Sermon 10th January 2016

Today, our Vicar, Cameron Barker, begins our study of some Bible faith-heroes. The reading is from Hebrews 11:1-12.

“Stories are powerful things. They give us a framework and a context to understanding our situations and challenges. Fairy tales tell us that good triumphs over evil. Fables teach us that actions have consequences. Legends inspire us to reach beyond our limitations and aim for more.” Those words from a Bible Society devotional last week challenged me to come up with a really memorable story for the start of this new series. So here it is … about a man who stumbled across the desert home of a preacher after being lost in a sand-storm for 5 days. After the preacher had nursed him back to health, the man asked for directions to the nearest town. The preacher offered to lend him his horse to take him there. But, the preacher warned him that his was a very special horse. To make it go the man had to say, “Thank God”; and, to make it stop, he had to say, “Amen”.

Climbing up on the horse the man said, “Thank God”, and off it went. After a while he said loudly, “Thank God”, and the horse started trotting. When he was feeling brave, he shouted, “Thank God!” and the horse began galloping. Suddenly he realized that he was heading straight for a cliff. He yelled “Whoa!”’, and hauled back on the reins. But the horse didn’t even slow! Nothing he tried worked; until, finally, he remembered, and shouted: “AMEN!!” The horse skidded to a halt right at the cliff’s edge. Heart racing, the man slumped in the saddle, and gasped: “Thank God”!

Stories are indeed powerful things; and teach us all sorts! They do give us a framework and context to understand our situations and challenges. And the best stories to do that in life-changing ways, I’d suggest, are true stories. Fairy tales, fables, and legends (not to mention stories about special horses) are wonderful. But how much more inspiring are stories about ordinary people whose lives are impacted in ways that our own life could easily be? That, above all, is the story of the Bible, from start to finish. Apart from 1 major exception (yes, of course: Jesus!) it’s overwhelmingly stories of, or material written by ordinary people, like any one of us, who met with God in the ordinariness of their everyday life, and became caught up in His story.

We’re starting this year with a short series about just these sorts of people, who we might call ‘heroes of faith’. I’ve chosen Hebrews chapter 11 as the passage to frame it, for a very obvious reason. If you read on to the end of it you’ll see why New Living Translation heads this chapter “Great examples of faith” – because that’s exactly what it is. It’s full of stories of these ordinary people who chose to become involved in God’s story – specifically by having faith in Him. Faith is at the centre of it, as those verses that we’ve just heard make very clear. But, to repeat what’s regularly said here, this is not about great people who had faith; or even about people who had great faith; but rather about ordinary people who had faith in a great God!

Over the next few weeks, before this year’s very early start of Lent, we’ll look at just some of these individual’s stories. The preachers have chosen their own person, for reasons that each we’ll explain. That’s also important, because, as that Bible Society devotional also pointed out, “The stories we share about ourselves are just as powerful. The memories we affirm and retell reveal something about how we see ourselves and what we think is important”. Of course all of us preachers are ordinary people who have faith in a great God. We have also become involved in His story, in the same way that all believers have. This series is about how we can help, and encourage, each other to take more steps along the road of faith in God this year, then.

So we’re beginning at what in many ways is the beginning of the faith-story; with the story of Abraham; or, accurately Abram! That was his name when he entered the story; God changed it along the way, as a sign of what was going on. First then, to say that I’ve singled Abram out partly because the beginning is always a very good place to start; but also because his story plays an important part in my own faith story. Now this brief summary in Hebrew 11 is much easier to read than the full 15 chapters that this story runs for in Genesis. It’s also a fine example of another ordinary person (whoever wrote this letter) taking a story and making points from it that others could then learn from. And that’s an invitation which God extends to us all, of course: here are the stories – what will we make of them for our own lives with God?

So, Abram: he was an ordinary person, living his ordinary life, thousands of years ago in modern-day Turkey; when God spoke to him – out of the blue, as far as we can tell. That’s how we meet Abram, in Genesis chapter 12 – in other words, very near the start of the Bible; with God telling him to leave everything, and everyone he knew; for some unnamed and unknown destination! That instruction came first; so we can’t be sure how much of what followed Abram absorbed first time round! It was pretty amazing, though, according to the detail in Genesis; and that’s well worth reading in full, of course. It wasn’t just a new home, we read: “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great … and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you”, God said to Abram.

