Things Not Seen

A sermon on Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff

As Heiko and I drove along the South Shore of Lake Superior into Porcupine Mountains State Park on the upper peninsula of Michigan last Sunday night, we could just barely see the far side of the lake. That far side, right around Grand Marais, is what I think of when I think of our Great Lake: its rugged shores and boreal forests, its frigid waters. Arriving on the Michigan side felt at once familiar and foreign, like meeting a friend’s sibling for the first time. As we drove, we watched people wading in the waves, playing with a similar assortment of lake stones to the Minnesota side, but the water was warm, the lake floor gradual, even sandy. Yes, we were on the shores of a lake we knew, but where the North side batters, this edge soothed. Weird.

After a night in the campground, we drove up to the observation deck overlooking Lake of the Clouds. One of the park’s highlights, as the name implies, Lake of the Clouds sits high above Lake Superior, behind a steep rock escarpment butting up hundreds of feet and separating the Superior shore from a vast, unharvested hardwood forest of Douglas Fir, Hemlock, Maple, and Aspen. We heaved our packs onto our backs and left the day tourists behind as we walked to the west, along the top of that dividing rock to our first campsite.

Will you join me in prayer? Holy One, like our spiritual ancestors, sometimes we struggle to see past our present reality. We look out from our small perch at the vast complexity of competing goals all struggling for their separate, unique survival and sometimes we wonder: can there be a future where it all doesn’t simply cancel each other out into oblivion? Be patient with us, Gracious God, and remind us of the broader stories of which we are only a part – stories of new life and a movement towards balance. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts together be ever acceptable in your sight, O God, our source, our comfort, our being. Amen.

The path along the escarpment that first day wove from the cliff’s edge back into the forest and back again, and we ate our dinner that evening overlooking the valley at the heart of the park, surrounded by the prickly low shrubs that stubbornly cling to rock edges. I think the thing I value most about going to the north woods is the sense of time it provides. Whether in the Boundary Waters or in the Porcupine Mountains, with their exposed bedrock, shallow soils, and forests ever evolving and maturing, I sense the presence of time. I picture the glaciers that receded to the north and think, so this is what nature can produce in twelve thousand years: lichen and moss, needle and leaves conspiring to produce this soil, this forest, this animal and plant habitat. I find it healing in a way that I can’t quite explain that in ways entirely outside human influence or control, there are thousands, millions of acres of wild lands busy building themselves on a time scale that I can just barely comprehend. Networks of tree roots and mycelium and pheromones and worm trails, somehow filling the land with rich, abundant life. It inspires awe in my soul and always grounds me.

The author of our reading today from the letter to the Hebrews is also seeking to connect with a broader sweep of time. Probably written in the very last days of the first century, the text is a series of pleas aimed at the small band of Jesus followers to not lose their faith. Because in those days over fifty years since Jesus’ death, there was cultural pressure to drop the counter cultural practices taught by Jesus and just go with the flow of belief in the Roman gods.

But the author opens up time itself and points to Abraham and Sarah, the couple at the heart of the Jewish creation story. God visits this couple, well into their old age, barren and heirless, and promises that their offspring will be as numerous as the stars. Against logic and experience, they conceive. Then God tells them to take their new family and go to an unnamed land that will be theirs. They go. They trust in God’s care.

And the thing is, Abraham and Sarah themselves never received the land God promised them. The story continued past their lives through generation after generation before the Israelites reached the land they would finally settle. That’s exactly the point, says the letter’s author: faith’s timeline often works at a speed that we can’t see. But the fact that we can’t see what’s moving, building, progressing, doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening. And in fact, our faith is part of the alchemy of how God does God’s thing of building a commonwealth for us all.

As the Message translates it, “By faith, we see the world called into existence by God’s word, what we see created by what we don’t see.” (Heb. 11:3) Our faith that God creates outside our view gives us the courage, like Abraham and Sarah, to take seemingly hopeless actions, even actions that feel doomed to fail, that nonetheless feel right even though their outcome isn’t known. And God uses our risky, blind steps in the dark to build our ever-shifting reality.

On our last night, we camped near the shores of Lake of the Clouds. Our small tent crouched underneath massive firs and hemlocks, the canopy high above us. It felt so different than anywhere else we had hiked because of the presence of these grandmother and grandfather trees. We spent the afternoon exploring around the site, eating thimbleberries, finding frogs sitting in the moss, photographing the dozens of mushroom varieties popping up wherever you looked. A scene twelve thousand years in the making.

When your faith has waned, when your one small life feels lost in the world’s chaos, what stories too big for one lifetime have broadened your perspective and restored your hope? My friends, may we never forget that things – good things – are moving, building, and progressing all the time just outside our perception. May we possess the faith of Abraham and Sarah to move towards the impossible, towards our dreams for the healing of this world. God willing, our ancestors may point back to our shaky steps in praise and gratitude. May it be so. Amen.