This morning we are kicking off our sermon series Questions of Faith. During the month of May, we invited you to share your faith questions, and for the next few weeks, we will be exploring these questions. Notice I didn’t say “answering” these questions. When we asked you to submit questions of faith, you dug deeply and gave us questions that were challenging, profound, and mysterious. Jeff and I have been sitting with these questions and wrestling with them, too. And while I hope that this sermon series will give some guidance or food for thought on these questions, we do not claim to have all the answers to them. To be blunt, the answers to these questions are above our pay grade. 

Our previous sermon series was about Mysteries of the Faith, and I think it will be helpful for us to remember that the answers to many of these questions are mysteries, too. Our hope is that over the next few weeks, we can draw a little bit closer to the mystery together. And maybe we will find ourselves embraced by the mystery in a way that helps us draw closer to God.

Today, we will be exploring this question: Faith is belief without evidence, right? How is that a good thing? This question sounds a lot like what the writer of Hebrews said in Hebrews 11: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The word for “assurance” is the word “hypostasis,” which literally means to stand under. It’s a guarantee, something you can stand under that is legally binding. Faith is the promise of things hoped for. It is the internal confirmation or conviction of something we cannot see. Faith is different from evidence because evidence is something we can see, touch, prove. But faith? Faith is belief even when evidence is not available. The person who asked this question wondered: “How is this a good thing?” And I would add the question: “Is this a good thing?”

To help us explore this question, we have before us the story of God calling Abram and Sarai to leave their homeland and go to Canaan. This passage from Genesis happens to be the Old Testament selection for today in the Revised Common Lectionary – a list of Scripture texts for reading and preaching that many churches follow. This story is an invitation to consider the relationship between faith and evidence.

To get a fuller picture of the story of Abram’s call, we need to back up a few verses to the end of Genesis 11:

Now these are the descendants of Terah. Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran was the father of Lot. Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans. Abram and Nahor took wives; the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah. She was the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah.Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.

Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there.The days of Terah were two hundred five years; and Terah died in Haran (Genesis 11:27-32).

Abram had lived in Ur of the Chaldeans with his father, his uncle Haran, and his nephew Lot. While in Ur, Abram married Sarai, and his uncle Haran died. For some reason that the biblical text does not tell us, Abram’s father Terah decided to move his family from Ur to Canaan. Along the journey, Terah and his family came to Haran, and they decided to settle there, some 600 miles from their homeland in Ur. 

They remained in Haran, where Terah eventually died. Then, the Lord spoke to Abram. Professor of Old Testament Kathryn Schifferdecker writes this about God’s call to Abram: “It is hard to overestimate the importance of this week’s story. Genesis 12 is a key text for understanding not only the whole book of Genesis, but also the whole Old Testament. It is also a turning point in the book of Genesis. Before this chapter, of course, we have all the familiar stories that make up what scholars call the ‘primeval history’ — Creation, the Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood. Beginning with this chapter, the focus narrows; instead of stories about cosmic beginnings, we read stories about one particular couple, Abram/Abraham and Sarai/Sarah, and their family.”

Until recently, the part of this story that captured me the most was Abram’s willingness to move his family from Haran. I grew up in a family that moved every 3-5 years, and I did not handle the moves very well. As a quiet, introverted, and studious (or, nerdy) kid, I struggled to make friends and find a new routine. Once I started to find my people and feel at home, it was time to move again. That history made it very difficult for me when Jeff and I started to sense God calling us away from our ministry in Iowa. I didn’t want my kids to have the same experience I did with feeling like I never really belonged anywhere. But, when God called Jeff and me to leave our home in Iowa–the place where our kids had experienced all their first milestones–and move to western Nebraska, I knew in my bones that it was right for us to move.  

I still felt the grief of leaving behind our relationships, our home, our community, but I knew it was right, and I was grateful for that. I used to read this story and wonder what Abram thought about leaving Haran and his life near the Euphrates River. I wondered if he felt sure in his bones that uprooting and moving to Canaan was the right thing to do. I still wonder about this, even though the Scripture text itself doesn’t give us any clues about Abram’s thoughts. 

But, something else has captivated me about this story recently: Abram’s willingness to trust in the calling of a Lord he most likely had never encountered before. You see, Abram grew up in Ur of the Chaldeans. As far as religion goes, Abram was probably most familiar with the gods in the Babylonian pantheon. We know that Abram’s father Terah had worshiped gods other than the God of Israel because of what we find in Joshua 24:2: “Joshua said to all the people, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: “Long ago your ancestors, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates River and worshiped other gods.”’”

