Sermon of August 19, 2007

20^th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
August 19, 2007

Walk in the Light

Today we launch the Light from Light Capital Campaign. We chose this day because of the public school calendar, not because we had been reading ahead in the lectionary. I had confidence the Spirit would have a timely word to speak through scripture on this day. What I didn’t anticipate was that the Spirit would go way past preaching and commence to meddling.

The reading from Hebrews picks up where we left off last week, just as the writer is catching his breath and launching afresh into his list of saints who have gone before us in the faith. And what a company it is – Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jeptha, David, Samuel and the prophets, Red Sea crossers, walls-of-Jericho breachers, fire-quenchers, kingdom-conquerors, lion’s-mouth-shutters, and that’s just to name a few. Don’t forget the stoned-to-death, the sawed-in-two, the mocked, the flogged, and the persecuted.

Faith in the God of the Bible does not guarantee comfort, but it does make life interesting – and crowded, according to Hebrews. We live, the writer says, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses to the grace, mercy, and steadfast love of God made known in Jesus Christ. As one theologian has put it, the work of the church – our liturgy – expresses not the dead faith of the living, but the living faith of the dead.

This life of faith is like a race, the writer says – not a sprint – a marathon. In ancient times a marathon ended with the runners coming back into the stadium. When we come to the home stretch and enter the great stadium, the writer of Hebrews promises, the bleachers will be filled with those who have gone before us. This very Table is the place where we recall that promise, and where, by some miracle of grace, we dine with that great cloud of witnesses.

As I pondered this passage last week, I couldn’t help but think of Maurie Vance, long-time member of this church, historian of note at FSU – a person of great dignity and precision. Sometime after his 80^th birthday, Maurie undertook a project. He decided that he would touch up the pews in this sanctuary – especially the ones on the south side, where years of direct sunlight have deteriorated the paint. After careful research as to color, type of paint, and proper tools, Maurie began his project.

He sanded and scraped and painted, and after a few months he began to suspect that he just might not live long enough to finish what he had started. When Maurie went to live at Westminster Oaks, his great regret was that he didn’t have time to finish that job. Maurie died at the age of 86. He ran with perseverance the race that was set before him, but before he finished the race, he passed his sandpaper and his paintbrush on to the next generation.

These days, if you visit the sanctuary early in the week, you just might find a crew composed of Jim Lyle, Dave Custis, and (You guessed it!), James Vance, son of Maurie, still working on those pews. This old meeting house harbors not just memories, but vibrant, living, active saints with work to do and a mission to fulfill.

The letter to the Hebrews doesn’t mention air conditioners, water intrusion or solar voltaic electric generators, but it does mention people – people who live by faith, people who stand in the generations, people who gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing and look to Jesus as the pioneer and perfecter of their faith.

The church is people. It is possible to be the church without buildings, without air-conditioners, and without sanctuaries built with bricks fired on the plantation in 1834. It is impossible, however, to be a disembodied church. We serve an incarnate God, a God whose Word became flesh and lived among us. We can’t be the church without getting down and dirty with God’s created world.

That means that if we’re going to have buildings in which to worship and from which to carry out mission, we owe it to God to make them beautiful, functional, and faithful expressions of the stewardship of creation.

When people walk past the corner of Park and Adams now, they see a steeple and a clock (or rather two clocks which never agree with one another). If they arrive at the right time of day, they might see the children of the Preschool out playing, looking very much like a pint-sized United Nations at recess.

“There’s a place where worship and mission are going on,” they might well say to themselves.

God willing, it won’t be long before people will walk by and see something new: space-age panels on the roof of the Education Building. Then perhaps people will also say, “There’s a place where people care about the environment, where people are trying to change the way they live their institutional life. It looks to me as though people in that church really are trying to be faithful stewards of creation.”

Or maybe they’ll just say, “What’s that!” And we’ll be able to tell them. “That’s light from light. Just like Jesus! Would you like to hear more?”

Rather like the letter to the Hebrews, this campaign celebrates the past, but looks toward the future. Some Christians see the future as an occasion for escape. For them the end of time is all about being snatched away into heaven while the rest of humanity is left behind.

Christians in the Presbyterian tradition have a different take on the future. Like the writer of Hebrews, we see Christ standing at the end of history, drawing all people to himself. Jesus stands as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, as a beacon casting God’s light from the future into the present.

To be a Christian is to walk in that light and to invite others to do the same. It is to run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking forward, toward the light.

The writer called Peter put it this way: we are called “to declare the deeds of him who brought us out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

That’s a very high calling for the likes of you and me. We are, after all, rather ordinary people, and sinners to boot. But that’s what saints are: ordinary people with a high and holy calling.

Walk in the light, friends. Run the race. There is no other way to be the church of Jesus Christ.

If you would like to receive these sermons by e-mail, send a note to brant@oldfirstchurch.org.

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