Faith: Action for the Now & Not Yet

The Rev. Sara Warfield

Scripture: Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

One of the first things I did when my sabbatical began was to get off social media. Now I’ll be honest with you, both my Facebook and Instagram feeds were already highly curated at that point. (I’m too old to be on TikTok.) No one but my family and close friends appear in my feeds—except the random posts that the algorithm sends me, but that’s a whole other sermon. But even that highly curated experience, where I’m seeing perspectives from the people I trust most, had become overwhelming. Brown folks being disappeared by masked men on the streets. Gazans being shot waiting for food that they desperately need because they are literally starving to death. Affordable healthcare for the people who need it most being defunded.

Something must be done! What are you doing? the posts screamed. Are you doing enough? What am I doing? Am I doing enough? I started feeling guilty if I didn’t attend every protest, if I didn’t go to every resistance training offered, if I didn’t call my representatives about every issue. Every time I opened the apps, I felt frantic, frustrated, futile.

As if everything depended on me. On the actions I took. Now that I think about it, it seems pretty self-centered, pretty self-important. That’s what social media does to me. It riles me into a frenzy in which the alleviation of all suffering, the breaking of every chain, the righting of every injustice is dependent upon me and what I do.

And that kind of thinking, well, it’s actually the opposite of faith.

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

The Greek here in Hebrews can be translated a few different ways. The word for assurance, hypostasis in Greek, can also be translated as “reality.” The word for conviction, elenchos in Greek, can also be translated as “evidence.”

Which renders the verse: Now faith is the reality of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. God does not just assure us of hope, God has already created the reality that we hope for. Things we can’t see, we can’t realize yet, are already present not simply because of our conviction, but they are evident—manifested, obvious—when we have faith.

Let me put this a different way. Faith is trust in the reality that God has already prepared, and our faith in God is evidence of that reality that we’re not able to see. At least not yet.

Now I’m doing a tricky thing with verb tenses here, intentionally, because faith is about both the now and the not yet at the same time. The author of Hebrews explains:

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. By faith he received power of procreation, even though he was too old-- and Sarah herself was barren-- because he considered God faithful who had promised. Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, "as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore."

The verses that the lectionary skips over also describe Abel, Enoch, and Noah, who all acted out of faith. And, the scriptures say,

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.

This is to say faith is manifested in action. The reality of our hopes is manifested in action. Our action is the evidence of things not seen. Faith, in other words, is taking action, as Abraham and Sarah and Noah did, even if we ourselves will never see the promises of those actions fulfilled. The not yet.

But your faithful actions also manifest those promises here and now, if only as one stone laid for the foundation for a cathedral. And it may take hundreds of years to come to fruition, as many of the early cathedrals did, but that one stone, that one action, still manifests the cathedral’s reality, is still evidence of the cathedral as of now unseen. That cathedral couldn’t exist without thousands, probably millions, of such stones. It couldn’t exist without your stones.

So there are two things going on when it comes to faith in God: the now and the not yet. And neither exist without the other. In fact, they both exist at the same time or not at all.

If you don’t lay your stones, the cathedral can never exist. If you don’t take gospel action when the world needs it, the Kingdom of God can’t exist.

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I think where I go wrong when I see my Facebook feed, is that I think I need to lay all the stones, build the entire cathedral myself, solve every problem of the world, find every way to live gospel love all the time, create the whole Kingdom of God on my own right now.

So I call social media my carousel of constant crisis.

I was talking to my spiritual director about this last month, and she shared an African proverb with me: “The times are urgent, we must slow down.”

Is there anything more faithful than the willingness to slow down? Than to move at the speed of trust in God that God is creating something we cannot yet imagine but that we are already part of?

To slow down means to take time to listen for God’s call in your life, to take time to recognize the stones God has given you for building God’s Kingdom. To know what gifts God has given you, then to embrace those gifts and to share those gifts with the world. But that discernment takes time. The cultivation of those gifts takes time.

It took Abraham and Sarah years of wandering, and not without a few missteps, to reach the land they were called to, to have their child, the first of the people of Israel who would become as many as the stars of heaven.

I feel called to be a priest, to be your rector, to build up a gospel community who will then bring the gospel into the world. But it took two decades of learning organization and management in various office jobs, three years of seminary, and overcoming a huge fear of public speaking. It took time, but now I feel pretty grounded in my gifts.

What has your life been building you towards? What gifts has life honed in you that you may not even see clearly yet?

Those are your stones for building the Kingdom of God. Faith is manifested by your actions. The reality of your hopes is manifested in your actions. Your actions are the evidence of God’s Kingdom now and not yet.

And yes, there are moments when you will need to be spontaneous, to respond to crises immediately, but that’s not the same as frantic rushing. Being grounded in your faith, knowing your gifts, knowing what actions you particularly are able to take, helps you to step up when you need to. Being anchored in your faith, being prepared in your hope is what allows you to respond quickly and with intention, and even with a kind of ease.

So yes, each of us is called like Abraham and Sarah to obey God by stepping into our faith. God does not just assure us of hope, God has already created the reality that we hope for. Things we can’t see, things we can’t realize yet, are already present not simply because of our conviction, but because we make them present through our actions. One stone at a time.

Amen.