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A wonderful chapter! "Faith's Hall of Fame," they call it.
If we were to read on we would encounter great names - after
Abraham, we find Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, and on and
on and on.
Now, wait a minute. Rahab? Rahab was a prostitute, wasn't
she? Yes. She lived in Jericho during the days prior to the
Hebrew conquest. Two spies had been sent by Joshua to determine
the strength of the city. When the king of Jericho learned of
the spies' presence, he sent men to arrest them, but Rahab
outsmarted the king and hid the men on her roof, sending the
arresting officers on a wild goose chase toward the Jordan River.
In return for her help Joshua spared her and her clan when the
Hebrews destroyed Jericho.(1) To borrow Clarence Jordan's
phrasing, she had literally bet her life on the unseen reality of
God's ultimate conquest. And she won. In the gospels, we find a
Rahab named as the mother of Boaz in Matthew's genealogy of
Christ,(2) making her the great-great grandmother of Israel's
greatest king, David, and by extension, the great-great-great-over-and-over-again-great-grandmother of Jesus. And we meet her
one more time, along with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and
Moses in this trip through Faith's Hall of Fame. Rahab. The
prostitute. What a strange saint.
By the way, I am using "saint" this morning in a way that
harks back to the original meaning of the root words - a "saint"
NOT being someone with a special corner on virtue, not "holy" in
a sense of being "goody-goody" with a halo in place. I use
"saint" to mean someone who has been "sanctified," which means
"made holy," made to be DIFFERENT, set apart by God.
That being the case, we still would have to regard these
famous names in Hebrews 11 as strange candidates for sainthood,
the high virtue kind, the set apart kind, or any kind. Except
father Abraham, of course, the patriarch of three great
religions. This one really IS a saint, right? Well, perhaps.
There are legends, of course.(3) One told by the Arabs has
Abraham seeing many flocks and herds and asking his mother, "Who
is the lord of these?"
She answered: "Your father, Terah."
"And who is the lord of Terah?" the lad Abraham asked.
"Nimrod," said his mother.
"And who is the lord of Nimrod?" asked Abraham.
His mother bade him be quiet and not push questions too far;
but already Abraham's thoughts were reaching out to the God who
is the God of all.
The legends of Abraham's deep devotion are all well and
good, but actually, we hear nothing remarkable about him until he
is 75 years old, and then his only claim to fame seems to be that
God called and he answered.
Good for him. But, as an old black preacher once observed
about our hero, "There were parts of him that had not heard the
Word."(5)
For example, soon after he and his entourage arrived in
Canaan, this place that God had promised would be the new
homeland, a famine struck. Stay here? No way, no matter what
God has to say. They headed to Egypt where word had it there was
food. Upon arrival, our hero told his 65-year-old wife, just in
case some Egyptian prince should take a shine to her, to pass
herself off as his sister and even to marry the poor fool if he
asked. That would insure Abraham's survival and might even line
his pockets. Nice guy. The only reason a terrible mess was
averted was the moral sensitivity of the Pharaoh who was
horrified when he learned of the scheme.(6)
As time went along, our hero of faith began to question the
promise which had been made about descendants. His wife Sarah
was childless and now well past her child-bearing years, so, with
his wife's permission (reluctant though it no doubt was), he took
Sarah's servant Hagar and fathered Ishmael. The custom of the
day permitted a woman to claim as her own any children a servant
girl might bear after a liaison with the master of the house, so
this might have worked out...except for Abraham's wimpiness. You
remember. Hagar and Sarah began to get on each other's case;
things went from bad to worse. The tension between the two was
thick enough to cut with a knife. It got worse when Sarah
miraculously bore her own child, Isaac. The dysfunctional family
situation was finally resolved, not by good father Abraham
stepping in to mediate, but by chicken father Abraham stepping
away from his paternal responsibility and allowing poor Hagar and
Ishmael...his first-born son...to be driven into the desert and
left to die. What a guy! Strange saint.
Others in "Faith's Hall of Fame" are not much better.
Isaac? About the only thing he is remembered for is being
hoodwinked on his death-bed into giving the family inheritance to
the wrong son. Jacob? As much of a scallywag as anybody in
scripture. Joseph? An arrogant and self-important youngster who
was such a pain to his siblings that they sold him into slavery
to get rid of him. Moses? A murderer. Verse after verse it
goes, and none of the heroes fare any better.
What does that say? The most obvious thing is that God uses
whom God chooses. God is not limited by our nice, neat
predictable boundaries. This God does not go to just the fine,
friendly, church-going religious folk. This is a God who calls
both weak and strong. This is a God who calls a childless couple
too old to have children to establish a new nation, a God who
reaches out to a prostitute inside an enemy city and invites her
to become part of the people of God. God uses whom God chooses,
and God equips them for their tasks with the gift of faith - 20
different times in Hebrews 11 is someone described as pursuing a
goal or accomplishing a task simply "BY FAITH." Over and over
the litany is repeated - BY FAITH, Abraham...; BY FAITH,
Isaac...; BY FAITH, Jacob...; BY FAITH, Joseph...; BY FAITH,
Moses...; BY FAITH, Rahab... (there she is again). And that has
been the case through all the ensuing centuries.
They are still "Strange Saints" though. I think of that
young man in North Africa who led such a wild, riotous life, that
even after he decided to become a Christian he refused baptism
because there was still some sinning he planned to do, and he
wanted to go wild with at least a relatively clear conscience.
