How Faith, Hope, and Love May Abide (February 3, 2019)

Readings

1 Corinthians 13

Luke 4:14-30

How may faith, hope, and love abide?

First, I think that it may be important for us to have some definitions in common – the meanings of faith and hope and love. For the purposes of this sermon, therefore, let me just observe to you that when I say “faith and hope and love,” I am meaning this:

Faith = I am bound to you, either by promise or by grace.
Hope = Better things are coming, and redemption is near.
Love = Unconditional, undifferentiated embrace with no requirement of reciprocation.

When I started researching for this sermon, I was intrigued by the insight that the name of the town where Jesus’ home was throughout most of his ministry, Capernaum, is a word in Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke) now associated with chaos and meaninglessness. I was fascinated that he should have moved from Nazareth to Capernaum, from the place where he spent his childhood to that haven of insanity.

And then we read the passage Erick and I just shared with you from Luke... and you have to realize that Nazareth was pretty crazy too. So, what Jesus proposed to do was to introduce the God who first ordered creation to the chaotic world in which we live. Into this world he would bring

Faith = I am bound to you.
Hope = Better things are coming.
Love = Unconditional, undifferentiated embrace with no requirement of reciprocation.

But because “the greatest of these is love,” that’s where I am going to try and concentrate most of our focus, today.

Faith = I am bound to you.
Hope = Better things are coming.
Love = Unconditional, undifferentiated embrace with no requirement of reciprocation.

It’s kind of nice to have so much in our readings concerning love, here so close to Valentines Day. I can’t find evidence that that is why we just read 1 Corinthians 13, but it feels almost as if we’re reading this in order to prepare for February 14.

Love, Paul argues, is the necessary basis of every spiritual gift he has mentioned in chapter 12. He continues by asserting that, if you have any spiritual gift but you lack love, then you don’t actually have the spiritual gift. If all that is happening is some kind of personal gratification or reward, then what you have cannot possibly be love.

Love is a divine quality, rooted in the Holy Spirit – chesed, lovingkindness – a product of grace, a byproduct of promises kept, pointing toward a potential in human beings that we rarely achieve.

Love (what Paul called, agapé) is the stuff of heaven, abundantly available on earth, and fundamentally irreplaceable, but scarcely employed.

When it happens, it is so unusual that it stands out. Being selfless and unconditional, it is starkly different from what one is accustomed to seeing produced from out of human beings. When love is accomplished successfully, it draws amazed attention. For example, the real estate developer Candice Payne in Chicago, this past week, recruited other merchants to provide housing to people who had been living in tents but whose propane fuel had run out. Together, Ms. Payne and those other citizens put up eighty or so people in sixty hotel rooms on the South Side. She and her husband paid for a third of them... and not just for one extremely cold night but for three.

That’s a nice example of how to remedy a situation in the immediate. But what if you know that remedying the immediate doesn’t actually fix the problem? What if you know that the problem really is rooted more deeply? You know, the old metaphor of pulling drowning people out of the river and then realizing that the solution is to prevent them from being thrown in, in the first place..?

In Utah and New York City, and other places, agencies are dealing with a level of homelessness in our country the rate of which is only exceeded by that which existed during the Great Depression. There are two prominent ways of dealing with homelessness: Housing Ready is the most common, but there’s also a new concept called, Housing First.

Housing Ready provides homes to homeless people who have undergone training on how to maintain a healthy and stable household. They learn skills like balancing a checkbook and cooking simple meals and interviewing for jobs, sometimes responsible parenting, and those sorts of things. Some are given avenues toward becoming sober. There will usually be some transitional living situation provided as a first step toward affordable or even free housing. But the idea is that, once you have completed such life skills development, then you can qualify for a place to live. Such programs can have as much as a 40% success rate among the chronic homeless, but it is usually considerably lower both for the chronic and the persistent homeless person.

