By Faith
In trying to find a common high-risk factor for heart disease, Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick 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 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!”
We might ask ourselves, how do we find the correct common denominators in random lists? How are we able to draw the appropriate lessons from the raw data? How do we not mess things up? Look at Hebrews 11.
Life is possible without the hazards faith promotes, so why take the risk?
Abel makes a grade A offering. Enoch hikes into heaven. Noah delves into zoology. Abraham leaves behind home and hearth and the family farm to strike out for a new frontier, for the unknown. He and his wife Sarah collect their pension and child tax credit cheques the same year. A large group of slaves exits Egypt by walking through the water. A prostitute helps out spies and is spared. Israel creates a racket outside Jericho until the walls come down.
What’s the thread here? What do these events and people have in common? Well, the author of Hebrews tells us that what they have in common is faith; that whatever they chose to do, they did by faith.
By faith Abel offered … by faith Enoch was taken up … by faith Noah constructed an ark … by faith Abraham obeyed, stayed put, and looked forward … by faith Sarah received the power to conceive … by faith people crossed over deserts and seas, walls fell down, the mouths of lions were stopped … all by faith.
It’s perfectly possible to roll through life without taking all these chances on purpose. After all, we can attend and finish school without faith, have a career without faith, build a house, marry, and have a family without faith in God. We can be good citizens without faith. We are free to plan and organize, engage in commerce, enjoy vacations, and retire without faith in God. And we do.
Life is possible without the hazards faith promotes, so why take the risk? I have a friend who tells me that whenever you ask mainline Christians to take a risk, you should remember you are speaking to people whose ancestors invented insurance.
My suspicion is that we sometimes go on autopilot to get the job done. Our routines are so well established that we can go on sleep-walking for quite a long while and no one notices.
And yet, underneath it all there is a low-grade apathy at work when we’re honest with ourselves. We think to ourselves, “I’m not really into anything full on. I don’t feel engaged.” 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. And it’s dull.
Tony Campolo tells the story of asking his first-year sociology class, “How long have you been alive?” One student raised his hand slowly, “Nineteen years, right?” Campolo responded, “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?”
Hebrews has this wonderful, and yet precarious, line for us: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen …”
People here this morning know more about this than we are aware. When I ask most people to tell me how they found their vocation, they talk about when things went sideways, and they took the only way left. And the tone is animated!
Faith is the assurance that as God has been with us in the past, God goes before us into the future.
“Faith,” writes Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann, “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.”
What does faith mean for us and for our churches and communities and for VST these days?
Notice from our reading in Hebrews that the people in the chapter lived by faith, yet they were not imitating one another. They did not do the same thing. Each lived by faith, believed in God; but they each had their own work to do.
We betray our forebears in the faith if we merely try to replicate what they did. What we want to imitate is their faith, not provide a carbon copy of their actions. What was faithful action in their time is almost certainly not faithful action in ours. Times change, and God’s people are called to faithfulness in our actions now, by living in our time today, not by impersonating others from another era.
Where in the world is there a spark of the kingdom? That’s where we throw fuel on the fire!
We need to look at the world through Scripture to spot God’s MO (modus operandi) so we can go with the flow of the Spirit in the world beloved of God. Where in the world is there a spark of the kingdom? That’s where we throw fuel on the fire! By faith we participate in God’s restoration project of the whole of creation.
The work will not be the same in every person or community. And thanks be to God for diversity of mission and ministry born of the Holy Spirit, that giver of gifts and faith. Multiple points of light will shine upon us, enlightened by the Light that has come into the world.
My friends, may it be said that whatever the students, faculty, and staff do in this our time, we do by faith.
Amen.
Richard Topping is the President and Vice-Chancellor of Vancouver School of Theology and holds the St. Andrew’s Hall Chair in Studies in the Reformed Tradition. Prior to that, he served churches in Muskoka and Montreal, and taught at Presbyterian College in the Montreal School of Theology at McGill University.
This article is an abridged version of President Richard Topping’s sermon. For the full text, please contact VST.