This Far By Faith

Hebrews 11: 1– 3, 8– 10, 13– 16

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for,

the conviction of things not seen.

Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.

By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared

by the word of God,

so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called

to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance;

and he set out, not knowing where he was going.

By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised,

as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob,

who were heirs with him of the same promise.

For he looked forward to the city that has foundations,

whose architect and builder is God.

All of these died in faith without having received the promises,

but from a distance they saw and greeted them.

They confessed that they were strangers

and foreigners on the earth,

for people who speak in this way

make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.

If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return.

But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God;

indeed, he has prepared a city for them.

  

2 Corinthians 5: 16– 20

From now on, therefore,

we regard no one from a human point of view;

even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view,

we know him no longer in that way.

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation:

everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation;

that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,

not counting their trespasses against them,

and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.

So we are ambassadors for Christ,

since God is making his appeal through us;

we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

  

Luke 14:1, 7-14
On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.

When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable.
"When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host;
and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, 'Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place.

But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, 'Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you.
For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."
He said also to the one who had invited him, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.
But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.
And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

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Paul tells the Corinthians, Anyone who is in Christ can no longer be regarded by human standards. We no longer look to the outer characteristics of the person - how they look, what they wear - but to the inner person - the love they share with others, the faith they reflect for the unknown future. The fruits of the Spirit. The descriptions of love that we hear in the passage so often used in wedding services – Love is patient, kind, not envious, not boastful, not arrogant, not rude. Not irritable, not resentful, not rejoicing in wrongdoing, but rejoicing in the truth. This is the standard of married life, just as it is the standard of Christian life.

When I counsel a couple that is married or preparing for marriage, I usually talk to them about the three entities in a marriage. There is you, and there is you, and then there is both of you - the couple - the married entity. This is a new creation; one that can only be seen by these inner standards, these fruits of the Spirit, these descriptors of love. A healthy marriage is one in which the two “you’s” can maintain themselves as healthy individuals, AND together the couple - the “both of you” - live their joined-together lives in a way that bears good fruit - fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. A new creation, stepping forward in faith.

And it takes a good deal of faith to decide to marry, and also to journey together as a couple, as a new creation. As the days and weeks and years go by, you learn more about one another, and you also are growing and developing as a couple, just as a newborn child learns and grows and develops as time goes by. I think it is preferable to think of marriage not in terms of whether the couple is successful, but whether they are faithful. And for those of you who think I am speaking about faithfulness to one another, well, that is necessary, but it is not sufficient. A couple who is faithful to God will come to understand, more and more, that faithfulness goes way beyond being faithful to one another. The new creation is created in covenant with God. The marriage vows are a covenant to one another before God. God is an essential part of this new creation. And God calls us both individually and in communion, in couples and in friendships and in congregations and communities, to a new way of life – a new way of faith – come what may.

The passage we heard from Hebrews is all about journeying by faith, stepping into situations where the outcome was never clear – in fact, was often frightening for those who were taking them on. We heard about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, each setting out in faith, staying in tents in a foreign land, looking ahead to the city whose architect and builder is God. It begins by saying that faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. In the journey of marriage, come what may, we journey on by faith alone.

I am pretty sure that the couples here today, celebrating their 30^th, 40^th, 50^th and 60^th anniversaries, as well as everyone who is or has been married, can attest to the reality that marriage involves that kind of faith, remaining sure of what is hoped for, staying certain of what cannot be seen.  They cannot know when they first take those vows, what lies ahead on that mutual journey as a couple. But they step out in faith, trusting in God and in one another, that as a new creation they will find a way to bear good fruit. Not to be successful, but to be faithful. And the way they can do that is by focusing on the fruits of the Spirit. Because we have an abundant supply of those - a never-ending supply, provided by the power of the Holy Spirit. And we are called to give them, freely and abundantly, to all those who need them. And we know that they are desperately needed in the world.

