The Sedimentation of Faith

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Hebrews 11:1-16

My great-grandmother lived in a little house in the country.  Oddly, she had no well.  Instead, she had a rainwater cistern at the end of the back porch with a hand-crank pump on it.  She didn’t have indoor plumbing so she didn’t need a lot of water.  She had a tin roof with eavestroughs that emptied into the cistern to provide her with water.  All the water she needed for drinking, cooking, dishwashing and bathing came from that cistern.  I remember having to carry an old metal bucket out to the pump and cranking that pump to fill it and then struggling to carry it back in without spilling.  For a drink of water, you ladled it from the bucket into a glass. The water always seemed so clear and fresh, but my dad always said, “Don’t drink what’s at the bottom of the glass.”  Once it sat there for a minute or you knew why.  There would be bits of rusted metal and who knows what else that had washed down off the roof with the rain…but we drank the water anyway as per dad’s instructions.  It was good, fresh water instead of city water.

Anyway, the polite word for that stuff at the bottom of the glass is sediment.  Sediment is the result of that very complicated process known as sedimentation.  That’s where the stuff that seems hidden at first settles out and becomes visible.  When you ladle the water into the glass the motion keeps the sedimentary product afloat and depending on what it is it seems invisible.  But the sedimentary product is heavier than water and starts to sink to the bottom.  It’s sort of a natural purification process.

Now, I bet you didn’t know it but in the Greek of the New Testament there’s a word that describes that process of sedimentation.  It’s hypostasis. Breaking the word down, hypo means under or below and stasisroughly means standing so put them together and it means “that which stands under” sort of like foundation.   Hypostasis means “that which is more real”.  In the process of sedimentation, the sediment is the hypostasis, the more real stuff that at first was hidden but becomes visible in the water as it settles out.  Medically speaking, when you feed a baby, the milk goes through the hidden process of digestion and then you have the hypostasis of the brutal reality of a loaded diaper.  

Philosophically speaking, hypostasis is the reality of the stuff of our lives.  It’s what arises from the hidden processes of cause and effect or the stuff that comes out of left field.  It’s the reality that arises from our plans and motives and dreams.  Hypostasis is the real stuff we have to deal with.

Well guess what?  Paul uses hypostasis to define what faith is.  He says, “Faith is the hypostasis of the hoped-for things; the coming to light of unseen things.  I have to warn you this is a different way of looking at faith than we have become accustomed to.  Paul is saying there is a hidden, behind the scenes realm of God acting in history to save and heal his very good creation and especially humanity and like sediment, faith is the real, tangible things of God’s actions becoming visible.  It’s as real and strong as a dandelion plant poking through in the middle of an asphalt parking lot.  It’s as beautiful and symbolic of hope as snowdrops and crocus blooms in early March.  Faith is the sedimentation into reality of the hoped-for things in Christ, the inbreaking of God’s kingdom, the real tangible evidence of God’s love.  Faith is better defined as the actions of faithfulness, both God’s faithfulness and our own. 

We tend to understand faith as a subjective reality, meaning something that goes on inside of me.  For example, our NIV translation of that verse reads: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”  The NRSV reads: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.”  Faith seems to be a feeling of certainty.  When somebody says “I have faith”, they usually mean the belief or the feeling or the intuition or a just plain irrational agreement to ideas that there is a God we can trust.  In that sense, faith is purely subjective.

        But what Paul is trying to say here about faith is that it is the objective, outside ourselves, reality of the very real things that God is doing in history that are coming to light, that are being evidently and really manifest. What we call “my faith” should rather refer to our participation in what God is doing instead of simply what I believe or trust. Read the rest of the chapter and you will notice that it is all about God working through people to set the stage for his saving of his very good creation especially humanity in, through, and as Jesus Christ. Faith is more about what God is doing in us than whether I think or feel the right things about God, about Jesus.

Paul said it well in Galatians 2:20 where he says, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I now live in the flesh, I live in the faith that is of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” Or, “…I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me or gave himself for me.”  It is likely that Paul is reflecting a bit on what Baptism is.  For him, Baptism was a real participation in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.  Paul believed he had died with Christ when he went under the water.  The life he lived after coming out of the water was "new life" in Christ, a new life in which Jesus was living in and through him by the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Paul, the persecutor of Christians, had had a life re-orienting encounter with Jesus on the Road to Damascus that left him not only knowing Jesus was who he said he was, (the Lord, the Messiah, the Son of God) but Paul suddenly became a faithful servant of Jesus and an integral part of Faith, the sphere, the realm, the inbreaking reality of what God is really doing to save his very good creation and especially humanity.

