I moved to Seattle when I graduated from college, and that’s when I met Maxine. I came to Seattle to work on the staff of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and my boss asked me to meet some long term InterVarsity donors. Maxine was one of them.

Maxine and I became friends and stayed in pretty close touch for many years. She was the first friend I ever had who was my mother’s age. When I moved to Seattle, I was 22, and Maxine must have been in her mid to late forties. She seemed so old at the time! Yet we had a lot in common, particularly a love for Bible study.

Maxine was a homemaker. When I met her, she had two teenaged sons and a ministry. Every week she taught a Bible class at her church, and she continued to teach that class for many years. She usually spent 20 hours a week preparing for the class. No one I have ever met studied the Bible like Maxine. Every single word was important to her, and she wanted to know where else that word was used in the Bible. Every place name or name of a person had significance to her, and she wanted to know the story behind the name.

Maxine’s Bible class met every Wednesday during the school year, and she took a long time with each book of the Bible she studied. A short book like Philippians or Ephesians might take a year, and a gospel might take four years. I remember when she studied Hebrews. She took four years to work through the book, and she took about a year just on Hebrews 11.

You can imagine that each name in Hebrews 11 was an opportunity to go back to the Old Testament and learn that person’s story and consider the way that story demonstrated faith. When she got to verse 32, she had to take several weeks to look up the stories of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David and Samuel. Verse 37 created an exhaustive search through the Bible. Who was stoned? Sawn in two? Who wandered around in goatskins and sheepskins?

She was also interested in asking questions about the way the author of the Hebrews interprets the Old Testament stories. When Abraham offered up Isaac, this chapter says that Abraham

“considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead.”

How did the author of this letter know that Abraham was thinking that? It’s not in Genesis. And this passage says that Moses

“considered abuse suffered for the Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt.”

Since that idea isn’t in the story in the Old Testament, what clues from the Old Testament story gave this author the idea that that was what Moses was thinking?

Our pastor, Dan, comes up with the sermon schedule, and he didn’t know Maxine. Therefore he didn’t know we would need a year to do justice to this chapter! Since we have a slightly shorter time than Maxine did for this chapter, I want to make a few general comments, then zero in on two particular passages that have had a great impact on my life.

First, the general comments. Faith in this chapter is portrayed as a matter of action and story. I really like that. In the 20th century we got a bit preoccupied with faith being cognitive assent to a set of truths. We viewed a person as faithful if they could say the right things. Here the emphasis is acting in response to God’s guidance.

In those years that I worked for InterVarsity, I had a very good boss. One of his favorite sayings is that the Christian life is lived in a two-beat rhythm. If you know music, life is lived in two-two or two-four time. The first beat of each measure, the down beat, is God’s action. The upbeat, the second beat of each measure, is our response.

• God initiates love,
• God guides us,
• God cares for us,
• God empowers us,
• God forgives us,
• God heals us.

God acts first, and we respond. We might respond in faith, or we might respond by ignoring God’s action or even disobeying it. That’s the theme of this chapter: People act in faith in response to God’s action.

I am very concerned about the frantic pace of life today because it takes away time for reflection and conversation. How are we going to notice the downbeat of God’s action in our lives if we aren’t reflecting and talking with friends? How are we going to know what God is calling us to do if we aren’t praying?

We also need prayer and reflection and conversation with Christian friends in order to discern our own story, the way our story might be written in something like Hebrews 11. The story of each of our lives really does matter. That’s where our faith is acted out, and we need to be willing to make the effort to notice.

I want to zero in on two particular passages in this chapter. First, verse one.

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

This verse has been a touchstone for me for many years, a way to reorient myself when I am feeling faithless.

I memorized this verse a long time ago, and I’m glad I did. When I feel discouraged, when I find it hard to believe in God, when faith seems empty and valueless, I think about this verse. I start by asking myself, what do I hope for? If faith is the assurance of things hoped for, what are my hopes that are relevant to faith?

I have particular candidates I’m hoping get elected this fall. I have hopes that I will one day weigh less than I do now. I have hopes for my kids. It takes a certain kind of faith to hold onto those hopes, but I don’t think that’s the kind of faith held up in Hebrews 11.

