The internet has ruined family arguments, hasn’t it?

The minute you get heated about which pitcher played the last inning of the 1996 World Series, or what year it was that the Hindenberg exploded, or which Kardashian it was who called out Taylor Swift, all you have to do is get online and do a quick Google search. Argument short circuited.

We have such a vast store of information at the tips of our fingers. We can go as far back in history as there are written records. We can learn every piece of trivia about our favorite show. We can learn about obscure plants and animals, ways of life in other countries, the mysteries of space.

We can even go a little bit into the future. We can see projections of who is most likely to win an election. We can watch videos of what might happen to the earth if all human life ceased to exist. We can upload our photos into programs to project what we will look like when we are older.

We have so much information now that when we run into a situation where we cannot research an answer, we feel flummoxed! How long will my company survive? When will I meet the love of my life? How sick is my disease going to make me?

When we bump up against these questions, we are reminded that the future is not predictable. Our knowledge has a stopping point.

The second generation Christians to whom the letter of the Hebrews was written were running up against their own limitations. They had never met Jesus, but they had heard about him from people who knew him. They believed the stories, but because of their belief, they were running into real trouble in the world. They were being jailed and harassed. The author of the letter to the Hebrews has to convince them that their belief in Jesus is legitimate and that they have a future.

And so we get one of the most beautiful passages of the Bible: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Faith in God is not the same thing as scientific belief. We can’t titrate anything and come to a clear answer about whether God exists. To relate to God is always an act of faith, facing the world with a clear hope about how the world is structured, without having concrete evidence to back up that hope.

While we don’t have evidence, we do have something even better: stories.

Before I became a Christian, when I was a teenager, I would read Madeleine L’Engle books and really want to inhabit her world. I did not have words to express why, but I loved her sense of wonder and the way people related to each other in her books. Years later, when I was a Christian and I learned she was Christian, it all made sense to me. The stories she created, while rarely mentioning God, were rooted in a Christian centered world. Her characters behaved the way they did because of their faith and it was that which attracted me.

Stories tell us things that are true, even if the stories are not historical. L’Engle’s books taught me that we are accepted even if we are awkward, that we all have important jobs to do in the world, and that love conquers fear and hate.

The author of Hebrews also uses stories to make his point. He tells the story of Abraham, to whom God promised descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, despite Abraham and Sarah’s old age. Abraham was given this promise. He did live to see Isaac’s birth, but he did not live to see his descendants grow to the millions. Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob after him, followed God without evidence. They trusted that God would fulfill his promises.

Well, according to the author of Hebrews they did. If you actually look back at the text in Genesis, you see Abraham doubting God at multiple points in his life. Every story of faith is more complicated than it might appear.

Second generation Christians needed to be reminded that they were part of God’s story. Like Abraham, they were faced with real doubts about God’s faithfulness. But through reminding them of the story of God’s faithfulness, the author hopes to encourage them and give them hope.

Today at the 10:30 service we will baptize Ellie Jane Simmers. When we pray over the water, we will tell ourselves the story of how God has used water throughout history. We will remind ourselves about how the Holy Spirit hovered over the waters during Creation, how the Spirit brought order out of chaos as land pushed through, separating the vast waters into oceans. We will remember the Israelites following Moses through the waters of the Red Sea, magically parted so they could escape slavery in Egypt. We will remind ourselves that at Jesus’ baptism the skies parted and God’s voice boomed down, blessing his Son. We will remind ourselves that in our baptisms we are buried with Jesus’ death and reborn into a new life of resurrection.

This story is so important. This story shapes our lives. If we are resurrection people than we know we can face hard things with courage. If we are resurrection people we know no one is their worst day. If we are resurrection people, then we know that there aren’t just second chances—there are third, fourth, seventy seventh chances to pick ourselves up and start over with God. If we are resurrection people, maybe we can even have faith that when everything looks bleak, God will show up and change the story.

Ellie Jane is becoming a member of a really radical community, a community based entirely on faith. And we have faith that God is already at work, claiming Ellie Jane and each of us as his own. We can’t Google whether or not God loves Ellie Jane, but we have faith that he does. And God loves Ellie Jane not because of her resume, because it is still pretty thin. God loves Ellie Jane because love is who he is. When we march babies down the aisle, I see the love in your eyes as you meet babies who now belong to you as members of the Christian family. I am always moved by how people will crane their necks, even leave their pews to catch a glimpse of our newest Christians.

Babies are cute, but I think we so enjoy greeting a newly baptized baby because there is joy in remembering that God loves us even more than we love these babies.

If you are in a place in your life where it is just too hard to believe in God’s love for you, may I suggest you tell yourself some stories? Maybe you need to read some stories from the Bible to remind yourself of the ways God has loved and challenged human beings. Maybe you need to tell yourself stories from your own past—times when God showed up in unexpected ways. When we are anxious about the future, telling ourselves stories is one of the best ways to shore up our faith.

And if you come to church once a week, you are guaranteed to hear stories about God, rather through Scripture or the sermon or the prayers at communion. We tell ourselves the stories of God’s faithfulness to us over and over again, so we can join those early Christians in faithfulness and hope.

Amen.