So it is with each of us.  We are each part of the reality, the hypostasis, the sedimentation of God’s acting in history to bring about the world’s hoped-for saving by means of the Lordship of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.  God has done things in our lives to create in us a sure sense that we are his beloved children, that he is watching over us, and he creates in us a sense of loyalty to Jesus.  These inner workings by God are often hidden to the world like particulates swirling around in a freshly ladled glass of Great-grandma’s water.  But in time we begin to act according to the love of God in Christ that God has poured into us, the Living Water of the Holy Spirit.  Nurtured by daily devotions and Christian fellowship we begin to do things for others that are part of God’s acting to bring the hope and love of Jesus to them.  Also, when we organize together and as a congregation do things we feel led by God to do, well, that’s the sediment of, the becoming real and visible of the reality of the Kingdom of God.  Faith isn’t so much about what we believe as it is about Jesus living in and acting through us.  Faith isn’t so much about us being able to say what we believe, but rather our being able to point out what God is doing in our midst.  I hope this makes sense.  Amen.

 

Faith Beyond Belief

Hebrews 11:1-16

Let’s assume everybody here knows how to text.  I need to know if you’ll be around in the afternoon so I can call you because there are some things we need to catch up on.  I text you to find out.  You text back that you’ll be around.  I text back, “Okay.  I’ll shout at you later.”  That would seemingly be a harmless exchange, right? 

But, what if you don’t really know me and my predisposition to be caring, nice, and polite like a Canadian and you were not up on my colloquialisms?  “I’ll give you a shout” is a fairly commonly understood colloquialism.  “I’ll shout at you later,” admittedly that one’s a bit tougher.  If you are a non-native speaker of English, you would be perplexed as to why I would want to call you up and speak to you at the top of my voice.  Or, if you don’t know my genial nature, and are prone to anxiety, you will fully be expecting me to call you up and yell at you about something you did that I thought was wrong.

Well, I bring all this up because it seems to me that we deal with faith in much the same way as we would deal with that text message.  Like the text, God has spoken the saving Word of the Incarnation of God the Son.  In the power of the Holy Spirit the Church proclaims the Gospel of this saving Word throughout the world and something called faith arises in its wake.  But what is this faith?

Carrying through with my analogy, most of us would say that faith would be my understanding of and response to “the text”, to the Gospel that in, through, and as Jesus Christ the Triune God of Grace is saving his creation from sin and death.  To respond appropriately I must have somehow decided to believe or to make intellectual ascent to the idea that there is a God, that this God’s nature is love, that I do indeed need saving, and I need to live accordingly.  We may wish to use the word trust to make us “feel” better.  I place my trust in Jesus and live accordingly.

Yet, this understanding of faith is largely subjective, meaning it is centered in me and the internal state of my mind and emotions and how I am able to sort this “Text of God” out.  But if faith and matters there of are purely subjective, then faith is simply a private affair and this is what has led many an enemy of God to say that faith is for the weak-minded and mentally unstable.  This is why atheism is abounding.  It is no stretch to say that history is proving before our very eyes that this subjective understanding of faith is flawed as congregation after congregation closes.

This subjective, this very inside-my-head, understanding of faith began to fester in the 1600’s when a French philosopher named Renee Descartes awoke from sleep and answered the question “how do I know I exist?” with the very profound observation, “I think, therefore I am.”  A century later the German philosopher and theologian Emmanuel Kant took subjectivity to its ultimate end teaching that there is no objective “reality”.  We cannot know things in themselves.  All we know of them is what we experience of them and what sense we make of those experiences.  Things are what they are because that’s the meaning we give to them. There are no laws in the universe other than the ones I place upon it. 

Kant went on to say that we cannot know God.  We can only know our ideas about God.  This is a far cry from our proclamation that God is knowable and has revealed himself in, through, and as Jesus Christ and through the presence and work of the Holy Spirit.  Sadly, if you want to talk about God in a world where reality is based in my ability to think and give things meaning, then agnosticism and atheism are the logical conclusions.  God is simply a figment of my imagination and faith is my crutch.

