Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for,

The conviction of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:1

Unfortunately it did not occur to me until after the bulletin was printed that most of us here today might not have actually heard of George Michael, never mind having heard his famous song on the radio.

I won't try to sing it for you, for fear of mortally embarrassing my sweet wife. But the refrain of this song affirms that to survive in the wild world out there you gotta have faith, faith, faith.

The question before us, then, is whether that's true. To make it through life, do you have to have faith? Or can you get by on your wits, your looks, or whatever your greatest asset happens to be?

The answer to that question is actually easy. Of course you can make it through life without having faith. Millions of people do, after all. The real question is, why would you want to?

The author of the letter to the Hebrews may be right. Faith may well be the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But I contend that faith is more than that. I contend that faith is that inner prism that gives meaning to the stars and helps my life make sense whatever comes my way.

So why don't more people have faith? Taken as a group - and this is actually true - more Americans believe in the virgin birth than believe in the theory of evolution. But on a practical level God plays a vanishingly small part in our daily lives.

Why is this so?

Oddly enough, I think preachers may be to blame. And I don't mean preachers like Jerry Falwell and Ted Haggard who give God and the Bible such bad name and make it nearly impossible for so many reasonably minded people to believe.

I mean ordinary, every day preachers. The problem, you see, is that many of us don't preach about faith all that often. This may sound kind of startling but in our defense, neither did Jesus. Yes, faith does come into play in Christ's ministry, especially in his miracles, but as a theological matter it did not occupy that much of his time or attention.

So I'd like to think that we're actually being faithful to the founder of our faith in preaching about the things that seem to have mattered most to him - about love and service and peace and healing.

But we progressive-minded folk should make no mistake here. As odd as this sounds, faith lies at the heart of our faith. Surely that's what this passage from Hebrews today is trying to tell us.

And not just of our faith. Three great world religions were born out of this one single act of faith:

Go, Abraham, to the land that I will show you. And so without knowing where they were going, Abraham and his equally faithful wife Sarah, did just that. The pulled up their tent pegs and set out for an unknown destination, trusting that God would show it to them in due time--an act of faith so simple yet so profound it has become foundational for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.

I think it's reasonable to ask why, then, does faith not seem to matter more to Jesus? Apart from a few parables, why are more of his teachings not centered on something so central to one's spiritual life?

Again, the answer is easy. Because in his day, everyone had faith. It was essentially a given. The Jewish people in particular routinely sought to center their lives around God's precepts and God's presence.

Yes, you say, but that was before the Crusades and the Inquistion. That was before evolution put paid to the idea the earth was created in six days. Before Freud and Jung explained humanity's need to invent God. Before Auschwitz and the Nagasaki. Before the Cold War and 9/11.

If faith is believing in what can't be seen, then I have no need for such a thing, for what I can see outweighs it, thanks very much.

And that, I think, is the great mistake in talking and thinking about faith. In Greek, the root for the infinitive verb "to believe" is "to give one's heart to." But that's not what belief has come to mean in our time.

Nowadays to ask someone what they believe is synonymous with asking them what they think. Do you believe Barry Bond's homerun record is tainted? Do you believe The Death Hallows is the best Harry Potter book? Do you believe in global warming? Do you believe in God?

They're all just intellectual questions. Belief has lost its original heart connection. Indeed, nowadays we regard faith as a suspension of the intellect. We need faith only to explain the things we cannot see, the things that make no sense, the mysteries that evade our understanding.

And maybe that's exactly right. Maybe that's how it should be. Maybe today, 20 centuries on, faith remains the evidence of things hoped for; the conviction of things not seen.

Maybe Rosa Parks had that verse, that definition, that reality, pulsing through her heart that day as she sat in the front of that bus. Maybe she sat there pondering the story of Abraham and Sarah as she gazed out the window onto the mean streets of Birmingham.

I can't see the promised land from here. And I don't know where this is gonna lead. I only know I ain't gettin' out of this seat. My sitting here is evidence of the thing I hope for - the day when it won't matter what color my skin is. My sitting here is the conviction of the thing I do not yet see - the day when my granddaughter can be a heart surgeon and Andrew Young can serve as mayor of Atlanta.

Abraham went out not knowing where he was supposed to go. Rosa Parks sat in that seat not knowing where that road was going to lead.

And who does, really? You can map out your life as precisely as you like, but does life ever go according to script? Will that map lead you home? Will it take you to the place you were called to be?

Faith is the evidence of things hoped for; the conviction of things not seen. And you don't need your head for that. Faith is not science. It's not supposed to be. If it were about certainty and data and maps, it wouldn't be faith.

To believe is to give one's heart to. That is to say, to believe is to trust. To believe is to be in relationship with.

Listen to how the novelist Rachel Basch fleshes out that idea in her book The Passion of Reverend Nash . The main character of the book - Rev. Nash - is struggling with this same question; how to interpret faith to her congregation.

"The problem," thought Rev. Nash, "was to speak about faith and not seem as if you were instructing adults to behave like children, to blindly place their trust in something larger than themselves. The essence of faith was not about God's dominion over us. She hated that word dominion. No, no, the essence of faith was inner strength, not abdication, which is how it was so often taught in Sunday school - faith as surrender, mindless surrender.

[No,] she would . . . propose an active, life-affirming faith, faith as movement and power, faith as one's fully realized partnership with the Divine."

To believe is to give one's heart to. To believe is to trust. To believe is to be in relationship with. To have faith is to be in partnership with the divine.

Barbara Brown Taylor, one preacher who does talk about faith, puts this same idea slightly differently. For her, "faith is about converting ink to blood." That is, it's about taking the truth of these ancient stories and making them real in our time.

Faith in the 21 ^st century is about trusting God to guide you just as God guided Abraham and Sarah on their original faith journey. It's about believing that your wanderings are not purposeless but that God will lead you home.

Faith is about never being defeated and never giving up. It's about believing in spite of everything that the world can be different. That this other country that the writer of Hebrews refers to can be realized in the here and now; that God' kingdom can come and God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Faith is about believing that love and hope are stronger than fear. That terrorism will not win because God has the final say in history.

Faith is about trusting that your losses can be redeemed. It's about believing that cancer and alcoholism and militarism do not have the last word but can be overcome.

In your hard and painful times, faith is about believing that your tears matter. That within the vast emptiness of the cosmos, that you matter. That your dreams and your sorrows and your struggles are seen by someone.

That you are not alone.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

It was true then. It remains true today.

Amen