Several months ago when we were talking about mobilizing the whole church to participate in our capital stewardship campaign the Children’s Ministry department came up with the idea of having our kids collect pennies. The ultimate goal is for the kids to amass “a mile of pennies.” But we needed to know how many pennies there are in a mile, so Karen Jensen and Kathy Hogan got busy calculating. The first thing they noted, in a report to me, was that there are 5,280 feet in a mile, slightly more if they are small feet and slightly less if they are large feet. And then they measured how many pennies it takes to make a foot, in two fashions: lying end-to-end and stacked. Would anyone care to guess how many pennies it takes lying end-to-end to make a mile? The answer we came up with was 84,410. And would anyone care to guess how many it takes if they are stacked? That number is, of course, higher: 1,077,120. One stacked mile of pennies is $10,771.12. Therefore we need a little over 1,671 miles of pennies to make the $18 million we will eventually need to complete the entire master plan for campus development.

Based on the current level of pledges and commitments, we are over a third of the way there! The level of our giving at this stage will determine whether or not we are able to undertake the whole development plan right now or if we’ll need to approach it in phases. In either case, we still have a very large task ahead of us. And that should not surprise us nor deter us, because scripture teaches us that it is in the very nature of our faith that the life of discipleship to Jesus Christ is a life of discipline, of persistence, of what Eugene Peterson has called “a long obedience in the same direction.” The project of building or developing a church home is a fairly simple metaphor or example of the much more important project of building a life of following Jesus Christ, or building a body of believers into a microcosm of the Kingdom of God. This business of working on God’s plan to build his people into a holy nation starts with a great step of faith, but that step is followed by countless more. Fifty years ago, a group of people gathered in this community to start a church, and for fifty long years, thousands of other people have worked, day in and day out, to build this church and to build themselves in the process. We are being launched into a new phase of church life in this season, and this will require not just great dreams or promising beginnings: it will require persistence that is born of faith in what God is doing with his Village Church.

One of the most compelling pictures of this fundamental dynamic of Christian faith and Christian faithfulness comes to us from the pages of the letter to the Hebrews. In the early portions of this letter, the early church was being taught about the true nature of Jesus Christ. They were discovering the theological richness of who Jesus was as the ultimate prophet and priest and king. These early Christians were learning some of the profound implications of Jesus’ life and message and especially of his death and resurrection, and they were learning also some profound implications for their own lives as they moved more deeply into the life of following him as their Lord and Savior. One of the things they were learning was that when you follow Jesus sometimes that takes you into places that are not easy to go, into attitudes and actions that run counter to the prevailing mood, along a pathway of life that sometimes leads to glory by way of a cross. The early church was learning about the difficulty of following Jesus in the everyday challenges of life and in the acute challenges that come in the face of opposition and even persecution.

To bolster their courage, the author of Hebrews reminds his readers of the nature of faith itself. It is, he says, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The key here to understanding faith is the fact that faith is seeing something that cannot be seen, knowing something that cannot be known, at least, not in the normal sense. The author of Hebrews does not so much seek to describe this faith as he simply illustrates it for us in the lives of well-known heroes from Jewish history. We cannot dwell on them all, and so we’ll focus just on Noah. Noah heard a message that he trusted was from God. The message was quite fantastic and in the normal realm of things, unbelievable. But Noah saw what couldn’t be seen and knew what couldn’t be known, and so he built a boat. What Noah saw and knew eventually came to pass. But in the beginning, all Noah had was his faith.

To Christians facing ostracism and persecution, Noah was a useful hero. The Christians had decided to follow a God who had been very real and present to them in the form of a man, but the only problem was that the man was gone now and, to the world’s way of thinking, not very much like a God at all. The Christians were acting something like Noah as far as the rest of the world was concerned, not very rationally or normally. They talked of forgiveness of sin rather than paying for your mistakes, of loving enemies rather than destroying them, of caring for the weak rather than using them. They started acting as if they were living in a different world, and because they did, they started changing the world into the kind of place that they were dreaming it could be. They had faith that things could be different. They saw a new way. And they started living it.

