I Corinthians 12

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Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16 Matt Mardis-LeCroy Des Moines August 12, 2007 cSpoiler Alert! d I Spoiler Alert: This sermon will contain information about the goal of human history and the purpose of your life. If you do not want to know that stuff 4if you would rather live in suspense 4you should probably tune me out or take a nap or play Tetris on your cell phone. Just do whatever you have to do.

I 9ll give you a moment& It 9s been a rough couple of weeks for Harry Potter fans. In case you have been living under a rock: The 7 th and final installment of the much beloved series was released earlier this summer. In the run-up to the big finale, extraordinary measures were taken to keep the ending a secret.

Bloomsbury, the London-based publisher, spent an estimated 10 million pounds 4that is more than 20 million dollars 4on some serious security arrangements. I 9m talking about James Bond type stuff: warehouses with round-the- clock armed guards and delivery trucks outfitted with the latest state-of-the art satellite tracking systems. Employees of Amazon and Barnes and Noble were told that they could be fired 4and even sued 4for so much as ... more. less.

sneaking a peak inside the book. When the finished manuscript was hand-delivered from London to New York, the lawyer for the American publisher actually had to sit on the manuscript for the entire trans-Atlantic flight. 1 The ending would not get out. There would be no spoilers. Period. But everything changed at the stroke of midnight on July 21 st , when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows finally went on sale. Some people stood in line for most of that day, bought the book, took it home, put on a pot of coffee and read straight through till dawn. If you did not pull an all-nighter to finish it 4if you are that rare Harry Potter fan who actually has a life 4by noon on July 22 nd , no place was safe. Your friends had already finished the book. The neighbor kid was starting it for the second time. Newspapers were publishing reviews. Spoilers were everywhere. If you still wanted to find out how it ends on your own, you basically had two options: You could move to an ice-fishing shack in the Canadian Yukon, safely beyond the reach of radio, cable and internet. Or you could walk around your office, your home, your school with your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears while you sang at the top of your lungs. Neither option is very appealing. (Especially if you have ever heard me sing). But people want to avoid spoilers at all costs. And it is not hard to see why. Knowing the ending changes your relationship to the story. Spoilers &spoil. But that makes me wonder if Plymouth Church might not need to update its motto. Forget about cWe Agree to Differ. We Resolve to love. We Unite to Serve. d And cGod is Still Speaking d is so 2004. No, we need a little truth in advertising around here. Over every single entrance to this church, there should be a giant banner, with two words: cSpoiler Alert. d If you enter this place, you risk finding out how the story ends, the only story that really matters, the one in which we all play a part. And knowing how the story ends before the story is over&well, that just might spoil you. 1 II Our Scripture lesson today comes from the Book of Hebrews. As near as we can tell, Hebrews was written late in the 1 st century to a group of Jewish coverts to Christianity in the city of Rome. After carefully weighing all the evidence, most biblical scholars agree: these people were not happy campers. The earliest Christians expected Jesus to come back at any minute and bring the curtain down on human history. Of course, that did not happen 3and by the end of the 1 st century, it was becoming kind of embarrassing. In the mean time, the Roman Empire began to take an unwholesome interest in this strange new sect. With every passing day, the return of Jesus seems less and less likely. With every passing hour, the threat of persecution grows more and more severe. It is not hard to see how some of these early Christians would have been tempted to throw in the towel. Maybe it is time to go back to Judaism. Maybe this Christianity thing has just been a phase. Maybe we should just give it up. So somebody 4we don 9t know who 4writes them this letter, this sermon, actually, that we call The Letter to the Hebrews. It is equal parts argument and encouragement. The author insists that Christ is still better than anything else out there, and urges these wavering Christians to stick it out. 2 Chapter 11 is probably the best-known part of the book. Some people call it the faith chapter; others call it the biblical Hall of Fame. It is both. The author wants to define faith: What is it? What does it look like? How does it work? So the chapter opens with a 75-cent definition 3the kind of thing you might write in your sophomore philosophy paper: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Sounds good. Kind of pretty. But you get the sense that even the author is not quite sure what that means. So the letter quickly shifts gears, brings things down to earth, and starts telling stories. cYou want to know what faith is? Let me tell you about Abraham and Sarah, about Moses and Miriam. d It turns out faith is kind of like obscenity: it may be hard to define, but we know it when we see it. 3 We see it in the lives of faithful people who came before us. By faith, Abraham uprooted his family, left everything he had ever known to go to a place he had never seen, because he saw what God had promised. By faith, Sarah gave birth to her only son at the ripe old age of ninety-nine, because she saw what God had promised. By faith, the saints of old were strangers and wanderers and resident aliens, never settling in this world because they had a glimpse of the better one that God had promised. So you might say faith is seeing things that other people do not see; trusting more in the future that God has promised than in the circumstances of the present moment. Verse ten tells us that c Abraham looked forward . d He was able to leave his homeland, to spend his life wandering around, because he found the future more compelling than the present; because he figured that something God has promised me tomorrow is a better bet than anything I have today. 