Pentecost 12 - C

Thief in the Night!

Introduction
How much faith do you have? Enough to move mountains?

I do not. I have to be honest with you, I have never been one of those people who feels that if I pray about it everything will be ok. I knew a guy in seminary who would set out on a road trip to an important meeting and not fill the car with gas, claiming that God would provide… Most of us thought he was crazy….

But he, honest to God, believed that God would provide… the one thing he did not lack was faith.

And it always made me wonder, what does it mean to have faith? What is it that we are supposed to have faith in?

There are many possibilities, we can believe we are going to heaven if we are good enough, we can believe that God is making things work out the way they are supposed to, we can have faith that Jesus came and did something which saved us in some way…

But on a day to day basis… what do we have faith in? And what do we mean by that… is it the same thing to say, “I believe in” as when we say that “I trust that” and is that what it is to say, “I have faith in”

Just some light fluffy questions for you to think about …

I can tell you that it is hard. It is hard for most people to believe everything will be all right when the evidence shows differently. When you are all alone it is hard to believe in love. When you are really sick it is hard to believe you will get better. You get the idea, just having faith that something will work out is not a very easy thing to do.

Is it Just Trust?
Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and not seen.

I have heard that definition for most of my life… faith is simply believing, despite the evidence. So, from this perspective, is faith simply trust? Is that all there is to it?

That passage from Hebrews is right, there were a ton of people who trusted God and did what was asked of them without ever seeing the promises fulfilled. Abraham was going to be the father of a billion people, or at least that is what God promised; but when Abraham died his kids hated each other and it was not looking good.

Moses never saw the promised land, even Jesus didn’t find out whether Easter meant anyone to anyone…. In other words, they just trusted that doing the right thing would bring the right result.

We all take risks. I suppose, we take a new job, or we move, or we get married or we have kids, or we buy a house… hoping that things will work out the way we want. But we have some idea before we do it, don’t we… we go and see the house, we interview for the job… we try to raise the kids properly… it is not really going in blind… we are not asked to trust that everything will work out even though we cannot possibly imagine how that could be possible.

The Biblical characters were… Abraham finally had a son when he was somewhere North of 80 and the very next thing God tells him to do is take him up the mountain and sacrifice the boy. So… he has waited his whole life for the promise of kids… and when it happens… God says, you are going to lose him… but trust me…

What would you do? Do you have faith like that? Can anyone? And again, is that what it means… to trust despite not knowing?

The Stick
What if the definition of faith, the definition of trust was to sell everything you have and join a convent, become a monk, join the church and wait for the end of the world? It might make things a whole lot easier, no?

At least we would know what was expected of us, what being faithful meant…

But I think this passage goes deeper. Where the passage about Abraham told us that faith is being able to trust God, this passage tells us that faith is also the belief that things are different, that things will get better, that there are other possibilities.

What if I said it this way: You don’t need the fancy car or the big house. You don’t need the big promotion or the flashy jewelry. You need to live life in a way that you are ready for whatever happens. You need to be ready for the miracle of really living… of the unexpected… of the new… and if you are too tied in to the old, you will never be able to recognize when the new things are happening.

One of the main things that Jesus came and tried to teach us is to embrace possibility. He would call it the kingdom of God, and he was always saying that God has made the world much bigger than we believe… that there are always more possibilities than we can imagine… that anything is possible.

I remember growing up and believing that I had to be one of four things, a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or a minister. I honestly did not think there were many other jobs… but I could also be a soldier while doing any of those things so make it five…

One day when I was in my 20’s and almost done seminary I drove by a billboard saying that I should become a Marine Biologist and work with whales… And I thought, how cool would that be! But I never even thought of that before? People can really become marine biologists?

I know it sounds silly, but that was really what I thought. All of a sudden I realized the world was a whole lot bigger than I had been imagining… and the only thing limiting me was myself; I had made myself believe that only certain things were possible.

I have done a whole lot of things since then, just for the record, and right then I also decided to start working on writing. It took a decade or so but I started writing for the papers, and on stories, and magazines….

I had never believed I could do that… but all of a sudden I started to ask, why not?

So be ready for action, keep your lamps lit, let go of the things that are holding you back, look out for the opportunity that is coming in the middle of the night, be ready for what God throws your way…. That is what I believe Jesus was saying.

Conclusion

So I do not think that faith is simply trust, and I do not think it is simply believing in certain things.

I believe faith is a way of life. It is a way of seeing the world that says that there is more out there than I can possibly imagine, and being okay with that.

That also means that we are called to have a sense of trust, a sense of belief, a sense of openness and a sense of wonder as we approach life.

No matter what comes our way, we have to be ready to embrace it and see it through, we have to be willing to ask, what are we supposed to learn in this and where is it supposed to lead us…

By embracing the world for what it is and seeing God at work in everything, maybe we can even move mountains.