Scripture: Hebrews 11:29-12:2 (CEB)

29 By faith they crossed the Red Sea as if they were on dry land, but when the Egyptians tried it, they were drowned.

30 By faith Jericho’s walls fell after the people marched around them for seven days.

31 By faith Rahab the prostitute wasn’t killed with the disobedient because she welcomed the spies in peace.

32 What more can I say? I would run out of time if I told you about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets. 33 Through faith they conquered kingdoms, brought about justice, realized promises, shut the mouths of lions, 34 put out raging fires, escaped from the edge of the sword, found strength in weakness, were mighty in war, and routed foreign armies. 35 Women received back their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured and refused to be released so they could gain a better resurrection.

36 But others experienced public shame by being taunted and whipped; they were even put in chains and in prison. 37 They were stoned to death, they were cut in two, and they died by being murdered with swords. They went around wearing the skins of sheep and goats, needy, oppressed, and mistreated. 38 The world didn’t deserve them. They wandered around in deserts, mountains, caves, and holes in the ground.

39 All these people didn’t receive what was promised, though they were given approval for their faith. 40 God provided something better for us so they wouldn’t be made perfect without us.

12 So then, with endurance, let’s also run the race that is laid out in front of us, since we have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us. Let’s throw off any extra baggage, get rid of the sin that trips us up, 2 and fix our eyes on Jesus, faith’s pioneer and perfecter. He endured the cross, ignoring the shame, for the sake of the joy that was laid out in front of him, and sat down at the right side of God’s throne.

The Word of God for the People of God

Thanks be to God!

You Will Find Me

I have been preaching, on and off, since 2014.  And in that time, I have often used embarrassing stories from my own life to help me make a point about God.  I’ve told you about towels, about wanting to be a rapper, about being smacked in the face by the ground, about being blown up at football practice.  But there is one period in my life I have never publicly discussed, until today: Middle School.  I want to be very clear: it is possible to survive and thrive in Middle School, and I know this because I’ve seen other people do it.  But I’m intentionally withholding my most embarrassing Middle School stories, and after today, I’ll probably never discuss my time in Middle School again.  If you consider how embarrassing some of the stories I have shared with you are for me, you will have a sense of what that time in my life was like.  

I left Middle School as an eighth grader.  I entered Middle School as an anxious sixth grader.  Starting at a new school is tough, a reality made worse for me by the fact that I began that year riding the bus to school for the first time in my life.  My mom had to commute to work at 7am every day, and my little brother’s school day started around 8, while mine began around 9:30.  So, for the first few weeks of the year, my dad would drop my brother off and start work at a normal time, and I would wait to catch the bus at home by myself.  In those mornings, sitting in the house alone, my anxiety would get a hold of me, and I would start to spiral.  

Life is full of times like that, in which we must do our best to face a hard new thing.  In these moments, we often want to turn to our faith.  But how does faith help?  In our passage for today, the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews uses examples from scripture and Judaean tradition to show that both good days and hard days have always been part of life for the faithful.  And, rather than treat this as a philosophical problem, Hebrews instead does what the Bible as a whole does: refuse to definitively explain how the goodness of God coexists with life’s challenges, and simultaneously offer us something better than an explanation.  

Why this response?  Why deal with the “Bad things, good people” question in this way?  Many of the statements about God we were taught to accept as fact were first written down by powerful people living in ivory towers.  Often, these were people who could, if they wanted to, escape into that ivory tower at the first appearance of real life.  In that world, clarity, research, and careful deductive reasoning are the highest priority.  But when the ivory tower collapses, and the challenges of life become as real as Roman and Babylonian soldiers kicking down your door, you prioritize something else.  From Genesis to Revelation, the voices of scripture most often belong not to the powerful, but to people who had been so thoroughly crushed by empires that they were forced to live their lives as foreigners, strangers, and outcasts.  Those people were intelligent and thoughtful, but they did not give us the Bible to win a debate.  They wanted to speak of the God they had encountered in their real lives, and share with their fellow outcasts how those encounters had given them hope, and helped them to feel less alone.    

After the first two weeks of my sixth grade year, my dad changed our morning schedule.  Instead of me taking the bus, each morning, my dad, my brother, and I would leave home together.  Dad and I would drop my brother off, we would ride over to the Middle School at around 8:30, and we would go for a walk in the surrounding neighborhood.  That neighborhood had sidewalks and hills and lots of trees, and about a half mile away from the school building, a small, sandy trail that ran beside a creek.  I remember walking up and down those hills, past those trees, and along that creek with my dad, and as we walked, we talked.  We talked about football, and we commiserated over how awful the then-Redskins were.  We studied for my vocab quizzes.  We talked about life.  And once we made it back to the school, I would go to class feeling calm and settled, not consumed by anxiety, but ready to have some new experiences, and, eventually, to find my friends.  

The life of faith is hard.  There are good days, and there are hard days too.  The point of scripture has never been to explain this.  Instead, when real life comes knocking, scripture has what I needed most in those first few weeks of 6th grade: a splash of hope, and a reminder that we are not alone.  Jesus Christ is the pioneer and perfector of our faith not because he is the answer to every question, but because he shows us that the God of the universe is with us in both our best days and our worst.  Who would better understand anxiety, than the man at Gethsemane, waiting for the arrest and execution he knew was coming?  Who would better understand rejection, than the man who watched his friends and followers abandon him to save themselves?  Who would better know what it feels like to be misunderstood, than the man who healed the sick and fed the poor but was condemned as a criminal?  And who would be better positioned to give us hope that anxiety, and rejection, and being misunderstood are not the end of our story than the man who faced all of those on Good Friday, and transcended them three days later, when the tomb opened up, and God’s final triumph was complete?

In the days ahead, may your faith grow, and may your faith make room for the notion that God really is with you.  Anxiety, and rejection, and being misunderstood might feel as final and all consuming as death, but when God is in our lives, even death has to give way to resurrection.  And if we find ourselves sitting in the grave, waiting for the darkness to end and the new day to begin, we can have faith that even in the darkness, we are not alone.  In Jesus Christ, the God of the universe has told us “If you look for me, you will find me by your side.”  Face the challenges in front of you.  Run with perseverance the race marked out for you.  Trust in God, and be amazed at what the pioneer and perfector of your faith will do.  Amen.