Ninth Sunday after Pentecost: August 10, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson
Readings: Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 | Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24 | Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16 | Luke 12:32-40
In the context of Luke’s gospel, our passage today comes on heels of Jesus’ exhortation to his disciples to guard against the fears and anxieties of this life in light of the ultimate concerns of the coming kingdom of God. You may recall from last week that as Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, the crowds following him and coming out to hear him were growing in number. Jesus turns his attention to the disciples, encouraging them not to fear those who have power only to kill the body but instead to fear the One who has authority to cast into hell. Someone in the crowd then asks Jesus to settle a family financial dispute, which leads Jesus to exhort his listeners to be on guard against all kinds of greed by storing up treasures that make them rich toward God. The ultimate concern of Jesus’ disciples is not about protecting one’s riches or wealth, nor is it even about calming our anxieties about life, food, and clothing. Worry about such things adds nothing to our lives, Jesus explains. “Do not be afraid, little flock,” these things that occupy your minds are impeding your perception of God’s will and activity in your lives. Instead of living from this place of fear, Jesus instructs, “be dressed for action and have your lamps lit,” be ready, keep watch, be vigilant and prepared for the kingdom to come in all its fullness.
I suspect that many of us here today know the weight of “keeping watch,” of being vigilant and tending to the signs of the times. We yearn for the return of “the master,” for a time when the world will be put right. We long to see an end to the endless cycles of death and destruction, an end to state-sponsored starvation and annihilation, an end to the greed that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, an end to the violent ways that greed and fear lead to self-preservation. Like the prophet Isaiah, we are weary of the “rulers of Sodom” and the “people of Gomorrah” whose bloodied hands inflict injustice in our streets while professing loyalty to the will of God. I suspect many of us here wonder how long we must endure until the rich and powerful are sent away empty and the hungry are satisfied.
In light of this, it may seem cliché to turn to the letter to the Hebrews. After all, most of us have probably been on the receiving end of the well-meaning pastor or friend or family member who bids us “just to have a little more faith” in the face of the sometimes-overwhelming circumstances of life. “Keep the faith,” we’re told, “hold onto hope, things will get better.” This would suggest that faith and hope are little more than optimism, a belief in the inevitable progress toward the good, the better, the more secure. But this is not, ultimately, the faith and hope meant by the writer to the Hebrews. Faith is not about belief, nor is hope about optimism. Earlier in the letter, the writer reminds the readers who were facing social and political oppression that Jesus’ self-sacrifice is the foundational and compelling force of their own faith, hope, and love, that Jesus’ death and resurrection is “sufficient to sustain their hope and provoke each other to deeds of love.”[i]
In the chapter from which our reading comes today, we are reminded that the content of our hope is intimately connected to our experience of faith and that we cannot assume or expect that our faith will be supported by the surrounding culture. Our faith and hope begin and end with Jesus, and so to look to the world-at-large as a source to bolster our faith and hope is to land us squarely into the cycles of fear and doom-scrolling that produce the anxieties that Jesus confronts in his teaching.
Faith is less about belief and more about trust. It is a trust that is compelled by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus which reveals to us the nature of the God whose good pleasure it is to give us the kingdom of God. It is a trust in the ultimate goodness of this God whose tender care for us frees us from the need to follow in the ways of the world that focus our attention on self-preservation and security. And hope is not about a pie-in-the-sky optimism that all things will be okay if we just believe. Hope is an orientation to a reality not yet seen bolstered by trust in the promises of God. It is a way of life rather than an emotional or intellectual disposition, and it is founded in the longing we have to see the coming of the reign of God in its fullness in a world that is often characterized by its lack.
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” the writer of the letter tells us. In other words, Faith is the reality of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. If you’re like me, the practice of keeping watch and staying vigilant can slip rather easily into total focus on the things that are wrong with this world, to decry the “rulers of Sodom” and the “people of Gomorrah” whose bloodied hands kill and destroy. Inevitably, this leads me to practices of preparation that are about my own self-preservation, particularly as anti-trans legislation continues to pass in local, state, and federal government: what might be the final nail in the coffin that will lead me to leave this country? What do I need in a go-bag? What will happen to Asher if I need to leave? Where would I go, where would I be safe?
And yet, this is not the kind of keeping watch or preparation that Jesus talks about in our passage today. Jesus doesn’t bid us to keep watch by focusing on the catastrophes of our world or to prepare for such catastrophes by conceiving plans of self-preservation. Please hear me – I am not suggesting that caring for ourselves and our families is something we abandon. I don’t think that’s what Jesus is saying. Instead, Jesus is inviting us to trust that God cares for us and for our families and for our world more than we do. Jesus invites us to step out of the culture of fear in which we exist and trust in God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom, to draw us into God’s good future where the promises of liberation, freedom, and healing are fulfilled.
“Faith is the reality of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This definition of faith is paradoxical as it places our hope in things unseen while also suggesting that there is evidence of those very things. When we get stuck in the practices of keeping watch and preparation that keep us focused on the evil of this world, we tend to miss those experiences that reveal glimpses of the coming kingdom. Our faith and our hope become disconnected, leaving us blind to the will and work of God in our lives and in our world. Our longing turns into despair and our faith into empty rhetoric, and we lose the capacity to imagine something different, to see the reality of what God is building in our midst, to wonder at the impossible possibilities that flow from God’s good pleasure.
Friends, there is so much about our world right now that can tempt us into the wrong kind of vigilance, to get caught in the cycles of doom-scrolling, anxiety, and worry. But Jesus invites us to step out of that place of fear and into a place of trust. No, it’s not easy, especially when the doom that shrouds our world impacts us on very real levels. But when our vigilance is kept from this place of trust rather than fear or worry, we will find ourselves freed from the tyranny of the powers and principalities of this world to focus on that which matters most. From this place of trust, we can “learn to do good,” to “seek justice” and “rescue the oppressed,” to “defend the orphan,” and “plead for the widow.” These are the acts of preparation that Jesus bids us to practice, these are the actions that provide the “evidence of things unseen,” that open us to the substance of our faith and hope as we long for the fullness of God’s reign, as we learn to embrace the impossible possibility of what can be.
May God’s grace sustain us in faith and bolster our hope, that we might trust more fully in God’s good pleasure for us and for this world. Amen.
[i] John C. Shelley, “Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16: Theological Perspective” in Feasting on the Word: Year C, Vol. 3, 328-332.