"Possess This in your Porfolio"
Faith is our most valuable possession
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Text: Hebrews 10:32-39
I received a telephone call from the Ottawa police department. They said, “We'd like you to come down to the station and pick up a member of your church.” This was a few years ago, don't worry. So I got in my car, still wearing my slippers after having enjoyed a relaxing supper, and headed off to the police station. I was wondering to myself, “Who from my congregation has got themselves in such a pickle that they need me?” I walked into the entranceway and sitting there on one of the benches was an elderly lady from my congregation - a member of the UCW, a member of the Sanctuary Guild - sitting alone. It boggled my mind to think what she had done that would require me to pick her up. I sat down on the bench next to her and suddenly the police officer who had called me appeared and said, “Reverend Stirling, I'm really glad you're here. This lady asked for you.” What I found out subsequently was that her house had been burgled and she was frightened to return to it. Feeling violated, feeling that her life had been, in many ways, taken from her, the one person she wanted to go back with her to her home was her minister.
We got in the squad car and drove to her home. As we approached the front door, I could see the look of terror and foreboding on her face. Someone had been in her home uninvited. She went inside and rather than going, as one would assume, to a safe, a particular locked drawer or even a jewellery cabinet, she went right up into her bedroom and opened a dresser drawer. She pulled a box out from under some scarves and gloves and opened it. She took out some letters, written to her from her fiancé many, many years ago, before he was killed at sea. We subsequently found out that money had been stolen, jewellery had been pilfered and her bankbooks had been taken, but at that time the only thing that interested her was something that had no intrinsic value but, to her, meant the world.
If someone were to take from you nearly everything that you own, if you were to lose everything within in your portfolio, if your dreams were shattered, if you didn't have the opportunities you thought you were going to have, if your house was ransacked, what would you value the most? What possession means the most to you? I ask that because that is the scenario in our reading from the Book of Hebrews. We don't know who wrote Hebrews; we can speculate and scholars have different views. We don't know the audience to whom the author was writing, although we can speculate. Some people have suggested that it was written quite early on, probably to people who had experienced the persecution of the Emperor Nero in A.D. 64. Others have suggested that it was written later to talk about the experiences of the early martyrs of the church. Regardless, the writer tells us that the people to whom he was writing had experienced some form of persecution. They were publicly portrayed as bad, according to the writer of Hebrews. They'd been associated with people who had been persecuted and ridiculed, who were the pariahs of society, who even had to make friends with people who were in prison, which again, is a sign that they were identifying with people who were on the outside rather than on the inside of life.
Then there is this incredible line: “And you also joyfully endured the seizing of your possessions.” In other words, they must have had their houses or property taken away from them. Clearly, whatever the situation or context, we know from what is said here that they'd suffered, had hardships, their friends had been rejected, they'd visited people in prison and their houses and possessions had been seized by the authorities. Clearly, they had experienced devastation. Then there is this amazing line in verse 34: “But you have a better and abiding possession.” He uses the word, kratos, which means “powerful”- you have a powerful, a strong possession and you have an abiding - he uses the word, meno, which means “ongoing” - sense of owning something more. In contrast to the loss, the persecution and the seizing of their property, they have something that is abiding and better than any of those things.
What's he talking about? What is this abiding possession, this enduring thing that they have of which he speaks? I think you have to understand the context of the Book of Hebrews to really appreciate what he's getting at. The Book of Hebrews is about a people who were on a journey, which the beginning of the Book of Hebrews implies is heavenward. The people are moving into a heavenly country; they are on their way to something where they have a citizenship, “not of this world.” At the end of their journey, there will be eventually a New Jerusalem, a new capital city. In the heavens there will be this magnificent place, but right now what the people were experiencing was not a new, glorious, heavenly place, but the wilderness.
Just like Psalm 121, which says, “I lift mine eyes up to the hills from whence commeth my aide; my aide comes from the Lord.” Just like that, the writer of Hebrews suggests that although the people are in a wilderness, he is trying to get them to look to the future; the journey is not yet complete. While they are having travails and difficulties in the present, they must keep their eyes firmly fixed on the goal to which they are aspiring. With that in mind, I think it explains to us what the possession is. The possession above all things, is faith. The faith that he is talking about throughout the whole of this book is the faith that we have in Jesus Christ. It is a faith that understands that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, was crucified but that this same Lord was also raised from the dead. He now sits at the right hand of God the Father, just as the Apostle Paul writes. There was this hope, this belief, in triumph, not only for Jesus but also for all his followers. But, and this is critical, he understood that even though they had this faith, they were still experiencing a time of deep trial.
