". . . strangers and pilgrims. . ."

Sermon by James W. Crawford

The Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 22, 1998

From Hebrews 11 and 12

 The other day I received in the mail a "Statement of Concern Issued by the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Council of Churches." The concern? "Youth Sports and Public Activities on Sunday Morning." It describes the variety of events taking place on Sundays and makes a serious plea for churches and clergy, for parents and other adults, to make a commitment "to reclaim Sunday as a Sabbath time set apart, to schedule events in alternate ways, and to encourage civic officials to review the impact of these Sunday developments on families, society and community life."

Heaven knows the tremendous number of events, entertainment opportunities, community activities and family obligations we face over the course of a week. We live in an era when choices over the use of our time, money and energy increase daily at what seems like an exponential rate.  The old triumvirate of church, school and home, where socialization takes place, where friends are made and nurtured, values shaped and foundations laid, tends to erode daily. The big screen in the theater, the smaller screen in the TV room, the 17-inch computer screen and their fast-paced images, vast amounts of information, opinions, games and invitations to new, challenging and pleasurable venues swamp us by the second. Hundreds of agencies, groups, associations, Eastern philosophies, and therapeutic offerings promise salvation, community, inspiration and wisdom. Shopping is now a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week proposition, the Sundays in Advent, four of them before Christmas, turn into a commercial bonanza.  The baseball season opens in Boston this year on Good Friday, churches and church life turn out to be just another compartment, a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, an irrelevancy in the busy lives of urban dwellers.

What is the impact of this seven-day, high-powered activity schedule? Tough to tell. But this last week you may have noted Boston's Roman Catholic Archdiocese plans to close up to 60 of its churches. Lack of parishioners, they say. Lack of priests, they add. Each year the United Church of Christ puts out a State of the Church report, and like other so-called mainline denominations, the statistics in money and members continues to show a decline. And as I have told any number of folk in this church, we have to run like crazy just to stay in place. Even then it can feel like an uphill struggle and an effort whose energy can get lost down an unfathomably deep, perhaps bottomless, black hole.

Should we be discouraged? Should we quit? Should we move to the suburbs? Should we close up shop, merge with some of our sister congregations? Should we give up and let other churches carry the Gospel to our city? It is that kind of situation our author to the Hebrews confronts as he writes to his troubled congregation. They are giving up. The enthusiasm they began with has run out. The courage they previously showed amid bloody persecution is trickling down the drain. The endurance they practiced in earlier years while caught in an avalanche of hostility, malice, and yes, indifference, is going up in smoke. Folk are dropping out, retreating, going elsewhere, saying their church is a fraud, their religion a scam, their clergy weary, their faith burnt out.

I

And do you know what our author writes to buck them up? Do you remember what he does to get the juices running again? Do you recall the approach he uses to support and encourage them? Our author tells them -- our preacher tells them, just as he tells every congregation going through tough or difficult times -- yes, he tells us and he tells the church across the Square and that one down the street, indeed, he insists: our faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. He understands we continue to live in a world where human sin runs rampant, where our desires frequently run into stone walls, where what we see and what we experience does not seem to comport with the Gospel. He recognizes the ongoing conflicts eating up our cities, the illnesses continuing to gnaw at our bodies, the emptiness of soul many of us suffer. He understands fully the failure of churches and the stupidity and phoniness of those of us in the ministry -- all of this he witnesses and he knows it gets you down -- and he knows it gets me down too.

But here is the point: our faith lies not in churches and ministers, politicians, theories, programs, therapies, things we can purchase, manipulate, get a hold of. Not in the least. Our faith is the assurance of things hoped for -- the conviction things not seen. We avoid extrapolating the really real, the promised new creation from the chronic anxiety and recurrent brokenness of our current existence. Faith, he asserts, is a plunge, not just of our intellects, not simply of an assent to the proposition, "God exists." Faith  represents an investment of our whole being. That is what the word "assurance" means in this passage: the surrender of all we are to the service of the Divine reality lying in the midst of, as well as beyond the things that eat us up and turn us inside out. Faith is not a mode of belief, it is a full-scale delivery of everything we have and are in behalf of a new social configuration where healing resides, where treatment of one another issues in selflessness and compassion, love works out to justice and justice grounds peace. We do not see our hope everywhere -- and maybe nowhere. We do not experience it all the time. But for Christ's sake we bet on it, the attitudes we harbor reflect it, the choices we make display it.

