Faith, Hope and Love: Something Like a Homily for the First or Second Sunday After Trinity or Pentecost Depending on Your Book (Its fun to be an Anglican in Canada) with reference to Romans 5.1-8, Matthew 9.35-10.8 And 1 Cor 13.13 which wasn’t even a reading for today…

I love the Bible. I love the way through the words of Scripture Jesus lays me down to rest with something like a mother’s soothing touch one moment while in the next putting a shot across my bows with some seemingly unfair or utterly demanding requirement. I love the way it is impossible for me to wrestle it to the ground in quite the way I want it so I don’t have to be quite so countercultural. 

So when I was preaching every Sunday I worked hard to try and let the Scriptures assigned for the week dictate and fill what I was being called to say so it wasn’t so much my own clever ideas and opinions supported and enhanced by the readings of the week as it was God’s Word written speaking and drawing attention to itself through me. Although I didn’t go looking for them, I tried not to avoid the hard teachings about things like sex, marriage and money when they came up. I enjoyed the process of living with the text for the week while looking for path it always presented by which to speak The LORD’s word written and incarnate, Jesus, to his people at that time. In later years, I also decided it was important to begin and end each homily with the name of Jesus—a sort of Alpha and Omega spiritual exercise for me and a reminder of who holds all things together for the souls for whom I was responsible. 

Sometimes it was a bit of a weight, especially when the path was not obvious at first or when I thought it was getting a bit late in the week for comfort. But I enjoyed the sense of anticipation and discovery as I waited for the way to be revealed. For me, God’s Word was, and is, living and active, indeed!

For the last few weeks, even though I don’t have to preach, I’ve enjoyed pondering over each Sunday’s readings and writing down what I might have said if I’d had to preach. I read it to Judy, my wife, and we talk about it. 

Here are this week’s musings:

Jesus both promised and breathed the Holy Spirit on his disciples. St Paul also wrote in this morning’s Romans passage that the Holy Spirit has been given to us. Has been given. Note the tense. And note, too, that that is how God gets his love to us. It has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit (Ro5.4). 

When did that happen? At conversion says the ESV Study Bible, in other words, at the moment when we knowingly confessed with our mouths that Jesus is LORD and believed in our heart that God, the Father, raised him from the dead (Ro10.9). We Anglicans then promised to trust in that love when we were baptized, if we were making our own vows, and/or when we were confirmed. There was also a prayer asking that we would be witnesses to that love for the rest of our lives (BAS, 154, 155, 623, 629). 

Romans 5, this morning’s epistle, is a bit like a commentary on the last verse of 1 Cor 13—the Love Chapter—and the core chapter of Saint Paul’s great presentation of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit and how they are to be used in 1 Cor 12, 13 and 14. 

And so faith, hope and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love(1Cor13.13). 

Faith, hope and love. 

Look at Romans 5 again:

Therefore, since we have have been justified by faith, we have peace through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand (Ro5.1-2). 

And 

Character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Ro5.4-5).

Faith, hope, love. 

Faith and hope are good, but love is greater and is what gets poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Love. Not just warm fuzzies, mind. There’s warmth in it, but so much more. The strength and breadth of God’s John 3.16 love for all the world. A love that needs no love in return, but appreciates it and revels in it, that is intelligent and purposeful, always directed at the need of the other. Not a love into which you fall. A love by which you rise. A love to do, by choice of will, no matter what. That’s the greater and amazing love that has been poured into our hearts. 

It’s the love which caused that compassion to well up in Jesus when he saw the crowds in our gospel, because they were so harassed and helpless, like sheep with a shepherd (Mt9.36). And it’s the love which sent the disciples out and has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us so we, too, will venture out among the lost sheep around us—and they are everywhere, no less harassed, helpless and shepherdless than the crowds in Jesus’ day—neighbours, family members, friends, workmates, strangers—having no hope and without God in the world (Eph2.12). People to whom we are called and empowered to witness to the love of God by proclaiming that the kingdom of heaven is at hand in our day. 

Jesus sent the original twelve out to do this by healing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing the lepers and casting our demons—for free! (Mt9.8). Should it be any different for us disciples since the Holy Spirit has been given to us, too? Or was that just for then? Are we are just left to do what we can do as people who can no longer heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse our equivalent of lepers and cast out demons? Not to mention the speaking in tongues, prophesying and extolling God with new fervour and abandon we heard about at Pentecost a couple of weeks ago. 

Is this the way it’s supposed to be? Has God put a stop to such signs and wonders for some good reason? Have we put a stop to it in some way? 

I can’t shake the feeling—hunch, bee in my bonnet, something—that there is more, perhaps there should be more. So with the compassionate Jesus and those first disciples in mind, lets believe in the possibility. Faith it, rejoice in God’s promises, hope for it, and LOVE. Love God and love the people around us by praying earnestly for sick ones to be healed; for the dead, even if just the spiritually dead, to be raised; for the cleansing of whoever are the lepers today; and that the demons which oppress, entangle and steal our joy be cast out. 

