Run the Race: A Living Faith
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Grace Hills Baptist Church
August 28, 2016
A perfect 10 was long thought to be impossible in the sport of gymnastics. In fact, every sport has barriers that are thought unattainable; for example, it was long believed that human beings could not break the four-minute mile, at least until Roger Bannister managed to push past that artificial limit in 1954 through extensive training and race strategy. But a perfect 10 in gymnastics is something a little different. It requires not just besting a physical limit on the human body, but also stringing together a series of complicated techniques that are physically and mentally demanding to perfection in the eyes of a judge or judges. It had never been done on the largest and most difficult stage, the Olympic Games. Yet in a gymnastics arena in Montreal in 1976, a 14-year-old from Romania did the hitherto impossible.
Nadia Comaneci was born in 1961 to a Romanian auto mechanic and his wife. A gymnast since age 5, she stepped onto the world stage in 1971. She entered the 1976 Olympic Games with considerable anticipation. in the finals of team competition, Nadia entered the history books: she turned in the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics history for her compulsory routine on the uneven bars. She would go on to hand in 3 more perfect scores on the uneven bars and 3 on the balance beam on her way to 3 gold medals, 1 silver, and 1 bronze.
What is most incredible to me about Nadia’s perfect performances is how much had to go right. Her success didn’t come in a sport where you could push through a stumble or even just blow past another competitor with an extra burst of energy. Her success came through attention to every little detail: where to position her hands on the bars, when to let go in the middle of a swing, how far to move her arms and legs so that she could do the next technique, what to do now…and now…and now. Nadia Comaneci won not just Olympic gold, but a place in the history books, because she did all the details and little things that add up to a perfect 10.
When it comes to our faith, we’ve probably told ourselves – or heard from someone else – that perfection is impossible. “Oh, I’m only human,” we say, and then proceed to let ourselves off the hook for pursuing excellence in our walk with Christ. Controlling our appetite is too difficult, we say. Reigning in our anger is too tough, we say. Letting go of greed and selfishness is too demanding, we say. Developing a spirit of grace and forgiveness is beyond our capabilities, we say. We believe in Jesus, of course, and we trust in his forgiveness and grace for our salvation. Why pursue excellence and sweat the details, when basic belief can get us by? Why push ourselves towards a perfection that’s humanly impossible if we don’t really need it? After all, we’d be deprived of all that goes with an expectation-free faith, like putting ourselves first, not worrying about our actions, and ignoring our responsibilities to others. Why not just have a basic faith and ignore Christ’s call to actually pursue perfection?
The author of Hebrews is trying to head off just such an attitude of spiritual apathy among his readers in our passage today. He has just spent two chapters painting a picture of the race of faith all Christians are called to run – with appeals to the heroes of old who exhibited a hopeful faith, a reminder to emulate Jesus and his enduring faith, and a challenge to allow God to purify us with a consuming faith. Now, in the final chapter of his letter, the author lays out some of the details that make up what we might call a living faith, or, as the author calls such a life in the last verse of today’s passage, “sacrifices…pleasing to God.”[1]
This living faith is what the entire letter of Hebrews has been about, and can be summed up in this way: the day-in, day-out walk of faith is about doing good and being good. This is what Jesus speaks to in the Great Commandment: love God with all you have – being good – and love your neighbor as yourself – doing good. And this is what Hebrews has done for 13 chapters: laying out how to do and be good.[2] But what does that look like for us? What does it take to have a living faith?
Our text lists a number of prohibitions and a number of reminders. There are some things, the author said, that people who are truly living out their faith do, and there are some things they do not do. And he doesn’t pull any punches; this list is not full of easy tasks, like going to church 2 out of every 4 Sundays, or easy temptations to avoid, like not murdering someone. These reminders and prohibitions get at the very heart of where our faith challenges what we hear every single day that we live. This passage is about what it takes to have a living faith.
It begins right there in verse 1 with a focus we probably aren’t surprised to find: love. There are a whole bunch of different kinds of love the Bible addresses: including the love between close friends, the love of a person for their country, the love between spouses. There is even a special sort of love the Bible speaks about quite a bit, agape love – the love that led God to send his son to redeem the world. But the type of love mentioned here is different. It is love described by the Greek word philadelphia – brotherly, or family, love.