Couples can support one another in sharing these gifts. They can practice on one another, and as they encourage one another and grow in confidence of their abilities to freely give and receive things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and so on, they can also step out in faith to freely give and receive these gifts with everyone they meet. And they can do it individually and together.

Jesus talks about this in a story that is set, no less, than at a wedding banquet. How appropriate is that?! But his story is not about the right food or the right table settings or the right band or dress or flowers. It is about where you sit. And those of you who have planned big weddings are probably thinking, oh, yeah, it’s really important to get the table seating assignments right…..

But that’s not what he means, of course. Jesus tells the dinner gathering, tells us, that we shouldn’t worry about whether we get to sit at the place of honor. In fact, we should sit at the most humble, lowly place we can find. In this, too, is a statement of faith, a declaration of trust. We do not need to strive for the things that lift us up in human terms - who we surround ourselves with, how highly we are thought of by others. Instead, by trusting in God’s goodness, we can go sit with those in greatest need, and be with them, and God will be with us. If we continued reading in Luke, the next verses have Jesus telling us who should be on our guest list for a great banquet like a wedding feast. It’s not the social elites, but the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame. They are the ones who will be seated at the table in the kingdom of God. 

So life gives us many opportunities, married or not, to show our faithfulness to God, by living as people who have faith that through us, God will bear good fruit for those who really need it. And each couple, as a new creation, is given a gift of opportunity - the opportunity to bear more good fruit than they could as individuals. And that can only happen by turning over our trust to God, by focusing our faithfulness on God, by living out our vows to one another with God’s help, each and every day.

As we move to a time of reaffirming marriage vows, for these four couples who have come this far by faith, and for whom the journey continues beyond this day, let us all, married or not, recommit ourselves to trusting in God and living our lives, individually and communally, as disciples of Jesus Christ, who came for the least and the lost, and who calls us to care for them in humility, in faithfulness, and in love. 

Amen.

A Prayer for This Day

Matthew 6:1-15, 24-34

“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.

“So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.

But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,

so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

“And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.

But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

“When you are praying,

do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do;

for they think that they will be heard

because of their many words.

Do not be like them,

for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

         “Pray then in this way:

         Our Father in heaven,

                  hallowed be your name.

                  Your kingdom come.

                  Your will be done,

                           on earth as it is in heaven.

                  Give us this day our daily bread.

                  And forgive us our debts,

                           as we also have forgiven our debtors.

                  And do not bring us to the time of trial,

                           but rescue us from the evil one.

For if you forgive others their trespasses,

your heavenly Father will also forgive you;

but if you do not forgive others,

neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

 “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

“Therefore I tell you,

do not worry about your life,

what you will eat or what you will drink,

or about your body, what you will wear.

Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?

Look at the birds of the air;

they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns,

and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

Are you not of more value than they?

And can any of you by worrying

add a single hour to your span of life?

And why do you worry about clothing?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow;

they neither toil nor spin,

yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory

was not clothed like one of these.

But if God so clothes the grass of the field,

which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven,

will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?

Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’

or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’

For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things;

and indeed your heavenly Father knows

that you need all these things.

But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness,

and all these things will be given to you as well.

“So do not worry about tomorrow,

for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.

Today’s trouble is enough for today.

Luke 11:1-13

[Jesus] was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

He said to them, “When you pray, say:

         Father, hallowed be your name.

                  Your kingdom come.

                  Give us each day our daily bread.

                  And forgive us our sins,

                           for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

                  And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

And he said to them,

“Suppose one of you has a friend,

and you go to him at midnight and say to him,

‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread;

for a friend of mine has arrived,

and I have nothing to set before him.’

And he answers from within,

‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked,

and my children are with me in bed;

I cannot get up and give you anything.’

I tell you, even though he will not get up

and give him anything because he is his friend,

at least because of his persistence

he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you;

search, and you will find;

knock, and the door will be opened for you.