He made a prayer once in reference to his raucous womanizing; he
said, "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet." His name was
Augustine, and even though he lived a thousand years before the
Reformers, he became the inspiration for the work that they would
do to change the church. Strange saint!
There was a young man in England, John Newton. Newton was
so wild in his youth that Great Britain was not big enough to
contain him. He became a slave trader, and eventually dipped so
low that he became the slave of a slave himself. Like the
prodigal son, one day came to himself, and realized how awful his
life had become. He turned his heart over to Jesus and to this
day, we celebrate that conversion and newfound faith with him as
we sing,
Strange saint.
No question, we are tempted to think of saints as being
special people in unique situations, and even, "If I were in
their place I might do something wonderful too." Or maybe we
think, "I'm just a teacher, I just balance the books, I work with
my hands, I'm a senior, what opportunity do I have?"(7) The key to
sainthood, these verses are saying, is faith, the trust that the
God who is in charge of all this will provide the task and the
means of completing the task that is the right one for you. In
Clarence Jordan's words, it turns dreams into deeds. And as
Hebrews 11 testifies, it makes people special.
One of my cyberfriends tells of a man he knew several years
ago at a church in Indianapolis.(8) Jim could not read, but each
Sunday he would be in church school and at various moments his
faith would lead him to say something like "The Bible says..."
and then open his Bible and act as if what he was saying was in
the Bible. Jim also was in the choir and, along with his
inability to read, he could not sing. But he would try. Some
churches might have objected strongly to Jim's singing. But not
this church. The choir and the congregation at large loved Jim.
Each evening when Jim would come home from his job at a
"sheltered workshop," he would get off the bus several blocks
from his home to check on the church building, to make sure all
the doors were locked and no windows broken. Then came the day
that Jim's foster family was moving to a new city. Jim asked
that he might say something to the congregation the Sunday he
would be there. The pastor of the church had no idea what Jim
would come out with, but gladly gave him the opportunity to voice
his good-bye. He stood before the congregation and said only
three words: "I love you." As you can imagine, there was not a
dry eye in the house. One of God's strange saints.
Or another one. This one a drunk. And he would be the
first to admit it. Had it not been for the ministry of AA and a
new church in his neighborhood, he may very well have died in
some gutter somewhere. But God touched him. His faith led him
to become active in the congregation. He served on boards and
committees. If the church needed workers, he worked. If the
church needed money, he gave. He was never backward about coming
forward. He was never shy about sharing his feelings. If
something needed saying, he said it. If something were right, he
would praise it; if something were wrong, he would try to fix it.
Sometimes he would explode, and the shrapnel could be painful for
those caught nearby. But for 35 years, St. Paul Presbyterian was
blessed with his wisdom, his insight, his hard work, his faith,
and we who were Jim Gibson's friends will always be grateful for
our years with this saint.
The list of saints that you and I both know could go on and
on and on. Some, we would admit, are stranger than others, but
all shared the same experience - their faith allowed them to be
set apart by God in a unique way for tasks that they and they
alone could perform at a certain place, in a certain time, and in
a certain way.
One other experience they shared: each one had his or her
eyes set on another destination. As scripture describes it, "the
city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God."
They knew their journey of faith would not be finished here.
They knew that "God's not finished with me yet." All along the
way they could see signs of that future, and they looked forward
to finally arriving at the "better country, that is, a heavenly
one" that remains our goal until the day we make that final
crossing.
Are you ready for "sainthood?" Perhaps you feel, "I am not
worthy, God would never want me for a saint." Maybe you have
made a mistake, taken a wrong turn in life, done something
surpassingly, sinfully, dumb. The memory of it weighs on you and
holds you back. Let me offer you a thought from a wise Canadian
churchman who said something so wonderfully insightful that I
invite you to engrave it on your heart for the times when you
feel down and out and perhaps even worthless. "A saint", he
said, "is not someone who is perfect. A saint is someone who,
when they stumble and fall, is willing to let God pick them up,
dust them off and start them on the way again."(9) Abraham and
Isaac and Jacob and Rahab and Augustine and Newton and our friend
Jim Gibson are all saying AMEN to that right now. Are you
willing to let God do that for you? Scripture says it happens
"by faith," "betting your life on the unseen realities."
"Strange Saints." There sure are a lot of them. Come to
think of it, is there any other kind?
1. Joshua 2:1-23, 6:17-25 2. Matthew 1:5 3. William Barclay, Daily Study Bible, CD-ROM, (Liguori, MO: Liguori Publications, 1996) 4. Genesis 12:1-4 5. John Claypool, Glad Reunion, (Waco, TX: Word Publishing, 1985), p. 15 6. Genesis 12:10-13:1 7. Ross Bartlett, sermon, "Unlikely Saints," http://www.rockies.net/~spirit/sermons/c-or19-98.html 8. Robert Baum, via Ecunet, "Sermonshop Discussion," #4461, 8/7/98 9. Emmett Cardinal Carter of Toronto quoted by Ross Bartlett
"Go from your country and your kindred and your
father's house to the land that I will show you. I
will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you,
and make your name great, so that you will be a
blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the
one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the
families of the earth shall be blessed." So Abram
went, as the LORD had told him...(4)
That saved a wretch like me;
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.
Amen!
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