WE’VE COME THIS FAR BY FAITH
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
Covenant Presbyterian Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Text: Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
“Are we there yet?”
“No, son. Not yet.”
“Well, are we almost there?”
“We still have a ways to go.”
“But pretty soon, huh?”
“We’ll see, son.”
(Pause)
“Are we getting close, dad?”
This familiar scenario probably came to my mind because it’s August, the month my pastor father always took his vacation. My parents would load all four of us children into the car and head out somewhere. Often those vacations were with my parents’ families in Louisiana and those old Buicks were never air-conditioned, so you can understand some of the urgency of the questions. “Are we there yet?” “When will be there?” “Will it be soon?” I won’t recount any of the bickering that went on the back seat, but, again, I’m sure you can imagine, if not actually remember. Of course, the best times were when we would break into singing – “Red River Valley,” “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” “Springtime in the Rockies,” “Tell Me Why,” “Amazing Grace.” Time and miles would fly. But, I digress. There is a text to address.
“We’ve Come This Far by Faith” - I don’t remember ever singing that gospel song in the car, but I know it was a favorite of the congregation I belonged to in Oakland for many years. We would sing with great gusto and deep feeling –
We've come this far by faith,
leaning on the Lord;
trusting in his holy word,
he’s never failed me yet.
O can't turn around,
We've come this far by faith.
It’s a great chorus of affirmation. It sings of the faithfulness we want to live with every day of our lives – individually and in community. It recognizes God’s constancy and how God sustains us through life’s journey. Yes, we’ve come this far by faith, but the nagging questions remain. “Where is it that we are headed?” and “How close are to being there?” One can’t help but wonder how often Abraham and Sarah, and later Isaac and Rebekkah, and Moses and Miriam, and all those other pioneers of the faith down through the centuries asked such questions as they journeyed. “How long, O Lord? How long?”
According to the ancient word, Abraham and Sarah were as old as some of us when they left the comfort of their well-appointed home in Ur of the Chaldees, wandering west toward Canaan. Why? Because God had called them to go. How many of us can imagine, at 75 years of age, packing up all our worldly possessions, leaving family, friends and the familiar behind, striking out for some unknown land, in obedience to God’s call? Those poor souls didn’t even have Mapquest or global positioning devices! Yet, there they were, wandering from place to place, living in tents, trusting in God’s promises of future family and home.
The ancient word says that when Sarah overheard, at age 99, she was finally to have a baby, she laughed out loud. The improbable had become ridiculous in, until she actually held her baby boy. They were so ecstatically happy, they named him Isaac, which means “laughing.” Can you see them, journeying along, little Laughing asking, “Are we almost there?” He had no clue that mom and dad had no clue about where they were headed. He had to learn for himself that it might just be, for now anyway, that the journey is home. All of us who trace our faith heritage back through the branches of this family tree, may need to learn the same lesson. The journey is our home.
Is this good news? For many of us I imagine not. We like the settled comfort of our lives. I frequently tell friends from other places what an ideal place Palo Alto is. Who would want to live anywhere else? Affluent, cultured, educated, well-fed, perfect weather – what more could one ask for? And still, even for us, those nagging questions come: “Where are we headed?” “How close are we to being there?” By all accounts, Sarah and Abraham were wealthy folk, well-settled in their Mesopotamian homeland. Then they heard of a city “whose architect and builder is God.” Something deeper than pride of place and material comfort was touched in them. Something was stirred deep down inside that called them to search for more, what the writer of Hebrews calls “a better country…a heavenly one.”
Now I suppose writing like this can spawn songs like “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.” (And by the way, I think we did sing that one in the car occasionally.) But I don’t think that’s what this writer is getting at. I think the writer is lifting up a state of mind, a way of being. I think he is leading us toward something like Augustine’s great confession, “O God, you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” The home and the family to which our faith draws us is near to the heart of God. It has nothing to do with love of country or possessions. It has everything to do with being grounded in God.
We’ve come this far by faith. The writer describes faith in beautifully familiar words, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith is our conviction that the things we hope for in God will become visible reality. Take a moment to look inside this morning. What are your deepest hopes? Peace perhaps - an end to enmity and strife, to war and destruction? Maybe a little more justice, some economic equity? How about healing for a loved one or a land like Haiti or this small planet we all inhabit? Guidance for a child, bright futures for youth everywhere, settled rest for someone late in life? A new song to sing? Time to stop to smell the roses? Assurance that the One who holds the future is the One who holds your hand? What is your confidence level that your deepest hopes might be realized? This is your faith quotient, according to the writer of Hebrews.
Our forebears journeyed in faith. No, not with faith – in faith. This faith was not related to a set of beliefs or principles to which they assented. It was not based in a creed they recited. It was not proof of anything except their deep experience of traveling with God toward God. Frederick Buechner says that "Faith is different from theology because theology is reasoned, systematic, and orderly, whereas faith is disorderly, intermittent, and full of surprises….Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting" (Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, quoted in Kate Huey “Living into the Promise, ucc.org.) It may be that faith actually requires that we let go of our certainties in order to trust truly God’s way.
In The Message, Eugene Peterson translates the definition of faith this way, “The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It's our handle on what we can't see.” And Clarence Jordan in The Cottonpatch Version writes, “Now faith is the turning of dreams into deeds; it is betting your life on the unseen realities.” For people of faith, trust in God’s presence as well as in God’s future is a fundamental fact of daily existence. It is a firm foundation that makes life worth living, regardless of where we find ourselves. Pain, struggle, doubt, fear, death itself – and always underneath the everlasting arms! Dreams realized, however incompletely. Can you imagine living into such reality? Literally betting your life on unseen realities that promise everything you ever needed.
It was the poet W. H. Auden who penned the line, “Nothing can save us that is possible: We who must die demand a miracle” (“For the Time Being.”)There is life – rich life, abundant life beyond what we think we know, beyond what we believe we see and understand – and it is this life, the miraculous life of unseen reality, life anchored in the mysterious presence of God, for which we long, to which we journey, when we choose to live our lives in faith.
Let me close with some hopeful words from Frederick Buechner, “By faith we understand, if we are to understand it at all, that the madness and lostness we see all around us and within us are not the last truth about the world but only the next to the last truth….Faith is the eye of the heart, and by faith we see deep down beneath the face of things – by faith we struggle against all odds to be able to see – that the world is God's creation even so. It is he who made us and not we ourselves, made us out of his peace to live in peace, out of his light to dwell in light, out of his love to be above all things loved and loving. That is the last truth about the world" (Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, quoted in Kate Huey “Living into the Promise, ucc.org.)Friends, such faith might yet turn the world right side up.
We’ve come this far by faith. I imagine that is more or less true for most of us. But we are not there yet and we really don’t know how much longer. Even dad can’t answer all our questions to our satisfaction as the old Buick chugs along. But, you know, there’s some real assurance that he’s got his hands on the steering wheel and he’s going to go with us all the way. So we continue to journey – not just by faith, but in faith and we journey with one another because God knows this is a journey too difficult to undertake alone. I thank God that you are my journey partners and I pray that God will continue to bless us as we journey together toward that city whose architect and builder is God, to that homeland to which all are welcomed and in which all will find their lives fulfilled. Amen.