Sermon Ideas For Hebrews 10:11-18 Part 1

Two great streams of radicalized Hebraic thought are present in the texts for today: apocalyptic thinking and sacramental thinking. One is a manifestation of the prophetic tradition and the other of the priestly one. Apocalyptic invites expectation of chnage and historical transformation; sacrament enacts the fulfillment of what has been. Mark 13:31 expects that "heaven and earth will pass away;" Hebrews 10:14 announces that Christ's sacrifice brings us to that which is "perfected for all time..."

For all the contrasts of apocalyptic and sacramental thinking, they share deep convictions. Together they contain important correctives to aspects of contemporary thought. We can identify three points that are important today:

1. Time is not eternity. 2. Nature is not reliable. 3. Theology is necessary.

Most Christians over the ages have thought that there is a difference between time and eternity, and that eternity was more important than time. The restless course of events and the constantly altering patterns of thought and affection have traditionally never been seen as ultimate.

Of course, Christians do, and must, take history seriously. Things change. The contexts of our daily lives are not constant. We do not live in an eternal now or in some cycle of ceaseless recurrence, but in history--an arena of dynamic change where the most significant moments are those where eternity touches time. Indeed, Christ only makes sense in a context where a Messiah is expected, where a novum could be introduced, and where things are different after that great event has occurred.

Further, most scripture is narrative--a way of speaking that demands the discernment of plot and character, the interpretation of life in terms of conflict, climax and resolution. Christians have, as Augustine recognized, a "dramatic" view of life.

Christians thus agree with the author of the letter to the Hebrews: Christ's sacrifice offered "for all time a single sacrifice...," and that things are now different than they once were, both in the form of God's covenant with humanity, and in the way sin influences our destiny. Such a claim demands that we develop a sense of "epochal thinking." That is, things appropriate to one age may not be necessary in another--precisely because things change in time.

But history is not everything. It is not true, as some today argue, that we cannot understand anything unless we understand it in its historical context. That is an historicist reduction. History itself takes place in a context that is more enduring than it is. Time has a beginning and it has an ending; it does not go on forever. There was when it was not. And there will be when it no longer is. Although our minds reach most easily to the historically concrete, what was and is and ever shall be is larger, more comprehensive, and more reliable than anything that is only historical.

Nor is that larger context "nature," as has been argued by many. Some of the ancient Greeks thought that nature was the realm of the permanent, and no small number of Christians have been attracted to this view. They thought that behind history was the fixed realm of natural order that was truly reliable. Therefore, our task was to make historical life fit the natural order of things.

Christians take the biophysical world seriously. God made the world and all that is in it; we humans are to take stewardly care of the ecosphere; the body is the temple of the spirit; and Christ came in incarnate form. Material reality is not viewed as wicked or a trap or illusory. But neither is it permanent, or the source and norm of life.

Modern science partly confirms the Christian view. To be sure, it knows no Creator beyond nature, but evolution challenges the notion of a fixed and reliable natural order. It teaches that time and history--and not timeless nature--provides the most reliable and comprehensive model of the biophysical cosmos. It tells us that nature is historical in its very essence. The implication is clear: We cannot find a fixed, reliable model for faith or ethics in nature--it is always changing, adapting, and mutating.

The Hebraic tradition of temple worship knew that nature was not final. One of the ways this was indicted is that what was created had to be given sacrifice to the creator. The ritual offering of the most valued ox, the most prized ram, the purest of lambs, the gentlest of doves, for examples, signaled that even those parts of nature which humans domesticated and took as parts of the agrarian household, those upon which the economy depended for labor, food and fiber, were secondary, not primary. The natural life of the world is under a higher order which has first claim on them, and it is only by rendering the best of this world to the other that the pretenses of this world are subjected to the holiness of the other.

We are ultimately left with only one guide to life and thought. That is theology, the logos of God manifest in covenant relationships. All of history and all of nature is to be interpreted in this light; the eternal, reliable God is their context. God's truth and justice written on the human heart is their form in this world. Neither history nor nature contain what is reliable without these.

The apocalyptic emphases of the gospels and the sacramental element of the letters allow us to understand what John captures when speaking of the start of things. "In the beginning (and at the ending) was (and will be) the Word..." That alone is really eternal; that alone is ultimately reliable.

Daniel, too, caught the vision of this deeper, wider reality, which he calls the "Ancient of Days." He sensed that this is the locus of true authority, and recognized that all peoples, nations, and tongues who catch this vision are called to serve a realm beyond time and creation. It is more than many contemporary humans can imagine; but without such visions, the horizons of life grow short and the depth of life falls flat.

Max L. Stackhouse