First You Leap, Then You Grow Wings

Heb. 11:1-3, 8-16; Luke 12:32-40 + Pentecost 11 + August 8, 2010
Community of St. Luke, Auckland, New Zealand

From the written word and the spoken word, reveal to us your true and everlasting Word, O God, our strength forever. Amen.

“If I get the full-time job, I’m going to visit you.”

One of my best mates in university had told me about his dream to take a semester and study in Australia.  He was two years behind me in school, but we had built up a close friendship in that time.  As the date was coming closer and closer on the calendar for him, the date also was coming closer and closer that I was about to embark on a new journey in my own life: being graduated from my schooling and having to go to work in the so-called real world.

His excitement was mixing with my dread.  Taking an extended time to study abroad was something I had dreamed about for my own education, yet always found excuses to avoid doing so, first opting out of a foreign exchange studentship during high school, again opting a short-term intensive study tour of India instead of a full semester at Oxford during university.  It also marked a different stage for myself – one indicated not by the passing of courses and semesters, but instead shaped by 60-hour workweeks and coveted two-week work holiday time.

In a fleeting moment of dreaming, I made that declaration that I was going to visit him while he studied abroad, with the caveat of being selected for a full-time, salaried position to which I had applied.  We were both partaking of the finest American beverages a university student’s budget can provide, and I know I simply assumed I had a lapse of judgment in the whiskey-induced haze.

As the weeks passed by, however, the idea couldn’t get out of my head.  I marked all the reasons why it was a silly idea about dreaming of a two-week holiday in Australia and New Zealand before I had even begun payments on outstanding student loans, right after beginning five years of car loan payments, in the thrust of my first apartment payments and all the rest.  But that didn’t seem to matter much to the dream.  I pushed forward and began researching airfares, budget accommodations, and car hire fees.

So I was ready on that day in July 2006, when over lunch I was offered my first full-time job, for being more excited about a reckless abandonment of responsibility that had been indicative of my life and booking airfare for a trip I logically did not need and could not afford.

In his contemporary translation, Eugene Peterson begins today’s passage from Hebrews this way: “The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living.  It’s our handle on what we can’t see.”

I didn’t think about it as being an act of faith when, at the end of 2006, I took the longest plane trip of my life to that time.  I thought more about the exciting times I was about to have, about the fulfillment of a dream to visit two lands that I otherwise thought I’d never see.

That journey was such a success, that one year and six-or-so months ago, I walked into the Field Education Director’s office at McCormick Seminary and informed her I wanted to do an internship in New Zealand.  I sent some series of e-mails to ministers, visited congregational Web sites, and threw a proverbial bottle in the ocean directed toward one David Clark at the Community of St. Luke.  It came back with affirmation, and the rest – as they say – is history.

Faith is the peg upon which we can hang our hopes.  The two work in synchrony with each other.  Because of faith, our hope is more than simple dreams or flights of fancy.  Faith is more substantial, a foundation to which we can hold fast.  Faith provides us with the courage to move forward, to move into a new and better day, to give us courage, to answer the impossible question, “Why?”

Perhaps that, more than anything else, is the challenge of today’s Gospel reading from Luke.  I’m not sure about anyone else in this room, but there is a certain comfort and ease of taking stock of one’s life based on material goods.  I know I have my basic needs covered – food, shelter – because I can point to specific examples.  I can identify that I live in Kimbark Avenue in Chicago, and I know I won’t go hungry because I have a couple of boxes of pasta and a jar of pasta sauce in my pantry.  (That is, I had them there before I left.)

I can point to proof of my educational attainment at my Bachelor of Arts diploma, to my skills and abilities in communication and design from my work portfolio.  I can identify my standing and belonging based on my circles of family and friends that span the United States and are reaching now into new parts of the globe.  I am warm in winter and cool in the summer, and live in a fabulous, comfortable apartment in an attractive, vintage Chicago brownstone.

Quite simply, I can’t point to heaven with the assurance it exists.  And if I can’t do that, I certainly am challenged to place tangible stock therein.

In 1788 in his sermon at Yarm, John Wesley posed it this way:

“But still none of our senses, no, not the sight itself, can reach beyond the bounds of this visible world. They supply us with such knowledge of the material world as answers all the purposes of life. But this was the design for which they were given, beyond this they cannot go. They furnish us with no information at all concerning the invisible world.”

I don’t really understand gravity.  I get the basic gist, obviously: what goes up must come down, we’re not all going to suddenly float around, and the earth won’t be flung out into the depths of space.  That makes a pretty simple faith.  The forces of gravity are invisible, but we can observe its action using our senses.

I can think of a deeper everyday faith as I drive around Auckland.  My driving instructor when I was a teenager once told me that I was in control of “a 2,000 pound bullet” and the vehicle was just as much a deadly weapon as a firearm.  When it gets right down to the matter, it takes a great leap of faith to trust that the painted lines and rules of the road will keep those bullets from crashing into each other and placing my life and the lives of others into complete strangers’ hands as frequently as many of us do.

William Sloane Coffin, in his Credo, writes, “I love the recklessness of faith.  First you leap, and then you grow wings.”  For all earthly purposes, faith is often the most reckless of ambitions, and the best faith is not easily thwarted by reality.  It exists in spite of reality, empowering hope and rooted in the deepest core of our being.

Hope without faith is boring, frankly, and ripe for failure.  Together, though: what a combination!

Later on in his sermon, Wesley says this:

“But I know by faith that, above all these, is the Lord Jehovah, he that is, that was, and that is to come; that is God from everlasting, and world without end; He that filleth heaven and earth; He that is infinite in power, in wisdom, in justice, in mercy, in holiness; He that created all things, visible and invisible, by the breath of his mouth, and still ‘upholds’ them all, preserves them in being, ‘by word of his power;’ … Of all these things, faith is the evidence, the sole evidence, to the children of men.”

The first verse of today’s Gospel reading is easy to gloss over, and if people are anything like me, to miss as I quickly throw up my defenses protecting my earthly possessions.  “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”  The phrase, “do not be afraid,” is a rhetorical prelude throughout the bible to the announcement of divine good news.  It happens here, it happens as God is speaking to Abraham about his many descendants, it happens in the angelic announcement of Jesus’ birth.

Do not be afraid … you will inherit the kingdom.  This is not about preparations for the world-to-come, but it is about instilling faith in a better world now.  It is a liberating faith that empowers the Christian faithful to go about work in the lives of our everyday communities to be generous, to be free, to be confident in a future that is secured not in ourselves but in a God who is just as generous, just, and free.

Faith is not simply a model or goal, nor is it a message of judgment.  Instead it is created in a promise about the future.  As we live into the promise of God, let us keep our hope tethered to faith, and our faith in the one who is our promise.

Soli Deo Gloria: To God alone be glory.  Amen.