11 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. 2For by it the elders obtained a good report. 3Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
8By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. 9By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: 10For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. 11Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised. 12Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable. 13These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. 14For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. 15And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. 16But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.– Hebrews 11:13, 8-16 (NRSVue)
Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as the assurance of hope and the conviction that something unseen actually exists, or could exist one day. Hebrews offers a two-pronged definition of faith that offers both a reason to continue to have hope, and a reason to live as if what is hoped for is actually true. This definition is then rooted in the specific example of the Jewish patriarchs, from whom the author of Hebrews claims descent (verse 11:2).
The passage included in the lectionary focuses on Abram/Abraham, but the rest of chapter 11 includes the stories of the sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as Enoch, Joseph, and others. Each person is mentioned performing some act that speaks to their willingness to commit whole-heartedly – body and soul – to a promise, a vision, of a world where the greatest hopes of a people have materialized: a homeland where all of a people can take root and finally rest from their unjustly long odyssey to find a place to call their own.
Abram’s story demonstrates this pattern. He was willing to leave his home of Ur and live the life of a nomad in search of something, without a plan on where to find it (verses 11:8-10), and then accepts new children – new life – unexpectedly late in his life (verse 11:11), that become a whole sweep of descendants (verse 11:12) whose lives are also irrevocably shaped by the same conviction that while they didn’t really belong anywhere (verse 11:13-15), they were certain that God loved them enough to keep the promise made of a homeland (verse 11:16).
It’s a powerful vision, offering an identity emerging from a future to prepare for, and a way of daily living built upon practices emerging from that sense of identity. In this sense, what may be mere castles in the sky – promises seemingly incapable of becoming fulfilled, despite powerful commitment shown, such as the centuries-long quest for Catalan independence or for the New York Mets to finally win another World Series – become ground in which to root an actual sense of purpose and meaning for life, growing a foundational sense of identity and belonging.
According to the author of Hebrews (unknown, unfortunately), for the Jewish patriarchs (with one eyebrow-raising mention of a matriarch in verse 11:11: Sarah is only mentioned as being “involved” in her own pregnancy? Come on now…) the promise of a homeland for their people became a foundation stone of their existence, what it meant to be themselves: it guided their lives and enabled them to continue to have hope in the possibility of a future.
The slow erosion of time passing on can be unbelievably corrosive to hope, even more than a singular crisis or betrayal. The drip, drip of a promise still unkept, day after agonizing day, where the profound difference between the reality in which you exist and the world promised generations ago can wear away sanity, hope, even a will to live: this is the world that Hebrews is invoking, where the promise sustains long-suffering people by rooting them in the absolute, concrete certainty that God loves them, wants them to have a place to root and flourish, and will welcome them home when their time on earth has passed.
Now, admittedly the Letter to Hebrews has an overarching theme of reading the existence of Christ into the grand sweep of Jewish history, and the context of this passage is that the homeland that the patriarchs were actually in search of was one framed by Jesus as the High Priest who occupies and orders the heavenly city that God builds for God’s people in verse 11:16. I’d like to lay that context aside for now, however, not to ignore it but to offer a reflection on the concept of faith as the meeting of a promise made that is both not yet fully realized, but also already kept in the actual lives of people living into the promise.
In this sense, faith is not a gift bestowed by God onto a grateful people, desperately caught up in the chaotic storms of life and powerless over the vicarious winds of fate and the whims of the powerful. Instead, this is an active faith, lived into, responding intentionally and purposefully to circumstances out of our control by deciding to live into that future now: by acting as if the promise is already coming to pass in their lives, we can begin to make it a reality. In other words, Hebrews offers a vision of faith that not only demands our trust in God keeping the promise, but also insists that we have a role to play in fulfilling the promise: by our actions, we help make the unreal real, the unseen seen, and thus become a people capable of receiving the promise when it finally begins to manifest in reality and flourish in the lives of the people.
By living as if the promise is already fulfilled (at least in part), we help make it happen.
But how? First, we need to define a promise. One definition should be obvious: a promise is a commitment you make. When I promise to get someone ice cream, for example, I am making a commitment to that person that an ice cream cone is in their near future. Now that person is trusting me to fulfill that commitment, and begins to live as if the promise is real: they’ll start imagining the type of ice cream they’ll get, maybe even planning their day around being fully prepared to enjoy that ice cream when it finally arrives in their hands. They might eat differently, wear different clothing (especially if their age is a single digit), even shuffle their expectations for their day based around the trust they place in you to hold true to the commitment you’ve made.
At this stage, unless you’re some kind of dream-killing monster excited to disappoint people by breaking their faith in the value of your word (i.e., you willingly break a kid’s heart by breaking the promise of ice cream), you are (at least in part) now bound by that commitment, and must live as if your promise is trustworthy by shuffling your own expectations and plans for your day around ensuring that you fulfill your commitment. A promise, therefore, is not mere words but an act itself, one that frames the lives and perceptions of both the promiser and the promisee through their active participation in creating the world of the promise. We make the promise a reality by living as if it is already real, even if it’s not yet fulfilled. In this way, a promise is an eschatological reality, one where the past (the trust we’ve already placed in the promiser, and thus their promises), the present (the life we live in anticipation of the promise), and the future (the promise itself) all exist simultaneously.
