Hilton Head Island, SC – September 1, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 17:14-21; Hebrews 11:1-3
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. - Hebrews 11:1
Everybody has faith. There is nobody alive who does not have faith. Atheists and agnostics have faith, as well as the followers of all religions. Scientists have faith, mathematicians have faith, physicians have faith, physicists have faith. It is not possible to live without faith.
The sun came up this morning. Did you know it would come up, or did you believe it? If you think you knew it would, how did you know it? Was it because it has always done so every other morning of your life? But what absolute guarantee do we have that it will always come up, every day, forever and ever and ever?
Some day, or over a series of millions or billions of days, the process will begin which will guarantee that the sun will not come up, that it will burn out, that our solar system will become so much cosmic dust. In fact, that process has already been in progress for perhaps fifteen billion years. As surely as the big bang got us started, the slow fizzle has begun by which the sun shall one day not come up, although "come up" is of course not exactly the proper description. Earth revolves around the sun; the sun does not revolve around the earth. In any case, I believe, I am convinced, that at some point, probably in the far distant future, the sun will cease to function as the primary source of physical energy for this tiny corner of the universe, although I also am utterly unable to verify this conviction.
All that notwithstanding, God, whom I and you and we believe created the universe, the galaxies and the sun and planets and the moon and the seas and dry land and mountains and lakes and hills: God is the primary source of all that is, and we have faith that in His own time and plan, He will save the entire universe, whatever "save" actually means and however immense the "universe" actually is. And we can say that with utter confidence because we believe the statement that "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16).
The letter to the Hebrews is unique in the New Testament. Nothing else is like it. It was apparently written by a Jew who had become a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, and he wrote it for other Jewish Christians whom he feared were beginning to defect from Jesus and to revert to Judaism. His main purpose was to show that Jesus was the Great High Priest of a new approach to the religion of the Bible, by which he would have meant what we call the "Old Testament," and that we can fully understand God, whom the biblical Israelites called Yahweh, only by understanding Yeshua ha-Notzri, whom the Christians call the Messiah, the "Christ."
As he came toward the end of his letter, the writer, whom no one can identify beyond dispute, gave a definition of faith, and then a whole litany of the people of faith, the great leaders of the Hebrews. "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for," he said, "the conviction of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). You can't know what you believe, in the sense that you can be certain of it, nor can you see what you believe, in the sense that it is openly and scientifically or empirically demonstrable. And if those words are too wordy for you, and you wonder what on earth I'm talking about, then we might put it this way: if you can truly prove something, you don't believe in it; you know it. Faith is a kind of knowledge, but it isn't that kind of knowledge. It is knowledge beyond or above or outside proof, conviction that results from something other than ordinary verification. Faith truly is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Thus we believe that the sun will rise (so to speak) tomorrow, and we believe that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine will end, but we don't know when, because we can't know when. Some things are verifiable only after they happen, not before they happen.
The story is told in Matthew of a man who brought his epileptic son to Jesus to be healed. The disciples were there, but Jesus wasn’t. So the man asked if the disciples could heal the boy, and they couldn’t. Then Jesus came along, and he instantaneously cured the boy of his affliction. The twelve asked Jesus why they could not do that, and he told them it was because their faith was too weak. Jesus said, “If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move hence to yonder place,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible to you” (Mt. 17:21).
Obviously Jesus was speaking figuratively, not literally. But faith can move figurative mountains. I know a man who was stricken by a very rare form of cancer. He was in Russia on an extended business trip not long after the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl melted down. Somehow his heart contracted cancer as a result of that visit. His doctors here gave him little hope of survival, but an oncologist at the MUSC Hospital said he thought treatments there could cure him. Five days every week for many months his wife drove him to Charleston and back, and eventually he was cured. He trusted that he could beat the cancer, as did his wife, and it happened. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
And that's the way it is with our Christian faith too, isn't it? We won't know it is completely valid in every respect until we reach the end of our story, but we trust that it will end well. In this life we gather mounting evidence and clues that what we believe about God is true, but the case will not be closed until the case is closed, or, as Unique Yogi so memorably put it, it's never over till it's over.