Now, I don’t know about your family, but I had a great family growing up. My parents were and are amazing. I had a whole bunch of aunts and uncles and cousins I enjoyed spending time with, who spoiled me rotten as the youngest grandchild and who loved me dearly. Family get-togethers were one of the highlights of my year. But as I grew up, I realized what I’ve found is true for most families: we had some dysfunction. In various parts of my extended family, there were people whose marriages ended in divorce, people who struggled with addictions, people who had feuds with other family members. Yet we tried, and continue to try, however imperfectly, to hold onto the love we have for one another – because we need one another. As we face health concerns, as loved ones die, as financial crises hit, as life changes with the passage of time, we need to rely on one another. This, the passage says, is true for our family, too – the family of faith. We need one another in the hard times of life. No matter our background with one another, no matter the ways we’ve let one another down, continue to love each other.
A second reminder that we find in our text today is perhaps even more difficult than enduring in loving one another within the family of faith, both because of practical concerns and because of loud voices within our culture that proclaim a different message. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers,” we read. On the face of it, that doesn’t seem too hard, particularly here in Appomattox. After all, we are champions of Southern hospitality, right? Yet hospitality – biblical hospitality – is a significant challenge. It means inviting someone into your home, into your family, into your life. It means sharing whatever possessions you have to extravagance. It means seeking their good even though it costs you dearly. It means, in short, going “all-in” for someone else…and here, we’re told, a living faith means offering that sort of hospitality to strangers.
Now, strangers don’t exactly top the list most of us want to talk to, much less open our homes to and invite into the most intimate areas of our lives. That was true for the people who received this letter as well, and it was true for most of the people who received the various writings of the Old and New Testaments. As humans, we are suspicious of strangers. They might hurt us. They might steal from us. They might influence our children and threaten our way of life. And so down through history, we’ve forced strangers in our midst to be second-class citizens, we’ve made them wear special clothes or avoid certain areas, we’ve beat them up and we’ve walled them out and we’ve scapegoated them at the first opportunity. The last thing we want to show most strangers – particularly strangers who are truly strange to us, different than us – is hospitality.
And yet, we are told here, we are to show hospitality to strangers, “for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”[3] This is probably one of those verses we’ve heard a thousand times, and probably most of those times it brought to mind the image of an undercover angel, keeping their halo dimmed and their wings hidden. But the word angel in the Scriptures, while it does at times refer to a heavenly being, simply means messenger, especially a messenger from God. Sometimes, when we show hospitality to strangers, we are letting God get a message to us. That stranger, who trusts us, depends on us, receives a blessing from us, somehow communicates to us a truth from God – perhaps that we are dependent, too, perhaps that we can make a difference, perhaps that we have value. When we harden our hearts and shut our doors, when we choose to be inhospitable, we not only hurt people who need our help and inhibit God’s work; we also can keep ourselves from hearing God’s voice more clearly. So show hospitality to strangers – that’s part of a living faith.
The next statement in our passage today is one of reminder. “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.”[4] In biblical times, there were people imprisoned who were dangerous or violent criminals – but many people were imprisoned for much more sympathetic reasons. Debtors were a significant percentage of prison inmates, often impoverished sharecroppers who would never be able to pay off the debts they owed at astronomical interest. Other prisoners were the subjugated, the people who received unjustly oppressive sentences. Picture Jean Valjean, the protagonist of the novel and play Les Miserables, who served 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. And, of course, there were people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time – prisoners of war, religious minorities, supporters of those who opposed the powers that be.
This wide-ranging underclass of society – present in every culture and every time period – is often far removed from our thoughts and concerns. If we are not on the receiving end, or know someone on the receiving end, of corrupt systems or unjust situations, if we do not personally know someone who is struggling with incarceration, if we have not felt the bite of persecution ourselves, then we are likely apathetic at best and judgmental at worst. I must confess, often the only time a prisoner or our justice system crosses my mind is when I read of a particularly violent crime happening – and then my uninformed hope is that the system is strong and even vindictive. I doubt I’m the only one here today who falls into that mindset by default. They’re criminals, after all – why do they need my compassion?
