Sermon for August 10, 2025

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The Rev. Taylor Vines

My best friend and I went to the same university back in Mississippi, and later we both moved out of state for graduate school and work. But when we happen to be home at the same time—usually around the holidays—we end up reminiscing about our college town. We gossip about gossip that’s over a decade old, and remember our old haunts, like Marlins, our favorite bar, where we’d sit and critique the live bands like we were Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets.

But Marlins actually closed before we even graduated. Now there’s a whole new entertainment and retail district across from the university—apparently someone decided the students had too much parking and that empty lot needed to be put to use. In good ways and bad, our beloved college town has changed. It’s no longer the cozy, familiar place it once was.

And while we don’t say it outright, I think grief tinges those conversations.

And maybe you’ve had a similar experience: returning to the place where you grew up, or the church where you were baptized, or the town where you started your first job. You find the buildings smaller, the people changed—or gone—and maybe even the roads are different. I was in North Carolina when they put in a traffic circle between the library and the Cajun seafood grocery store, and let me tell you, the Facebook drama was intense. But whatever the details, something has shifted. The place you thought would always feel like home suddenly… doesn’t.

And that’s a disorienting feeling. But it’s not a new one. In fact, it’s exactly the kind of emotional territory the Letter to the Hebrews is written for.

We don’t know exactly who wrote Hebrews. And it’s not really a letter—it reads more like a sermon. A sermon for a weary, disheartened community. These were second-generation Christians—people who had started strong, endured hardship, stayed faithful—but now were beginning to falter. People were drifting away. Worship attendance was down. Confidence was low. And you get the sense from reading the whole book that they were asking, deep down: Is this still worth it?

The preacher—whoever they were—offers what they call in chapter 13 “a word of encouragement.” And that word begins with memory: Let me tell you where you come from.

Our reading today begins with one of the most well-known verses in all of Scripture: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

This isn’t a sentimental definition. It’s not about warm feelings or a blind Polly Anna optimism that refuses to look at reality. It’s more like homesickness—for a place we haven’t yet arrived at, but believe is real. It’s the kind of trust that keeps walking forward, even when the road is unclear.

The preacher doesn’t leave the idea in the abstract—they tell stories. Stories of people who lived with that ache in their bones. And the focal point of those stories is Abraham.

Abraham left behind everything he knew—his homeland, his kin, his security—and set out for a new place based only on God’s promise. He walked without a map. He camped in tents. He lived as a stranger in the very land that was promised to him. And still, he kept going.

Hebrews says he did it because he was “looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”

Abraham and Sarah, the great patriarch and matriarch of Judaism and Christianity, were searching for what I think most of us are searching for:

A home that can hold us in all our joys and sorrows. A world that is truly stable and just. A community that lives by grace and love.

Yet Hebrews says they didn’t find that world in their lifetimes. “All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.”

That image—seeing the promise far ahead, and still waving to it as if it’s already yours, reminds me of all the times when I’ve had a glimpse of what heaven might be. Over a shared meal full of laughter and good food, when the choir is singing a beautiful anthem, or when we care for each other as people who share a common home. Those glimpses are real but not complete.

The text continues: “They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth.” They owned that truth. They didn’t pretend they belonged to the powers and values of the world as it was. They made it clear—by their words and by their lives—that they were “seeking a homeland.”

Now, if they had been thinking of the land they left behind, they could have gone back. But they didn’t. Their longing wasn’t nostalgia—it was hope. They weren’t trying to return to what once was because that would never really satisfy them. Instead, they were moving forward to something entirely new: “a better country, that is, a heavenly one.”

And because of that, Hebrews says, “God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.” God is not embarrassed by their wandering, or their restless hearts, or even their unfinished faith. God claims them, proudly. And God has made ready the home they had been seeking all along.

That’s what it means to live by faith. It doesn’t always come with answers. It doesn’t always feel strong. But it carries a kind of homesickness—a longing for the place where God’s promises are made real. And that longing, according to Hebrews, is itself an act of faith.

So if you feel a little unmoored right now… if the places that once felt like home no longer fit… if your soul is restless and your prayers feel unfinished—you are in good company.

You’re walking with Abraham. With Sarah. With the whole communion of saints who longed for a better country—a heavenly one—and who trusted God to lead them there.

You are already part of that story. And even now—even here—the road is leading home. Amen.

St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Ypsilanti, MI

All are welcome!

Sermon for August 10, 2025