Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
August 12, 2007
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
For the past 7 years now after the church retrofit/renovation project, we have taken the elevator for granted. We ride it to Joe’s Kitchen for Sunday breakfast. We use it to carry heavy boxes up and down. Young parents depend on it to take their baby strollers to the Nursery. And even when we say to ourselves that we should be taking the stairs as our stair-master exercise routine, we know we can count on our elevator when we need it.
For us who are regular churchgoers, we know what’s on each of our four stops. But if you were visiting our church for the first time, you might not know but have the faith that if you push the 2 button, you will get to the Nursery or the 3 button will find the pastors or the 4 button will get you some waffles and eggs.
In the elevator technology business, there’s a new elevator called, the destination elevator. Unlike our tiny 4 stops on our elevator, destination elevators are designed to move people quickly in buildings with 20 or 30 or 50 stories high. Traditional elevator cars would take one person to the 45th floor and then would come all the way down to the first floor to take another person to the 10th floor. This is considered inefficient and a waste of time. We all have had this happen to us—we wait what seems to be a long time for the elevator to come.
Destination elevator cars are connected to computers. You walk up to a computer kiosk in the lobby and type in the floor you want—9th floor. The computer analyzes your request, and used sophisticated software to figure out the most direct and efficient way to respond to the traffic demands moment to moment. It calculates the optimum route for each car (based on where passengers are and where they’re going). Weight sensors in the cars estimate the number of passengers already on board to help “decide” whether to drop off passengers before picking up new ones.
After all that, which happens almost instantaneously, the computer tells you which of the elevators around you is going to be stopping at the 9th floor on its next trip up. When the elevator arrives, you simply get on and are whisked off almost directly to your floor in much less time than a traditional elevator. Since the computer groups passengers by floor, more elevators become available and each makes fewer stops.
Sounds pretty good, right? While many people are happy with the 20-30 percent reduction in wait time that destination elevators provide, others are less enthusiastic over the reality that they have lost control in running the elevator car. You see, there are no buttons inside the cars. People are not objecting to the new technology, they object to the lost of freedom of choice. The truth of the matter is that people would rather be a little late for a meeting than to lose control of running the elevators themselves. They want to push the buttons. Pushing the buttons of the floor you want to go retains our control. Pushing the “close door” button or the “open door” button lets us tell the elevator when we want to go or when we want to get off.
Destination Faith
The writer of Hebrews makes it clear that faith in God works like a destination elevator. Like a destination elevator car that has no buttons to push, a destination faith involves making a choice of getting on board to where God is taking us. We may want to control and have a say on where God may be taking us but the writer of Hebrews is saying that the people of faith went willingly into a button-less spiritual elevator. They stepped out into new lands and new situations where they could only rely completely on God for provision and protection. It wasn’t speed, efficiency or self-interest that drove them, but rather the assurance and conviction of faith.
Faith, in other words, is the confidence that one’s invisible and unrealized hopes will become a visible reality. The patriarchs and matriarchs of the Old Testament made choices to trust God despite present circumstances and unknown futures. It’s very much like a destination elevator—you get on with the faith that it will take you to where you need to be.
Perhaps there’s no better example of this kind of faith in the Scriptures than that of Abraham. God meets Abraham and tells him to “set out for a place that he was about to receive as an inheritance” even though he went “not knowing where he was going.” Abraham’s only choice had been to say “yes” to following God, the choice of faith, and it was for that choice that the patriarch received “approval” from God.
From the moment he punched in his willingness to travel, God took over control of Abraham’s destination, sending him to “the land he had been promised” where he wandered from place to place “living in tents.” It was the journey, rather than the destination itself that proved Abraham’s faithfulness.
His faith was based solely on his budding relationship with God and the potential of the promises of God—promises of land and descendants that were still only a dream when Abraham set out with no map and a wife who was barren. Abraham himself was “as good as dead” in his old age, yet he still stepped aboard God’s invitation.
Even though he would not see the fulfillment of all of these promises in his lifetime, Abraham and his descendants did not seek an opportunity to return to the ground floor to revisit their options or to turn back. Instead, they saw themselves as “strangers and foreigners on the earth” who looked ahead to a “better country, that is, a heavenly one.” God was at the controls; therefore the destination, wherever it may be, was going to be a good one. For them, faith was complete trust in God without a specific and comprehensive road map to travel.
Pushing Buttons
It’s easy to talk about faith this way and a lot harder to embrace it. We want to give ourselves over to God, but we’d like to be able to know the destination details in advance. We would love it if there was some travel itinerary or schedule for where our lives will end up and all we need to do is what we often hear—finding God’s will for my life—as though there were some magic bullet or formula or at some place there’s a secret plan that tells us precisely how our lives will play out.
We’d also like to have the option of getting off a floor or two early just in case things get to be too uncomfortable or if circumstances warrant. We want to have the control of pushing buttons about the work we do or the friends we have or even the old hurts and sad memories we want to avoid. And when God may be taking us to his destination for us, we still want to have the option to push the “open door” button to get off.
