All Saints’, Dorval
August 10, 2025
Tissot, “God’s Promise to Abram”
Extraordinarily, 25 years after my first sermon, roughly 20 of those years in active parish ministry of one kind or another, I don’t seem to ever have preached on this set of readings. Which are just another example of how you often get some of the best bits of Scripture during the doldrums of August.
The eleventh chapter of the letter to the Hebrews, our second reading for today, is one that grabbed me when I was still a child and has been one of my touchstone passages ever since. (I have left instructions for it to be read at my funeral.)
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This English translation of the first verse is certainly compelling. But as is so often the case with the New Revised Standard Version, it doesn’t actually go far enough in conveying the meaning of the Greek. A more accurate rendering might be “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” In other words, we are not talking just about assurance and conviction – our own intellectual attitude to the things we believe – but rather about the reality of those things.
It seems a bit contradictory talking about faith – and its closely related concept, hope – this way. After all, if things were self-evidently real in the present, we wouldn’t need to hope for them or put our faith in them.
But this way of presenting it is true to our experience, and to the paradoxical way that God does in fact operate. We cannot see everything that God is up to. Oftentimes, things only become clear in hindsight.
But, because of that hindsight – and the hindsight of generations of our ancestors who went before us – we know that God is faithful. We know that there is a pattern that shows up over and over in how God deals with us, his flawed, fragile, yet beloved creations.
As the funeral service so poetically puts it, we live in the “sure and certain hope” of the resurrection to eternal life – and that hope is no less sure and certain for being a hope, even though in our ordinary language hope and certainty would seem to be opposites.
Because of the hindsight of our own lives and of the generations that went before us, we know that God is faithful, and that is the substance and proof of our own faith. And the letter to the Hebrews goes through that sequence of generations in remarkable detail!
The passage that was actually assigned for this morning concentrates on Abraham alone, but I added back the four verses mentioning Abel, Enoch, and Noah, in order to convey the sense of this long list of famous names sweeping through history (which will continue in the passage we hear next week as well).
When we get to Abraham, the main focus of this passage, the emphasis is on his faithfulness to a promise that was given to him, that completely upended his life, putting significant demands on him and his family, and of which he waited decades to see even the beginning of the fulfillment, while complete fulfillment did not happen until generations after he died.
The reading contrasts two images – that of the tiny group of faithful pilgrims, living in tents, as foreigners, and that of the promise they are looking forward to, “the city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” (If you’re cross-referencing these quotations with your scripture sheet, you’ll notice that I still quote from memory in the Revised Standard Version of my childhood. Like I said, I imprinted on this passage early.)
The one image is of a life that is risky, contingent, strenuous, transient; the other is settled, permanent, leisurely, and secure. And the writer of Hebrews admits frankly that while Abraham and his family may have yearned for that settled security, in this life at least, they never got it. They died still on the move.
“These all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen and greeted it from afar. They confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.”
As I’ve said many times before, passages like this one can be – and have been – easily misused: too often, the interpretation has been that there’s pie in the sky when you die, and so worrying about the material conditions of human beings here on earth is unnecessary; suffering will be rewarded in the afterlife, so the poor and needy should just suck it up. I hope it goes without saying by now that that’s nonsense.
But as we can see from much of the chaos and horror that currently constitutes international news, taking these parts of the scriptures as a blueprint for human endeavour, and trying to build God’s kingdom here on earth, also tends to lead to a lot of human suffering, as we kill and torture each other over our different visions of what that looks like. Building God’s kingdom is God’s job, not our job. Our job is to seek the kingdom and be faithful to its vision.
I think the writer of Hebrews has something very profound to offer us in her image of a communion of saints who all have their eyes on a horizon beyond which none of us can see, who radically renounce control to the God who has all things in hand, and who concentrate on traveling together here, shoulder to shoulder, journeying as well, as peacefully, as kindly, and as hopefully as possible, as we wait to arrive there, which is our true and only home.
And having that sure and certain hope, founded on the evidence of things not seen, does not mean that we just sit back and count the days until we get to heaven. Abraham worked hard and traveled hard all his life, arriving at the end of his days covered with the dust of the road and the sweat of toil.
The city of God is not for polite spectators. We should arrive there worn out, scuffed and dusty, bearing witness to our labours on behalf of the Kingdom that – as Jesus says in the Gospel – is breaking out among us even now, although its final fulfillment is yet to come.
In 2025, that might look like having gone a few rounds with the powers that are currently trying to strip rights from many of our fellow human beings and return the world to a state of greater inequality, oppression, and authoritarianism. While governments and institutions are capitulating to fascism, Christians need to be on the side of the union bus drivers in Los Angeles who are refusing to let ICE board their vehicles, and the Latino teenagers filming their own arrests in Florida, and be willing to take a few hits if necessary. We may be safer here in Canada, but just this week there were headlines right here in Montreal about a Black woman who was held by police because her stroke symptoms were seen as evidence that she was on drugs. And there are still trans, refugee, and Indigenous siblings who need allies in the fight.
God’s vision of the world is for all of us, together, with our eyes fixed on the goal just over the horizon, to work humbly to provide for each other’s needs and make this world as good a place to sojourn as we can. But ultimately, we are called, always – as John Bunyan put it in the classic The Pilgrim’s Progress, the second most popular Christian book of all time – to “desire now a better country, that is, a heavenly one.”
We are all exiles. This earth does not belong to us, but to the God who created and cherishes it. And God is not ashamed to be called our God, because he has prepared for us a city.
In this time of our sojourning as exiles in tents, let us live always in the sure and certain hope, in the faithful expectation, of the city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
Amen.
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