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, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us...The writer here insists on something that sounds very odd to the modern ear. Our faith and our "salvation" is connected to the faithful of the past. In fact, our faith reaches back and includes them in God's saving activity. Salvation history has an arc, a movement that requires our faith to be joined to the faith of others, even to those long dead.
This is largely at odds with many current notions of faith. In American Christianity, faith tends to be a private thing. I believe and so I get saved. But the Apostle Paul speaks of the body of Christ with each person having their distinct and essential role, and the ancient creed speaks of a "communion of saints."
When I grew up in the Presbyterian Church, I heard the Lord's Supper referred to almost exclusively as "communion." But what I saw didn't seem to have much communing. Perhaps there was communing with God that I couldn't see, but there surely wasn't much communing between worshipers.
We did communion by passing trays containing cubes of bread and little cups of juice down the pews from person to person. But there was very little feel of family or friends gathered at a meal together. This was a solemn event, and people often avoided eye contact as they passed the elements. They didn't even serve one another as you might expect. Instead they handed the tray off, that person held the plate and took a piece of bread, then passed it to the next person who did the same.
When I first became a pastor, I tried to get the congregation to say "The bread of life," to their neighbor as they passed the plate, but most people wouldn't do it. It broke the very private moment. Funny how we can be in worship with a crowd of people and remain by ourselves. Worship sometimes looks less like community and more like going to the movies.
Perhaps this is the dark/shadow side of American individualism. While individualism has encouraged people to do great things and allowed people to break free rigid class distinctions, without something to bind us all together, it becomes "everyone for his or herself chaos." Certainly American politics seems to have lost some of its sense of a covenant community whose fates are intertwined. We have become less a communion of citizens and more a collection of like thinking interest groups.
In his first letter to the church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul chastises the Corinthians for pursuing their own spiritual gratification without thought of their fellow believers. And the writer of Hebrews goes further, saying that our faith binds us to saints past, present, and future. Our perseverance in the race set before us draws others along. It seems we're all in this together.
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