Ambiguity

Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching [Hebrews 10:23-25].

Earlier this year, our Carolina Arbors Bible Study spent four months—March through early July—moving through Hebrews. It’s a New Testament epistle that generally gets short shrift in many of our congregations. One of the first things we learned is that the “Letter to the Hebrews” isn’t much like the other “letters” that form our NT canon; it’s really more of a sermon.

To be sure, as a sermon, it’s a bit of a stem-winder. At the outset, we see that the writer/preacher is addressing an urgent pastoral problem: the congregation is exhausted. As the Reverend Dr. Tom Long, gifted preacher and Bandy Professor of Preaching at Candler School of Theology at Emory University has noted in his splendid commentary on Hebrews:

They are tired—tired of serving the world, tired of worship, tired of Christian education, tired of being peculiar and whispered about in society, tired of the spiritual struggle, tired of trying to keep their prayer life going, tired even of Jesus [Thomas G. Long, Hebrews, Interpretation Series, John Knox Press, 1997, p. 3].

Sound familiar? It seems the author/preacher’s congregation is a lot like our own. Oh! We do get to deal with one problem that didn’t exist 2,000 years ago: COVID-19.

As one progresses through the chapters in the Epistle, one may be surprised at the author/preacher’s solution to the exhaustion in the pews. He doesn’t point out the need for a praise band. He doesn’t offer any New Age conflict management techniques. He fails to propose that the congregation institute classes on spiritual formation. Instead, he offers a rather long and complex theological argument about the nature and meaning of Jesus Christ.

In particular, the author/preacher seems to violate a tenet of modern church life—that the folks in the pews (or those watching from home via some streaming mechanism) don’t have sufficient attention spans to handle anything more potent than “three points and a poem.” Indeed, instead of announcing a six-week sermon series on “successful living in a secular world,” instead of offering some form of “Christianity-lite” that seems to be so prevalent in many “modern” congregations, the author/preacher stubbornly points to Christ—Christ crucified, Christ resurrected, and quite importantly, Christ ascended to sit at the right hand of God the Father.

Time and space don’t permit me to flesh out his full argument. We get a glimpse of it here in the verses that are appointed in the Lectionary for this upcoming Sunday [Hebrews 10:11-14, (15-18), 19-25; the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost, RCL, Year B], a portion of which I’ve reprinted above. The author/preacher draws a contrast between the Temple priest, who stands and offers daily sacrifices for the sins of himself and the people, with Christ as the new High Priest who, by means of a “single offering” [Hebrews 10:14], perfects for all time those who are sanctified. Through the saving, one-time gift of his life and blood, Christ sets in motion the mechanism through which Yahweh’s laws are written in the hearts and on the minds of all those who follow Him [10:15].

The Temple priest must return tomorrow to stand before the altar and perform the rite again. But when Christ ascended to His Heavenly throne, he assumed what we might think is an unusual posture: He sat down. The author/preacher is careful to explain that Christ sat down because all has been accomplished. Christ’s work is done! Christ’s sacrifice, like those of other high priests, cleanses the body, but Christ’s sacrifice also removes the consciousness of evil from the heart. Only through Christ’s internal cleansing can His New Covenant rush forward to a point within which our sins are forgotten and our hearts and minds are prepared for the implantation of Yahweh’s law [10:16-17].

And while we await our own place within the Heavenly realm, where does such an implementation take place? It takes place in church! The author/preacher speaks clearly: We are not to neglect our meeting together, “as is the habit of some” [10:25]. Indeed, we must regularly meet together—and you have to love the language the author/preacher employs—in order that we might “provoke one another to love and good deeds” [10:24]. As I wrote a few months ago, we all have friends who say they don’t go to church because they can encounter God near a mountain stream, or deep within a rolling forest.

Some years ago, a friend told me about an evening when he drove miles out into the country with his telescope, and he sat on a lonely hill in the chill of the late, clear evening. “I saw the stars, Tom. And I felt God.” I wanted to tell him, “I’m sure you’re the first person who has ever done that.”

The author/preacher is pleading with us to “go to church” because, as he describes here in Chapter 10, worship is an eschatological event. Whether it is rousing worship in the National Cathedral or Evensong at Duke Chapel, Friday morning mass, a summer revival under a tent, a Wednesday morning Bible Study (even via Zoom), a Methodist Watchnight Service, or the gathering of half a dozen folks in a house church, every time we gather for worship, we find ourselves in the company of heaving singing praises with the heavenly hosts!

Garret Keizer serves a rural Vermont community in two fashions. He teaches high school English, and he also serves a small Episcopal church as its lay pastor. In his hauntingly beautiful memoir of sorts, A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, Keizer relates how he and two others were the only folks who showed up one year for a Saturday night Easter vigil service. Beginning the vigil in the customary Episcopal fashion, he lit a candle, and offered a simple prayer from the Book of Common Prayer, asking God, among other things, to “grant that in this Paschal feast we may so burn with heavenly desires, that with pure minds we may attain to the festival of everlasting light ….”

Keizer allows that as he offered the prayer, he was struck by the utter ambiguity of the situation:

The candle sputters in the half darkness, like a voice too embarrassed or overwhelmed to proclaim the news: “Christ is risen.” But it catches fire, and there we are, three people and a flickering light—in an old church, on a Saturday evening …. The moment is filled with the ambiguities of all such quiet observances among few people, in the midst of an oblivious population in a radically secular age. The act is so ambiguous because its terms are so extreme; the Lord is with us, or we are pathetic fools [Garret Keizer, A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, Viking Press, 1991, p. 73].

The author/preacher of the Epistle to the Hebrews strongly urges that when we gather for worship, we aren’t fools. To be sure, on some occasions, when no one present can carry a tune, when the preacher offers up a “retread,” instead of a fresh sermon, when only a handful of regulars show up—and even then, they look tired and discouraged—it is easy to be discouraged, to fail to “hold fast to the confession of our hope” [10:23]. With Sunday T-ball, the Sunday Times, and the almond scones at Guglhupf, it’s easy to get out of the habit of worship, particularly during this time of pandemic. It’s easy to let things slide for a week or two, or ten. “We’ll go back next week.” Meanwhile, we’ll enjoy some extra coffee, or roll over and catch a few extra “ZZZs.”

Despite the ambiguities present within our lives and our worship practices, the Epistle writer reminds us that when we join together within a congregation and/or otherwise in small bands of believers, we are all gathered up into the presence of the Lord and the great company of the saints. Christ’s sanctifying love for us is not ambiguous, for the Lord indeed is with us. Amen.