Plausibility and the God Who Lives

Proper 14 (19), Year C
10 August 2025

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 22-23
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

A couple of years ago I reconnected with a member of the church I served before I came to Our Saviour. A woman in her sixties, raised in the church, and who had brought her own children to worship, Sunday School, and confirmation class. When we met up she had not been to church for some time, probably for a few years. As our conversation touched on various things we also talked about our families, and whether faith has a bearing of how we approach the end. While we agreed that it did, she surprised me by saying that she did not really know what she believed, except that there was more to life than this, than the material world.
Although, she had been part of the church almost her entire life, it seemed that now to her all religions and world views had equal standing and that she was looking at them not as an insider but as an outsider who is surveying a confusing array of options. This surprised me for a person who previously had been so connected to the life of the church, and after our visit I wondered what role the church had played in her coming to that place. After all, we know that we have not been terribly good at handing the faith down to our children.

Had our faith perhaps merely served to convey certain liberal convictions about the world and now that she had embraced these convictions, faith and church were no longer required?¹
Had the church failed to facilitate a relationship with our crucified and risen Lord, in the way that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews asserts that we do see Jesus (2:9)? In other words, have we only asked people a believe in certain propositions about God and the world and we never expected these propositions to come alive?
Or has the church only preached the hope of heaven and thus failed to enable us see how the life with God can animate our life today, and failed to let us see how, in the words of Jesus, the reign of God has come near?
Or was at some point instilled in her life a reading of our sacred texts as a self-help or history book, thereby making it difficult to discern how the Bible’s primary purpose is to point us toward God?

Pondering these questions I thought of Wendell Berry’s introduction to his little book, Blessed Are the Peacemakers. He writes in an American context of the first decade of this century: “[Christianity] has remarkably little to do with the things that Jesus Christ actually taught. Especially among Christians of great wealth and power, the idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus’s commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective ‘Christian’. (For don’t we know that everybody named Rose smells like a Rose?”²

For my friend, the Christian faith was no longer plausible.
She no longer knew what to believe, and her faith no longer guided her ethical decision making. What she had left were basic liberal humanist convictions, which historically would be unthinkable without the Christian faith: Concern for victims, respect for marginalized, restraint on vengeance, charity toward the poor, all these find their origin in the life and theology of the early church.³ Of course, the question today is whether a Christian ethic can survive without Christianity, and without being embedded in the Christian story.

It did take me a couple of hours to process our conversation. And in case you wonder whether I launched into a rebuttal, I did not. She had not asked my advice and there are very few people who receive my advice unasked, usually my family, and they would happily do without it.

The Letter to the Hebrews, from which our second reading is taken, is written to a group of Christians who may not be so unlike my friend. They are tired and perhaps ready to give up. It is the intent of the letter to encourage them and help them renew their commitment.
Our section begins with a description of faith, ¹ … faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. ²Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. That is the translation of the New Revised Standard Version. N.T. Wright translates it like this, What then is faith? It is what gives assurance to our hopes, it is what gives us conviction about things we can’t see. It is what the men and women of old were famous for. It is by faith that we understand that the worlds were formed by God’s word, in other words, that the visible world was not made from visible things.⁴

We may think that this is not helpful, at least not for my friend’s question. How can hope in the things we cannot see give us any kind of confidence? And it is important to distinguish hope from the mere optimism that tomorrow will be sunny, or that you would win the lottery.
But the concern about things we cannot see leaves out the fact that our most important decisions are not based on what we can see, but on trust. Trust that my relationships are mutual and not just my own projection. Everything else flows from this.
So when our reading tells us about people before us who built their lives on the things they could not see, we look at their lives and we see that their lives amounted to enough for us to remember them even three millennia later. The stories chapter eleven retells are the stories of Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and all of God’s people.

The philosopher Alasdaire MacIntyre says that in our actions and practice, as well as in our fictions humans are a story-telling animal. We are not essentially, but become through our history, a story-telling animal, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. Remember that much of the Bible is story-telling. It is a narrative. MacIntyre says that the key question for us is not about our own authorship, but that “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”

MacIntyre continues, “It is through hearing stories about wicket stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in a drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.”⁵
And so MacIntyre states that the key question for us is not about our own authorship, but that “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”

So when someone says that they do not know what to believe, they are saying that they have no story, except their own. That we should all be people to write own own story is an expression of capitalism, where everyone is supposed to write their own story,⁶ a void gladly filled by the self images brand name identification will provide. Unfortunately brand name identification will not get us very far and it will certainly not help us make ethical decisions, except the conviction that any decision is alright, and that there are no truths, only my truth and your truth. This may well be part of the reason for the political mess the West finds itself in.

And so it seems that to ask whether the Christian faith is true as opposed to, say Hinduism, is the wrong question. Not that I do not believe the Christian faith to be true, I believe that it is. Yet such asking will make us forever stand outside of any story. Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and all of God’s people will mean nothing to us.
The question we need to ask is for the story that narrates and animates our life. Is the Christian story true in my life? Are the metaphors of the Gospels the metaphors that tell my story?
Stanley Hauerwas takes us back one more step when he says that “we are not free to choose our own stories. Freedom lies not in creating our lives, but in learning to recognize our lives as a gift.”⁷
Remember that concern for victims, inclusion of the marginalized, restraint on vengeance, charity toward the poor find their origin in the life and theology of the early church and are unthinkable without the Christian story.

And should I meet my friend again I will ask which story it is that animates her life.

Thanks be to God who is our story, our life, and our salvation.

Amen.