Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

Many of you know that I have not always been a student of the Bible. I never actually read the Bible or even parts of it until I was 47 years old. Still, I was raised in a Christian home and I was familiar with the main story line. It’s sort of like the way I know about Harry Potter now—I haven’t read the first Harry Potter book, but of 18 people who were on the bus to Montreat for the youth conference the day after the last HP book came out, I think 15 were reading it. So, HP was part of the dominant culture in Reynolds Lodge that week and I just sort of absorbed a knowledge of it the way I had a working knowledge of the Bible even in my days as a total apostate. I know who Harry is and I know a little about Ron and Hermione. There are lots of sub-plots and secondary stories that seem for a while to be independent of the main story line and then in the end you realize they in fact are all intertwined and related.

The Bible and Harry Potter. Two books, similar literary styles.

Both operate on an underlying assumption that the world has all the potential to be a constantly wonderful and happy place, but there is this continuous thread of badness that over and over again keeps the world from being perfect. In HP, the ultimate source of badness is the evil Voldemont, who I gather doesn’t actually have a body but has a lot of power and no shortage of people willing to follow in his wicked ways. And the struggle throughout the HP series is to overcome Voldemont and the evil that he spreads.

Pretty good for someone who has never read an HP book. But, I’m sure many of you would really like to get up here about now and explain that I have no clue what I’m talking about. The HP series is full of poignant philosophy and thoughtful provocation.

I was equally ignorant about the depth of the message in the Biblical story. I don’t think I even knew there was a Book called Hebrews in the Bible before I read it.

In fact, its one of the more mysterious of the Books in the Bible. No one knows who wrote it or when or really whether it was intended as a letter or as a sermon. Some scholars have suggested it could have been written by Priscilla. There isn’t much to support that theory, but, if it was important, I could probably make the case in court without being accused of raising a frivolous argument.

Whatever Hebrews is, it is an amazing, very early synopsis of ideas and doctrine that came to be known as Christianity.

Here is how it starts out:

It has some famous Biblical expressions in it. "Surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses" "run with perseverance the race that is set before us," In Hebrews, Jesus as the perfect high Priest and sole intercessor inextricably tying God and humanity together.

Although we do not know the author or the exact date, it seems to have been directed to a first century congregation struggling to keep the faith in a culture that is just not hospitable to the faith they are trying to keep.

Many of the New Testament Epistles were written to reign in a congregation heading down the wrong path. The Corinthians were the first century girls gone wild. The Galatians had their heads turned by a new celebrity. But it seems that for our Hebrews, they were just plain tired of it all. At some point, they had been an energetic, confident force to be reckoned with, but whoever is delivering this message understands that their faith is waning.

We can imagine this group of people who were among the first to hear the Gospel. Maybe some of them were there at Pentecost and were among the three thousand who were Baptized that day. Probably they or their parents were part of the explosion that we hear about in the Book of Acts where over and over again great numbers of believers are added to the community.

But now it’s another 30 or 40 or 50 years later. Jesus has not returned. Life as they have always known it has gone on. The ordinary pressures of day to day living continue. For them, figuring out how to keep themselves and their families clothed, fed and sheltered were day to day concerns. And all around them there is this dominant Roman culture that stands for everything that is contrary to what they have heard about the Gospel.

One of the reasons the Romans became such a dominating force in the world was because wherever they conquered, they absorbed. The nations who came under their rule adopted Roman economic and political systems and most of them lost their ethnic identities. The Jews, thanks largely to groups like the Pharisees, were more successful than most in keeping their own cultural traditions in tact, but by the end of the first century, the pressure to assimilate was constant.

Just imagine being deluged constantly day in and day out with the demands of a materialistic, idol worshipping mainstream society where you would be ridiculed if you even suggested that people should share their food and possessions with strangers.

Imagine if you believed in your heart that there is a better way for people to live. A way where people live in community caring for each other regardless of their ethnic origins. A way where sex is something that happens between two people who are committed to each other instead of a form of entertainment or a tool by which some people dominate and exploit other people. A way where people understood that money in and of itself has no intrinsic value.

Now, imagine if that is what you believed in your heart, but every day, day in and day out, the world around you is telling you the complete opposite. Imagine if you lived in a world where you turn on the TV for the morning news and you see and hear all about the lives of rich, beautiful people. Then you watch TV commercials that tell you all the things that money can buy so that you too can be a rich, beautiful person.

Then, when you do see and hear about people who are not rich and beautiful, all you can do is despair. Those people are out there, but you can’t fix the world. The problems with health care, education and poverty are too big. After all, Jesus himself said the poor will be with us always. One person or one congregation can’t save the world, so why even bother to keep trying.

