Believe You Are Graced--September 1, 2021

Believe You Are Graced--September 1, 2021

"By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain's. Through this he received approval as righteous, God himself giving approval to his gifts; he died, but through his faith he still speaks." [Hebrews 11:4]

I have these childhood memories of periodically sitting down with my grandfather or grandmother, or with my mom, and paging through family photo albums.  Every so often, some grown-up in my life would get out this overstuffed volume with mostly black-and-white photos of people I had never known, or maybe whom I had met once at a family reunion.  And they would tell me the stories of these people--the great-aunt who served during World War II, or my grandfather in his sailor's uniform before going off to the Pacific theater, or the well-dressed people in wedding photos from my great-grandparents' generations.   I can still remember the smell of those old pages, it turns out.

Those names and faces usually came with descriptions, stories, or remembrances, which my mom or grandparents would supply.  "This was your great-grandfather--I remember him doing such and such..." or "This was what your grandfather looked like when he was a boy--look how much he resembles his brother!"  I would hear stories of how these people had worked hard, endured a Depression, made their homes, and lived their lives.  And the point of all of this storytelling, I'm pretty sure, was to help me to know whose lives had shaped me and my background.  The virtues they embodied--hard work, diligence, duty, and such--were handed to me as a legacy to carry and take up in my own life.  The challenges they endured were laid out for me like a bar to be cleared, as if to say, "You come from a long line of people who have faced difficult circumstances--you will be able to face whatever comes your way, too."

Well, the writer of Hebrews here is about to do the same with us--what we call the eleventh chapter of this book (remember, chapter and verse notations are later inventions we have come up with to help find our way in these documents) is sort of a trip through the family photo albums of the people of God.  And rather like sitting with a grandparent or parent and learning the stories that go with the names, the writer of Hebrews wants us to remember particular things about the family of faith we come from.  He wants to highlight how our ancestors among the people of God all lived by faith--they staked their lives and made their choices in light of the God in whom they trusted.  And again, much like my own grandfather telling me stories to help shape the kind of person I would become, the writer of Hebrews wants to shape us into being people of faith by remembering where we come from in this legacy.

The starting point of this family album goes all the way back to Abel, remembered in Genesis as one of Adam and Eve's sons, the same son killed by his brother Cain (in a fit of jealousy over who was more acceptable to God, sadly).  And while we get very little biography of Abel in the Scriptures (kind of like the distant ancestors in your family tree might only be known by a few scraps of fact and personal data), our writer here wants us to see all of what Abel did in terms of his faith.  He offered up gifts of thanks to God from his flocks and herds out of faith and gratitude to God.  He saw his life as a gift of God, rather than something he had achieved or earned, and that affected how he used his possessions.  That's living by faith.  And so, even though his life was cut off early by his envious brother, his life "still speaks" to us even now.

Sometimes I think we misunderstand what it means to live "by faith," and we need correctives like these remembrances from the family photo album of God's people.  We can turn "faith" in a matter of reciting correct dogmas in a creed, as though God were something you could reduce to memorized creeds or theological propositions.  Or we misuse the word "faith" to mean some particular partisan political affiliation, or an opposition to scientific discoveries, or a reckless attitude about public health (as in, "We have faith, not fear, so we're not going to get vaccinated for COVID and say it's about our devotion to God!").  But each of those twists or narrows what faith really looks like as a way of life.  For Abel, who didn't have any catechisms or creeds to recite, faith looked like living your whole live understanding your existence as a gift of grace, which calls forth gratitude as a response in love.  When Abel brought some of his flock to God as an offering, nobody had told him he "had to," and there wasn't any kind of "commandment" given about bringing offerings to God.  There weren't any instructions requiring payment for sins, either.  All we can reliably say from Abel's story is that he understood his life as a gift of God, and he sensed that such a relationship of love called forth a response of gratitude.  He took it by faith that his life was a gift of grace, rather than just assuming, "I exist, but I don't owe anybody anything, and nobody can tell me what to do."  

If we bracket out God from our lives, it becomes really easy to say, "I'm on my own in life, and so is everyone else--it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, so we all have to do whatever things we have to in order to save ourselves.  There's no one looking out of any of us, so it's survival of the fittest, and I can't dare share with anybody else or give up anything of mine, because that would show weakness."  If we live our lives simply on the evidence of nature's indifference and human cruelty toward one another and other creatures, we might tell ourselves we have no reason to be kind, to be compassionate, to see someone as a higher authority than ourselves, or to do justice when it is not in our immediate self-interest.  We can be real jerks sometimes, to be honest.

But to live by faith, like Abel does, is to understand that life itself is a gift, and to then live all of our lives in response to the Giver, who has brought us not just into existence, but into relationship.  Such a life requires courage to believe we are indeed beloved--and to see others as beloved as well, but that is the kind of life that leaves an impression on the world long after our days are past. 

Today, live like you are beloved by the Creator of the universe, and like your life itself is a gift.  That's how we will live by faith today.

Lord God, give us the courage to live, to act, and to choose in this day as though everything is a gift of your goodness... because it is.