Oh friends, our preacher knows well what we may put up with on a daily basis. He knows much of life is fragile, precarious, worrisome. He knows tragedy waits around the corner, coming like a bolt out of hell, hurling things into disarray, tearing the foundations from under us like a house tumbling off a cliff edge into the sea. But behind it all, our preacher invokes, he perceives, he sings about One who in the face of everything denying it, continues to grasp for us, to reach out to us, and permeate the cosmos with a presence ultimately bringing incoherence into order, chaos into mutual support, conflict into solidarity. We live in confidence, as our preacher affirms, that the worlds were forged by the Word of God, the very love enfleshed in Jesus Christ, so that "what is seen is made from things that are not visible," or as John Calvin adds, "If God should withdraw His hand a little, all things would immediately perish and dissolve into nothing."

"Yours" writes the poet, "is the mighty plan, the steadfast order sure; in which the world began, endures and shall endure."

II

And then, listen! In order to encourage a stumbling, faltering congregation, we are treated to a list of those who lived "by the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." As one commentator says, "This is Faith's Hall of Heroes." We catch a glimpse of men and women who form a great chain through the ages of those who face indomitable resistance -- obstacles so great if one were to diagnose their circumstances, calculate their chances, discern their plans hope would prove not so much as anything but wishful thinking, prayer a fantasy, faith a brutal farce.

But here they are: Noah. Can you imagine watching him build an ark? no weather channel, no long-range forecast, just eyes to see beyond the immediate future, ears to hear a word from on high with no evidence --  none whatsoever -- to indicate a deluge around the corner, and the rainbow beyond. A conviction of things not seen!

And Abraham. Decrepit, ready for a rest home, stepping out, taking a terrible chance, listening to a promise that he will sire a people with Sarah, an 80 year old crone who mocks that ludicrous promise with raucous laughter. But there they go, as Halford Luccock writes, "marching off the map" -- a conviction of things not seen.

Our author runs through his Hall of Fame Handbook, names we do not have time to call, and, with those Hebrews, he tells us we really claim citizenship elsewhere; in a city out there, we can just make out its bare silhouette, but there it is beckoning, urging, inviting, greeting us from afar. We are yet pilgrims on the way, strangers where we are, foreigners, thinking not of the places we left behind nor of ever returning to them, but of gaining the city on the horizon, our true homeland.

But now that preacher is on a roll. He barrages us with a list of Hall of Famers, their visions and exploits, so as to call us to attention, to console us in our own difficulties, to encourage us with others facing tough and seemingly insuperable odds. He takes his illustrations from the Old Testament. But this morning let me offer another list, reminding us of those on whose shoulders we stand, whose "assurance of things hoped for  and conviction of things not seen" undergird and nourish us yet.

I ran across a woman some years ago who knocked me out, about whom I have been waiting to tell you for a long time. Her name is Josephine Butler.  She lived from 1828 to 1906 and in these days when sex and the law dominate our headlines, her example is powerful. She fought for women's equality not only in the law, but in every way imaginable. She found 18th century England to be a ruthless hell-hole of double standards, punitive legislation, a bastion of legalized contempt, humiliation and inferiority for women. Her fury surfaced over the economic degradation of women, the source of an enormous London underworld trade in vice and prostitution and a vast international trade in kidnapped girls as young as seven for brothels all over Europe. Talk about sex and the law! Her indignation over the virtual legalization of domestic abuse, the outright exclusion of women from rights to sue, from rights to initiate divorce proceedings, from rights to a public or private education, unless a parent or brother took the initiative,  her indignation drove her to right these systemic wrongs. You wonder why?  Where lay Josephine Butler's motivation? It lay in her profound assurance of things hoped for, her deep-seated conviction in things not seen, and she lived as a stranger, a pilgrim, a foreigner seeking that future city she could only greet from afar.

