In today's verses from Hebrews, the writer recounts great acts of faith from heroes of Old Testament days, but then adds, "Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses..."My congregation repeats the Apostles' Creed most Sundays, saying that we believe in "the communion of saints." Saints here speaks of all those in Christ, not some sort of super Christians, and the creed is saying that we are all joined together. Together we form a great arc through history. The faith of saints long dead impacts us, and our faith affects them.
Yet we modern American Christians have turned our faith into something that is largely individualistic. Despite what we may say in a creed, we tend to view faith as something personal between us and God. And I think it is such thinking that allows people to participate in a congregation, do a little mission work down at the homeless shelter, then make business and political decisions with no thought as to how those decisions square with the teachings of Jesus.
Our associate pastor preached a sermon recently that honed in on the line in 1 Corinthians 12 where Paul speaks of believers as one body saying, "If one member suffers all suffer together." Yet in our individualist view of faith, others are so disconnected from us that their suffering is usually easy for us to ignore, and it has little impact on how we live out our faith.
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