Why not just give it up and buy into the material world all around us. I don’t hear much about Jesus when I turn on the TV or pick up the newspaper. But every time I open outlook I have new emails about great deals on clothes and sheets and furniture. Checking them out can be very entertaining –and it’s a good way to distract myself when I just feel tired of all the bad news. News about mothers in Africa who watch their children die from malnutrition while the most serious health problem in America is obesity. I’m not going to go down the bad news path—you know what I’m talking about.

It’s not too hard to imagine how these Hebrews were feeling 2,000 years ago.

Whoever is writing this letter or sermon to the Hebrews understands their struggle and understands ours too. So, the writer tells us to take a step back and remember. Remember who we are and why.

There have been some famous incidents of angels showing up in the guise of a vagabond. The writer is referring to Abraham, but do you remember a movie called "It could happen to you." Nicolas Cage is a policeman who doesn’t have money to tip a worn down, depressed waitress so he promises her half the winnings of his lotto ticket. Then he actually wins, and they fall in love, but too bad, he was married and the wife ends up with the winnings. The angel shows up at the end of the movie in the guise of a homeless person in the middle of a New York City winter and they give him some soup.

If you think the world is wearing you down with all the pressures to be successful, imagine if you had no control over when you ate, what you wear, what you eat, who you sleep next to.

The writer of Hebrews is probably referring to victims of religious persecution. For most of us, religious persecution is not a major concern, although I did get myself into a little trouble over that premise in one of my seminary classes.

One of my fellow second career students was a former public school teacher. She often complained bitterly about how she was prevented from teaching her students about her particular version of Christianity. I stayed quiet for a long time as others in the class sympathized and provided their own examples of how they felt their ability to express their religious beliefs were stifled. I even stayed quiet while they made blatant misstatements about the law—you know things like "ever since the government made it illegal to pray in school." Listen to me. It is not illegal to pray in school, and the government never "kicked God out of our schools." Our government is not that powerful.

But I opened my mouth when a fellow student said: "We Christians in America today are just as much victims of persecution as the early Christians even if it is a different form of persecution." Then I said: "those Christians who were fed to the lions or used as human torches to light the streets of Rome probably would take issue with your argument." The discussion came to an abrupt halt.

Luckily most of us don’t know what it feels like to be persecuted and luckily most of us don’t know what it feels like to be in prison. The writer’s point is that but for the grace of God there go we. And people in prison are our brothers and sisters in Christ regardless of what they may or may not have done to end up where they are and that is why we remember them.

For the past several months, I have been working full time here at the church as a summer intern. Being here almost every day, I have learned some things about the mission of this church in action. Christy Williams takes a bunch of elementary school kids and a small group of our high schoolers and a shoe string budget and somehow a miracle of hope happens. Summer Camp at First Presbyterian Church may be the most low-tech game in town, but these kids come here and they sing songs, play games, and they hear about Jesus. No, they don’t just hear about him, they get a little bit of exposure to the kingdom he described.

At the same time camp is going on, the steady stream of destitute and desperate people are coming in the other end of the education building. It is a daily event, but one incident will stay with me for a long time: a couple with 3 children, one of whom was in a stroller. The mother was 5 months pregnant and the toddler had a heart defect that required medical attention. They were trying to get back to Iowa where the baby had a doctor and the family was receiving public benefits. They came in with a complicated tale of woe that included being robbed of their cash from their Orlando motel room. For some inexplicable reason, the Orlando police who responded to the robbery told them to use the little money they had left to come to Tallahassee because they might get some help there.

So that’s what they did. They came here and stayed in the shelter for a weekend and showed up at our church first thing Monday morning.

I knew the Pastor’s discretionary fund was depleted and I really didn’t know what we could do for them. I did know there was no place else we could send them for help. To make a long story short, Brant found a way to pay for their bus tickets.

It wasn’t Brant’s money, it was church money. To those children whose faces lit up with joy and relief when they found out they didn’t have to stay in the shelter another night, you were angels of mercy. So even as our hearts ache for people, especially children, who are on the margins of this powerful and affluent culture we live in we can be witnesses of hope.

So what does that have to do with Harry Potter? Isn’t Harry all about hope and perseverance? About struggling to respond with goodness in a world inundated with evil both blatant and subversive?

That is what the writer of Hebrews is exhorting us to do because

And if we can break down the cultural barriers that keep us from understanding that simple fact, then we are able to respond to the grace of Jesus Christ by doing good and sharing what we have.