We live in a culture that loves to hype itself.

Rappers thrive on bragging about their prowess as poets and fighters and lovers. Sports figures out-do Muhammed Ali’s “I’m the best there is!” each and every day. Our products are new and improved, even our news is the “most watched 10 o’clock news” in the Portland area.

The endless claims and rankings make us cynical. It’s hard to impress us, especially because we realize that if you compare yourself to the right things, anything can look good.

I often do this at my house to feel good about MYself. I just make sure to set the category carefully, so that I can win. I often call for a vote at my house, asking my kids who is the favorite dad they’ve ever had. Sometimes I ask them to vote on best “man in the house”, and you’ll be glad to know that I am my wife’s favorite husband.

I’d love to be able to wave a magic wand and brush all of our cynicism aside, make all the hype and “better than” claims disappear from our minds.

Because if we could do that, the book of Hebrews might come alive to us. The book of Hebrews might be able to sink into our lives as it was intended.

If we could wipe away our cynicism about claims to greatness, if we didn’t hear and see people touting why they are better than everyone else all of the time…well, then maybe we would be rightly impressed by how Jesus is unveiled in the book of Hebrews.

We often say Jesus is our center of our faith, that he is the most important being in all the universe. Hebrews offers some of the best reasons for why.

In this book, we read that Jesus is how God spoke to us; that he is the exact representation of God; that right now, at this moment, he rules in heaven!

With meticulous care, with rhetorical skill and flair, the author of Hebrews shows that Jesus is superior to everything imaginable. Everything! And it’s not just an unsubstantiated claim on a package label; by careful argument, we read how and why Jesus is better than anything, truly above all.

For the original readers, who were Jews very familiar with the Jewish faith and the Greek version of the Hebrew bible, the original readers heard how Jesus is superior to angels and Moses and Melchizedek. Jesus is a better high priest, the author and perfecter of our faith, the one who brings better promises and a better agreement and covenant than anything else in the history of the world.

The book of Hebrews offers some of the clearest explanations and reasons for why Jesus is worth following and worshipping.

Yet it remains more unread and untaught than many of the books in the New Testament.

We want to change that over the coming months. Inside your worship folder, you’ll find a bookmark that shows which chapters we want to read together for each week until July 8. It’s more ambitious than we’ve done in the past…2 or 3 chapters a week is the norm, and near the end, we’ll read through the entire book again twice in the last four weeks.

One of the reasons, I think, that it isn’t read more often is that most of us are NOT Jewish, and many of us are not that familiar with the Old Testament or with Jewish practice.

The very things that make Hebrews such a great sermon by a great preacher are the very things that make it difficult for us. Whoever it was that wrote this book (no name is given for the author) knew his or her audience well, and used examples and illustrations and arguments that would have made perfect sense to a first century Jew.

That makes us struggle a little bit, because we have to learn what people believed then; we have to know some of the Old Testament and the patterns of worship of the Jewish people in order to understand what the author is saying about Jesus. One of the things that will help us in that struggle is a good study bible, with notes that explain things and references to the Old Testament passages.

But what is clear on every page is that Jesus is the best thing in the world!

This author and these early Christians found life because of Jesus. They knew God intimately because of Jesus. They had confidence and boldness and strength and hope because of Jesus.

I want to know Jesus in that same way! I want to experience a confidence and boldness and strength and hope because of Christ. I want to experience for myself and know for myself that Jesus is superior to any religion of philosophy.

That’s not an easy thing to say in our world, where we are supposed to have our own spiritual beliefs, but not compare them to anyone else’s. But I’ve been reading Hebrews over the past few weeks, and the confidence and boldness are catching!

I want to be bold enough to say that I believe Jesus to be the best thing that has happened in the history of the world!

Not in an arrogant or condemning way. This is not a defensive or egotistical belief, one that has to put others down in order to make me feel better about myself.

No, I want the kind of real experience of God and knowledge of God that no one else can take away from me. I want to join the author of Hebrews in the hope that God has made himself known to us and has forgiven us and made things right with us! These are our reasons for confidence.

Would you like to join me in the hunt to boldly approach God and know him better?

This journey through Hebrews will make us study a bit and learn some things…but it’s not just a head journey. It’s a life journey. It’s a real experience of God that is the goal, with practical differences expected in how we are to live our lives.

I want to invite all of us to be reading along the schedule that’s on this bookmark, letting these powerful words speak to us, pursuing the real God who has already pursued us, ready to share with each other what we are experiencing on this journey, as we don’t give up the habit of meeting together, but encourage each other and spur each other on to love and good deeds.

I want to invite us to throw off the sin that so easily entangles us, and run the race that God has set before us. I want to invite us to boldly approach God’s throne, his throne that is grace and forgiveness and acceptance, to boldly approach God with confidence because of what Jesus has made possible!

This is the journey of our faith; this is what it means to follow Jesus; this is why Jesus is so important and central.

Look in your worship folders at what was read for us earlier, the very opening words of the book of Hebrews. Or open your own bibles up to Hebrews 1 and let’s look briefly at those first three verses.

Whoever this preacher is who wrote this book knows how to hook us at the beginning! “Long ago, in all kinds of ways, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets…but now, he has spoken to us through his own Son.”

Long ago…the last book of the Old Testament is Malachi, and it was written more than 400 years before Jesus. The Hebrews had almost always had a prophet among them since the time of Moses, people whom God used to speak to Israel. But the prophets had lost their voice. To the Jews, God was silent.

For those hearing these words for the first time, everything about their spirituality was long ago. They still believed it…but it wasn’t alive and compelling and active. They still lived it, but the long years of suffering and silence had paid a price.

What about your experience of God?

Do you have a present, a now, an alive and active experience? Has God spoken to you, and not just those in your past? I wonder how many of us, 2000 years after Jesus, after who knows how many decades since your first experience of God….I wonder how many of us have only a “long ago” experience of the living and active God?

The opening words of this written sermon immediately create a sense of longing. Long ago God spoke, but what about now? Why is God silent? When can we hear someone speak like a prophet of old?

But there’s something better than an old prophet! There’s something far superior to anything we’ve known before.

“But now in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.”

This is who Jesus is….better than the long ago prophets, Jesus is the living voice of God. Jesus is what God sounds like, what God says, what God does in our world.

There’s a present tense finality about verse 2. This is it! This is what we’ve been waiting for. It’s happened, and it’s still happening. God has spoken through his Son, the one who made everything, and this will never be trumped. Because Jesus is not just that man from Galilee. Jesus is God’s radiant glory, Jesus is sustaining still everything in all of creation. Jesus is the exact representation of God, speaking on God’s behalf.

God is not silent! We are not forgotten! We are not lost causes! We are not passed over. This great Jesus purified us, did something about the things we’ve done wrong. And he accomplished that so perfectly, that Jesus now sits in the position of authority and honor right next to God.

From the very beginning, we know that this is world changing and life changing stuff.

It’s good news for us. Jesus is far more than we could possibly imagine, superior to everything and everyone. But more important than the greatness of Jesus is that Jesus is for us. He is on our side. He’s our connection to God, our friend in a high place.

All of these themes and more are going to be painstakingly developed throughout the 13 chapters of Hebrews. But right here at the beginning, with a bang, we see the hope and the power that are for us.

God is not silent!

Jesus lives! Jesus reigns! Jesus speaks! Jesus acts!

Ask him right now in our time of open worship to give you a right now experience of him that puts the long ago experiences to shame.