STORY: “The Guerilla”

It was Sunday morning in South America, in a little chapel on the border of Venezuela and Colombia. As Mass was beginning a not uncommon occurrence took place: a band of guerillas armed with machine guns came out of the jungle and crashed and banged their way into the chapel. The priest and the congregation were totally horrified and afraid. The men dragged the priest outside to be executed. Then the leader of the guerillas came back into the chapel and demanded, “Anyone else who believes in this God stuff, come forward!” Everyone was petrified. They stood frozen. There was a long silence.

Finally, one man came forward and stood in front of the guerilla chief and said simply, “I love Jesus.” He was roughly tossed to the soldiers and also taken out to be executed. And several other Christians came forward saying the same thing; they, too, were driven outside. Then the sound of machine gun fire. When there were no more people left willing to identify themselves as Christians, the guerilla chief returned inside and told the remaining congregation to get out. “You have no right to be here!” And with that he herded them out of the chapel, where they were astonished to see their priest and the others standing there.

The priest and those people were ordered to go back into the chapel to continue the service while the others were angrily warned to stay out “Until,” said the guerilla chief, “you have the courage to stand up for your beliefs!” And with that the guerillas disappeared into the jungle. (1)

What does your faith mean to you? Is it something for which you would die? Would you have stood, maybe not boldly, maybe with a little hesitation and trepidation, but would you have finally stood up with those few people in the chapel and declared that you were a Christian, certain that death awaited you for making such a daring claim? Granted, the tale of the guerilla was just a story, and we can bravely put ourselves in the characters’ roles as we hear this story. But what if someone did the same thing to us this morning and it was real? How many of us would witness to our faith in the face of certain death? Or would we stay seated hoping that we could survive?

We in our American society do not have to make these kinds of life and death choices, but other people in certain places in the world do have to make these choices. To witness to their faith as a Christian can be a life or death choice. It was certainly a life and death choice in the early days of Christianity and during the time when the Letter to the Hebrews may have been written. In the first couple of centuries after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, Christians were singled out for death because of their faith. And the interesting part of this story is that Christians were given a chance to renounce their faith when confronted with death. If they clung to their witness as Christians, they would be crucified, burned on a stake, or thrown to the lions. If they renounced their faith, that is, testified that they did not believe in Christ, and bowed down and worshiped the emperor as their god, they would be allowed to live and were freed. However, other Christians would not allow them to enter their churches again. Only those who stood by their faith even in the face of death could form the community of faith called the church.

The author of Hebrews wrote: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Those Christians who witnessed to their faith in that little chapel did not know what was to happen outside. They were certain that the guerillas were going to kill them, so they could not know what could not be seen. All they could do was hold onto the hope that God would take care of them, not just now but forever, regardless of what happened now.

You see what this story points to and what our scripture emphasizes is that faith is more than just saying we have faith or that we go to church, that life is more than just showing up and going through the motions of living, but that faith is something that we live each and every day in a way that recognizes and reveals and testifies to God’s will, that life is precious and valuable because God has given it meaning and purpose that is grounded in God’s will for all of creation.

You know how a lot of people live life and faith? It’s like the deer hound that set off one morning chasing a magnificent buck. A few minutes into the chase a fox crossed the path and the hound veered off to chase the fox. A little later a rabbit crossed the path, and the hound was soon baying after the rabbit. Then a squirrel crossed the path, and the dog was soon pounding after him. Finally, a field mouse crossed the path and the hound chased him into its burrow. The deer hound had begun chasing a great buck and wound up watching a mouse hole. (2)

God has created human beings for such great things, things like love and grace, peace and fellowship, joy and celebration. But too many human beings want to go their own way and end up watching mouse holes. They don’t have faith because they don’t have a clue for what God called them, and so life is haphazard and fuzzy at best as they just sit and let it slip away one drop at a time.

My friends, faith, and thus life, is meant to be dynamic and open to the possibilities and challenges God places before us. Even though we don’t know where we are being led, still we have the assurance that God knows and so we will end up in the right place. Look at the people whom the writer of Hebrews uses as his heroes and heroines. Noah, who is commanded to build a huge boat because God is going to bring judgment upon the earth, doesn’t have a clue to what this means or what the future may bring, but he obeys God because his faith is active and open to any new future that God desires to create.

Or Abraham and Sarah, who are old and well past their child-bearing years. God tells them to pull up stakes and go into a new land and have children. An impossible and crazy command. But Abraham and Sarah go, and at the ages of 90 and 75, this couple has a son who becomes the father of all the Israelites and Jews down through the ages. Only a faith that was active and obedient could have ventured into the unknown and accomplished what God wished.

Only by obeying God could these people actually accomplish that for which they hoped. Noah desired and hoped for a world where people were no longer wicked and evil, but centered on God. So God told him to build an ark, not to save his family, but to prepare for a new world where people would look to God. Abraham and Sarah wanted children and a future, so God sent them to a place where this would be possible, not just so they could have a child, but so that God could have a people through which to work grace.

Our hopes and dreams are always tied in with God’s purpose and will. When we have faith in God, when we actually live our faith in God, we will be attuned to God’s purpose and will. And what we want will be what God wants. And what God wants will fulfill our prayers, our hopes, our dreams, because they are the same or consistent with God’s.

In the final analysis, how we live our faith and how we live our lives testifies and demonstrates to the world that God’s presence and grace and will are real. If we do not stand up for what we believe, how does anyone know that our faith is real, that God does truly exist and care about all of creation. Only the willingness of worshipers in that South American chapel to stand up for their faith, even if it meant death, told guerillas that their faith was real and therefore deserving of life.

In the first 3 centuries of the early church, Christians in the Roman Empire, who were a small group always in danger of extinction, were slaughtered right and left with the goal of exterminating them. Yet the Christian faith grew for 3 centuries until 60 % of the people in the Roman Empire were Christians and they had to be recognized and given the power to make a difference. Why? Because people saw that this faith was real when Christians chose to stand up for the faith. If it’s worth dying for, it’s worth living for.

I could cite examples from the past 30 years where the persecution of the church caused the church to grow dramatically through conversions and peoples’ faith to be strengthened. But what Hebrews proclaims to us is that faith is real and powerful and able to change the world for the benefit of God. We may not see this happen, but God will.

We are here today both as a people of faith and as a people searching for a faith to live. Are we willing to embrace Christ Jesus who died for us and now lives as Lord and Savior? Without knowing the future, are we willing to live as people of hope in the face of the unknown? Like Christ, are we willing to die in order to live? How we answer those questions by living them will testify to our faith.

(1) William J. Bausch, A World of Stories for Preachers and Teachers (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1998), pp. 271-272.
(2) William J. Bausch, A World of Stories for Preachers and Teachers (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1998), p. 364.
(3) Ideas for this sermon were taken from Marion Soards, Thomas Dozeman, and Kendall McCabe, Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year C: After Pentecost 1 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), pp. 120-122.