September 1, 2013 – Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Love, Compassion, Faithfulness, Contentment
15th Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 22] – September 1, 2013
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
As I’ve said before, Hebrews is a funny book.
It’s got all this crazy language about sacrifice and priesthood that seems very foreign to us.
It can be hard to understand and difficult to make sense of and almost impossible to relate to.
But – as I’ve also said before –
the thing that is most helpful about the letter to the Hebrews is this:
it keeps Jesus’ death on a cross the central event of Christian faith.
Hebrews from beginning to end points to Jesus.
And I love that.
The passage we read today – like one or two others – is admirably clear,
As if you suddenly come upon a calm side-pool of a rushing river.
Near the end of his letter, the writer looks his readers in the eyes and says to them:
Endure in loving one another.
And extend that love to strangers.
Imagine yourselves into the lives of the imprisoned and tortured –
love them and visit them.
Be faithful in the relationships of love you’ve committed to,
in marriages and friendships.
Don’t succumb to greed, but be content with what you have,
For God will give you everything you truly need.
After all the high-falutin’ language we get some plain talk.
For this writer, these are the defining marks of Christian community.
The writer is simply reminding his people of what they are all about.
He is reminding the people of why Jesus went to all the trouble to die:
So that they might live differently.
He is reminding them of what Jesus stood for.
And therefore, of what they should stand for.
He is addressing a community that is having trouble standing for these things.
See, at one time the ideals of this early Christian community were compelling and fresh,
as if God really were creating a new world out of the old one in
the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
But the fervour has died down.
It’s become dangerous to be a Christian and – let’s face it – pretty inconvenient.
You might lose your income as business associates shunned you for
eating and associating with the riff-raff.
You might be carted off to prison for setting up an economy of manna-sharing outside the
usual economy of empire.
You might be tortured for refusing military service because of your pacifist ideals.
You might even be killed for claiming Jesus is Lord rather than Caesar.
He is addressing a community for whom these were once burning ideals,
but which they are compromising for their own security and well-being.
It all sounds kind of foreign to us, right?
Until we reflect just a little bit: how many of us would be here this morning if it meant
the loss of our jobs?
How many of us would be here if it meant that what we stood for could lead to torture?
How many of us would be here if our worship of Jesus meant that
after worship we could be killed?
Hebrews makes us reflect on how important our faith is to us – and for that alone it is valuable.
Does our faith in Christian ideals burn as it once did? If not, listen. If it does, listen on anyway!
The writer calls his people back to those things that were once so important to them:
those things which are perennially important to the God of the Hebrew scriptures,
the God made fully known in Jesus of Nazareth:
– the love of all people, a love not based on any marker, whether income or status or their biological relationship to you or their gender;
– the love of and care for strangers;
– compassion for the imprisoned and the tortured, even if by visiting them you implicated yourself in their “criminal” way of life;
– faithfulness in relationships of marriage and friendship;
– contentment with the things you truly need, rather than greed and acquisitiveness.
These things, he is saying, are what you are truly about.
Jesus embodied them: the love of all people, including strangers;
compassion for the imprisoned and tortured and all the vulnerable ones of this world;
faithfulness in all his relationships, even to the unfaithful;
contentment with a simple life.
Jesus embodies these things, and he has given them to you as gifts:
love, compassion, faithfulness, and contentment: they come to you this morning.
So receive them, and then take them out, and share them.
That is what you are about.
That is what makes you different.
That is something worth living for.
Endure in these things.
I experienced a little of this kind of life and was reminded what we are all about on our
Wilderness Canoe Trip last week to Caddy Lake and beyond to the Cross Lakes.
Caroline and Brock and I along with ten of our youth ventured out into
the Whiteshell for a few days together.
I was reminded that for all our words Christian community and Christian faith is finally about
a certain quality of life together.
The wilderness reduces you to basics, right?
What there isn’t is a lot: no cell phones, no personal devices, no running water,
no water in fact that doesn’t have to be filtered through a hand pump, no electricity,
no flush toilets (!) – a first for many of our kids (in fact, no toilet at all!),
no clocks, not even any parents!
What you do have, though, is also a lot:
and that is simply the grace of God.
First, the grace of creation, in all its simplicity and complexity:
the abundance of life in every square inch,
the quiet and dark and indescribable beauty of clear moonless nights,
the wonder of the stars and the Milky Way and meteor showers,
the heat of the sun and the cool of the water,
the work of eagle and beaver and chipmunk and crayfish and snake,
the quiet old strength of tree and rock.
And as if that weren’t enough, we were given, secondly, the grace of one another.
To work together to make our food;
To share the manna of food equitably;
To pray together;
To trust one another;
To make one another laugh;
To care for the common good of one another;
To receive and to share.
To love. To be faithful. To be content.
And that was enough: The grace of creation. And the grace of one another.
Gifts of an extravagantly generous God.
What more do we need,
than to live together respectfully in community respectfully within creation?
When I got home, Theo asked me, “Didn’t you missing having your cocktail every night?”
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
I missed my boys. I missed my wife. I missed my other friends. But I was strangely content.
For what I had – what we all had – was a lot:
Christian community within a tremendously unspoiled bit of creation that
we left as we found.
I think the writer of Hebrews might have said “Amen!” to that.
Or, in more modern language he might have said, “That’s what I’m talking about.”
According to the writer of Hebrews, we are on a sojourn through this world together.
And our choices matter. What we value matters – because what we value has a
huge impact on a world and on neighbours that God so loves.
How we steward the gifts of creation in not wanting too much of it but being content matters.
How we steward the gift of our bodies and the gift of one another matters.
Maybe we should all go on a canoe trip together.
But then, maybe we’re already on one.
As we continue to love one another and love the stranger among us.
As we continue to care for the vulnerable among us.
As we remain faithful in all the relationships we’ve committed to.
As we cherish this planet, this creation,
as the great gift it is and not covet more of it than we truly need.
Yeah: Hebrews is a funny book.
But it tells us the truth about who we are and about who God is,
and it calls us back to the journey and ideals of faith.
So while together we could indeed say, “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!”,
let us instead just say together, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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