Pentecost
12/Proper 14 7 August 2016
St Stephen
Lutheran Church, Pittsburgh PA
The Rev.
Maurice C. Frontz III, STS
I was in
the local Wal-Mart a few months ago,
for some
reason passing the jewelry desk.
I saw the
collection of cross pendants there and stopped to look at it.
I’m not
really interested in jewelry, but I am interested in crosses.
In some of
the little boxes the crosses came in were short verses.
I leaned
down to read one of the prayers, which said,
‘God grant
me the courage to believe in my dreams.’
No.
Oh, no.
I wanted
to die.
Or, more
accurately,
I wanted
the person who wrote that to die.
Well, not really die.
Not die as
such.
Die to
sin,
die to
unbelief,
die to
creating vapid, atrocious, blasphemous prayers.
Not die,
die.
But
seriously, how awful is that?
To make
the God who created the universe,
the God of
Israel,
the God of
Abraham and Jesus,
to be a
fairy godmother,
a
wish-fulfiller,
an enabler
of my dreams!
What
dreadful ignorance!
So what is
faith,
if it is
not the courage to believe in my dreams?
Is it the
intellectual assent to certain propositions about God,
God as
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Jesus Christ
as true God and true man?
Well,
certainly it is that.
But that
is not all there is to it.
It is to
believe that God is who he is and has done what he has done
in order to
bring us into communal and personal relationship with him.
This is
why Luther’s catechism does not simply say,
‘God
created all that exists,’ but ‘God created me
and all that exists.’
‘Jesus
Christ…is my Lord.’
The Holy
Spirit…has called me.’
We are
called not to have faith in our dreams, but in God himself,
for the
sake of God himself.
The letter
to the Hebrews says,
‘Faith is
the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.’
How is
this different from that prayer which comes with the Wal-mart cross,
the prayer
that God will help me believe that my dreams will come true?
What are
we to hope for?
The
hearers of the letter to the Hebrews would have known
exactly
what the writer was talking about.
Every
faithful Jew would have understood the hope of Israel,
that God’s
vision for his people would be accomplished,
that all
his promises would be fulfilled:
the day of
redemption for all his people,
when they
would live secure from all their enemies,
when
justice would live among them,
and peace
would be accomplished.
Those who
received this letter
were
faithful Jews who believed
that in
the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ
God had
made the promise absolutely sure.
But until
the day when God’s kingdom was seen by all,
they were
to live by faith in the unseen kingdom.
Abraham
was their model and their inspiration.
He was the
one that heard God’s promises,
and acted
on them,
even
though he couldn’t see
how or when they were going to come true.
Sarah knew
the faith Abraham had i
n God’s promises.
She knew that
Abraham
had been listening to God
when he started
packing the family goods
on the donkeys,
and
whatever couldn’t be moved was left behind.
She knew that
Abraham
had been listening to God,
when he started
coming to bed again every night.
Here was
Abraham, believing in the word of his God.
So the
Hebrews were to act,
so is
every Christian to act,
as if all
the promises of God are already fulfilled,
even if
the how or when is unclear.
This is
why Jesus tells his disciples to get rid of their possessions,
not simply
because they will not need them in the age to come,
for if
that were all that were true,
we might
keep them all
and devote
our lives to collecting and improving them until the day we die.
But we are
called to reject trust in posessions
because
the faith we have in them now
is opposed
to the faith in the world to come.
Because
too many possessions makes us unable
to hear
God’s promise and act accordingly.
Because
where we put our treasure in this world
dictates
how we live in the world,
trusting
in God, or in other things.
It is
quite doubtful that many people
dream of
giving up self, time, and possessions
in order
to hear and obey the command and promise of God!
But this
is what Jesus called his disciples to do,
what he
calls his faithful people to do.
We are
people who are on the way somewhere;
like
Abraham, on his way to inherit a land,
like the
Hebrews, on the way to an eternal city;
like the
disciples, on their way following Jesus.
If we are
to get up and move,
in order
to be on our way,
we may
just need to leave some things behind.
Not
exactly the stuff of
‘God grant
me the courage to believe in my dreams!’
But maybe,
just maybe,
if we change
just one word,
we could
have a good prayer;
a God-fearing
prayer, a God-pleasing prayer.
What if we
prayed,
‘God grant
me the courage to believe in your dreams!’
This is a
prayer of a person, of people, on the way,
a prayer
Abraham might have prayed,
a prayer
of faith,
looking
forward to what God promises,
and living
as if it were already reality:
for what
God promises, he surely will fulfill.