4 Faith is the conviction of things not seen 3things not seen because they have not happened yet; conviction of those things because the One who has promised is faithful. 5 And faith is the freedom to see it. 2 III To hear the Book of Hebrews tell it, faith is the ultimate spoiler. It tells us how the story will end while we are still in the middle of it. And knowing the ending changes our relationship to the story. A lot of us live our lives on the edge of our seats, every single day in suspense: What will become of me? Will my life ever amount to anything? Am I really going to be o.k.? Or, sometimes we mange to stop worrying about ourselves long enough to worry about other things 3our children, maybe, or the housing market, or global warming or global terror. What does the future hold? How will it all turn out? We wonder and we worry about all sorts of things. Sometimes the suspense is killing us. But it does not have to. We have already heard how the story will end 3and it is not on Good Friday, but on Easter Sunday; not in death, but in life; not in scarcity but in sharing; not in war but in peace. It was the English mystic, Julian of Norwich, who said cAll shall be well and all things shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. d 6 In other words: We really are going to live happily ever after. Every single one of us. That is how the story will end. We know because God has promised. Except we do not know -or, at least, we do not know that we know. We certainly do not live like we know. We go right on worrying. And hoarding our stuff. And hating each other. And living in suspense. We excuse our behavior by telling ourselves that we are just being sensible. Sure, God 9s promises sound great 3all that idealistic stuff. But we have to live in the real world. We can hope for the future, but we still have to believe in the present. 7 We have heard how the story ends, but we have a hard time buying it. So what should we do? Try harder? Have more faith? Discover the c7 Simple Steps to Believing in the Promises of God d? I don 9t think so. Faith does not really work like that. It is not something that we do ; it is something that is done to us. You can not close your eyes and clench your fists and try really hard to have faith. Faith comes from God. Faith is a gift. And it is not necessarily something we want. If we learn anything from the 11 th chapter of Hebrews 4anything at all 4it should be this: Faith will make you weird. 8 If we really start to see, if we really start to trust, in the things that God has promised, that could seriously mess up our lives. It made Abraham a homeless vagabond. It made Sarah the only senior citizen at Mom 9s and Moppets. It has made countless nameless saints into misunderstood, maladjusted, mighty peculiar people. What do you suppose it might do to us? In a few moments, we are going to gather together at Christ 9s table. As always, all are welcome -but proceed with caution. People who come to this table have been known to start seeing things 3to dream dreams and have visions, to be haunted by the promises of God. People who come to this table have been known to get cranky and impatient and fed-up with the world as it is because they have caught a glimpse of the world as it could be. People who come to this table do not always leave it in the same condition. When we eat this bread, when we drink this cup, it just might spoil us. Amen. 3 Plymouth Congregational Church United Church of Christ 4126 Ingersoll Avenue Des Moines, Iowa 50312 Phone: (515) 255-3149 Fax: (515) 255-8667 E-mail: mmardis-lecroy@plymouthchurch.com Notes 1 Seriously. See the article c10 Million Pounds to Guard the 7 th Harry Potter Book. d Rediff News. July 16, 2007. Available: http://inhome.rediff.com/movies/2007/jul/16harry.htm 2 A lot of the background and context that I present here is scholarly guesswork 3and the best guesses are presented ably by Harold W. Attridge in his introduction and notes to Hebrews in The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version . Wayne A. Meeks, General Editor. (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1993, pp.2250-2268. 3 Yes, this is a reference to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. If you already knew that, you need to get out more. 4 cHence, faith is never very different from hope. d Craddock, Fred. New Interpreter 9s Bible Volume XII Leander E. Keck, Ed. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2003). 5 This point is crucial to my interpretation 3that the cthings not seen d are not invisible, cspiritual d realities in the Platonic sense, but things that have not happened yet , i.e., things that God has promised. See George Wesley Buchanan 9s To the Hebrews Anchor Bible . (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972). 6 Julian of Norwich in The Writings of Medieval Women. Trans: Marcelle Thiébaux. 2 nd Edition. (New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 1994), p.453. 7 This is actually a based on a line from the early preaching of Karl Barth: c&people believe more strongly in the present than in the future. d Quoted in Eberhard Busch 9s Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts. Trans: John Bowen. London: S.C.M. Press, 1976, pp.88. 8 But don 9t take my word for it; take John Calvin 9s. See his Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews. Trans: Rev. John Owen. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1998, p.283. 4

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