And then…I read this verse. Eugene Peterson clarifies the challenge of this verse in his wonderful paraphrase: “Regard prisoners as if you were in prison with them. Look on victims of abuse as if what happened to them had happened to you.”[5] The Christian way, the way of Christ, calls us to not just remember that there are people who are in prison and people who suffer from unjust abuse. The Christian way calls us to identify with them, to stand up for them, to lead the way in forgiving those who do wrong and seek goodness and healing for those who are oppressed. Remember them as if you were right there with them, as if you were the one suffering. This, too, is part of what it means to have a living faith.
The next reminder hopefully comes as no surprise: “let marriage be held in honor by all.”[6] If there’s one message the church has proclaimed fairly consistently in the past 100 years, it is that marriage is a sacred thing. In fact, there have been times when we let our preaching on marriage get a bit shrill and a bit judgmental. Yet as much as we proclaim the importance of marriage, the preeminence of marriage, the holiness of marriage, I wonder how much we are really holding it in honor. I’ve heard the jokes we tell, harmless on the face of it, but hinting at underlying problems: men speaking of their wives as nags or as the “ole ball and chain,” women insinuating that their husbands are clueless or lazy. I know that men who follow Jesus can have just as wandering an eye and objectify women as much as men with no pretense of faith. I also know that women of faith can indulge in what they insist is “harmless fun” when they objectify men. And there have been plenty of affairs in the church, plenty of ruined marriages, and plenty of families that are torn apart, whether they go through the legal hoops of divorce or simply sit and simmer for years under the same roof. We Christians don’t always do a good job honoring the marriage vows we make. The author of Hebrews says that needs to change – because honoring our marriages, putting time into them, investing in them…that’s part of a living faith, as well.
The passage next turns to a temptation that is perhaps THE temptation of our culture, because it strikes at the heart of what we idolize and even worship. “Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have.”[7] Ouch! This steps all over our toes. After all, we live in the land of the American Dream, an upwardly mobile society where we believe everyone can better themselves and improve their lot if they just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The shadow side, the nightmare version, of that dream is that we are never content – we never reach the top. There’s always someone with more or better, and we want to be them. And so we kill ourselves at our jobs. We neglect our families or our faith in the pursuit of the almighty dollar. We give honor and respect to those who can make a few bucks instead of to people of character and morality. We worship at the temple of capitalism, of the free market, of financial independence…and in the process, we risk losing our souls.
Why? Because of what the passage says next: “for he has said, ‘I will never leave you or forsake you.’ So we can say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?’”[8] The life of faith is a life dependent on God for joy, dependent on God for provision, dependent on God for hope for the future. In our relentless drive for more and better, we lose that sense of dependency. We lose that sense of contentment. We lose that sense of faith. Greed, at any level, is incompatible with a living faith.
Finally, our text this morning has one more reminder for us: “remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you.”[9] All of us, every one of us, came to faith because someone told us about Jesus. It might have been our mother or father. It might have been our pastor or our Sunday school teacher or our VBS leader. It might have been our best friend or our spouse. Whoever it was, all of us came to faith because someone else told us about God. Beyond that, all of us – every single one of us – grew in faith, understood God more, became better people because someone (or many someones) continued to teach us more and more about what it means to follow Jesus. And, ultimately, we all have people – especially leaders in our churches – who we learn from not just by what they say, but by what they do: they show us how to live out our faith.
These are the people, Hebrews tells us, who we are to imitate. Now, I can tell you, as someone who has been tasked with being one of those leaders, that is a tall order. Our pastors, our deacons, our teachers, our formal and informal leaders in the church, all of us are human. We have to bite back some bad words when we stub our toe – and sometimes we don’t always succeed in biting them back. We have to discipline our minds and our hearts to stay on the straight and narrow. We struggle in the face of stress and worry about our futures and our families’ futures. And yet, somehow, God and the congregation have entrusted us with leadership…and that’s a big burden to bear. We bear it as best we can, because we want to do for you what other people did for us: we want to speak the word of God to you, and live a life that is worthy of imitation. As we read in 1 Corinthians 11:1, the mantra of those who are tasked with leadership in the church should be this: “imitate me, as I imitate Christ.” And to the extent our leaders imitate Christ well, we need to follow their example. This is yet another part of what it means to have a living faith.