One of the reasons that we are willing to step into our church elevator car is that it just goes up and down. You know that with only 4 stops, you’ll soon get to your final destination. It’s a straight trip. But when we are in God’s button-less spiritual elevator, it may not be so simple as going up and down with only 4 stops. When you have faith and are willing to say yes to following God in the direction that God wants you to go, you can never be too sure which way it is that God is going to point you.
It’s like a “Peanuts” comic strip where the little bird, Woodstock, flies one way in a crazy zigzag path. Then in the next frame he is flying back the other way in another crazy zigzag path. Snoopy looks at him and says, “Never fall in love with a butterfly.”
The Bible seems to teach us that when we have faith, when we fall in love with God, it is a lot like falling in love with a butterfly. We know that the shortest distance between two floors is a traditional elevator going from one floor to the next. But for some reason God is not a big fan of traditional elevators or straight lines. As time goes by, God does eventually get us from one floor to the next floor or from point A to point B, but often times it is by way of a route that we would have never imagined.
If you were to ask me any time in the first 50 years of my life whether I would ever be a vegetarian, I would say, “Are you kidding? I like oxtails!” I would have never imagined it. Many of you have talked to me about what caused me to change my eating choices to become a vegetarian now. When I study the Scriptures and discovered in a new way that in creation God gave us “every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit; to have them for food” (Gen. 1:29) I believe that eating green plants for food is God’s plan. And then in Isaiah 11 and 65, when God’s kingdom is finally realized, there will be peaceful and harmonious living among all of God’s creation—the wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fattling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and he bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like an ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den
They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.
I fully know and am not naive that it may not be within my lifetime for the kingdom of God—the peaceable kingdom to happen. The truth is that God’s will for us isn’t bound up in the final destination, be it the peaceable kingdom, heaven, a career choice or even a particular ministry that we have at our church.
God’s will is for us to be in relationship with God, to trust God with everything in our lives and to live each day in God’s presence. As a person committed to being a vegetarian, it is my way to live each day in God’s presence. When it comes to God, the journey really is the destination. Like Abraham and the others mentioned in Hebrews 11, we may never really see the fulfillment of our own potential—that may only be realized through our spiritual descendants.
Faithfulness isn’t about “what’s in it for me” in the future, but rather what’s possible for God and me to accomplish together in the present, realizing that everything we do for God is part of God’s larger purpose for the world.
Having Faith
There’s a story about a little girl perhaps 6 years old out shopping with her mother. It was pouring outside, the kind of rain that gushes over the top of rain gutters so much in a hurry to hit the earth it has no time to flow down the spout. Several people stood under the awning waiting, some patiently, others irritated because nature was interfering with their hurried day, when the little girl’s voice rose above the sound of the downpour. “Mom, let’s run through the rain.”
“What?” Mom asked.
“Let’s run through the rain!” She repeated.
“No, honey. We’ll wait until it slows down a bit.”
The young child waited about a minute and repeated, “Mom, let’s run through the rain.”
“We’ll get soaked if we do,” Mom said.
“No, we won’t! That’s what you said this morning,” the young girl said as she tugged at her Mom’s arm.
“This morning? When did I say we could run through the rain and not get wet?”
“Don’t you remember? When you were talking to Daddy about his cancer, you said, “If God can get us through this, he can get us through anything!”
The entire crowd was struck in silent. Not a sound was heard but the rain. Mom paused and thought for a moment about what she would say. Some might have laughed it off or scolded the child for being silly. Some might have even ignored her. But this mom chose to affirm her little girl’s faith.
“Honey, you are absolutely right. Let’s run through the rain. If God let’s us get wet, well maybe we just needed washing.” And off they ran, smiling and laughing as they darted past the cars and right through the puddles. They got soaked. But they were followed by a few others who screamed and laughed like children all the way to their cars. Suddenly getting wet didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
We build our hope on faith. Our faith in God provides a secure place for us to have confidence to face those things that are intangible and invisible in the future. If we have faith in God to watch over us, care for us, heal us and trust God that at the end of our journey, it is always good because it’s God, then anything that happens to us along the way even if it’s getting completely drenched and soaked, it’s okay.
When we have faith we come to trust that the way that things are right now is not the way they are always going to be. When we have faith, we come to trust that despite how things look at the moment, nothing is impossible for God.
The truth is that God’s plan for us is not bound up in the final destination but rather it’s to have a personal relationship with him. Whenever we step into that button-less spiritual destination elevator controlled by God, we just have to enjoy the journey—to live each day in God’s presence. The journey is really the destination and we leave everything else in God’s hand.
Let us pray.
Dear God, as you have led our spiritual ancestors to trust their lives in your hands and in the end, they were faithful and your blessed them and watched over them, we pray that we would also walk in faith leaving behind our need to control where we want to go. Show us that everyday is yet another opportunity to participate in your kingdom work and when such time when we have completed our journey on earth, you will also call us faithful to Christ, our Savior, to the Holy Spirit, our Comforter, and to you as our Creator God. Amen.