Let faith, hope and love prevail—for Jesus. 

Seinfeld and Philosophy

Reading Seinfeld and Philosophy: a Book About Everything and Nothing, (ed. William Irwin, Open Court, 2000). I'm not much of a philosopher, but I enjoy Seinfeld.

William Irwin, the editor, contributes an essay entitled, "Kramer and Kierkegaard: Stages on Life's Way." Now there's a juxtaposition of names and world-views! Irwin writes about the passion and "the absurdity and difficulty involved in making the leap of faith" into Kierkegaard's "religious stage" of life (a leap Kramer never makes, by the way). This sentence caught my eye:

The early Church Father Tertullian said, "I believe because it is absurd." p56

There's a fair amount of that kind of absurdity rattling around the Anglican world just now, only it's not particularly funny.

Yadda, yadda.

Thoughts on Labouring in the Vineyard, the Last Being First and Saving Faith: with Reference to Mt 20:1-16 and Wendy Mesley's "Chasing the Cancer Answer."

...a thought while watching Wendy Mesley's Chasing the Cancer Answer this evening. I can't remember why the thought came then. Perhaps it caused thoughts of fairness in life, or lack of it, to rise nearer the surface of my mind.

The thought:

I wonder if there is more saving faith out there than we think; people who may not have prayed the sinner's prayer in just those words but who believe in their hearts and have confessed with their lips in informal ways but don't have much, or anything, to do with church.

And I wonder if we church-goers and church-workers are called to worship on their behalf, as it were, and to pray for them, to carry them with us as we do what we do; to work rather like those unfortunate fellows who started in the vineyard at the beginning of the day and received the same wage as the one's who worked for just the last few minutes of the day.

And here we are doing all the work and bearing the "burden of the day and the scorching heat" of going to church Sunday after Sunday, living by the rules, tithing what could have been our annual holiday cruise money, and being faithful to our spouses. Meanwhile, God, in His generosity, chooses to make them, who labour under no such burdens, equal to us.

Do we begrudge His generosity? I know I do (Lord, have mercy). I resent the fact that they are not grateful to me in the least, are not at church and contributing to the effort, but expect me (us) to jump when they have a need.

But what if God, in His steadfast love and amazing grace, has chosen me (us) to stand in the gap for them, to slog through the heat of the day because of that's the way He wants it and will have mercy upon whom He will have mercy.

I think I've experienced a glimmer of what the last will be first, and the first last, means. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.

Faith: Notes for a sermon for Second Sunday of Lent

THINGS OF GOD	THINGS OF MEN AND WOMEN (Mark 8.33)
Promises (Ro 4.13)Promises Kept	LiesPromises broken
Gives life to the dead (Ro 4.17)	Give death to the living—a culture of death (Pope John Paul)
Calls things that do not exist into existence (Ro 4.17)	Send things that do exist into extinction
Suffering and rejection (Mark 8.31)	Freedom from suffering and conformity—we rebuke that still
Self-denial (Mark 8.34)	Self-promotion—a culture of rights
Taking up our cross (Mark 8.34)	Avoiding sacrifice
Following Jesus (Mark 8.34)	Following the ways of the world—ashamed of Jesus and his words

Faith involves setting our minds on the things of God (Mk 8.33)

• In hope he believed against hope because of the promise (Ro 4.18)


• He did not weaken in faith when he considered his and Sarah’s age (Ro 4.19)


• No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God (Ro 4.20)


• Grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God


• Fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. (Ro 4.21

Roger Steer, Spiritual Secrets of George Müller, (Wheaton, Illinois & Robesonia, Pennsylvania: Harold Shaw Publishers & OMF Books)

How our faith may be strengthened—first ask God for that gift since it is from him it comes. In addition

1. The careful reading of and meditation on the Word in order to learn of God’s ability and willingness to help


2. Take care to live the way God wants us to live


3. Don’t “shrink from opportunities where our faith may be tried” and “through the trial, be strengthened.” The more I am tried the more opportunity I have to see his work.


4. “Let God work for us, when the hour of the trial of our faith comes, and do not work a deliverance of our own.” (p76-78)

The cause of our weak faith:

We fold it up, as it were, in a napkin, lay it carefully away, and treat it as tender but foolish parents might do to their offspring: afraid of the open air, it will take cold; it must not walk out, it will fall and break its limbs; it must not take nutritious food, it is so delicate. Thus the poor, unfortunate child never rises to the full strength and vigour of adulthood.So it is with that class of believers who do little else than to nurse and sing a kind of lullabye over their puny faith; it must never venture out of sight, or upon a stormy sea in a dark night, or, in other words, never trust God. (p80)