Tuesday, November 6, 2007
"What more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah, also of David and Samuel and the prophets" (Hebrews 11:32).
IDEA: There is not much difference in the actions of the heroes and the failures in the Bible.
PURPOSE: To help listeners realize that it is God who works and he works with damaged goods.
When you see the abbreviation “etc.” when you’re reading, what does it stand for?
Does it ever bother you or make you wonder what the writer had in mind? What is “so forth”?
I. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews uses a kind of “et cetera” in chapter 11 as he offers us his “honor roll of the faithful.”
In Hebrews 11:32 he sounds like a writer who hadn’t planned his writing well, and he ran out of space and time. He has spent so much space on the first people he presented in the chapter. So what would he do next?
He simply listed several relatively unknown people and a couple of better known characters, but he didn’t say anything about any of them.
Does it bother you at all that he used a kind of “etc” – “and so forth”?
II. The list has a few quirks in it.
The list is not in historical order. Barak comes before Gideon and Samson comes before Jephthah. Why do you think he inverted the order?
The list doesn’t sound like an honor roll of “saints.” Couldn’t some of them be on a roll of dishonorable people?
Gideon was a coward, a very reluctant hero.
Barak borrowed his fame from a woman judge, Deborah.
Samson was a womanizer.
Jephthah killed his teen-aged daughter.
David was guilty of adultery and murder.
Samuel was an effective leader but a failure as a father.
Do you think the writer of Hebrews knew the shady side of these people? Why do you think they were chosen as people of faith?
III. Does any of this have anything to do with us? (Don’t check the “Not Applicable” box yet.)
Annie Dillard in Teaching A Stone to Talk (p 20) gives us a workable lead. Writing of the way that we do church, she says:
“A high school stage play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one. In two thousand years we have not worked out the kinks. We positively glorify them. Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter. Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens. Week after week Christ washes our dirty feet, handles their very toes, and repeats, ‘It is all right—believe it or not—to be people.’”
God makes his own sweet, sometimes discordant music with second-hand pawn-shop instruments that no one else thinks is worthy of God’s orchestra.