I was reading not long ago, and I am not an engineer so any engineer in the congregation can correct me, that when you build a bridge you have to think of three major loads: The dead load, or the actual weight of the bridge itself. In other words, the ordinary, everyday steel structure that is the bridge. You also have a living load, the load of all the traffic, movement and extra weight of all those crossing it. Finally, you have to account for a wind load, to adjust for any storms, tremors gusts or hurricanes that might come along and place an extra strain on the bridge. You have to prepare for these three loads. For the Hebrews, and indeed for us, we have all of those loads. We have the normal load of our ordinary existence, just simply the fact of being causes its stresses and challenges. Even if we never do anything or meet anyone, simply being can be a hardship. There are the dangers and vicissitudes of living our ordinary, everyday lives that bring with it their own burdens. But it is the wind that is the hard thing to discern - those things that come along and place trials and pressures on our lives that are hard to anticipate and understand. Those things come along and really place their toll on our lives.
I think there are many people today in our society and throughout the world who are feeling the trial and the burden of these loads on their lives, not just of living, the being, but of unexpected things that come and place pressure on them. No one knew this better than the writer of the Book of Hebrews. He says that even if you lose all these things, even if your possessions are taken away, I want you to have a possession that will endure, will be abiding. It is that possession above all others that allows you to withstand life's trials and difficulties and bear the loads it brings upon you.
There is an incredible moment in Goethe's Faust where Faust, the protagonist, is met by Mephistopheles, who represents the devil. Faust is finding that everything is going very well, life is good. Mephistopheles comes to him and says, “Just stay where you are, just enjoy this. This is what life is like: Enjoyment, beauty, goodness, everything working out just fine.” But in this story, things are to the contrary. Mephistopheles has lied - there is not always pleasure, there is not always joy, there is not always frivolity. Pleasures do not last; they are for a moment. The lie of Mephistopheles is that they last forever. I would say to you that insomuch as pleasures do not last forever, nor do sorrows, nor do difficulties. Another lie is to suggest that all we have is the tyranny of the moment and the pressure of the present. One of the great lies is to say that everything will stay as it is. That is not true.
It is not true according to the writer of Hebrews, because God is always doing something - even in the midst of the difficulties and challenges of life. He even goes so far as to quote the great Habakkuk that one day there will be the return of God and great things will happen, so there is no need to fear. What is the antidote to this, but faith. Faith helps us as, one person said to me this week, “Have a more gentle landing when things start to come down.” Faith holds us and gives us that abiding sense that there is always a God at work. Faith, and I love this phrase but I don't know who coined it, “causes us to look always to the horizon and to realize that what we experience now will not last forever.” Where do we see this? It is in the scriptures; in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
When the disciples thought all was lost and that everything was dark and their Saviour was dead, he rose. This Jesus in whom we believe makes the case, embodies the case, for the fact that when God is at work things do not stay the same. But it is not just possessing this faith that makes the journey of life bearable and keeps us looking to the horizon. You can have all faith so as to move mountains; you can have all the right doctrine, all the right ideas about time and place but I love a phrase that I heard and I don't know who said it: “It is not what you possess in this life that matters but who possesses you.”
In 1 John 4:4, the writer says, “The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.” My friends, I want to be straight with you today. I think we are going to have challenging times and I think the thing that is going to see people through those times is having the One who is the source of hope possess us.
Recently, I've been reading the works of Simone Weil, a French writer from the beginning of the 20th century who grew up in an agnostic home. She eventually became a Marxist but after a while questioned socialism. She was a capitalist for a while but began to question capitalism. She is someone who taught ethics and philosophy and whose writings are as disparate as you can possibly imagine - a fascinating person. But she is also someone who suffered terribly, physically. She endured the most awful pain and unfortunately died an untimely death at the age of 34. She wrote the following and I think this sums up what we Christians should really believe in:
In 1938, I was suffering from splitting headaches; each sound hurt me like a blow. I discovered the poem called Love by George Herbert, which I learnt by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache and nauseating pain, I made myself say it over and over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem but without my knowing it, the revelation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that Christ himself came down and took possession of me. In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God, I'd never foreseen the possibility of that - of a real contact, person to person, here below between a human being and God.
Here was a woman who'd experienced the most crushing pain but when she felt God, she was transformed.
When I left the home in Ottawa, I left the dear soul in her living room. I knew it was time for me to leave. It was now dark and I had to leave her in the home in which she felt violated. I was worried for her, deeply worried. How could I leave her alone? But she wanted me to. Finally, as I walked to the door and said goodbye, she put her hand on my shoulder. I asked, “Are you going to be all right?”
She smiled and said, “Of course I'll be all right. I'll just go to bed tonight and pray that the Lord will be with me, and he will.”
With that confidence, I turned to leave. She reached out a second time, touched me and said, “But I'll tell you, it was awfully nice to have that confirmed by you.”
I turned headed home and she bore the night alone. There are many people who are going to feel the night alone; there are going to be people who face difficulties, uncertainties and challenges but this is what they need: They need people of faith to say to them, “It is not what you possess, it's who possesses you.”
It's not what you think is valuable that counts, it is what is abidingly valuable that you should treasure. When you know those things, when you are certain of that conviction and when you have that faith, believe you me, you have the most valuable thing on earth and in heaven. Make sure that possession is in your portfolio. Amen.