I had breakfast yesterday morning. This is not, in itself, particularly remarkable. I have breakfast most days; but yesterday I had breakfast with friends, and what is remarkable about that is how we talked with one another. The food was fine but unimportant; the coffee was not up to the usual standard but that too is unimportant; what we wore and where we sat and how much the bill was at the end of the morning were all unimportant. What was important, indeed remarkable, was how we talked with one another.
You see, these friends of ours insist that we are honest with one another. They insist that, when we gather around the table, we share not just food but our very selves; we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, open, and honest.
And what happens then is that we are given the rare privilege of insight into one another’s lives – into the joys and the sorrows, the triumphs and the failures; we are given access to one another’s souls. And that is truly remarkable. We are invited to join with one another on a journey, the journey of life. We become, not observers of one another’s faith, but fellow travellers in the wilderness.
Abraham was a traveller on a journey, as was his wife Sarah. Moses and his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam were all travellers on a journey. Jesus and his disciples were travellers on a journey. Paul and his friends were all travellers on a journey. And they were all travellers who journeyed by faith. Just as my breakfast friends are travellers who journey by faith.
And “faith is the assurance of things hoped for”; faith is a journey towards a destination, towards something which is not yet in existence. Faith is predicated on the understanding that we have not yet arrived: as Abraham journeyed in search of the Promised Land, and Moses and the Hebrew people journeyed towards the Promised Land, we understand that faith is leading us somewhere. We cannot be truly faithful unless we are on the move.
The kingdom of God has not yet become the reality in this world and so, until that day arrives, we are always on the way towards that promised end. Having faith means we choose to live as a pilgrim people.
And herein lies a problem: way back in the early days of the church, a well-meaning Christian invited us to stop wandering in the wilderness and instead to sit down under a palm tree beside an oasis. And we did that, and we have found it hard to get up and get going again. I am, of course, talking about the Roman Emperor Constantine. Poor old Constantine who constantly seems to get the blame from people such as me who don’t know a whole lot about church history but who are looking for someone to blame for the church losing its identity as a people called to take great risks on a journey through the wilderness.
What’s Constantine’s story? Well he was the Roman Emperor who became a Christian and who made Christianity the religion of the empire, which meant that Christians were no longer to be persecuted for their faith, at the margins of society; now, they were to be at the centre of their world, safe, secure, at home in the Promised Land rather than on a journey through the wilderness.
And that is how it has been for most of the following sixteen or seventeen hundred years. The civilised world has been synonymous with Christendom. Yes, we had the Crusades and the Reformation and world wars and struggle and strife, but Christendom has been the dominant order of the day.
It’s hard to journey by faith if you believe you have already arrived. It’s difficult to be a pilgrim people if we have everything we need right where we are. But the central motif of the Christian life is the journey in the wilderness – from slavery to freedom, from crucifixion to resurrection. And so, over time, we began to tell the story differently: the Christian life, instead, became fixed upon the journey not towards the kingdom of God here on earth but towards the kingdom of heaven.
Now something quite remarkable has happened in the last few decades. In an incredibly short period of time society has moved on and moved on without us. We no longer live in the world of Christendom. The church is no longer at the centre of our society. Faith in God and in Jesus Christ is no longer of any particular significance in Australia in the twenty-first century. And not just Australia – try visiting Europe, once the proud centre of the Christian faith but now filled with people who no longer have any religious conviction and filled with churches which stand empty. Try visiting the Middle East or Asia or much of Africa: Christianity is certainly not the dominant voice in those places.
As the church we struggle to come to terms with that fact. Still, every census, every National Church Life Survey, almost every aspect of our society reminds us that the life of Jesus Christ is not the thing that determines what we will do and how we will do it. Our society no longer lives by faith.
And that makes it all the harder for us to live by faith. When all around us are living as if they have arrived in the promised land, how do we continue to point to that which is not yet real – the kingdom of God here on earth?
The sad truth is that our society and our church want us to be settled – not “on the way”. It is human nature – at least in this 21st century - to value security, certainty, and guarantees above all else. Sadly, time and again, we look for outcomes that are about being settled and secure.
But this wasn’t the life of Abraham or his descendants:
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 … For he looked forward to the city … whose architect and builder is God. By faith he received power of procreation, even though he was too old--and Sarah herself was barren--because he considered God who had promised faithful. Therefore from one person and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, and all of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.
Now we would suggest that anyone who set out on a journey (literally or figuratively) not knowing where they were going were at best foolish and at worst mad. And we might say well, that was then, but now is different. Yet this story is one way that God speaks to us today: calls us to journey today. And we find it very difficult to be satisfied with seeing from a distance – we want to achieve our goals now. But to be satisfied with goals we can achieve is to be satisfied with less than that which God promises. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
We must not, cannot, settle for anything less than a city (or a way of life, or a world) whose architect and builder is other than God. God calls us to be a pilgrim people, always on the way. And we, too, will probably end up only being able to see God’s city here on earth from a distance. But as for Abraham and his descendants so too for us – from a distance will be enough, for God is faithful and we are a pilgrim people always on the way to the promised goal. So let us live by faith. Amen.
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