Readings for Pentecost 11

Gen. 15:1-6        

Heb. 11:1-16      

Luke 12:22-34 (35-40)

Passages for meditation:  “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.  This is what the ancients were commended for.  By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” Hebrews 11:1-3 

Devotion:  If you ask the question, “what’s your story?” you’re likely to get a variety of different answers depending on the person you’re talking too and the context with which you ask it.  In a bar you might hear a tall tale, “This guy was big as a sasquatch and he came up to me and said…”  At a bike shop where I used to work, I would frequently hear from customers bringing in a mangled bike for repairs, “I was just riding along and…”.  If you ask the question “what’s your story”, you are inviting someone to share part of their individual history and experience.

When asked that question in regards to faith, people too will have different answers.  Some may recount a time where they were living apart from God and tell the story of how through turns of events their lives were changed by Christ.  Others may express it in terms of being “born again” or “saved”.  Many Lutheran Christians reference their baptism as the starting point of their story of faith.  When asked “what’s your story?” in regards to faith, by and large the response is framed in a personal context.  The story is about me and Jesus.

While it is certainly true that the story of faith includes me and Jesus, there is more that we often overlook.  There is more to the story than just our part in it.

The author of the letter, or sermon to the Hebrews provides the individual believer in Christ a larger story in which we are found through faith in Christ.  It is a grand and sweeping story that finds its origin in the Triune God, the creator of all things “visible and invisible.”  The story, from our perspective, looks back to the beginnings and follows the account of a loving, gracious God who enters into covenant a relationship with his creatures, particularly Abraham, and makes promise to him.  The story includes his descendents and their historical interactions with the Lord, both the good and the bad.  The story recorded in Hebrews 11 invites us to look back at the Old Testament hero’s of the faith and see a people who were looking forward to the fulfillment of God’s covenant promise in Christ.  And then to encourage those who came after Christ by their example of faith and trust in God’s Word as He points to the future fulfillment when the Lord returns to raise the dead.

The purpose of Hebrews 11 is to direct its readers and hearers, us and the church in all place and time, to see that those who have been baptized into this faith in Christ are brought full bore into this grand and sweeping story of God’s redemption of the world through Christ.  And as His church, this salvation that we are part of is intensely personal, yet always communal and bigger than just “me and Jesus”.  We were brought into this story, we remain in this story and we see ourselves as part of the story only by faith in Christ Jesus, the Word of God.