Hebrews 12:4-29

11th Sunday after pentecost, 2022 | Hebrews 12:4-29 | by Paula Murray |

Lord, Hear our Cry!

Lord, hear our cry!  Those words have been on our marquee, our sign out front, for the whole of the season of Pentecost.  We do not mean cry as in sobbing or weeping, though that assuredly is a part of the life of any human being including faithful disciples of Jesus Christ.  No, we mean “cry” as in a call for help directed at the Lord, at the One who can overcome not just the everyday kinds of needs we share but also dire human need. Essentially, “Lord, hear our cry,” is prayer, a heartfelt prayer, maybe even a frantic prayer, the kind that comes of seeing someone standing on the precipice of potential disaster, whether that someone is ourselves or someone else.  Most of us would call this intercessory prayer if we thought we needed to slap a label on it.  We generally think of intercessory prayers as prayer for others who are in great need; for a brother-in-Christ in need of healing for his heart or a total stranger’s need for help to feed her children.  To intercede, the root of the word intercessory, is to involve ourselves in the needs of others, so our assumption about the nature of intercessory prayer makes sense, still, the restriction of prayer to the needs of others is hardly biblical.  If Jesus Himself prayed to be relieved of the cup of suffering (Matthew 26:39) on the night of His betrayal, most assuredly we may pray to be relieved of our individual lesser trials (Philippians 4:6-7) that we may have our anxieties relieved.  have heard many a child of God say that they think it is more godly to pray for the needs of others than for their own needs.  I suspect, on hearing this sort of thing, most pastors want to get out the old crook and staff and bring the lamb in close for a good talking to, because the Lord Himself tells us that we are not only to cry out for the cure of the needs of others; we are to cry for help to the Lord for the sake of our own suffering as well, and for the world’s.

Indeed, it is the world’s many troubles, as well as the Scripture texts of early Pentecost, that set those words, “Lord, hear our cry” in our minds.  When three quarters of the country’s citizens believe we are in decline; when we see poverty, hunger, and pestilence grow in our poorer neighborhoods and in poorer parts of the world generally; when parents cannot find infant formula for many months; when totalitarian forces gain strength in world bodies, then our need for God’s intercession in human affairs becomes glaringly obvious.  Our problems are too many and too severe for mere human intervention, especially when humans are conflicted about what to do, or whether anything at all ought to be done.  And so we go to our knees in our churches, bow our heads in our workplaces, lay in our beds at night and pray, Lord, hear our cry.

Prayer, especially prayers like these, are acts of faith, a communication sent heavenward to One Who is not seen but Whose impact on our lives is both assumed and felt.  Granted, faith can be weak. But consider the one-time atheist stranded in absolute darkness below ground when a shaft collapses, or the mother who discarded faith in anything but herself long before her baby is diagnosed with a congenital lung problem.  In desperate need, faith in a saving God rebounds simply because in circumstances such as these only God can give us hope even if we cannot see the end in sight for which we pray.  We can understand then, why the author of the book of Hebrews began one chapter with, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

To support his argument, the writer of Hebrews lifted up a number of examples from the Old Testament of those saints who held the faith even though they did not see the fulfillment of God’s promises to them while they yet lived on earth.  The list ended with Abraham, who did receive both the land and the child promised to him and his wife Sarah in their old age, but who did not live long enough to see the third promise God made to him fulfilled, that his descendants through Isaac would number “as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.”  This was two Sundays past. Last Sunday’s offering from the book of Hebrews expanded upon the idea of faith in things not seen, noting that the faith God gives us will be tested, and the outcome of those tests likewise cannot be seen.  Again, some of the greats of what we called the biblical hall of fame were presented to us, as were the ways in which their faith was tested, and again, the best example of the lot was Abraham.  Abraham, whose faith was given the severest trial when God told him to take Isaac, that much longed for and much delayed son, and sacrifice him on the mountain.  We know the story, an angel of the Lord stayed Abraham’s hand when he would have done the deed, and the Lord provided the ram for the sacrifice. Yet we cannot deny that Abraham took his son, likely a teen at this point in his life, and a donkey laden with wood for the sacrificial fire, and went up the mountain alone but for his son with the intent to do what the Lord required of him.  With a bold and living confidence in the Lord God, Abraham prepared to break his own heart, and had it restored to him by the very same God Who would give His only Son up to the cross, that we might be saved from sin and death.

This week, the writer of the book of Hebrews turns his attention to those of us who are not members of the biblical hall of fame, but who are ordinary saints, justified sinners but who likewise struggle to live faithfully in a broken creation.  The context in which we hear God’s Word today is partially formed by what we heard last week, not only the portion from the book of Hebrews but also the Gospel reading. In that reading from the Gospel of Luke, we heard a passionate Jesus cry out that He came to bring conflict, not peace.  While we would rather think of Jesus only as the Prince of Peace of the story of His birth,  Jesus laid out the dissension between even close family members when faith in His saving grace is not shared within the family.  Then father will be against son, and so on.  The clear implication is that we, too, should expect to struggle with the conflict that arises when faith in Christ meets faith in something else, something false.

It is this struggle that the writer of Hebrews addresses today, but not, maybe, in a way that we find comfortable or uplifting.  We are rather chastised for griping about the struggle, about the conflict, about all the trouble faith requires of us.  Grace is free, and we know that, but there are consequences to every word and deed, including those formed out of a bold and living confidence in the Lord, and we are sort of manhandled into taking those consequences on.  After all, we have not yet bled for our faith as others have, so where do we get off griping about the struggle to live it!  Today, the writer of Hebrews tells us to think of our struggles to hold our hope in things unseen as a form of discipline imposed on us by our living, heavenly Father.  Just as our earthly fathers discipline us when we fail to do our homework, complete our chores, or treat a brother or sister with kindness so that we might grow up to be decent and godly adults, so our heavenly Father disciplines us when we fail Him.  Those tests of ours are acts of chastisement from a loving and everlasting Father who wants what is “our good, and that we may share His holiness.”  So, “Get over yourselves!” we are told, and lift our “drooping hands and strengthen our weak knees” and have courage, so that what is broken might be made whole.  To ensure we get the point, our brother in Christ reminds us to work for peace, proclaim the Gospel, refrain from sexual immorality, “and offer God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for God is a consuming fire.”  While the consuming fire of God is the same from the Old Testament through the New Testament, the covenants, the promise-based relationship we have with God changes.  The saving blood of Christ will do more for us than the blood Abel shed, for the blood Jesus shed led to our salvation and creation’s restoration.  “See,” we are told, that we “do not refuse Him who is speaking.”  That is, continue to have faith, to have the “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.