The Rev. Greg Johnston
Sermon — August 7, 2022
When I was in elementary school, my parents finished the basement in my childhood home. Before, it had been a dark and dirty place; I was scared to go down there by the laundry machines alone. But now, it was a bright room, with lights and a couch and a carpet and my new favorite place in the house: the cedar closet.
It was just a regular closet to store clothes, but lined with cedar, and of course cedar repels moths, so it was the perfect place to store clothes that were out of season. Of course, I didn’t care about this at the time. I loved it for a very different reason: the smell. Not the nasty smell of mothballs, but the indescribable smell of fresh-cut cedar planks. And so I’d go in there, and play among the coats like a little kid does in a coat closet, and enjoy that wonderful smell.
And then some time in early December, my mother would start telling me to stop messing around in the closets. She was always a little secretive about the reasons, and I wasn’t a very obedient child, so one day, I was playing in the basement and opened up the cedar closet and I discovered the reason she’d told me not to go in there: tucked away behind the fall coats and ski jackets was a stack of Christmas presents from my parents, each one neatly wrapped.
Now, don’t worry. This is not the story of how Greg opened all the presents in advance and ruined Christmas. And of course, my gifts from Santa Claus had not yet arrived. But to me, it’s the perfect illustration of the difference between faith and knowledge. I had faith, every year, that there would be something under the tree on Christmas morning. But I never knew for sure, not until that moment of excitement some time around 5am on Christmas Day when I would run down the stairs and peer around the corner into the living room and see that the presents had arrived. Faith and knowledge are two very different things.
“Faith,” writes Hebrews, “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1) Faith is to “set out for a place” you have been promised, like Abraham had done, “not knowing where [you are] going.” (11:8) Faith is spending a life living in tents, wandering in the desert in a foreign land, when you’ve been promised a home. (11:9) Faith is trusting the promise that your descendants will be “as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the sea,” even though no children have been born yet, and you are getting very old. (11:12)
Faith is not certainty; it’s more like perseverance in the face of uncertainty. And this is the frustrating and the wonderful thing about a life of faith. The greatest examples of Christian faith are not people who’ve always had an answer to everything and never doubted the teachings of their religion. They’re people who struggled with God throughout their lives, who went through long periods of spiritual dryness or despair, and who nevertheless persisted in loving God and loving their neighbors with everything they had.
This is a frustrating truth. “God, just give me a sign!” must be one of the most common prayers in human history. We genuinely want and need guidance. Some of us have had times when God felt especially present in our lives. Some of us have had spiritual experiences that reassure us of God’s love. But most of us spend most of our lives uncertain, wondering where God is, wondering whether any of this makes sense. And none of us truly know God; not on this side of eternity.
But these struggles are not a lack of faith. They are faith. Not “faith” in the sense of unquestioning belief in some theological proposition, but “faith” in the sense of Abraham’s faithfulness to God, and God’s faithfulness to Abraham. God has promised us a kingdom of peace, a community of live, an everlasting life of joy, and those things have not yet come to be. We are like all those whom Hebrews names who “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw them and greeted them.” (11:13) We get a taste to sustain us on our journey, but the destination is far off, and we do not know where we are going. And yet, faithfully, we continue on, and it’s the power of those promises that has sustained us over the years, that invitation into the dream of God that has inspired generations of people of faith. And that’s why I say that faith is a frustrating and wonderful thing: it is perseverance and uncertainty combined.
This goes beyond our own personal spiritual lives. The same is true about our journey as a community, as a nation, as the human species. God spoke through the prophet Isaiah 2700 years ago to command us: “learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” (Isaiah 1:17) Jesus invited us 2000 years ago the enter “the kingdom”: to sell our possessions, and give alms; to make for ourselves “an unfailing treasure in heaven.” (Luke 12:33) This is God’s dream for our world, and yet it’s obvious that that dream is not yet reality. That dream has sustained and frustrated us for generations as we journey towards it. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He knew that he would never live in the promised land of peace and equality. He could see it from a distance and “greet it,” as Hebrews said, but he would die in faith, without having received the promise—as will we all. And yet, his perseverance in the face of uncertainty—his conviction that history bends toward justice, even if the world is not yet just—has inspired millions of people to keep that faith in their own way.
God has promised many gifts to us, but Christmas has not yet come. We have made many prayers, but haven’t yet seen all of them answered. We are journeying together toward our promised home, but for now, we live in tents, in a foreign land. But even here, we live, as we always have, by faith. Not by knowledge. Not by certainty. But by persevering in the way that Jesus taught us, holding fast to that faith which is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things” that are not yet fully seen. Amen.