The Story of Faith

Synopsis: Faith is the paradoxical belief in the unseen and the hoped-for, guiding us to act towards a better future even when it seems impossible.


When I was younger, trying to figure out what I believed, something that really helped me was the eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews.

Hebrews is in the New Testament. It is a letter and a bit of a mystery. The author is anonymous, and the recipients are never specified. Those are generally the two most important aspects of a letter—the “to:” and the “from:” —and we don’t know either of them!

But we can infer a thing or two. The letter seems to be written to Jewish followers of Jesus because it references Jewish stories and other things Jews were concerned with. The writer’s identity is less clear, but whoever it was who wrote Hebrews, she must have been really smart.

The part of Hebrews that was so formative for my own faith is chapter 11. The chapter is all about faith, and it cites the near entirety of Jewish history to illustrate what faith is.

This chapter serves as one big definition of faith. A chapter to define one word may seem excessive, but faith is hard to define succinctly. What is faith? Belief in something? Belief in what? Belief in God? Belief in fate? Belief in the fact that Elvis Presley is still alive out there somewhere? Are all those faith? Do you have to believe at all times for it to be faith? Or can you doubt? How often? And for how long? Is faith an intellectual exercise? Or is it purely emotional? Or purely spiritual? Is faith something we can produce more or less of? How?

See? Just by listing questions, you could fill a book with possible definitions of faith.

But Hebrews 11 begins with the best kind of definition—one that is simple but expandable: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” That's from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. If you look this verse up in multiple translations of the Bible, you’ll find a fairly wide variety of interpretations. That is an indicator that we can’t be super sure what the original author was trying to say, and understanding it will require some responsible creativity.

The phrasing of the NRSV translation is unfortunate because it makes faith sound like something intellectually dishonest and potentially dangerous. The things you hope for are assured. The things you can’t see are a conviction. It sounds like you need to be sure of the things that no one is really sure about. There’s a word for that: delusion.

But, as I said, what we have here takes some interpretation. The rigid words in that verse that make me uncomfortable—“assurance” and “conviction”—have footnotes next to each of them. The footnotes say “assurance” could mean “reality,” and “conviction” could mean “evidence.” In that case, it would read: “faith is the reality of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” That, if you ask me, is a totally different meaning! One that sounds more like an exercise in imagination than the rigid thinking that makes me nervous.

Let's acknowledge that the new meaning is still strange in that it is paradoxical. Paradoxical means something doesn't make sense, but in a good way. In a way that fits our experience. And we experience paradox all the time, especially when it comes to meaningful feelings and experiences. All deep truth is paradoxical.

For instance, when you fall in love, you feel like you're walking on air. But you also feel like you’re about to die. You feel like you could do anything, and you also feel like one false move could ruin the whole thing. It doesn't make sense, but it's also not wrong. It's the weird, messy reality of what being in love feels like!

In the same way, “the reality of things hoped for” doesn't make sense. The things we hope for aren't reality. If they were real, we wouldn't be hoping for them.

Ditto on “the evidence of things unseen.” Evidence means proof. Evidence is something you look at, and now you know what's true. You can't have evidence of something you can't see. If it's unseen, it's not evidence.

And yet...

Sometimes there's something you hope for that's not a reality, but somehow you know it will be. And sometimes you can’t see it, but you know—somehow—you KNOW you couldn’t be more sure about it. You can’t explain it. It’s like a gut feeling, but it’s more than a feeling. It’s... the reality of things hoped for. The evidence of things not seen. It’s the impossibly possible. The unbelievably believable. The definite maybe. It’s faith.

I can’t think of the mystery of faith without thinking of *Star Wars*. The film, not the franchise. Yes, there was a time when *Star Wars* was one movie, with no subtitle or episode number or anything. It was just *Star Wars*.

At the end of *Star Wars*, it’s up to Luke Skywalker to destroy the Death Star before it can destroy the Rebel base and go on to destroy countless worlds. To do that, Luke has to shoot a photon torpedo into a teeny tiny ventilation shaft. More experienced pilots have already tried and failed to do this, and now—with time running out—it’s all up to Luke.

As he approaches, he hears the voice of his recently departed mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, telling him, “Trust the Force.” Then Luke does something crazy. He turns off his targeting computer. He actively makes it harder for himself to hit the target. Yet when he fires the torpedoes, as if guided there by fate, they fly right to their target.

The dreaded Death Star explodes. Luke has saved the day. And he does it by trusting the Force—something he can’t see or control. That’s faith, isn’t it? What better way is there to describe it?

A story is a good way to understand faith. A lot of our best stories are built around faith. So many great films are about someone learning to believe in something—*It’s a Wonderful Life*, *Groundhog Day*, *The Matrix*... *Elf*. Faith may be hard to define on paper, but in stories... it’s almost as if our understanding of faith is built in. It’s like all we need to really understand faith is the right story.

The author of Hebrews agrees with that! For the rest of the chapter, they continue defining faith, but with stories. They go on to list over a dozen stories of heroes from the Bible. And what links these heroes together? They all became heroes by faith.