For everyone who asks receives,

and everyone who searches finds,

and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.

Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish,

will give a snake instead of a fish?

Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion?

If you then, who are evil,

know how to give good gifts to your children,

how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit

to those who ask him!”

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A friend of mine from high school asks a question every so often on Facebook, and gets a variety of interesting responses. This week she asked, “what do you miss from your childhood?”, and I was surprised by my immediate memory of coming home from school, jumping up to sit cross-legged on the clothes dryer that was in our kitchen, and proceeding to tell my mom all about my day, usually as she fixed me a snack and got things ready for dinner. She was a great listener, and I trusted her to hear whatever I needed to share or to process, whether good or bad, trivial or significant.

According to Luke, the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray. They had seen him praying “in a certain place”, and they knew that John the Baptist had taught his disciples to pray, and so they asked him to teach them too. Now, as observant Jews they were not unfamiliar with prayer. In fact, from the first century, Jewish prayers addressed God as “Our Father, prayed for the hallowing of God’s name and the coming of God’s kingdom, and had other points of contact with the Lord’s Prayer. So when Jesus shared the words of the Lord’s Prayer, it didn’t sound foreign to them, at least at the start.

And the words of the prayers as captured in these two gospels, from Matthew and from Luke, are similar, but not identical, which is not that unusual between gospels. Luke’s version of the prayer is shorter and more basic than Matthew’s: (show on slide)

Father                                           Our Father in heaven

Hallowed be your name.          Hallowed be your name.

Your Kingdom come.                         Your kingdom come.

                                                      Your will be done

                                                               on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us each day our daily bread    Give us this day our daily bread

And forgive us our sins            And forgive us our debts

         for we ourselves forgive           as we also have forgiven

         everyone indebted to us.          our debtors.

And do not bring us                           And do not bring us

         to the time of trial.                     to the time of trial,

                                                      but rescue us from the evil one.

Matthew’s gospel places this instruction on prayer from Jesus in the midst of his instructions on fasting and giving alms, with an emphasis on keeping all three of these actions between us and God, not focusing on what other people think as we do any of them.

Luke, who gives more emphasis to Jesus’ practice of prayer than any of the other gospels, shows us through the broader context of this instruction, that Jesus is not giving the disciples magic words to say, but rather teaching them about the nature of the One to whom they pray.

The themes in each are these:

Ask of God as if you were asking of a loving parent,

and forgive others.

Let’s consider each of these themes, how they are addressed in the words of the prayer, and how the broader context of each gospel story sheds additional light on them.

Jesus prays to God the Father. In the first century both Jews and Greeks commonly addressed God as “Father”. The common synagogue invocation was “our Father, our King”. Jesus using the Aramaic Abba is a more intimate and personal term than the simple Greek term pater, and means something more like papa or daddy or dad. God the loving father is the one to whom we pray.

But that’s not all there is in this prayer that speaks of God. The prayer, like all authentic worship, is centered on God, not on us. And so it begins not with our needs and desires, but with words reflecting that we honor God as God, even as we come to God as our loving parent.

We confess – meaning to affirm our belief, not to say I’m sorry – that God is holy. To hallow is to honor as holy. This statement, hallowed be your name, both preserves the awesome holiness of god and prays for it to be acknowledged by all.

We pray that God’s kingdom comes. For Jesus and his disciples, the kingdom was not only a future reality at the end of the world, but a present experience. And so the prayer acknowledges that God is God and that God is ultimately responsible for bringing in God’s rule, but we cannot pray this prayer without committing our own will and action to fulfilling the will of God in the present, and also praying that other people will submit themselves to God’s rule here and how. For us as Christians, submitting ourselves to God’s rule includes becoming disciples of Jesus Christ.

After these two petitions, focused on the nature of God, we then turn to praying for our own needs: for bread, for forgiveness, and for deliverance.

