A life of faith
What does it mean to live a life of faith?
Is faith mostly about believing certain propositions about God? Belief is part of faith, certainly. But if you think of faith as just an intellectual exercise, you’re missing out on a lot.
If you search the Bible for a list of people remembered for their great faith, one name at the top of the list will be Abram. Abram, of course, would later become Abraham—the ancestor claimed by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. This morning, we heard a part of his story. In today’s passage, Abram hears the word of God in a vision. He’s already an old man, with no children, but the Lord promises him that his descendants will one day be numbered like the stars in the sky. Despite the odds against this promise coming true, Abram believes the Lord. “And the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
But if Abram (or Abraham) is a role model for faith, he’s a challenging one. He always seems so very certain that he understands exactly what God is asking him to do. The cynic in me sometimes wonders if his famous faith might at times be more accurately described as spiritual arrogance. But even if we take Abraham’s account of his interactions with God at face value, the reality is that most of us don’t usually hear God’s message with as much clarity as he did.
The Letter to the Hebrews describes Abraham’s faith in a way I find more helpful: “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
Hebrews describes Abraham as one who “obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance, and he set out, not knowing where he was going.” And as one who “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance [he] saw and greeted them.”
This description better matches my experience of God’s call and God’s promise. Faith is less about certainty—and more about hope. More about trust. More about patience.
There is one piece of Abraham’s story that I do think applies to all of us. We can all seek to imitate Abraham’s willingness to act, his willingness to take the next step—even in those times when he couldn’t see the full road ahead of him.
One of my own central images for a life of faith is pilgrimage. Almost twenty years ago, without much preparation, I decided to walk one of the most well-known pilgrimages: the Camino de Santiago. It was a month-long hiking trip, from the French border to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.
On my second day walking, I told a woman working in a restaurant how crazy I felt, trying to walk clear across a country for reasons I couldn’t completely explain. She replied, “poco a poco.” “Little by little.” And you know, she was right. I didn’t have to walk five hundred miles in a day. I just had to take the next step. A month of next steps later, I arrived in Santiago, understanding, I think, a bit more about how God operates than I had when I started out.
Life is a lot like pilgrimage—especially in times when we can’t see our goal very clearly. We can only feel our sore feet, our exhaustion, the hot sun beating down on us, the road that always seems to go uphill.
But if we keep walking, if we take just another step in faith, we’ll find that God walks with us.
Jesus models this for us too. In today’s Gospel, we meet Jesus as he’s traveling from town to town, making his way to Jerusalem. He’s been attracting attention—and attracting opposition. Healing the suffering. Teaching that the kingdom of God is a place where the last shall be first and the first shall be last. Then as now, Jesus’s promise that “the first will be last” wasn’t popular with those currently in first place.
Some local leaders come to warn Jesus that his life is in danger. They beg him to leave, to choose a safer path. But safety isn’t Jesus’s goal. His goal is to remain faithful to his mission, to do the work he’s been given to do.
If you’ll all indulge the geeks in the room for a moment, there’s a scene in the Lord of the Rings novels that makes a similar point. If you don’t know the Lord of the Rings, bear with me for a moment. It’s hard to summarize an epic. Evil is rising. A small company of heroes sets out on a journey to defeat that evil—but it’s a journey with little hope of success. Gandalf, the company’s leader, has fallen into a great chasm, apparently to his death. Others in the company begin to question Gandalf’s wisdom. After all, he couldn’t even protect himself.
But Aragorn, the group’s new leader, says this, “The counsel of Gandalf was not founded on foreknowledge of safety, for himself or for others... There are some things that it is better to begin than to refuse, even though the end may be dark.”
That’s true for us too. For Abraham, for Jesus, and for us: hope is found not in certainty, but in faith. Hope is found in beginning. Hope is found in taking the next step. Hope is found in persistence.
And hope is to be found in the trust that with every step we take, the love of God will surround us—a love like that of a hen gathering her brood under her wings—fierce, protective, warm, and sheltering.