Several weeks ago the Union Pacific Railroad took one of their Big Boy steam locomotives on a nationwide tour to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary. It came through upstate New York and I know several of our members went to see it. I did not get a chance to see it. It is understandable why steam locomotives are fascinating to us. They are complex and you can see the complexity in motion. The wheel drive rods, eccentric rods, and valve systems are mesmerizing to watch as power is transferred to the wheels. There’s also the boiler and all its piping, the sand domes, superheaters, and turbine generators, which may or may not make sense to you, but they are all in view. Ultimately, you can see the power in motion.
Contrast a steam locomotive with a diesel or electric locomotive. Even though a diesel or electric may be equal or greater in power, there’s nothing to see. They’re relatively dull.
The same could be said for clocks. It can be mesmerizing to see the insides of an antique mechanical clock. The pendulum, escape mechanism, and gears are all in motion at various speeds and directions. But an electric clock, even if it has moving hands and a second hand, is dull. There’s nothing to see.
Keep the fascination of a smooth running mechanism in mind and imagine yourself as a Jew living almost 3000 years ago. Perhaps you live in the countryside about 30 or 40 miles from Jerusalem. You live close enough to make it to Jerusalem for the three pilgrimage holidays each year. Jerusalem is the holiest city and the temple is its holiest place. The temple building isn’t big by today’s standards, (It was roughly the size of our sanctuary and surrounded by levels of storerooms.) but it was the biggest and most impressive building you’d ever see in your life. Around it are the altar and fires, smoke, and incense. Priests and officials come and go in orderly fashion. There were holy objects: cups, basins, ladles, fire pokers, and more. Animal and grain offerings are made regularly. Special bread is made and taken in and out. The temple, the center of your faith and religion, visibly runs like smooth machinery. It is a spectacle like a large steam locomotive running today. But instead of being a means of transportation, it is the mechanism of faith at work: forgiveness, reconciliation, the practices and rituals of right relationship with God easily seen. It is a visible expression of dynamic faith.
You are not ignorant. You know full well that the temple and the system of sacrifices is not the be all and end all of faith. You know that people abuse it. You know that wealthy people can commit all sorts of sins, and then just pay for forgiveness for them with sacrifices. To a wealthy person it could be like a business calculation: it’s more profitable to do sinful things and pay the cost of the sacrifices than to just be truly good. Just like a company today may breach a contract or ignore a court order because it is cheaper to pay a large legal team to tie up their opponents in court rather than to actually abide by the law. So while you know that sort of manipulation happens, you know that is an aberration of God’s intentions. You know full well that a true and good relationship with God is based upon faith and a good heart. Still though, there is something satisfying and meaningful in seeing the mechanism of forgiveness and faith at work.
That would have been about 3000 years ago. About 2600 years ago the Jewish nation had fallen. Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonian Empire. Many Jews were deported to Babylon. Many had fled to Egypt or to other lands. And the temple was destroyed. The visible core of faith and all of its smooth machinery was gone. You still believed that God is real and that God is powerful, but the visible operation of faith is absent. That’s hard.
It is into this absence that the prophet Jeremiah writes, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt – a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”
Those are famous words from Jeremiah. They were quoted by the author of Hebrews in what we read today. In their original context of the destruction of Jerusalem we understand what they mean. God is reassuring the people that even though the visible mechanism of the temple is gone, it is not the end. God will do something new. In fact, it suggests that God will ultimately do something that leaves the entire temple system irrelevant.
The author of Hebrews has been using that to point to Jesus. Last week we read that Jesus is the ultimate high priest. Today we read a bit about how that works, and how it is rooted in the prophesy from Jeremiah. But therein is something ironic. Jeremiah prophesies that God will write the law on the hearts of his faithful people, and they will no longer need instruction in faith because they will somehow automatically know it. That sounds wonderful, but if that’s really the case, then why was a teaching like Hebrews written? Shouldn’t people’s natural knowledge of God make writing down any sort of teaching irrelevant? If we all know God fully from the heart without any instruction, then what’s the point of Bible reading, and teaching, and church, and sermons for that matter? I’d certainly be out of a job!
Of course that’s not what Hebrews intends. But it does get at what is the heart of faith. It is that God plants a seed of beliefs, and yearnings, and moral commitments, and life principles inside us. And then we are to live them out. We learn, we grow, we explore, and we mature what God has planted inside us; and we do it along with God.
Next week we’ll explore that more as the teachings of Hebrews continues to develop. For today, let’s connect this growth of faith from a seed planted with the mechanism of a locomotive, or a clock, or the ancient temple system.
Our brains are fascinated by things that cause wonder. And our lives want things we can see. We are curious beings and we want to know how things work. God has not put us in this life and said, “I’ve planted a seed of faith in your life, now live it out with no tangible means of what it looks like.” No, God has put us in this life and given us many things of faith to see and do.
The church is an excellent example. Ideally a church provides teaching for the growth of God’s seed of faith. A church provides rituals and mechanisms for life and for forgiveness. In the not to distant past a church was the center of all of life’s rites of passage: birth, baptism, Sunday school, first communion, confirmation, marriage, and funeral. Any given Sunday the worship service has its flow and ritual, just like the temple system. There is gathering, singing, Bible reading, preaching, prayer, and maybe baptism or communion. The sacraments of baptism and communion are special promised ways where the mechanism of faith is at work for us. We can see, hear, touch, and taste our faith in action. These are God’s gifts to us.
Faith like a diesel locomotive where there is nothing to see, or a digital clock, or a computer-generated virtual reality would be exceedingly dull. God has made the life of faith interesting and interactive. Though we may want a life of ease and comfort – and perhaps we think we’d want a faith that somehow comes into our hearts automatically and without effort – God knows better for us. God knows how to inspire us to grow, and to value excellence, and to give us integrity and honor. All of that comes to us from our God of the new covenant, the ultimate covenant for all time.
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