Continue this exercise with other promises we make, and the pattern continues. When people marry each other, they commit to living a form of life defined by that promise. The wedding ceremony is simply a public declaration of a commitment, and an affirmation of a willingness to live a life defined by it. A wedding does not make a marriage, but only reveals one that is already becoming. Similarly, a marriage is not defined by vows recited once, but through the grind of making the promises made in the vows real each and every day, in every minute of the day. Parenting is the same: single actions and words do not fulfill the promises you make to a child, but demonstrating that a child can trust you with the big promises (I’ll always love you) by showing they can trust you with the small, quotidian ones (I’ll cheer for you at your game).
This isn’t to argue that breaking a promise once renders you incapable of keeping a promise continuously. However, when you’ve demonstrated that you generally strive to meet your commitments by fulfilling your promises, the exception can prove the rule: if you generally fulfill your promises to care, cook, and clean for a child, they’re more likely to face the broken promise of ice cream with disappointment, and not disillusion. They’ll trust that the world – and you – are fundamentally trustworthy, but just occasionally a bummer. Fundamental to this process is the firm, banal, trustworthy foundation of thousands of unspoken promises (meals made, clothing cleaned), and hundreds of spoken promises (I will take you to the park) kept, across the sweep of a lifetime: again, promises are fulfilled in the small ways before they are fulfilled in the big.
Disappointment is temporary. Disillusion, however, is the result of that process of corrosion mentioned earlier, where a promise is broken so many times, in so many numerous disappointments, that the ground within which trust is rooted has completely eroded away, leaving to the potential inability to ever trust again – whether that be individual people, a community, a government, or even God. Once you’ve scoured trust away through the continuous acid of broken promises, it can be nearly impossible to ever grow that ground of trust again, leaving any hope for a future – of any kind, of any promise – to wither and shrivel in the soul of individual people, and even of an entire people.
It’s a dangerous thing to play with hopes and dreams, making promises you have either no intention of keeping, or ability to keep. As Donald Trump is discovering right now, make enough promises to enough people, and they will come to expect you to fulfill at least a few of them. Break your promises and disappoint people enough, and you risk disillusioning the very people upon whom your own power and place in society depends.
Expand this argument past simply the current pied piper disappointment of a leader, and the true danger begins to come into focus: what if broken promises disillusion an entire people? The democratic experiment of the last few hundred years is itself simply a promise: that a people can make decisions on how to live together, and can trust that this decision-making process is fundamentally fair, such that broken promises are at the level of disappointments, and don’t erode into population-scale disillusionment, where all trust in the promise of a government that is fundamentally fair and even-handed is eroded down to a bitter nub.
The toxic flowers of despotism and dictatorship bloom in this bitter patch of soil, where people are either too numb or broken to be able to fight for their hope, or even to care about its demise, that they accept any promise so long as it brings calm or leaves them be. In other words, disillusion breaks faith by not only stripping away the reason to have hope, but by also corroding away any willingness to trust in a way of life framed by that hope: why keep continuing to follow God’s call/vote/build community/contribute a fair share/respect views with which I disagree/see as human those with whom I disagree when the promise appears to be completely broken and untrustworthy?
This question has defined the last decade at least, as the rise of authoritarianism and anti-democratic leaders and movements across the world has demonstrated. Yet, it is also a question that has defined the entire sweep of the history of these United States. Frederick Douglass asked this question with his famous speech reflecting on American society’s innumerable failures towards Black people, demanding “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity.” You should read the text in full, as Douglass defiantly argues that the United States daily proves itself to be entirely untrustworthy with Black people, and risks losing anything resembling moral authority with anyone else.
More recently, Martin Luther King declared that “instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” King strove to offer a ray of hope about the future, but also a warning, saying that it “would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro.” Remember: government for and by the people, and equality before the law, are only promises, and they will continue to be under threat of breaking for a good while to come, it seems. How will we respond?
I believe that a promise, at its core, is more than a fleeting utterance or a token of good intention. It is a uniquely human contract—an invisible thread spun between souls, binding one to another with the quiet strength of mutual trust. When we make a promise, we engage in an act that reaches beyond mere words; we create an unspoken pact that demands responsibility, honor, and integrity.
To promise is to declare an intention, to stake one’s character on the fulfillment of a vow. It’s not just a statement, but a profound emotional investment. Unlike legal contracts, a promise does not require ink on paper or witnesses to its making. Instead, it is forged in the intangible realm of ethics and personal values. The moment a promise is spoken, it weaves together expectation and hope—a silent agreement that the future will unfold as pledged.