Roger Ray, Pastor
Oct. 31, 2010
Hebrews 11:23-38, 12:1
23 By faith Moses was hidden by his parents for three months after his birth, because they saw that the child was beautiful; and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.* 24By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called a son of Pharaoh’s daughter, 25choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. 26He considered abuse suffered for the Christ* to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking ahead to the reward. 27By faith he left Egypt, unafraid of the king’s anger; for he persevered as though* he saw him who is invisible. 28By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, so that the destroyer of the firstborn would not touch the firstborn of Israel.*
29 By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land, but when the Egyptians attempted to do so they were drowned. 30By faith the walls of Jericho fell after they had been encircled for seven days. 31By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient,* because she had received the spies in peace.
32 And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets— 33who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, 34quenched raging fire , escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. 35Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. 36Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. 37They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two,* they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented— 38of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely,* and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us
In the early days of the Billy Graham crusades it was not uncommon for the famous evangelist to tell the massive audiences gathered in sports arenas to hear him, that within the next ten years, one out of every four people there would be dead. Given the average age of the audience, it was a statement of basic actuarial fact and yet it was said in a way to bring the reality of their mortality home to them in such a way that they would want to leave the stadium that day with some guarantee that when they die they would not go to hell but would, in fact, get a ticket on the glory train to eternal bliss.
It is not like Billy Graham invented this fear of hell and lust for heaven motivation. He exploited it more effectively than most, but it wasn’t new to him.
One way to define what a religion is would be to say it is a culture’s collection of answers to the great questions of life…. How do I know what is right and what is wrong? Where do babies come from? Does life have meaning? Will we survive nature’s onslaughts? Why is the World Series being played in November?
The finality of death is the shock and fear which every generation of humans has had to confront and the various world religions have shared their ideas and influenced one another’s view on the matter.
When I teach courses in World Religions it becomes very obvious how one culture suggests an answer and a neighboring tribe or nation picks up on it, makes it their own and passes it along. The Jews emerged from religious milieu of Egypt with its flirtation with monotheism and a host of nature deities.
What has always struck me about that is the fact that the Egyptian religion seemed to focus primarily on life after death mythology but the runaway Hebrew slaves seemed to say nothing about life after death at all for the next 1500 years. That may be partially explained by the fact that the Egyptians taught that the royal family was divine and they were the ones who would live forever….. not so much the help.
The early Hebrews developed a religion for slaves and their view of eternity had more to do with having children. They did not believe that we men and women have souls which survived us after death. They had a concept of what, in Hebrew, is called the “nephesh,” which had more to do with a life force. Your nephesh diminished when you were ill and could recover but became weaker and, when a person died, became like a shadow.
The Hebrew notion of “Sheol” does not translate into Christian conception of hell. Sheol was simply a pit or a hole in the ground…. A place under the earth in which the final gasp of the nephesh decended. The more common euphemism in the Old Testament for death was so that that a person had been “gathered until his fathers,” or “fathers and mothers” in a more politically astute way of saying it. Which is basically to say, “his bones now rest up there in the family cemetery with his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.”
It was not until the Jews had been taken into slavery for a second time, in Babylon, that they encountered the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism which introduced them to images of winged angels repeat with a heaven and an alternative place of punishment which was described as a lake of fire.
In spite of the fact that there is no empirical evidence, no way to really know, virtually all cultures have at least suggested that there is some form of eternal life because we need to believe that it is true. Hope of heaven quiets our painful grief when someone we have loved deeply dies…. It stills our fear when we become aware of our own mortality…. And it gives us some ability to cope with our experiences of great injustice in this world by allowing us to trust that God will settle scores in the end which we cannot manage to settle for ourselves.
Any honest treatment of the matter comes back to an awareness that while we have an anthropological reason to need to believe in life after death…. We want to believe it and some of us would probably even say that we believe in believing it…. But we do not and we cannot know.
Those of us who hold to a progressive form of spirituality have accepted with we prefer honest uncertainty to dishonest certainty….. we would rather live with an honest and human hope than to be drawn into the magical and superstitious world of training ourselves to disengage from reality.
There may well be a form of life after death…. I prefer to think that there is but as Soren Kierkegaard cautioned the church long ago: there are things which are true when they are whispered which become false when they are shouted. I believe that honesty requires us to whisper about any after life hope and to save our shouting for things which we can know more about.
Still, to come back Billy Graham’s assertion where I began today, whether his offer of giving you certainty of heaven and fire insurance against hell has anything to recommend it….. it is still approximately true that one out of every four of us here today will not be here in 2020.
One of the very first services we held in this building was the memorial service of my dear friend, Rev. Nelson Parnell. The rest of this year has been punctuated for me with the multiple surgeries and mishaps as my own father’s nephesh grew weaker and he was, in late summer, gathered unto his ancestors.
And, if I may carefully and compassionately observe that we are all regularly reminded of both church members and family members who are battling illnesses which threaten their survival….. we live in constant awareness that none of us have been put on this earth to stay forever. The mortality rate is still what it always has been, 100% and no miracle of science or medicine will ever change that.
Healthy spirituality does not ask us to deny reality but it can give us the strength to live, not with simple resignation but with a kind of healthy defiance. Compassion is the language of faith and so we show our compassion by caring for those who are ill…. Fighting for greater access to needed health care…. And sometimes we just take love in the form of a steaming casserole to strengthen the nephesh of another because we cannot personally cure cancer, stop a heart attack or raise the dead but we do not avert our eyes in fear…… we open one can of cream of mushroom soup, get out the chicken and the grated cheese and we start cooking.
While the writers of the New Testament often appeared to be afflicted with what Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote into the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, having a bit “too much heaven on their minds,” this text we read this morning from the theologically heavy and thick letter to the Hebrews, seems to throw its arms open wide to embrace our family, the living and the dead, the famous and the infamous.
He mentions the heroes of our family tree: Samson, Moses, David, Samuel but he also mentions the horse thieves and black sheep: Rahab the prostitute….. and he says it just like that as if “prostitute” was her last name…. and Jephthah who sacrificed his own daughter. He asks the church to remember and to celebrate all of the saints who gave us life, protected us and cared for us and passed along to us the beginning building blocks of our faith…… realizing that none of them were perfect yet all of them did their part to carry the ball of faith, justice, life itself down the field during their years under the sun and have handed onto us the responsibility to care for the earth, to refine a sense of conscience, to teach justice and hope to our children and to walk confidently towards that day when we too will be gathered unto our mothers and fathers.
We do not know the number of our days but we know that we have today…. We have this day as an opportunity in which to live a life which brings meaning, hope, compassion, forgiveness, love and reason into the world so that the fact of our mortality is not something which we must fear but a fact which inspires us to live well for as long as we have breath and whatever comes after that, we entrust to God. We too are a part of a great cloud of witnesses which include the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi and Mother Theresa, as well as Jesse James and our sister, Paris Hilton….. but we have a place in this cloud of witnesses in which we seek to add meaning and content to life and to the living while we certainly grieve and revere those who have gone before us.
Roger L. Ray, D.Min.
Pastor
Community Christian Church
4806 E. Cherry
Springfield, MO 65809
417-877-7821
www.spfccc.org
I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. (Martin Luther King, Jr. - Nobel Speech)