All progress, all change, all growth, all maturation depends on seeing a new way. Many years ago when I was faced with making some key decisions about where my future ministry would be, I asked Tom Gillespie, then President of Princeton Seminary, what wisdom he could share about how a person could know when God was calling you in a certain direction of life. One of the things he said was this: “Try to see yourself in the particular church to which you have an opportunity to move, and if you can see yourself there, then perhaps it is God’s call. If you cannot see yourself in that context, it is not God.” I tried that. I tried literally picturing myself working in the different churches that were calling me. In most cases, I couldn’t do it. In some cases, I could. It all depended on what I could see. If I could see it, then I could have faith that it was the right way to go.

Faith depends on seeing what cannot be seen and knowing what cannot be known. And then it depends on keeping that vision and knowledge uppermost in your mind as you follow it. That principle applies to everything in your life, not just to situations involving religion. Holding the vision in front of you and knowing that it exists in reality is what allows you to continue, to persevere, to persist. Have you ever been lost in a strange city or lost in the mountains, and someone in your group says, “It’s okay, I think I can get us home?” And then they proceed to take off down some street or up some hill, and you don’t really have any clue where you are, but they are so sure of themselves that you just have to trust them? If their vision is correct, if their faith is trustworthy, they get you home, don’t they? If not, well, then the situation is hopeless.

Hebrews reminds us that our faith is not in ourselves. And our faith is not a good thing just because it is faith. No, the quality of our faith and the trustworthiness of our vision depends upon whom we place our faith in, and in whom our vision has its foundation. Hebrews reminds us that we can persist and we can prevail because our faith is in “Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” There is Jesus, the one whom we thought was disgraced and dead and gone, but now he is sitting with God. He is the one who gives the vision. He is the one in whom we place our faith. Therefore, we keep going, because we know what lies at the end.

It makes a difference whom you follow. It makes a difference what you believe. It makes a difference what vision you see. The great preacher of the early 1900’s, Harry Emerson Fosdick, pointed out this fact about another hero of our faith, the Apostle Paul. Paul ended up more or less like Jesus, disgraced and dead. Fosdick reminded us that the Roman Emperor Nero had condemned Paul, but now, people name their sons Paul and they name their dogs Nero. It makes a difference whom you follow, what you believe, what vision you see. Because we follow the Lord of the Universe who now sits in God’s place because he is God, we can follow with unstoppable perseverance, unshakable persistence.

William Barclay writes: “The Christian is not an unconcerned stroller along the byways of life; he is a wayfarer on the high road. He is not a tourist, who returns each night to the place from which he starts; he is a pilgrim who is for ever on the way. The goal is nothing less than the likeness of Christ.” Who do you want to look like when you come to the end of your life? I’ll bet that most of us want to enter heaven looking like a younger version of ourselves. But the vision of Hebrews and of all scripture is that we would look something like Christ. And that, I pray, is the vision that propels everything that we do together in this church, and the vision that propels everything that you do in your personal walk with Christ. I want us to see a vision of ourselves as people who know our purpose, to become like Christ and to do the things Christ did on earth. I want us to see a vision of ourselves as people who love, who heal, who forgive, who restore, who renew, who redeem, who create, who correct, who bring the truth and grace and peace of God to bear in every situation of our lives. I want us to see a vision of our church as a place where people are invited to get to know Jesus, where they are trained in following Jesus, and then where they are given the tools and the opportunities and the resources to do what Jesus would do himself, out in the world.

The singer Josh Groban has a popular song from several years ago. It could be a song about a friend or a lover, I don’t really know. To me, though, it can be a great song about our journey with Christ. It goes like this:

When I am down and, oh my soul, so weary;
When troubles come and my heart burdened be;
Then, I am still and wait here in the silence,
Until you come and sit awhile with me.

You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains;
You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas;
I am strong, when I am on your shoulders;
You raise me up…to more than I can be.

We have a little building project going on here that is really only a visible part of a much greater invisible reality, the reality of the Kingdom of God that is growing in each one of us and in all of us together. It takes a lot of pennies to make a mile of them, and I’m told that we already have 28,020! It takes a lot of persistence and patience and perseverance to keep walking every mile with Christ. But as long as we see him in front of us, and as long as we see ourselves someday looking just like him, we’ll get there. He is the one who raises us up to more than we can be. Look closely to Jesus, only to Jesus. Can you see him?

Amen.

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