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.