Sermon 11 - Hebrews 13
I think, if the main points of Hebrews were to be organized into some gross structural outline, it might look something like this:
1. The sovereignty of Jesus, the Priest/King,
2. The superiority of the Era of Grace over the Era of the Law,
3. The divine origin of the Word, expressed in Earthly symbols, which are a shadowy representation of the REAL,
4. The power of faith especially through periods of suffering, and
5. The performance of acts of faith on an earthly level.
Hebrews 13 begins with a list of moral precepts designed to keep the congregation together, and whose enactment constitutes acts of Faith.
Concluding Exhortations
“1 Keep on loving each other as brothers.
2 Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels unawares.”
Once again, I find that one of my favorite Bible verses is from Hebrews and I didn’t even know it. This verse is especially meaningful, because is appears in one of my favorite David Mamet movies, We’re No Angels. In this movie, an escaped convict, posing as a priest, is called upon to deliver a sermon. In a panic, he searches his pockets for something to save him, and he finds an advertisement for some kind of hunting rifle; using that as a spring board, he fakes his way through the sermon while stumbling onto crude bits of wisdom in his uneducated language. This is it:
“Oh, God...Have you ever felt completely alone?
Alone in a world of danger, and no one to rely on?
Danger on every hand, in a world fraught with danger,
and at the brink of death, I felt in my pocket, and what did I find?"
What did I find?
What did I find? Nothing. There's nothing there. It's all in your head. They can take the money from you. They can take the position from you. I don't know, they can whip you, people turn their back on you. Everything happens to every body. And you ain't gonna find nothing in your pocket can stave it off, nothing can stave it off! Pain, affliction, we say, power. Power doesn't do it. Cause you never have enough. Money? I don't know, you know anybody has enough, still? Trouble befalls us, everyone has their sadness in their heart. Some people are meant to be heard. I don't know. It just seems like they are. We meet them.
Is God good? I don't know. All I know is something might give you comfort. And maybe you deserve it. If it comforts you to believe in God, you do it, that's your business. People have guilty, you know, guilty secrets, well if that's yours, that you want to go believe in something, well that's not so bad.”
I’ll be honest, the connection between this speech and Hebrews is tenuous at best, but it reveals the angel hidden inside the convict, who, lacking in formal religious training, discovers the essence of religious experience—FAITH. That is to say, in the act of BELIEVING we perform an incomparable act of faith. Furthermore, the convict says, “If it comforts you to believe in God, you do it, that's your business,” so as to highlight the idea that belief, as a subjective thing, resistant to dogmatic uniformity, is reinforced by feelings that are smarter than thoughts. It defines faith as an act of personal choice and will, not a matter of fact; it makes the act of faith an act of super-rational choice-making—to CHOOSE to believe is to create a reality that springs forth in imitation of the inner structure of YOU.
Going on with the moral precepts in Hebrews, all good practical advice:
“3 Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.
4 Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.
5 Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you."
6 So we say with confidence, "The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?"
7 Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.”
This kind of thing is necessary for lay people who will never go the whole distance into spirituality, but who crave instruction in the right way to live. It goes both ways, you know: spiritual experience inspires good works, but good works also lead to spiritual experience. Any time we step out of this world into a higher dimension, we bring spiritual blessings and insights into conscious being; hence, Jesus’ instruction to love our enemies, when enacted, erects a bridge to a higher spiritual plane. And by the ACT of loving, we create love out of alienation and hatred.
I especially like the part where the author says, “be content with what you have, because God has said, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you." I remember my grandmother saying this, “Never will I leave you nor forsake you,” in prayer—(it appears in one of my early tape pieces)—and never did I appreciate it until now. Being satisfied with what you have has probably been my life’s biggest challenge. Time after time I have enviously looked on, as men less gifted, or even less qualified as I, got the gig, while I continued to languish in anonymity and poverty; I have kicked at the pricks, and sucked the sour grapes, for most of my life. It was only when I realized with full force that Eternity cherishes no fame, and that the ribbons hung on my soul should ALWAYS have been enough; FINALLY THEY ARE, as they really were all the time, I just didn’t realize it or acknowledge it. The comforting presence and power of Jesus neutralizes all feelings of resentment and jealousy, because the eternal perspective, the shared Christ Consciousness made available to us through the mediator, deflates all the false values of a vain and troubled world, and brings the problem of existence down to its spiritual core. With Him never leaving or forsaking us, how can we feel alone?
In regard to wearing your trophies on your soul, two favorite passages from Cyrano de Bergerac spring to mind. The first is a speech to a friend:
“I carry my adornments on my soul.