Housing First puts people in stable housing situations regardless of whether they have been taught or acquired life skills for stable living, before their drug or alcohol use is abated, providing condoms and clean needles if needed, even before their mental health care may have been normalized for them. St. Louis journalist Aubrey Byron reports that a Housing First program in the state of Utah reduced chronic homelessness there by more than ninety percent in the decade from 2005 to 2015. It hasn’t had a similar effect in other homeless populations, such as those who are persistently homeless – say, for more than three months but less than a year – but the results of this type of intervention for the lives of chronically homeless people, newly housed after perhaps dozens of years, are really remarkable over the long term. They are shown to result in sobriety, lower per capita living costs (most notably because of a lesser need for emergency services and intervention of law enforcement), stabilized mental health, and reunion with estranged family.

Housing First requires a strong investment of volunteer and professional attention and time in those being housed, but as the Utah-based initiative’s founder Lloyd Pendleton likes to say,

I have learned over and over again that when you listen to somebody’s story with an open heart, walk in their shoes with them, you can’t help but love and care for them and want to serve them.

Now, the model isn’t a panacea. It has a magnificent success rate for the fifteen percent of homeless people who are the chronic homeless. But it’s an amazing start.

Persistently homeless people benefit from somewhat different approaches. Utah’s latest initiative for persistent homelessness, which they are boldly calling “Homes Not Jail,” was begun in 2017 by the state with the cooperation of a major shelter in Salt Lake City. It’s still too early to estimate its level of success, but you get a sense in the naming of the project what will be the measure of its success.

Just to make sure you’re remembering with me, here are our definitions again:

Faith = I am bound to you.
Hope = Better things are coming.
Love = Unconditional, undifferentiated embrace with no requirement of reciprocation (which provides a basis for the other two).

In consideration of Paul’s encouragement to other Christians to practice the unconditional love they have received from God, and to base their faith and hope upon it, it should come as no surprise that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon church, has been a major funds provider and advocate for these initiatives in Utah. The Mormons are proving to be significantly pragmatic in their approaches to homelessness and addiction, not placing restrictions, impediments, or expectations upon the recipients of their benevolences.

I wonder what it could be like for UCC churches to associate and move ahead in a similar way for the benefit of our own communities...

Can we love like that? Would it be possible for us, even as individuals, so to set aside our concerns about appearances, or our presumption about others’ laziness and lack of motivation or lack of will, that we might love others in the way that God loves us?

Think about that!

There is something in the way that God has acted toward us, something in our life that has caused us to perceive God’s favor, something in what we have been taught (maybe) that says that God loves everybody and therefore God loves us.

Even if we are not entirely satisfied with the present outcomes of our lives or the circumstances in which we may be living at the present, there has been a time, a blessed time that we cherish, when the goodness, the love of God was so readily apparent that we ended up here.

Or else, we’ve been told that if and when we’re in trouble, we ought to show up here, because this is where God will be. This space and this place, what I say, what we do, how we experience time here are designed to mitigate, to remove the usual daily obstructions and seemingly endless distractions of our attention from the Source of blessing.

We know that, and this is why we are here.

So, what about not only here? If

Faith = I am bound to you.
Hope = Better things are coming.
Love = Unconditional, undifferentiated embrace with no requirement of reciprocation.

then, mustn’t there be some kind of something that we could do that would move those qualities of faith and hope and love from within these walls to beyond them!

This is a challenging proposition, I know, because when we read that story from Luke, about when Jesus upsets those other worshipers from his hometown, we may be led to wonder at just why they got so angry. But it has something to do with what he was saying to them.

When he says, “This prophecy is fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus directs the attention of his audience to the Isaiah scroll he has just read, about the year of the Jubilee – the poor have good news, the captives are released, the blind now see, the oppressed are free.

But they don’t listen, fixated as they are on what has become of their native son.

So he points out to them that they have become distracted from the message of the prophet: They are potentially the fulfillment of God’s longing for all people to enjoy the benefits of the earth’s abundance.

You’ll recall, they had just requested that he do among them the kind of things that he had done in other places, especially in Capernaum where he had taken up residence. His response, which was based on what he had just read to them from the prophet Isaiah, was to say, in effect, that he didn’t belong to them; his hometown was heaven. And so was theirs. And if they would just act like it, imagine what would be possible! He was proclaiming the Good News, and this was to be good news for everyone.

