Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16 (Luke 12:32-40)
Faith is the assurance – the very substance – of things hoped for, the conviction – the demonstrated proof – of things not seen.
In other words, faith alters reality.
Faith creates reality, in fact, as powerfully as the Word of God creates reality in that Genesis story where God says “Let there be light” and light suddenly is.
Faith is, perhaps, a superpower.
And right now, I have a lot of incentive to want that superpower that makes things real.
I would like to think cool thoughts, to have faith in cool air, say, and have a cool church for us to be worshiping in, today.
Wouldn’t you?
The Hebrew Christian community whose mail we’ve been reading today also need that superpower.
They’re experiencing all the discomfort of waiting for something they’ve been promised that never seems to be happening.
In their case, it’s the return of Jesus to obliterate all our errors and sins (the way we screw up that hurts other people, and the way other people have screwed up that hurt us, and all the ways those hurts weigh us down) and unite us to God’s unstoppable glory and joy and love – which we are waiting for, too – a wait that’s gone longer and is more pervasive in our lives than waiting for air conditioning.
And they are hearing – so we are hearing – about faith making real all that we hope for. Proving to us the truth of things we do not see. So that we experience the reality of God’s promises, of Jesus’ presence, of our souls’ deepest longings being fulfilled, even when it’s obvious to any other observer that Jesus hasn’t come, the world is still a mess, and it’s still hot in this church.
Faith changes the reality we live in.
Even while that unappealing reality goes right on being real.
That story about Abraham experiencing God’s promise of a permanent homeland even while he’s packing his life and family around in tents is supposed to help us connect with this faith superpower for ourselves.
Supposed to be an example that will help us live in a reality where oppression and injustice and evil are obliterated, as God promises, even while the daily news is still full of unjust prison sentences and evil deceptions and oppressions we thought we were done with.
I want that superpower.
Anyone else? (show of hands)
The good news is that we do not have to be bitten by a radioactive spider, (or a radioactive Bible) to get this superpower.
On the other hand, it’s not instant, either.
For most of us, it comes on in gradual, uneven, often awkward, stages – like an “acquired taste” for olives or okra or a new kind of music.
You don’t just experience multiple realities on the first try.
Most of us, anyway.
The best way to start experiencing the reality of God’s promises here and now – to experience faith – is to hang out with it. To spend time with other people who experience the realities of faith, and to try on their experience for yourself.
Maybe you know someone who always seems to see the way the universe is bending toward justice, even when everything’s going wrong.
Maybe you know a person who goes into the scariest diagnosis with all the relief and zest for life of someone who’s already experienced complete healing.
Or someone who is always joyful and grounded and sees the action of God in what’s obviously sheer dumb coincidence.
Those are people living by faith in the reality of God’s promises, right in the middle of a reality empty of those promises.
Try it on with them.
That’s one way of staying alert for the coming of God that Jesus teaches in the gospel today, by the way. Seeking out faith to hang around with, and trying it on, helps keep us ready for God’s presence to appear unexpectedly.
Once, at the church I attended before seminary, a visitor to the congregation sat in a wash of color from one of the stained glass windows (when I really didn’t have time to listen) and told us the story of having been miraculously healed of a permanent injury by prayer, and visits to holy sites.
My rational, science-educated mind promptly generated explanations involving conventional medicine and coincidence, but as one of my friends nodded along with the story, I saw how real the miracle was, how real the healing was, right along with the rational unreality, and right along with the lingering signs of old injury.
It wasn’t my faith, not yet, but I glimpsed faith making healing real.
And it got easier to let faith change my own reality, to feel some healing in my soul even while some bitter truths still hurt.
Years later, helping with Vacation Bible School, I listened to our church’s young elementary-schoolers name their “God-sightings” – a friend met me at the pool, the sun shone today, I got a SpiderMan bandaid – and laughed a little. And then I tried on the possibility that I could, myself, feel the vivid presence of God in the morning sun, the friend who showed up for coffee, the store having bandaids that match more than one kind of skin tone. And the reality of the world did start to shift, to a world more naturally full of the presence and joy and love of God all the time, even while it’s also clearly the kind of world where God must be missing, much of the time.
Gradually, a little bit at a time, I try on the faith of those around me – deep, lived, tested faith and fresh, new, uncertain faith – and gradually become more and more a person who lives in the reality of God’s abundance and presence even in a world driven by scarcity and absence. Someone who lives by faith, in a world made real by a superpower I don’t always know I have.
A superpower, that perhaps, I don’t have, but that we have, together, as a community, a people, of faith.
A superpower you might not know you have.
But which you could have. Which you could share.
Faith is the reality of things hoped for; the proof of things unseen: It’s our shared superpower, changing reality, making God’s promises, hope, joy, and love more real than real has ever been before.