I do not dress up like a popinjay;
But inwardly, I keep my daintiness.
I do not bear with me, by any chance,
An insult not yet washed away—a conscience
Yellow with unpurged bile—an honor frayed
To rags, a set of scruples.
I go caparisoned in gems unseen,
Trailing white plumes of freedom, garlanded
With my good name—no figure of a man,
But a soul clothed in shining armor, hung
With deeds for decorations, twirling—thus—
A bristling wit, and swinging at my side
Courage, and on the stones of this old town
Making the sharp truth ring, like golden spurs!”
The second quote is from de Bergerac’s final scene, when he is dying from injuries received in an ambush—he is sword-fighting with and shouting at the specter of Death:
“Yes, all my laurels you have riven away
And all my roses; yet in spite of you,
There is one crown I bear away with me
And to-night, when I enter before God,
My salute shall sweep all the stars away
From the blue threshold! One thing without stain,
Unspotted from the world, in spite of doom
Mine own!
And that is…
—That is…
My white plume…”
Thus, Cyrano de Bergerac proclaims the superiority of inner reality to worldly reality. His acts of fidelity to his art are similar in quality to the acts of Faith we perform every day as tokens of our spiritual devotion. He also holds his vision of the Higher plane superior to the terror of Death; and his plan, after suffering the insulting abuses of this life, is to receive his reward in Heaven when his salute shall sweep away the stars. Me too.
I believe we Christians must forever have part of our attention riveted on the future hope that, in Heaven we will be relieved of the burdens of Earthly life. Heaven on Earth is such a powerful idea, an idea that opens gateways to spirit consciousness, that we sometimes forget to notice that we are still suffering from Earthly pains because we have not been able to stay fixed on the Higher plane, but, rather, have sunk down into mundane consciousness too easily and too often. Is it too much to ask that Heaven on Earth be traded in for Heaven in Heaven? I guess I’ll find out soon enough. My considered opinion is that our life’s work continues from this world into the next—I just hope all these reports of angel choirs and mansions prepared for me are true, because I could really use a vacation.
Going on with Hebrews, this next section switches gears and starts reminding us of the authority of Jesus as the Priest/King, an authority earned by Him through he shedding of blood. It returns to the idea of ETERNAL reward for bearing with Jesus the disgraceful humiliations of the world, and encourages us to go out into the world bearing that cross for all to see.
Bearing the cross for all to see has been a problem for me for many years. Door-to-door missionaries have always been a turn-off to me, and not because they are annoying but because they are doomed to ineffectuality— people cannot be led to spirituality, they have to come it IT of their own accord. No amount of proselytizing can make a horse drink if it is not thirsty. When I first got religion, so to speak, I was on fire to tell everybody about it and get them to get on board with me—I tell you, that project ended in disaster. Everybody thought I was nuts, and didn’t hear one syllable of my heart’s utterance. It had to be so, because it is impossible to convey to another, in words, the depth of transformation that takes place in you when your spiritual eyes begin to open; it is a very PRIVATE matter. So why are the apostles commissioned to go out into the world and preach the gospel? Perhaps the Heaven on Earth promised by Jesus is to be found in the moral code embedded in the scriptures—a code that can promote acts of mundane origin but whose roots are planted in Eternity.
Back to Hebrews:
Hebrews 13: 8-
“8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.
9 Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings. It is good for our hearts to be strengthened by grace, not by ceremonial foods, which are of no value to those who eat them.
10 We have an altar from which those who minister at the tabernacle have no right to eat.
11 The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp.
12 And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood.
13 Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore.”
The next two verses are prophetic, in that they refer to the new Jerusalem as part of God’s promise of the New Covenant. It suggests a glorious picture of Heaven as a place where praise falls constantly from the lips of men and angels.
“14 For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.
15 Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise--the fruit of lips that confess his name.”
On the subject of praise, that is to say, ART, I found a wonderful quote in G. K. Chesterton’s In Defense of Nonsense. I am quoting it here because it displays an original perspective on the act of SPIRITUAL ARTICULATION. As you know, I believe that artistic expressions are acts of praise performed for only one audience—God. The character of spiritual praise is determined by the subjective reality of each and every anomalous man, but there are certain patterns (come from on the mountain) which carry the scent of sacred air; how this sacred air comes to be is a mystery and a comedy.
