Friday, Phil and I drove to Durham, North Carolina, where we haven’t really spent any time before, though it’s not far away – home to Duke University, an interesting and quirky downtown where many of the old bank buildings have been transformed into art spaces and restaurants, a minor league baseball team, and its American Tobacco Historic District, which was particularly interesting and beautiful.
And while I was there, I found myself sitting on the front porch of an Episcopal saint, listening to the train whistles and the late-summer cicadas and writing poetry.
I was there to visit the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, a short drive from Durham’s downtown in what was historically a black neighborhood in Durham. Many of you have heard me talk about the Reverend Pauli Murray before – a priest, attorney, activist, professor and poet whose work contributed to Thurgood Marshall’s Brown vs. Board of Education victory. Murray died in 1985 of cancer, and her feast day in the Episcopal Church is July 1, just last month.
The Center is located in Pauli Murray’s childhood home, a house built in 1898 by their grandparents – Murray’s grandfather was a teacher, brick maker and Civil War veteran, and their grandmother was a seamstress and homemaker born in enslavement. It is now a National Historic Landmark. This weekend the center was hosting a writing workshop focusing on joy, courage, and world-building, taught by poet Destiny Hemphill.
And as I was sitting on Pauli Murray’s front porch, feeling the wood boards they had walked on under my hands and its wall supporting my back, this week’s readings came to mind, especially our Epistle reading from Hebrews, and I heard them echoing over and over in the afternoon’s conversations.
Our teacher began by having us introduce ourselves around the circle, and by asking us one question: What kind of world do we want to live in?
“I want to live in a world where…”
She gave us a minute or two to ponder what we hope for, what perhaps some of us pray for. So I ask you that question in turn:
What kind of world do you want to live in? You don’t need to answer out loud, unless you feel nudged to, but I’ll give you a few moments to think about the question as well, because it’s not one that can be answered quickly.
What kind of world do you want to live in?
…
I suspect that our hopes for this world connect and echo each other. We hope for a world where no one is in want, where everyone is beloved and respected, where there is no violence, no war, no hatred. We hope for a world where our trees and rivers and oceans are protected, and where every child has the opportunity and space to live and learn and play in safety, where no one has to choose between health care and housing or food and paying the electric bill. We pray that God will strengthen those who are grieving, protect those who are lost, and give comfort to those who are sick. We have faith that we will be together in God’s house, reunited with our loved ones gone before, no longer experiencing pain or sadness.
And we hear the promise of faith today, in the letter to the Hebrews – we don’t know who likely wrote it, or to which Hebrews it was written, but we do know that it was written to believers in Christ who were uncertain, tired, anxious, beginning to be persecuted by the Romans, and despondent that Christ had not yet returned. They were a people in need of hope and assurance – perhaps something we can relate to today – and so the Letter to the Hebrews is a letter for us in our present time as well, and this morning’s words are familiar and comforting. Listen again:
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen… By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.”
Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
“Assurance” and “conviction.” The Greek words at the root of these two words are hypostasis and elegchos (el-eng-khos) – and those who study Greek point out that our translation doesn’t quite communicate the full meaning of these two words.
“Assurance” – Hypostasis – really translates better as “confidence,” or “the very being,” or, as Yale scholar Harold Attridge suggests, “reality”:
“Faith is the” very being or the “‘reality’ of things hoped for.”
And that second word – elegchos – translates not so much as “conviction,” but as “proof.”
Listen to that sentence again:
Faith is the reality of things of hoped for, the proof of things unseen.
How does this translation of those two words change the way we read and hear this passage?
I believe it tells us that faith is not just abstract hope. Faith is not just a thing that we hold onto, that we practice, but it is a thing that God holds with us.
If faith is the reality of things hoped for, the proof of things unseen, then the worlds that God is creating, worlds where we are no longer in pain or in want, a future where there is no more war – is not far-fetched, a beautiful story to encourage us when we feel helpless. Faith in what cannot be seen, faith that our present sufferings or anxieties are temporary tells that what is good is eternal, and is of God.
That what is seen was made from things that are not visible.
Our very faith is not just the hope of what is to come, but the acknowledgment that it will come, that it is already here, deeper than grief, and that we are not bystanders, but are participants in hope.
This kind of faith means that when we look at the world and have trouble seeing anything but sadness and war and political divisions – and when we look at our own lives and have trouble seeing anything but anxiety and uncertainty about our present and perhaps our future – we are not seeing everything.
What kind of world do you hope to live in? What kind of world do you have faith in?
Faith is the very being of things hoped for, the proof of things not seen… By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.
What kind of world does God invite us into seeing?
What kind of world does God invite us into being?
Amen.