A generous, eloquent, magnanimous, deeply compassionate woman, Josephine Grey Butler almost single-handedly began to turn the system upside down. In her efforts she received the scorn of Parliament, the disdain of the Medical profession, the ridicule of the bar. She pursued social change and reform, says one biographer, with neither self righteousness nor stridency, possessing finally an assuredness that across all social barriers men and women must change their whole attitudes toward one another.  "But ultimately," writes her biographer,

"ultimately her feeling that society was out of joint derived from the impulse which led her in the first place to help those less fortunate than herself. That is, it derived from her Christian belief. There were many things, tragedies in her own family contributing to moods of doubt and despair, when she felt tempted to a hopeless and final denial of the Divine goodness. But she repeatedly returned to the central notion that the world fell out of joint when it departed from the purposes of the Divine goodness itself. At the heart of her practical concerns for others there remained something -- clearly refined by much suffering and frequent doubt -- something like a mystical love for God."

We are told that in the 1890s, Josephine Butler was chosen for what was called, indeed, "the Hall of Fame" series of portraits for those who "made the century." And do you know the posing attitude the portrait artist asked her to strike? You can guess. He asked her "to look into eternity, looking at something no one else sees." And when the artist finished Josephine Butler gazed at his work and told him she nearly burst into tears.

"I will tell you why," she said.

"(As I looked at the portrait of that woman) I felt so sorry for her. Your power has brought up out of the depths of the past, the record of a conflict which no one but God knows of. It is written in the eyes and in her whole face. Your picture has brought back to me all  that I suffered and the sorrows through which the Angel of God's presence brought me out alive. I thank you that you have not made that poor woman look severe or bitter but only sad and purposeful."

And did you know, that each May 30 the Episcopal Church prays in unison a collect beginning:

God of compassion and love, by whose grace your servant Josephine Butler followed the way of your incarnate Son in caring for those in need; help us like her to work with strength for the restoration of all to the dignity and freedom of those created in your image; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, . . .

And what more could I say this morning, for time would fail me to tell of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King and Simon Weill, of Oscar Romero and Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry and Desmond Tutu, Mother Theresa and Walter Rauschenbusch, who through faith stood up to dictators and prelates, were beaten with clubs, attacked by dogs, blasted with water cannon, assassinated in the line of duty, some starved to death for the sake of peace, others were imprisoned and hanged confident of Christ's intimate presence. Still others while worshipping and struggling for social justice were shot by paid thugs. And yes, others, giving up everything, healed lepers, fed the homeless, battled bureaucracy for prison relief, gained condemnation and the hatred of the powers that be for the sake of national reconciliation -- of these the world is not worthy. "Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not -- apart from us -- [My soul, hear that? Apart from us] the long line of martyrs and witnesses of disciples and hall of fame types -- Abraham, Noah, Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Fry and Martin Luther King, Jr. -- apart from us they cannot be made perfect." That means we are in the chain, too. We do not just celebrate the heroes of the past, we stand in their line, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder with them, their work lies incomplete without us -- you, and you and you and you. Got that? The perfection of their work depends upon ours. They are not off there somewhere on a pedestal for us to admire, they are up front in the trenches for us to join. They are not plastic saints; they are honest-to-God sisters and brothers inviting, cajoling, encouraging, wheedling, begging, maybe even dragging us by the collars to join their fervent and transforming witness in this glorious but troubled world of God's. Without us, they are truncated and unfinished. Without them, we are cut off at the knees. Together we commit to the assurance of things hoped for, together we live the conviction of things not seen, together we join as strangers and pilgrims, seeing, greeting through the mist and haze on the horizon, that promised homeland.

Therefore -- therefore -- since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, Let us also set aside every weight, and the sin." (the apathy, the fear, the laziness, the procrastination, the mistrust, the distractions) "that cling so closely to us, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him, endured the Cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at right hand of the throne of God."