To and from work, you drive I-35W through the city twice a day, a couple hundred times a year. You drive it so often surrounded by rush hour traffic that you no longer even notice that part of your route passes some 60 feet over the Mississippi River. Or you’re heading to meet extended family for dinner like you have so many times before and find yourself late and crawling along in traffic on that same stretch of road. Or as a construction worker you’ve endured another hot day of Minnesota road maintenance, with impatient motorists shouting drive by obscenities over their inconvenience while you simply look forward to finishing your shift and heading home to family. Or on a whim, just this once, you decide to take the highway instead of the road less traveled. And on a sultry Wednesday in August, a bit after 6 pm, the bridge collapses beneath you. And you spend the rest of your life, or if you die, loved ones spend the rest of their lives, asking why. Or perhaps you left work a bit earlier than usual and crossed the bridge a half hour before. Or a semi truck changed lanes in front of you causing initial exasperation, until you feel the road rumble and bumper-to-bumper vehicles just five in front of you plummet out of sight. And you spend the rest of your life asking, “Why not me?” Jim Koralesky, age 63, drove over the bridge six times that day before the collapse. He was about to take it again a few minutes before 6 p.m. to go to Home Depot. But he ran into a friend in his parking lot and got involved in a conversation. After 15 minutes of chatting, he scuttled plans for his errand. “It would have put me on that bridge around that time,” he said. “Someone’s looking out for me.” Not to belittle the overwhelming gratitude of the near-misses of this tragedy, but does that mean no one was “looking out for” the victims? Satisfactory answers escape us… We don’t really know who wrote the letter to the Hebrews, because the name of the author is not mentioned in the biblical text, only that he or she is a friend and contemporary of the early church evangelist, Timothy, referenced in the closing verses of chapter 13. However, we do know to whom the letter was written. Hebrew Christians, formerly Jews before converting to Christianity during the first century, were being abused from both sides of the fence. Socially and physically, they were assaulted by both Jews and Romans because their newfound beliefs were an affront and a threat to the traditional religion and social order of both. Here these fledgling Hebrew Christians thought they were on the high road to healthy, happy living, and instead their bridge collapsed in pain and persecution. Their minds were filled with “why” questions, satisfactory answers eluded them and they struggled with the purpose and value of faith. To answer this question then and now, it’s important to look at Hebrews chapter 11. If you’re looking for a dictionary definition that fits faith into tidy, neat categories, with clean answers and happy endings, you won’t find it here. But if you are looking for a description of life lived in relationship with God, in the midst of the hard challenges and harsh realities of life, and how people act who enjoy that relationship, then here it is. Hebrews 11:1 reads, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” We often focus on just the first half of that phrase – as if faith’s only role is to comfort and assure us that one day our hopes will come true. While that may motivate our perseverance through times of trial, if the definition of faith stops here, then faith is little more than a passive venture and the random tragedies of life quickly dash it to pieces. A Santa Claus faith doesn’t go for very long before we realize that no matter how bad or good we’ve been, by outward appearances, we just don’t always get what we hope for. When we add the second half of the sentence however, the meaning takes a different turn: “Faith is the conviction of things not seen.” For the writer of Hebrews, the invisible heavenly world is just as real as the visible, earthly world. And faith requires us to trust that there is purpose and promise beyond what we see in the present moment and to act with conviction that moves us in the direction of that purpose and promise, even if the journey is through shadows and valleys as well as sunshine and mountain peaks. According to biblical scholar Richard A. Spencer, our text for today deals with faith “more directly than any other text in the New Testament,” (Interpretation, July 1995, 288-292). It defines faith not as some “tame, pious Christian virtue, encapsulated in spiritual slogans and greeting card phrases,” Spencer writes. Faith is rather “a sunburst of truth, not a doctrine, proposition, creed.... It is the behavior of someone who allows God to be God, trusting in someone other than one’s self.” In this regard, I love the translation of Hebrews 11:1-2 by Eugene Peterson in The Message version of the Bible. “The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see. The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd.” And then in the verses that follow we read a litany of countless, faithful, Old Testament characters that blend a faith of both attitude and action, internal assurance and external conviction that enables them to endure adversity and strive for healing, even if those changes remained for them only a vision of something they would never actually see for themselves. The list includes people like Abel and Enoch and Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Jacob. In The Message, Eugene Peterson sums up this list of faithful souls with his translation of verses 13-14 in these words, “Each one of these people of faith died not yet having in hand what was promised, but still believing. How did they do it? They saw it way off in the distance, waved their greeting, and accepted the fact that they were transients in this world. People who live this way make it plain that they are looking for their true home.” A nun who worked for a local home health care agency was out making her rounds when she ran out of gas. As luck would have it, there was a station just down the street. She walked to the station to borrow a can with enough gas to start the car and drive to the station for a fill-up. The attendant regretfully told her that the only can he owned had just been loaned out, but if she would care to wait, he was sure it would be back shortly. Since the nun was on the way to see a patient, she decided not to wait and walked back to her car. After looking through her car for something to carry to the station to fill with gas, she spotted a bedpan she was taking to the patient. Always resourceful, she carried it to the station, filled it with gasoline, and carried it back to her car. As she was pouring the bedpan contents into the tank of her car two men walked by. One of them turned to the other and said, “Now that is what I call faith!” Faith that is both assurance and conviction causes us to do some things that wouldn’t make sense to the rest of the world because we’re acting on a vision that others may not be able to see. A litany of such faithful is not limited to the letter to the Hebrews, nor to characters of the Old Testament, but continues today. We may well add to the list in Hebrews 11: By faith Christy Soran from our congregation, spent a year in Tanzania as a volunteer with Visions in Action, a non-profit organization “committed to achieving social and economic justice in the developing world.” There she met a young girl dying from a congenital heart defect and responded with the assurance and conviction that all people merit access to adequate health care. Because of Christy’s faith, 14-year-old Hidaya got the surgery she needed and is healthy as Christy returned home this last week. By faith Sarah Bonnie from our congregation, grieved the death by suicide of a close teenage friend, Lily Kanan. In one of the darkest times in her young life, she responded with the assurance and conviction that the disease of adolescent depression need not go undiagnosed and untreated. She organized a team to walk 20 miles in Lily’s memory in the Out of Darkness Overnight Walk through New York City last month. With support from many including Good Samaritan, she raised $33,300 for research and response to teen depression and bi-polar disorders. By faith Peter Hausmann from our Rosemount UMC congregation, plunged into the Mississippi River in his van as it fell off the I-35W Bridge and surfaced unharmed. And then with the assurance and conviction that few of us could muster he apparently gave his life trying to rescue others from the murky waters. You may have seen it in the Minneapolis StarTribune this past Wednesday on the one week anniversary of the Bridge Disaster. It was a half page ad in the A section titled, “For all the days that end in ‘why.’” With a watermark photo of the bridge in the background the words read, “In memory of those whose lives were lost, With compassion for those who lost loved ones, In gratitude for those who risked their lives to rescue, recover and give care, The people of the United Methodist Church pray with their neighbors.” I’m proud to be part of a denomination that reaches out in this way… For all the days that end in why, faith does not so much strive to placate us with shallow answers, as it does to hold us in the assurance that even death and destruction isn’t the final word and to challenge us with the conviction that change, even if unseen in our lifetimes can be effected in and through us!