loving us.)
“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” our passage says. We are called to step out again in faith. In a world where real hope is often a rare sight, in a world where fear and death, violence and terror, rampant consumption and self-centered, self-promotion seem to rule us, real hope can certainly fall into the category of “things not seen”. And yet we lean into hope through faith -- faith not ultimately in technology or weapons or any human-made schematic or innovation. Some of these things can certainly be good, but we are called to lean into a hope in the One who prepares a city for us, a place we can’t even see.
Now, Hebrews’ references of hope reaching beyond even the boundaries of this life, reaching beyond even death itself, the cosmic dimensions of the hope we’re dealing with here, does not catapult us out of our present situation. This heavenly hope actually injects us even more deeply into our present moment...
We Christians don’t live with hope wistfully longing to be swept away (that’s why that Left Behind stuff was so wrong).
Because of this faith, this hope, we live even deeper into our present reality, attending to the needs of the world, especially those who are hurting in our world. We don’t need immediate assurances that “everything is going to be ok”, because we know in the end -- the big end, the final end, the glorious end -- everything truly will be ok. So we live in hope, love, joy and peace now -- even as the world is flying out of control. Christians have faith.
Friends in Christ, God’s hand is leading us. God’s love is supporting us. Can you see it? Maybe not, but together we have faith that God’s hand is there, God’s support is there.
What gets me about the saints -- Old Testament heroes, historical models of faith like Clare of Assisi (who we commemorate this week) or Martin Luther...or Martin Luther King Jr. -- is that so many of the saints died without having reached “the promised land”. [pause] They were children of Mt. Nebo. Do you remember Mt. Nebo in the Bible? Mt. Nebo is where Moses goes in the very last verses of his life in Exodus. It’s where God takes him up, to look out and see the promised land. He dies before he gets there. But he gets to see it.
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| a view from the top of Mt. Nebo |
Sisters and brothers in Christ, in so many ways, we to are children of Mt. Nebo. Like the saints, those who have -- what do we say? -- “died in the faith”, we too will die before we get there. As Bp. Oscar Romero said, “We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.”
He once wrote (I invite my confirmation kids to memorize this...):
“It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession
brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives include everything.
This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's
grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the
difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not
messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.”
We move on and outward in faith. We continue to pray: “God help us to trust you more.” And we give thanks for God’s faithfulness in loving us, even when we fail. AMEN.
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