“So Abram went, as the Lord had told him” is what we read in the next verse in Genesis 12: no if’s, no but’s, no question asked. Well, as Martin Luther King once put it: “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase” – even if you are 75 years old, as Abram was; even if you don’t have a clue where you’re going; and even if you don’t have any children, as he didn’t. And all of that spoke very powerfully to me at a key time in my life. I had already made the choice to do full-time Christian work; I was living in a community, a group home, and spending my days and nights with homeless people; and I could hear God saying that He wanted something different, something more. Well, it made no sense to me – but when a close friend told me that I should get ordained, I knew that was it. The thing was, I couldn’t imagine anything that I wanted to do less! My father had been ordained before I was even born: I knew Vicarage life from the inside, and had no desire to return to it. And how could this possibly fit with my skills, life experiences, or personality? But it was as clear as a bell that this was God’s plan; and the more that I fought, and refused, the louder it got; until finally after reading these very verses from Hebrews 11, I realised that I didn’t have to understand: I just had to obey; and then I took the next step.

I should also say now that it was another 7 years before I was actually ordained; and that it involved a veritable theme-park full of twists and turns just getting there; let alone all that has happened in the 20 years since then. But that too is fully in keeping with the story of Abram. As I say, it’s a good read so do fill in the detail of what’s summarised here – and be prepared for the many ups and downs that Abram and Sarai experienced. It wasn’t until he was in his mid-80’s that God specifically promised Abram a son; after 10 years of moving about here, there and everywhere! And the closest that he came in the end to receiving God’s promised inheritance was when he bought a cave in a field in the land of Canaan to bury Sarah in, by the way. And Sarah and Abraham, as they had become by then, didn’t have their one child, Isaac, until Abraham was 99, and she was 90!

It’s easy to romanticise stories such as these when we read them in the Bible. Of course we always read them with the benefit of hindsight. So we, centuries later, know that Abraham’s descendants through Isaac really were that numerous – and that’s even if we count them only biologically. The trouble for us is that we live our own lives forwards. When we’re in the middle of waiting for God’s way to become clear, or to actually happen, we often can’t make sense of the waiting, or the pain of it. But that is when it’s so Godly-helpful to have such examples of faith-heroes, who held on and trusted God; even in the hardest, and quietest, of times. What we mustn’t ever do, though, is minimise the struggle in that waiting. We might not read about it in the story itself; but it’s just as real as the final Godly outcome: 24 years of waiting for just that one promise to become real is beyond-words hard!

Fascinatingly, what many probably think of as Abraham's greatest faith-test doesn’t appear in this summary. Again you’ll have to read the detail of this in Genesis (chapter 22), to see just how deeply Abraham trusted God. When told to sacrifice this only son, the one on whom God’s whole promise rested, Abraham showed his willingness to do even that. If you don’t know the story, at what seemed the very last minute, God told Abraham to stop. A careful reading of this story shows that Abraham never doubted that his son would be coming back with him from the place of sacrifice – though not how he thought that could happen.

Of course there are – many! – parts of the story that aren’t told; at all; let alone in any detail. Just imagine how long the Bible would have to be to include everything that we’d possibly want to know in each and every story! What matters though, is that there is always more than enough there to tell us what we need to know in order to work out how to live as God’s people in our own circumstances. That, after all, is what it’s about, in the final analysis: it was for Abraham; it was for Sarah; for all the others in this long Hebrews 11 list; for those in this series – and now it is for us today too. It’s about how we come to believe that God is who He says He is; and that He will do what He says He will – even if and when there’s no evidence.

The name that’s most often given to that process is ‘faith’. As Hebrew 11:1 is put in New Living Translation: “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.  Through their faith the people in days of old earned a good reputation”. There can be no doubt that we all need trustworthy examples of faith-at-work to hold onto when we need to, as life inevitably means that we all will; at least sometimes. Well they are abundantly present in the Bible: ordinary people, living ordinary lives, having that kind of faith and trust in this great God. Here are just a few of them; ordinary people that we hope God will speak to you through, whatever your circumstance may be. These are stories of the many men and women of the Bible who have left us a record of spiritual greatness born out of a will firmly set to do the will of God. May they be the context and the framework through which we experience our lives and understand our circumstances, then. And may that help us to tell, and to live, our own stories that follow their Godly, faith-filled examples. So let’s now pray that it will indeed be so …