Let’s look at the first three.

Firstly, Abel. This story is in Genesis. Abel was the very first good boy. We humans didn’t have a great start according to the Bible. Abel’s parents, Adam and Eve, broke the one rule God gave them. The one and only thing they weren’t supposed to do, they did. Abel’s brother, Cain, was another disappointment—he committed the world’s first murder. And the guy he killed happened to be Abel.

Cain’s murder of Abel was a crime of passion. He killed Abel because God said Abel’s sacrifice was better. Sacrifices were a common way of worshiping in the ancient world. You basically offer your god something important—usually food—by burning it up. For example, Abel is a shepherd, so he sacrifices one of his sheep. And yet the text of Genesis doesn’t say why God preferred Abel’s sacrifice to Cain’s. In fact, this was something we couldn’t figure out in Adult Bible Study. We spent a lot of time on it and didn’t come up with an answer. What made Abel’s sacrifice better than Cain’s?

Well, the author of Hebrews thinks they know. And the answer is [dum dum dum] faith.

A sacrifice, like any other religious obligation, is easy to do in a way that’s, well, obligatory. In the way we modern people worship, it’s entirely possible to come to church, stand up and sit down at the right time, sing the right words, speak at the right time, and do it all by rote—without ever thinking about the actions you’re performing. In other words, you can do it all “right” without ever needing faith.

I imagine this is what Cain did. Oh, God wants a sacrifice? K, here. Is’at good? Which, from God’s point of view, must feel like, I got you flowers from the grocery store, I left them in the toilet for you.

Any time you worship or pray, you’re doing something that isn’t actually the real thing you want to do. When you’re baptized, all that’s happening materially is that you’re getting yourself wet—either a little or a lot, depending on your tradition. But we don’t do baptism to get wet. We do it to demonstrate a new connection to God. That’s the important part AND it’s the part no one can see.

So I expect that the author of Hebrews is likely right. Abel’s sacrifice was better because he wasn’t merely lighting meat on fire. He was doing the invisible part too. He was really giving something to God. Which is, when you think about it... ridiculous. God doesn’t need anything we can give, least of all a burnt sheep. But that’s the point of worship. We do something physically—we sing, pray, give—so we can do something spiritually—the part we can’t perceive, the part we’re actually longing for: connection with the divine.

The next hero is Enoch. Or, as we know him, Who?? Enoch is a character very briefly mentioned in Genesis. The only information we get about him—besides his place in the patriarchal family tree—is this: “Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him” (Genesis 5:24). Dude was so holy, he didn't die—he

just went to be with God. That's impossible! Or is it?

It’s kind of fun that hero #2 in this long list of faith heroes is a total mystery. Like, you know what faith’s like? Faith is like a mystery you’re not going to understand at all, even if you read the backstory.

This section concludes with Noah. He of the ark full of animals. In Genesis, when God saw the world getting more and more evil, Noah seemed to God to be a good place to restart. By the way, if you feel like it's monstrous of God to kill 99.9% of life on earth—you’re right. (Even Thanos stopped at 50%!)

But the thing to remember is that in ancient times, the gods were thought of as completely capricious and uncaring. No one would’ve been surprised by a god that floods the earth. In fact, similar flood stories are found in ancient cultures around the world. But they would have been surprised by a god that promises to never do it again, as the God of the Bible does.

But that’s God’s part of the story—and a whole other sermon. Let’s focus back on Noah and his faith.

Noah is asked to do something insane—build the biggest boat anyone has ever seen. And wait for rain. In most depictions of this story, we imagine the rest of the world laughing at Noah. It seems like he’s preparing for the impossible. Until it starts raining. And the impossible becomes reality.

So those are the first three stories meant to give us a better understanding of faith. Next week, we’ll look at more. But one more point:

I can easily imagine someone having heard all this and still thinking of faith as something foolish or even dangerous. Because the association with faith is that your faith would be in God being real, or Jesus “dying for your sins,” whatever that means, or that the Bible is 100% factually correct, even the parts with talking snakes and magic. Many can’t help but see faith as a process of talking yourself into silly, outdated ideas about the universe.

But faith isn’t that small. The reality of things hoped for includes hope for a world free from racism and homophobia. The evidence of things not seen includes impossible things like peace or compassion. The kind of world we want to live in is impossible. You’re never going to get a world with this many selfish people to work together and make a better world. And yet there are people who work for it every single day. Those people are crazy, but history usually proves them right. The world gets better because of the people who have faith that it will.

Abel, having faith in an empty ritual, filling it with spiritual reality. Enoch, blurring the lines between heaven and earth. Noah, preparing for a reality that’s not here yet.

Faith is living into a better future. Dancing to music that has yet to be played. And the good news is that faith is nothing new. It was available to the heroes of our oldest stories, it is available to us today, and it will lead us to the stories God has written just for us.


God of our Ancestors,
Thank you for faith—our path to the impossible, made real.
Give us the intentionality of Abel,
the imagination of Enoch,
and Noah’s anticipation of impossibility.
In the name of Jesus, the culmination of all of God’s stories, we all say AMEN.