The prayer for daily bread, this day, each day, brings us back to the time when the Israelites were provided each day with manna in the wilderness. It was sufficient for the day, but it could not be hoarded. If they tried to safe it, it became wormy and was spoiled. Because of this, the Israelites had to trust and rely upon God’s provision each day of what they needed. Just as Jesus tells us “do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own”, so we are challenged here to only ask for what we need today, and to trust that both today and tomorrow and always, God will provide.

We ask next for forgiveness. Matthew asks for our debts to be forgiven. Luke asks for our sins to be forgiven. Jesus assumes in these words that every person who comes before God in prayer comes as a guilty one who needs God’s forgiveness. In these words, sin is thought of as a debt owed to God, which cannot be repaid. In confidence, the disciple of Christ is taught to ask for God’s forgiveness.

The commentaries and reflections in the New Interpreters Bible, which informed me as I prepared this sermon, speak of “the binding of human forgiveness to God’s… God’s forgiveness is unconditional, it preceded human forgiveness of other human beings, and is in fact the grounding and cause of our ability to forgive others. Yet, praying for God’s forgiveness, they say, is unthinkable for one who is intentionally an unforgiving person. Here and elsewhere in this prayer, divine action and human action are not either/or alternatives. The danger of presuming God’s grace and therefore being an unforgiving person oneself is emphasized in the quid pro quo wording found in both the Luke and Matthew gospels. Forgive us as we forgive. Forgive us for we have forgiven.

The third petition relating to our human needs is “deliver us”.  Do not bring us to the time of trial. Matthew adds, but rescue us from the evil one. It begs the question, world God want to lead us into either temptation or trial? In the Revelation to John, it is the devil who tempts us to sin, not God. In the first letter of James we find the assertion that God tempts no one. On the other hand, there is a strong biblical tradition of God testing believers – the testing of Abraham, the testing of Job, the testing of the children of Israel in the wilderness, and of course, the testing of Jesus in Gethsemane.  Because of these traditions and the threat of persecution, we appeal to God in this prayer, for deliverance from any trials that will threaten either our ability to confess and affirm our reliance on God, or God’s provision of our daily needs, both physical and spiritual.

Frederick Buechner speaks of the boldness needed to pray this prayer at all. He says, “we can pray it in the unthinking way we usually do, only by disregarding what we are saying.”

He says, “For we are praying ‘your will be done. “We are asking God to be God. We are asking God to do not what we want but what God wants. We are asking God to make manifest the holiness that is now mostly hidden, to set free in all its terrible splendor the devastating power that is now mostly under restraint.

We are praying “your kingdom come on earth’. And if that were suddenly to happen, what then? Who would stand and who would fall? Who would be welcomed in and who would be thrown the Hell out? Which of any of our most precious visions of what God is and of what human beings are would prove to be more or less on the mark, and which would turn out to be as phony as three dollar bills? Boldness indeed. To speak these words is to invite the tiger out of the cage, to unleash a power that makes atomic power look like a warm breeze.”

He goes on to say, “you need to be bold in another way to speak the second half [of the Lord’s Prayer]. Give us. Forgive us. Don’t test us. Deliver us. If it takes guts to face the omnipotence that is God’s it takes perhaps no less to face the impotence that is ours. We can do nothing without God. We can have nothing without God. Without God we are nothing.

But he concludes by saying, “It is only the words ‘Our Father’ that make the prayer bearable. If God is indeed something like a father, then as something like children maybe we can risk approaching him anyway.

You know, sitting on that clothes dryer, talking to my mom, I felt like I could be bold enough to trust her with just about everything I had to bring that day. And as I think about prayer, using the Lord’s prayer as a model prayer, I agree with Frederick Buechner, that I can speak boldly to God, knowing that God my loving parent can be trusted with all my doubts, all my fears, all my sins, all my angers and frustrations and unknowns. God listens, God provides, God forgives, and God gives me strength to forgive and to give and to love and to serve. Prayer is what keeps my communication lines open with God, my loving parent, forever more.