Faith is counterintuitive. We tell ourselves, “Why should I believe in anything that I cannot verify?” We suppose it makes no sense to do that, But the only way that faith can become operative is to throw ourselves onto the love and support of a God we cannot see but whom we trust will grasp and uphold us, whatever obstacles may confront us. Faith is the ground on which we stand when surrounding us is nothing but quicksand.
We have an old aphorism: "Seeing is believing." Recently I saw a bumper sticker that said, "Sometimes You Must Believe Before You Can See."
In the end, that is exactly the way it is, Christian people. We must take what Paul Tillich called, and what Soren Kierkegaard before him also called, "the leap of faith." If you insist on waiting to know beyond doubt before you plunge into faith, you never will have faith, because in matters of faith you can never know beyond doubt. And if you think you can do that, you are only deceiving yourself. In order for faith genuinely to be faith, what we believe must have the possibility of not being so, or else, by definition, it cannot be faith. Only those who are prepared to leap will ever come down onto the Terra Fides. Those who demand proof or certainty will stand forever at the edge of the chasm between verifiable human knowledge and God-given faith.
For you see, in the end only God can give us faith. We cannot will it or choose it; we can only accept it. And God offers faith to each of us, to all of us.
But what happens if we should reject faith? Then we shall live as paupers, deliberately choosing to go without one of the greatest gifts God has to offer us. Does refusing to take the leap doom us for all eternity? No, it only dooms us to a devastating spiritual poverty in this life, when we might have lived in the divinely appointed luxury of that sort of faith in God which only God can give us. Nobody is able to will to have faith, but all of us can accept the gift, provided we are courageous enough to take the leap.
In the last five of these six sermons in summary, I shall be quoting from my favorite poet, the lovely, haunting, haunted, stellar Belle of Amherst, Emily Dickinson.
I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart (the map) were given.
Faith grants us the imagination to see that which otherwise we could never see; it gives us ears to hear what otherwise we could never hear. Four days ago I spoke to a woman whose husband just died. He had been so terribly ill that one day, in desperation, she prayed to God, "Please take him; he's suffering so much." Deep within herself, she heard a voice, and the voice said to her, "Don't worry; it will be all right." She said the voice was clearer than any voice she ever heard, but also unlike any voice she had ever heard. She stopped worrying, and it was all right; in a few days he slipped quietly away.
"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." What causes things like that to happen? The answer is faith, which is to say, ultimately, God. He wants to give us faith; He wants us to take the leap. He is standing on the other side, ready to catch us, and it is not far; it is only one small step for a man, although one giant supra-historical leap for mankind.
In January of 1932 a young black minister named Michael King accepted the call of a struggling church in Atlanta to be their pastor. A bank was about to foreclose on them, because they could not pay their mortgage. In a few short years, under Michael King's leadership, the membership of that church shot up from two hundred to four thousand.
Two years after arriving there, the congregation sent their minister and his family on a tour of Europe, and they ended up in the Holy Land. This was 1934, in the heart of the Depression, and these church folk were black, and thus almost by definition poor, but the people of the Ebenezer Baptist Church thought it would be a good experience for their parson and his family. Michael King, Jr. was only five years old when they went on that summer-long journey, and the other two children were also very young. It was an amazing journey for a sharecropper's son, and no one, least of all he, could have imagined such a thing could have happened just two years earlier.
When they returned from Palestine, Michael King changed his name to Martin, and so he became Martin Luther King. His son thus became Martin Luther King, Jr. The rest, as they say, is history.
We don't have to see exactly where we are going, but we can never get there till we take that first little leap. Faith is the gift of God to get us started toward our goal.
Flannery O'Connor was that wonderful, rare, singular novelist who was born in Savannah and spent most of her life in Milledgeville, Georgia. She was a Southern Roman Catholic when Catholics were very suspect in the South, and she died in her forties from that strange and vicious disease called lupus. She once wrote, "What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can't believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God."
Good advice. God is patiently waiting to give you that which you most need. Are you waiting to receive it?
So then: What do you believe? And why do you believe it?