The kind of hopes that relate to this kind of faith are the things we can hope for from the Bible. One of the biggest hopes I try to hold onto in difficult times is the hope from Romans 12 that God will bring good things out of bad things. Another hope from the Bible is the promise throughout the New Testament that God will be with me in all situations, that Jesus will be with me, that the Holy Spirit will be with me.

Depending on what I’m feeling discouraged about, I might think about the biblical hope that God will bring good fruit from my obedience. Or that God will honor my attempts to serve him.

So when I’m discouraged and I’m thinking about Hebrews 11:1, I’ll ask myself, can I rest in the assurance that God will do these things I hope for? That he will bring good out of evil, that he will be with me, that he will honor my obedience?

Then I do the same thing with the second half of the verse:

“Faith . . . is the conviction of things not seen.”

Well the major thing that is true, but I can’t see, is God’s presence with me. But there’s more.

• You can’t really see love, but it’s the most powerful force on earth.
• You can’t see prayers.
• You can’t see angels.
• You can’t see God working in people’s hearts.

But I do believe that all those unseen things are going on.

“The conviction of things not seen.”

Thinking about that phrase is so encouraging to me when I feel distant from God. Thinking about love and prayers and other unseen realities gets me back on track.

Now I want to jump down to the paragraph that begins with verse 13 and talk about how the concepts from that paragraph have been helpful to me. Some of you will remember a book called Resident Aliens that came out in the early 1990s. The authors were William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas. About ten years ago the session here at Bethany, our board of elders, read that book. The book is based on the main idea from this paragraph, that Christians live here on earth as foreigners, as strangers, as “resident aliens.”

This paragraph came alive for Dave and me when we lived in the Middle East. We spent two years in Iran and Israel about 25 years ago. They were years that changed our lives, that deepened our faith in amazing ways, and years that have impacted us ever since we were there.

There were some very hard aspects to our time. We were in Iran when the revolution was happening. When we went to Iran, the Shah was ruling and Americans were welcomed. After only a few months there, people started to spit on us in the street and the most common graffiti was “Death to America.” We left Iran about the same time the Shah left.

We went to Israel on vacation and to our amazement, Dave was offered a job there, teaching at Tel Aviv University. We had been in Israel only a few months when I became pregnant, and the hormones of pregnancy brought on a severe depression. We didn’t have any idea what was going on. We knew nothing about depression; we didn’t even have a word to describe the inner pain I was feeling.

We often read this paragraph from Hebrews 11 to each other. We talked about the fact that we were living as strangers and foreigners in a foreign country, but at least some of our discomfort was coming from the fact that all Christians are strangers and foreigners on earth.

We talked about the “better country,” the “heavenly one,” that is coming. We talked about what it means to be citizens of two places, this place where we live, and some other place as well. We talked about the danger of being so involved with this particular place, that we forget about our homeland.

And we talked about the equal danger of being so involved with our homeland that we forget to care about the place we’re living now.

I can see that so clearly right now in my own family. Our son, Jonathan, recently married a wonderful woman from Japan named Aki. Aki’s family and many of her friends are still in Japan, so her heart is there. But her heart is also here, and she is doing a great job living faithfully in both worlds.

Aki brings a wonderful flavor of Japan to her life here. When she cooks, she uses Japanese ingredients. She has that artistic flair that so many Japanese people seem to have, and everything she does reflects that wonderful Japanese precision and artistry.

I find myself wondering if I reflect my citizenship in heaven as well as she reflects her Japanese citizenship. Does my life have those flavors, that flair, that comes from my citizenship in heaven? Can people tell when they interact with me that my citizenship is somewhere else? I sure hope so.

So I’ve talked about the stories in this chapter in a general way, that they demonstrate that two-beat rhythm of life that we are all called to. A two-beat rhythm where God acts and we respond. A rhythm that emphasizes faith in action, not just in words.

I’ve talked about the way I have used verse 1 as encouragement when I’m feeling distant from God. I think about the things I know I can hope for and I think about the reality of things we can’t see, and I cling to them.

I’ve talked about living as foreigners and strangers on earth and our call to be faithful citizens of heaven, bringing the flavor of heaven into our lives here. And we are also called to be faithful citizens of this world, all the while knowing our true citizenship is elsewhere.

The life of faith is such an adventure. God’s call to obedience takes us to such amazing places, just like all the people in this wonderful chapter 11 of Hebrews.