In this day and time because what we call faith has been so twisted about by our over-focusing on subjectivity, we need to stop assuming we know what faith is and step back into the Bible and try a little harder to understand what the writers of the Bible meant by “faith”.  Let’s try this and take a look here at Hebrews 11:1 where Paul gives us a concise definition of faith. If we look at the words Paul uses will see that faith isn’t just something that goes on in my head that I choose to believe in order to make sense of my reality.  Rather, faith is something that God is doing and is bringing into existence in his creation and has included us in it. 

Faith is the sphere of reality in which we wilfully and actively participate out of gratitude and devotion to God for his saving work in, through, and as Jesus Christ and the presence and work of the Holy Spirit.  Faith is the sphere of reality in which God is making the future coming reality of the Kingdom of God visible in our present.  The sphere of faith, which we could call “in Christ”, counters the sphere of reality that Paul calls “in Adam” or “the flesh” which is marked by sin and death.

Humour me here and let me say Hebrews 11:1 in a way that’s Greek sounding English or English sounding Greek.  “Faith is the hypostasis of the hoped for things, the bringing to light of the unseen.”  This is a far cry from the NIV’s describing faith as “confidence” and “assurance”, which in themselves are totally subjective words and, in light of what I said a few moments ago, that fact should make us wary of using that translation.  I like the Holman Christian Standard Bible translation that says “Faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of things unseen.”  Paul says that faith is the hypostasis of the hoped for things.  The “hoped for things” are God’s promises, that Jesus will return and establish the kingdom, there will be resurrection, and the victory that Jesus won over sin and death and the devil on the cross will ultimately be realized.  Faith is the hypostasis of these things.

 You are probably wondering what hypostasis means.  In the ancient Greek world it was a philosophical, scientific, and medical term.  To the philosophers it was the actualizing in reality of true being.  To talk like the philosopher Plato, a chair is the hypostasis of “chair-ness” or a tree is the hypostasis of “tree-ness” – an actualizing in reality of true being.  It can also mean the actualizing of the details of a hidden plan.  When Hebrew writers used the word they used it to speak of God’s plan for history coming into being and playing out.  Noah, Enoch, Abraham, and all those faithful people that Paul lists are the hypostases of God’s plan of salvation.  They are the bringing to light of God’s plan for history.

In the world of ancient Greek science “hypostasis” was used to describe sediment – the end result of the sedimentary process.  Go to your nearest pond and scoop out a bucket of water.  Though it looks clear or mostly clear, if you let it sit, eventually stuff will settle out in the bottom.  Hidden realities becoming actual.

In the world of ancient Greek medicine “hypostasis” was used to describe urine and fecal matter.  These were the end results, the actualizations of hidden, internal processes.  If you were a youth group I would now proceed to actualize my hidden sense of potty humour.  But, I like my job and wish to keep it, so I’ll keep that hidden.

So, faith is not so much about what is going on in my inner, subjective world in which we could define faithfulness as the actualizing of my internal beliefs.  Faith is bigger than that.  Faith is participating in the whole sphere of reality in which God’s hidden plan and purposes for his creation and our lives are coming to light, actualizing, becoming real through us, through real people in history by the powerful workings of the Holy Spirit.

We cannot talk about true faith without talking about Jesus. Faith is God actualizing, bringing into reality the New Humanity he began in, through, and as Jesus Christ by his life, death, and resurrection.  Faith is God’s working in us by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit in us and making actual the hidden reality of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ in and through us.  Faith is God’s getting ahold of each of us, bound in the sphere of sin as we are, and by his grace he invades our wills and sets us free from our bondage to sin and enables us to want to love and serve him and to be a part of the actualizing of his plan for history.

This requires active participation on our parts.  God in his great love for us has graciously gotten ahold of us and thus we must be faithful; what Paul calls in Romans 1:5 “the obedience of faith”.  John Calvin spoke of faith as trusting God’s saving love and mercy towards us in Jesus Christ and spoke of it in the sense that this trust is a gift of God that arises out of our being encountered by God.  Martin Luther taught that because we have faith – a love and trust of God and a desire to serve him – we know we are saved.  God was no mere idea to them or a matter of private belief.  They were, just as each of us are, active participants in God’s making actual in history his plans and purposes for his Creation formed in his great love.

In Chapter 11 of Hebrews Paul lists what he calls “a great cloud of witnesses”, people who throughout history were the sediment, the actualization of God’s hidden plan.  We all know people who we would add that list.  People who by their faithfulness were obviously living witnesses to what God is doing.  They lived in the sphere of reality Paul calls faith.  They, and each of us are living proof of God’s reality.  Let us stand humbly in this awesome reality and work unreservedly to live faithfully.  Amen.