Because heavenly love cannot be localized. What we do here on Sunday mornings celebrates faith, hope, and love that have to abide as heaven abides – in, with, and through the earth. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, as they say, but what happens in First – that stuff of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit – must not stay here. How may faith and hope abide without love? And how may love possibly abide in just one place?


I want to go back to what I said at the beginning of this little talk and reassert it, because it really is at the heart of what we are about – as individuals, as an organization, as the Church – and that’s love. Love is the necessary basis of every spiritual gift. If you have the gift but you lack love, then you don’t actually have the gift.

If all that is happening is some kind of personal gratification or reward, then what you have cannot possibly be love. The people around us, the community around us have to see some benefit from what happens here. Or else we’re useless. “If I have the faith that removes mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give everything away, even give my life away, but I have no love, nothing is gained.”

So, how shall any of these abide – faith, hope, or love?

I promise you, the only possible way is that we keep returning to the Source of all three, and that we return persistently to the One who introduced us to them in the first place, introduced us so that they consisted of reality and meaning.

This is how you do it. You find it here and then share it. You take it out, and then you bring it back, over and over again.

On My Way

A sermon by Student Minister Reina Ueno, translated by the preacher. This English version was delivered in worship, February 24, 2013. To hear the audio of this sermon, please click here. 

Do you remember your hardest experience in your life? Or perhaps some life path that was difficult for you? I do not want to dwell on it very much, but I think each of us have had a tough time we can remember.

For the Lenten season, we remember the suffering of Jesus at the same time all of us have to pass through hard places in our life jorney, at some point. Today’s Scripture describes that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem and actually seems to suggest that Jesus will be faced physical crisis by going up to Jerusalem.

Because today is Seminary Sunday, I have been asked to talk about my life at Eden Theological Seminary. Before that, I would like to talk about some stories about Japanese Christians who have supported in my studies in the United States.

There are many active elder members who are more than 75 years old in my home church in Japan. They have experienced life in wartime in World War II. Some of them were Christians at that time; some had not become Christian yet. I heard lots of witness from them how they worshiped in the wartime and how the Japanese church or Christian leadership have struggled, that they eventually supported a Japanese military government even though they actually did not want to do it. One lady said, pointing to the back end of sanctuary, “Here, there was military policeman every Sunday when we had a Sunday morning worship. They check up whether we worship not only Christian God but also Japanese Emperor.” They always were suspected of spying for America because they were Christian. 

And I know that lots of people experienced Copernican paradigm shift from the end of war in 1945 to the time of after wartime. They totally lost their identity as Japanese. Even as Christians, they realized and were disappointed that Japanese Emperor was not God but he was a human being, and they as a result were not belonging to God’s kingdom. And some of them found that they truly oppressed other Asian countries. 

Also, many of them have held onto very difficult feelings about Hiroshima and Nagasaki since the end of World War II. When I visited my home church last summer, some of elder members asked me seriously “How do American church think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, now?” This question might be connected with their faith journey. I could not answer the question. But anyway, then so many Christians have experienced such a hard times and are also unique.

Their journey is part of my journey as a Japanese Christian. I think I have a responsibility to understand historical facts and people’s emotions, to rebuild relevant relationships, especially with Asian countries.

There is another story concerning the sexual minority issue. I know one boy who struggled with his confusion between his body and soul. When the boy noticed that he had biologically female body then he also realized that he is not female but male. He was raised up by Christian mother and non-religious father. He was baptized as a child. When he attended a high school, which was only for girls, as a female student, he came out to his mother and sisters. 

His mother was so confused and blamed to herself because she thought she failed to raise up her daughter as a female. She believed that God created human being only biologically male and female according to a literal reading of the Scripture. It was huge crisis for both her faith journey and her daughter’s life but unfortunately there was no help from church. She and her daughter wanted to talk to a pastor but they could not. They were not totally sure the church could accept their situation. They could not get any information about sexual minority people or any positive perspective about the matters of sexuality both in the life of church and in pastor’s preaching. Since this mother was divorced, she somehow noticed the way of pastoral care that she was provided by her pastor. There was surely gentle prayer, but there was no appropriate instruction about concrete issue of relationship. So they hesitated to talk with a pastor and a relevant pastoral care has never happened at that time.