  According to some Jewish midrash, Abram realized that the gods his father worshiped were false gods. In these stories, Abram took an ax and destroyed all of Terah’s idols. This explanation is given as the background to why Abram was willing to walk away from his upbringing. While this could certainly have happened, the story in Genesis 11 does not say for sure. All we know is that Terah had worshiped gods other than the Lord, and after Terah died, God called Abram to move his family to Canaan. 

How did Abram know the call he was hearing was from the Lord? And, even if he knew he was hearing from the Lord, how did he know he could trust the Lord if he had grown up surrounded by other gods and other ways of worshiping? It amazes me that Abram was surrounded by other gods, and yet when he heard the call of the Lord, he seemingly got up immediately, packed what he had, and led his family away from Haran. It’s hard enough to move and leave behind everything you know when you are convinced it is the right thing to do. How could Abram have so much faith and be willing to take such a risk without really knowing the Lord before this?

We get a little bit more information in the speech Stephen gave in Acts 7. Stephen said, “Brothers and fathers, listen to me. The God of glory appeared to our ancestor Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, and said to him, ‘Leave your country and your relatives and go to the land that I will show you.’ Then he left the country of the Chaldeans and settled in Haran. After his father died, God had him move from there to this country in which you are now living.” It seems that when Terah first moved his family from Ur to Haran, it was because God had called out to Abram. For some reason, Terah had agreed initially to the journey, and then something happened that caused him to settle in Haran instead. After Abram’s father died, Got called out to him again, this time calling him to leave Haran and continue the journey to Canaan.

And yet, even if Abram had heard from God once before, how did he find the faith to uproot his family not once, but twice, at the call of a God who was largely unfamiliar to him. And, to get more at the question we are exploring today, how can we find faith like Abram when we are in situations where the path ahead is unclear? Corrie ten Boom once said, “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God,” and I agree. But, how do we know God? And, how do we trust God’s leading? 

First, it’s not easy. I think we have to get that out of the way right off the bat because faith is a process and it doesn’t come naturally to all of us. Some of us are able to quiet down our hearts and minds and listen for God’s leading, and once we feel a nudge, we are able to take action–like Abram when he began his journey to Canaan. But, for most of us, faith can be difficult. When Jeff and I felt called to go to seminary, I think we made a hundred budgets (not much exaggeration here) because we wanted to know we would be able to manage it financially. Every single budget we made wouldn’t balance. The evidence we craved just wasn’t there. I wish I could say we took a deep breath and brushed those doubts aside, but instead we lost a lot of hours of sleep. We worried and we prayed, “God, is this the right thing for us to do?” 

After making yet another unbalanced budget, Jeff and I realized that we had two choices: step out in faith because we felt certain God was calling us, or walk away from the calling because we couldn’t find the evidence we wanted. We decided to take the leap, and I’m so glad we did. We never went without. God took care of us. And yet, when we first took the leap, I still worried that we were testing God. Faith is not easy. It’s not straightforward. We felt compelled to take the leap, but someone else in the exact same situation might feel compelled to walk away from a decision that feels risky, and God could be behind them walking away just as God was behind us taking the leap. Faith is tough.

Even still, I don’t think faith is 100% without evidence. When God called Abram, God made promises that help us understand the nature of God. God promises to bless Abram’s family, and God promises to bless the nations of the world through Abram. What are the two greatest commandments? To love the Lord with all we are, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Anything that calls us away from love is not from God, and that’s something we can always cling to. If a decision in front of us has the potential to lead us to make decisions that do not love our neighbors, those decisions are not decisions from God. 

Returning to our question: If faith is belief without evidence, how is that a good thing? I believe it’s a good thing because certainty can easily become self-righteousness. When we have all the answers, we can forget about loving God and our neighbors. But faith requires us to lean–on God and on others–to help us know what steps we should take. Certainty urges us to lean inside of ourselves for the answers, but faith gives us the courage to lean on others in community, and to lean on God who ultimately wants what is best for us. 

May we be people who have the courage to admit when we don’t have all the answers. May we find strength in leaning on each other, and in holding up the light for one another when the path ahead is dark and uncertain. May we find the courage to take steps in faith as we follow God who blesses us so that we can be a blessing to others. Amen.