Sermon, 8/7/22. Trust: The Invisible Calculus in Every Transaction

9 Pentecost                  

Psalm 50:1 – 8, 23 – 24; Isaiah 1:1, 10 – 20; Hebrews 11:1 – 3, 8 – 16; Luke 12:32 – 40

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.  Heb. 11:1

As a culture, we stand often in awe, wonderment, and praise, and also all too often are we inclined to be deferential, when we encounter a successful businesswoman or businessman.  I confess: I place myself among this “we.”  When we hear that the CEO built an enterprise from its foundation, which inevitably conjures up long hours of hard work, few or no vacations, denials of luxuries that he or she may now enjoy, we may declare to ourselves privately, or even in polite company, that we could never do such a thing. 

We say of ourselves: we lack vision.  We lack imagination.  We lack skills.  We imagine having to attend the XYZ School of Business at ABC University, in order to learn the basics of starting, expanding and maintaining a business.  We imagine having to master the language of spread sheets: inventory, deductible expenses, gross income, net income, liquidity, customer base.  The new vocabulary is daunting.  The terms are almost unending, and thus we declare that we could never succeed in business.

I propose that each of us is a CEO in our own rights.  But let me not become personal.  Rather, look at the job which a conscientious, dedicated caregiver or a parent performs day in and day out: A parent learns to balance the family budget; to meet obligations to those who provide services such as utilities; to get children off to school, if they be of school age; to confer with or observe other caregivers or parental units, in order to learn how better to provide services to the family—their customer base; to negotiate disputes among the stockholders, i.e. the children. 

I suggest to you that that the successful CEO, even the lowest rank and file employee, and a caregiver have a something in common which remains in the background, unseen, and never referenced, but which is essential in every human endeavor.  That something in common is intangible, and is none other than FAITH.  Even when one company buys out another—a condition that requires looking closely at every aspect of the enterprise—the company has as its core a belief that something grander, bigger, more productive will be forthcoming.  And someone, employed in the new merger, clocks in daily in the hope that he/she will be compensated for his/her labor. 

The Letter to the Hebrews connects the CEO and the hourly wage earner and the caregiver or parent. In the Letter to the Hebrews we hear: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb.11.1) This one sentence acknowledges the inner desire for stability in life, while at the same time giving credence to possible growth which comes when taking on new responsibilities.  Faith points to the future, a quantity and quality yet to be determined.

The example given is that of Abraham and Sarah, who live out their lives on a promise.  God tells Abraham and Sarah to leave behind the certainty which they have known, and to get themselves unto a new land.  Whither?  God only says, “I will show you.”  Why are they leaving?  Because they believe that somehow God, who has supplied them throughout their life with their daily bread, is going to bless them and make of them a great nation.  That is futuristic.  They are old.  The plan is a long shot.  Whole pages in this new business plan presented to them by God are simply blank, but they start out anyway.  Faith is like that.

When I ask people about a seminal or altering event in their lives, most often they recite one or two events from their past where they made choices on an intuition that produced something new and different.  Those choices pointed them in a direction for life.  They admit, upon further reflection, that at the time the direction was not fully mapped out for them.  But that intuition was too strong, too overwhelming, that it could be ignored.

Acts of faith are steps forward into the great unknown.  But one comes alive in those moments.  One is connected, tingling a bit from nerves, connected with something greater than oneself.  I personalize this: If you could stand back from the situation and look at the whole picture dispassionately, you probably would not do it.  But you can’t.  Such is the call of faith.  You have lost some of that dispassionate, cold objectivity.  You have to choose.  You have to commit to that intuition.

Abraham and Sarah could not have anticipated the consequences of their decision to leave their homeland.  Rightly so, they could not really even imagine the birth of a child, let alone that child having children who would become 12 tribes, which in turn would become a whole nation.  Great waves of goodness came out of their jump, waves they never lived to see and could not really envisage.  All they knew was that they felt alive, for that moment.  It was a spiritual awakening.  They did not wall themselves in, and nor did they wall out change.

Even a cursory review at our Book of Records would reveal that most of the people who are drafted into the adventure which we call faith are not any more religious than anyone else.  Abraham and Sarah were ordinary people.  Moses, David, Ruth, Joseph and Mary were all very ordinary people.  Nothing in their resume would declare them CEO caliber.  Nothing in the biblical stories about them would suggest that they were more pious, or had some unique, divine connection that the rest of us do not have.

Indeed, scripture seems to suggest just the opposite.  They were just trying to get on with their daily lives, as are we.  But then suddenly, in quite an unexpected, unwanted way, they are called to make a decision, to open a door to the future, to take a risk and jump, reluctantly, sometimes, as was the case with Moses who, when called by God, produced a full chapter of reasons and self-deprecation, that he should be the CEO to plead the case of enslaved Hebrews before Pharoah.  Moved by faith, he went, and he did.

Some years ago, during a service at the National Council of Churches on the occasion of the dedication of the new Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggeman made the following observation in his homily:

“We are all children of faith.  We have been conceived and birthed, generated and summoned, given life by this faith and none other.  Faith keeps having its way among us…. We must come to terms with it.  We spend our lives struggling with faith, sometimes struggling for faith, sometimes struggling against faith.  Faith always has its say among us; it will not go away.  Its voice is a haunting one… and in it we hear the very voice of God: majestic sovereignty, awesome holiness, passionate grace, weakness made strong.  Because the text which will not go away, we have haunted lived, filled with yearnings for what is not in hand, promises not yet filled, commands not yet obeyed, desires not yet granted, neighbors not yet loved.  And because faith will not go away or be silent, we are destined to be endlessly haunted, uneasy, restless, on the way.”

All of us take risks, even now in our daily lives.  We would never accomplish anything, if we did not.  Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky put it his way: “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.”  Mark Twain captured the problematic of faith in our lives, slightly differently, but with the same message: “Twenty years from now you will be most disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did.”

We people of faith wrestle with expressing faith in our lives, an expression that goes far beyond a cross which may hang as a pendant around our necks.  As Christians, we are moved through our faith in the words of Jesus Christ, God’s Messiah, to try each day to actualize, to make real those expressions of God’s will for us and all humankind, for which Christ was crucified.  That faith teaches us to become the living example of Christ’s resurrection.  In our separate lives, we become CEO’s for Christ, and this we do, for “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”   It is this which we, as Christians, must never forget and which we hold up for all to see.  Amen