The Chesterton piece begins as a piece of pure literary criticism, extolling the qualities of nonsense as a somehow new and wonderful, other-worldly, imaginative genre. He then goes on to make this potent connection between nonsense and Faith:
“Our claim that nonsense is a new literature (we might almost say a new sense) would be quite indefensible if nonsense were nothing more than a mere aesthetic fancy. Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth. The principle of art for art’s sake is a very good principle if it means that there is a vital distinction between the earth and the tree that has its roots in the earth; but it is a very bad principle if it means that the tree could grow just as well with its roots in the air. Every great literature has always been allegorical–allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The ‘Iliad’ is only great because all life is a battle, the ‘Odyssey’ because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle. There is one attitude in which we think that all existence is summed up in the word ‘ghosts’; another, and somewhat better one, in which we think it is summed up in the words ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’
Even the vulgarest melodrama or detective story can be good if it expresses something of the delight in sinister possibilities–the healthy lust for darkness and terror which may come on us any night in walking down a dark lane. If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be the tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also. And here we fancy that nonsense will, in a very unexpected way, come to the aid of the spiritual view of things.
Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the ‘wonders’ of creation, but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible. So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to the astonishment of the park-keeper. Everything has in fact another side to it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense. Viewed from that other side, a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain of stalk, a man a quadruped begging on its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hat to cover a man from the sun, a chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple with only two.
This is the side of things which tends most truly to spiritual wonder. It is significant that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has been represented by the merely rational religionism of the eighteenth century) a picture of the ordered beneficence of the Creation; but, on the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it. ‘Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?’
“This simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense.”
Again:
“This simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense.
Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook. The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of things, has decided that ‘faith is nonsense,’ does not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is faith.”
I find this statement to be incredibly profound because it focusses our attention to an idiom of spiritual manifestation that comes from an unexpected source—or, better said, it reveals spirituality in a place where we least expect it, i.e. nonsense, thus affirming the idea that God and spiritual truth are EVERYWHERE.
Going on with Hebrews and a return to basic moral precepts, meanwhile remembering that the Heaven on Earth promised by Jesus is to be found in the moral code embedded in the scriptures—a code that can promote acts of mundane origin, whose roots are planted in Eternity:
“16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.
17 Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you.
18 Pray for us. We are sure that we have a clear conscience and desire to live honorably in every way.
19 I particularly urge you to pray so that I may be restored to you soon.”
The final chorus, so to speak, of Hebrews, ends with a song of encouragement, also mentioning a bit of news about Timothy’s release from prison.
“20 May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep,
21 equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
22 Brothers, I urge you to bear with my word of exhortation, for I have written you only a short letter.
23 I want you to know that our brother Timothy has been released. If he arrives soon, I will come with him to see you.
24 Greet all your leaders and all God's people. Those from Italy send you their greetings.
25 Grace be with you all.”
As I mentioned at the outset Hebrews can be seen to divide itself in these discreet categories:
1. The sovereignty of Jesus,
2. The superiority of the Era of Grace over the Era of the Law,
3. The divine origin of the Word, expressed in Earthly symbols, which are a shadowy representation of the REAL,
4. The power of faith especially through periods of suffering, and
5. The performance of acts of faith on an earthly level.
This final chapter is an elegant summation of the SPIRIT of the letter. It is filled with wise counsel as well as elevated philosophical concepts. The book as a whole is a light in the darkness illuminating the design of a new way of life based on the precepts of the Era of Grace. It is beguiling in a seductive way, as it endeavors to lure the Jews of Jerusalem away from their old modes of thought and introduce then to a new idea and a new discipline. In this series we have explored such subjects as the authority of the Priesthood of Melchizedek, the Blood of Jesus, Faith in things unseen, and acts of moral rectitude performed in an immoral world. It has been good for me to go over this material because it has provided clarity on some issues about which I have not yet made up my mind. It was especially enjoyable to immerse my self in the poetry of the book, for instance, Hebrews 12: 22-29:
“22 But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly,
23 to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect,
24 to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
25 See to it that you do not refuse him who speaks. If they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, how much less will we, if we turn away from him who warns us from heaven?
26 At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, "Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens."
27 The words "once more" indicate the removing of what can be shaken--that is, created things--so that what cannot be shaken may remain.
28 Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe,
29 for our "God is a consuming fire."
But perhaps the biggest blessing I received from Hebrews was the promise of the New Covenant, a Hope generated by Faith.
Let us pray: Jesus, thank you for this treasure trove of religious doctrine. Let it continue to inspire us as we strive to become ever more like You, ever more loving, ever more faithful. Amen.
