It's just not the same. Thanks be to God.

Annunciation by Carlo Braccesco

Text: The Letter to the Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

Nobody knows who wrote the book we call The Letter to the Hebrews. But there is some language in this letter, or Epistle, that has lodged in hearts and minds of Christians since the day of its writing. Two weeks ago we heard the beloved phrase “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…. Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.” The week before that we heard that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” One of my favorite verses in this letter exhorts: “Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” Because I have so often needed mercy and have indeed found grace. 

There’s a line in today’s reading that I’ve occasionally heard quoted as well, but a little more problematically, and that’s this one: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” The problematic part is that sometimes folks get the words “Jesus Christ” mixed up with the words “the church.” Perhaps an honest mistake. But a mistake nonetheless.

The church is not the same as it was in the 2nd Century, or the 10th, or the 15th, or the 20th. Bach was not played in church in the 10th Century, believe it or not. There was a time when girls could not sing in the choirs, or women preach in the pulpit, or gay people tell anyone at church they were gay. There was a time when the Gospel was read in Latin and only the priests took communion. That last one came back around again during Covid here and there.

In some churches parishioners kneel a lot and in others they never do. Some churches meet around a dinner table or at a brewery. In some churches nearly everything in a service is sung but in others, everyone sits in silence for almost the whole time.

The church is not the same as it was, and it is not uniform in the present. And it never has been. But many of us deep down inside wish that in some way, remembering a time that gave us meaning and happiness at a particular time in our life, there would be a way for church to stay the same forever.

Because, as we all know, change is hard and we don’t like it. The feeling we often associate with change is fear, often the fear associated with loss. My mother in law, of blessed memory, suffered some very difficult, sad, life-altering changes before she was even 5 years old, and so perhaps not surprisingly her mantra was “Do not ever try to make any changes, because things can always get worse.”

So what does it mean when the mystery writer of the Letter to the Hebrews says Jesus Christ is the same yesterday today and forever? I suspect that the writer was pointing to the divinity of Jesus to call forth the firmly held philosophy of the people of that time that The Divine is perfect and therefore everlasting and unchangeable, for one thing, but also that the character of Jesus was consistent. 

Which is true - Jesus was consistent. Consistently surprising. Consistently turning things upside down, like he does in Luke’s Gospel today. Consistently challenging the status quo, consistently innovating, consistently reminding his followers of the great story of God’s generative love that desires wholeness and justice for all people. Consistently insisting that God is creating and doing new things in the world all the time and that our job is to see God’s work out there and go out there and join in. Consistently showing how God has always taken risks on flawed, fallible human beings from Noah to Sarah to Solomon to Mary Magdalene and everyone in between and even to this day, risking laying the awesome love and power of God Almighty on their and our shoulders and asking us just to try to be faithful, and forgiving them and us when we, inevitably, are not. 

God is consistently taking risks and improvising and innovating so that among every tribe and language and people and nation, in the past and the present and the future, God’s mission of healing and justice and wholeness has been, is being, and will be born anew, to be effective and effected in each time and place in its peculiarity and specificity. Good is consistently choosing us even when we fail to choose God’s way. That’s what stays the same, God’s overflowing love that knows no bounds and never runs out and does not depend on status or accomplishment or having all the right beliefs or, God help us, being deserving.

There are many layers of philosophy since the time of the writer of Hebrews. We no longer subscribe to the model of the three-tiered universe. The Platonic ideals of omniscience, immutability and perfection - Holy Words that have long been in use in the church - need to be held alongside other ways of looking at the world and at God and at the relationship between God and creation and people. In our day, we understand God to always be at work creating and re-creating among us to bring about transformation. We look to our Bible stories and see that especially through Jesus God became vulnerable to live among us and to suffer and to die as one of us and then overcame death and the grave and that is where we find our hope.

 

And so that means it’s really important to recognize that if God’s work is about love and relationship and creation and hope, then words like innovation, risk taking, improvisation, vulnerability, transformation, and a willingness to fail are Holy Words too. 

And they are not just Holy Words words about our Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They are also Holy Words for the church. Our Hope is in God, who is always doing new things, and that is the part that never changes.