Their journey is also part of my journey as a family member. The transsexual boy is my youngest sister. She is officially male now. I attended ONA conference yesterday and one of the important things I have heard in the workshop is to name specific people who are marginalized. Because they are not sure whether church welcomes them like my mother and my brother has experienced. How do they know they are welcomed? There is no church proclaiming Open and Affirming Congregation in Japan. Therefore I think I have responsibility to work for LGBTQI people who are still strongly forced to be hidden without any support.

So, let’s return to the Scripture.

Then some Pharisees came and said to Jesus, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” Jesus said to them, "Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.”

Why does Jesus call Herod a fox? Why does Jesus use this kind of bad word, even if Herod is actually bad person? Isn’t Jesus supposed to be gentle!

I think Jesus may be articulating how very much Herod differs from himself. Jesus explains his own work specifically in this way: "I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work."

The implication of this explanation might be: This is what happens when God is working among people. And this is what a true king of people has to do. But Herod never does that. Jesus is doing it today and tomorrow, and until he dies. Herod never even gets started in this way.

Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.

“I must be on my way.” This phrase of Jesus catches my eye. “I must be on my way.” – What does it mean?

I actually struggled with feeling some nuance in English for this phrase. Pastor David taught me “way” has two different meanings in English - a road and a practice. But still, I do not think I get the nuance of this word in English.

So I will talk through the perspective of the nuance in Japanese language.

To me, this phrase seems to be like Jesus is emphasizing “his way” differ from Herod. And the way he must go down the road to the city of Jerusalem is required from God. On the other hand, Jesus’ way of doing things truly is applicable in both contexts. His way need not necessarily be the way of a king. Jesus talks about what he was doing in his life and how he was associated with people. He cast out demons, healed the sick, and finally, one day, he would finish this work.

So, “the way” means not only the road but also the practice that Jesus did in his life: casting out demons and performing cures. Moreover, this should be the statement of the obedience to God’s will. Not only for Jesus but also we must be on our way because it is impossible to change God’s will.

We are strongly required to be on our way differently. Likewise the elder Japanese church member experienced, my mother and my brother struggled, and all of us have certain life journey, which is impossible to refuse. In other words, through the prophet Isaiah: My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways. (Isaiah 55:8)

My study at Eden is connected with the Japanese church members, families, friends and American church, too. One of my hope in studying at Eden is to discern how to compose these elements with my own context as a single female Japanese pastor. It often causes isolation to me compared with other students or other female pastors in Japan because simply American Christian is majority and Japanese female pastor mostly get married with male senior pastor. But I really appreciate that I am only one Japanese student at Eden and one of a few single female pastor in Japan. It is unique and this is the way I must be on that God required to me.

But, what is the purpose of this way? Why has God given us this way?

I think the answer is in another Scripture for today. Here, God speaks of a promise to Abraham. When Abraham looks back his journey in the past he could not find any hope to have his child anymore. Abraham seems to have a tendency to consider that God is not keeping the promise, because of what has not yet happened in his life. But even though, back then, for Abraham the facts were not yet in God’s favor, and Abraham could not find hope just in that moment, God nevertheless asked him to see the hope in the sky. There were stars like lights of hope.

In the Epistle to the Hebrews 6:13-20, the author explains hope from God,

When God made a promise to Abraham, because he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, saying, ‘I will surely bless you and multiply you.’ And thus Abraham, having patiently endured, obtained the promise. Human beings, of course, swear by someone greater than themselves, and an oath given as confirmation puts an end to all dispute. In the same way, when God desired to show even more clearly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it by an oath, so that through two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible that God would prove false, we who have taken refuge might be strongly encouraged to seize the hope set before us. We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered, having become a high priest for ever according to the order of Melchizedek.

The purpose (goal) of our way required by God is hope. God is providing hope even if we are on the hardest way. And this hope is a sure and steadfast anchor of our soul. The hope enters the inner shrine, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered.

We must be on our way today, tomorrow and the next day, following Jesus in word and deed.

We are on our way differently, but we have the same hope holding you as an anchor.

Can you see the hope on your way? Yes, you can see it.