Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
I don’t usually go in to the church on Fridays, but last Friday I was there to meet a couple named Billy and Liz McCullough. Billy and Liz are from Northern Ireland and they are visiting the area indulging Billy’s special interest: Francis Makemie.
That’s a name that is very familiar in our region ofthe world. Francis Makemie is known as the founder of several churches on the Delmarva Peninsula, including ours. We all claim our founding date in 1683, because that is the year Francis Makemie arrived on our shores. He was invited to come here by Colonel William Stevens, who was an Episcopalian living in Somerset County.
Makemie was apparently a good organizer, because he traveled among the Scots-Irish communities, who were all Presbyterian, and helped them organize into congregations. Later, he helped organize the first presbytery in America in Philadelphia.
He was also, I’m guessing, quite the diplomat. The Scots-Irish, I’ve been told, were rather belligerent by nature. It was an ethnic group born in conflict, and never seeming to escape it. As a result, they were fairly suspicious of others, including other Scots-Irish communities. I am sure they were not easy to organize. But Makemie managed to do it.
So as I sat down to think about this well-known passage on the meaning of faith from the letter to the Hebrews, Francis Makemie was on my mind. He was clearly a man well-grounded in faith. And being well-grounded, he was constantly on the move.
Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not see. These words from Hebrews 11 are just about as familiar as any words of scripture. They tell us, very succinctly, two things: Faith is assurance and conviction. Faith assures us we are on solid ground and gives us the conviction needed to take action. Faith is both comfort and passion, solace and purpose.
Because of this, faith is not passive. Faith acts.
And the letter to the Hebrews takes us backward to show us this. We go on a stroll through our history to remember those individuals who were so instrumental in building the structures of our faith. Abraham and Sarah set out from their home, the land of their ancestors, because they were called by the voice of God to do so. They traveled toward a place they did not know – not only was this all uncharted territory for them, they literally did not know what the game plan was. They simply journeyed on by stages, trusting in God to show them the way forward, every step of the way.
Abraham and Sarah followed the call of God through barren wildernesses and lands in which they were the aliens, the strangers. Places where their lives were at risk.
Abraham and Sarah followed a promise. A hope. They did not see God, nor did they see the land God promised them. They did not see the promised generations that would be as many as the stars in the sky, as many as the grains of sand on the shore. But they, and all those who followed them – Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Samuel, David, and many others – acted by faith born out of hope.
This chapter of the letter is a recitation of the faith hall of fame. I can picture all these men and women walking into a packed stadium like olympians, doing a slow victory lap around the track while we cheer and express our appreciation for the part they played. We are thankful for them all – not just the giants of scripture, but all the church fathers and mothers, all the way through our history, including Francis Makemie, who organized Wicomico Presbyterian Church, which has stood as a place of worship for well over 300 years now.
There is something really cool about having such a long history. It means we have a special story. It is an important part of who we are. Yet, there is a danger of letting this special story overshadow everything else. There is a real risk that we will let this special story become the end of our story – instead of the pattern for our story.
The narrative in Hebrews shows us how each of these amazing individuals – Abraham, Sarah, and all the others – lived in faith, acted courageously for the sake of the promise of God. And it shows us how they died in faith, never having received the promises, but only seeing them from a distance. Each one of these heroes of the faith played a small part in the story.
We are a part of this story of faith – the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And if we look to these men and women we read about in the scriptures, what do we see? If we look to these men and women we see in the history books, what do we learn?
How do the faithful actions of Abraham and Sarah and Francis Makemie create a pattern for us to follow? In venturing out for new places, not knowing what they would encounter nor what would be expected of them, how do they guide us?
Francis Makemie had a religious conversion as a young man. While at Glasgow University as a student, he experienced the call to become a minister. He was ordained in West Ulster, Ireland in 1681 and almost immediately was called as a missionary to America. Like Abraham, he was sent out to a place he did not know.
Unlike Abraham, I suppose, he did know something about his mission, and he went at it with zeal. He learned the territory, he adapted to the local customs, and he left his mark here. The Makemie name lives on here on the Eastern Shore.
After his work here, he traveled up and down the Atlantic coast from New York to North Carolina. In New York he was arrested for preaching without a license. Presbyterians were not especially welcome there. Makemie spent two months in jail and endured a trial – which he won, but at great expense. His case would later become known as a landmark case in the fight for religious freedom in America, something written into our constitution that most Americans are fiercely proud of.
Now, more than 300 years later, the Makemie Churches remain. They have moved from one building to another to another, but are still serving the communities in which they were established. This vast continent has been covered from shore to shore with transplants like Makemie, who have planted churches of all kinds.
Now in this place, more than 300 years later, religious freedom is something we have come to take for granted. It’s hard for us to imagine a time when Baptists and Congregationalists and Episcopalians and Catholics fought with each other. We don’t need to fight anymore. And we don’t need to set out for new unknown places anymore.
Does this mean the journey of faith is over? As the Apostle Paul would say, by no means!
We may not have to journey across physical distances now, but the church is traveling through uncharted territory, nonetheless. We are journeying through wilderness every day, where the things we always did before somehow make less sense now. Maybe we’re sad about that. Maybe we miss those old days when things made more sense, when the world made more sense to us.
But we owe it to the ancestors of our faith to keep moving forward. We need to follow the pattern they created for us: move forward through the wilderness, courageously, decisively, boldly. We must be willing to make mistakes just as Abraham did and Makemie did. We must be willing to do this all for the sake of the gospel.
The letter to the Hebrews says that these ancestors of the faith were foreigners on earth, seeking a better land, a heavenly land. We too are seeking this better land –
A land where all of God’s people will be at home, where children will not be separated from their parents.
A land where weapons are no longer useful but, as Isaiah says, swords are beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks.
A land where there is bread enough for all, and all receive their daily bread.
This is the land the scriptures tell us about. This is the promise of God, that all our heroes of the faith have journeyed toward. None of them got there; they only saw it from a distance. We, too, may only see it from a distance. But we journey on
Through uncharted territory.
The church always has something to move toward, something to fight for in this world.
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