“FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE”
A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday, February 13, 2005
All
I've never
pretended to be a great fan of
And so forth. I won't continue this bill of particulars, and I admit that he was every bit the captive of prejudices in his time as we are captives of our own prejudices in our time. Furthermore, Paul's reputation suffers from the misfortune of having had multitudes of followers who believed his words to be the words of God. Few of us will have our legacies burdened by that fate.
Be that as it may, Paul's essay on love contains the most familiar words ever written on the subject, and I understand that there are more words written on the subject of love than on any other subject. His words are probably read more often at weddings than almost any other text. And deservedly so, I think, for the words are not only beautiful, they are insightful, maybe even profound. The only problem is that they are not exactly about the kind of love most of us think about when we use those words. They are not about romantic love or marriage.
The Latin
word for romantic love is "eros."
Paul was writing about "agape," a more universal sense of
love: "love thy neighbor" kind
of love that Jesus preached. He was
writing to the members of the church in the city of
"If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers to understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing....
"Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends... So faith, hope, love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."
There was nothing in the context of this passage that addresses marriage or romantic love. Paul is no Dr. Phil when it comes to advice about marriage. He was a life-long bachelor, in part I suppose because he carried disdain for women in general. His advice in the letter to the Corinthians was how people in the church can show respect and get along. That may be why the word "love" in that text is often translated as "charity." It turns out it is good advice. It is good advice to church members everywhere. It is good advice to neighbors. It turns out, perhaps accidentally, that it is good advice to couples as well.
Another impressive part of this essay is that final sentence, "faith, hope, and love abide . . . " It was brilliant of him to identify these as the greatest abiding values. Ever since then, the entire Western world has packaged them together. Faith, Hope, Love. They go together like "horse and carriage." As advice to the church congregation, he could not have chosen a better set of values. As advice to families, or even to society, this is a brilliant set of values. Even though it was not intended as advice to couples, it turns out to be very appropriate -- appropriate enough to be read at weddings, I think. Appropriate also, I suppose, to be the subject of a sermon on the day before Valentine's Day.
Faith, Hope and Love. It seems to me that these values are easily misunderstood, and I would like to address some of that misunderstanding. For one thing, people often think of these as feelings that we have. Faith, Hope, and Love. On the contrary, it seems to me these are not feelings we have, these are activities we do. Let me illustrate some of the misperceptions that seem to me all too common about these concepts.
To some people, "faith" is synonymous with "belief." "Faith" means a set of beliefs, and often it implies beliefs that are unproven. In this sense, a person's "faith" identifies their belief system. To ask, "What is your faith?" is to solicit an answer like, "Catholic" or "Jewish" or "Buddhist." But faith is not the same thing as belief.
It is also sometimes suggested that faith means believing something that is unproven, something that can't be proved. Belief in God, in that sense, is often considered "faith," since there is no proof of God.
But it seems to me there is something about faith that is deeper, more fundamental, and more universal that merely a system of specific beliefs. Faith is a human psychological orientation of trust toward life and the world, and as an attitude, it is independent of the content of belief. Webster doesn't always get its definitions right, but in this case, the first definition of "faith" is "belief in the value, truth, or trustworthiness of someone or something." Faith is indistinguishable from trust.
Matthew Fox, the contemporary renegade priest, tells us that the biblical talk of faith is more properly talk of trust. He says,
"The New Testament word most often used by Jesus for 'faith'... in fact means 'trust' (pisteuein) in the original Greek. Jesus time and again assures people that 'your trust has healed you' [not 'your faith has healed you']. He recognizes the salvific power of trust. And he also laments of how little trust he finds in people, 'O ye of little trust' [rather than 'O ye of little faith'].
It is hard to imagine how anyone can get through life without some level of faith and trust. Simple daily activities require it: getting behind the wheel of a car, or simply riding in one; taking medicine when we're ill or following a doctor's advice, or deciding to follow your own instincts; making major decisions about life partners or career moves. If one wants to learn to swim, one must first trust that the water will hold us up. To choose a church to attend or a house to buy or even a book to read requests from us to trust on some level the decision we make. Without trust, without some element of faith in the outcome of decisions, we would be paralyzed from doing anything.
Faith is an orientation toward life that says what we trust and don't trust. If I say I have faith in human nature, I mean that, by and large, I trust the capacity of people to make good choices. If I say I have faith in democracy, I mean that, by and large, democratic choice is fairer than other systems. If someone claims faith in scripture, they imply that they can trust the claims and advice of that book. If someone says they have faith in science, they mean they trust not only the conclusions of scientific investigation, but they trust the potential for science to provide answers that are needed.
Faith is also the way we choose to make sense out of things that we don't fully understand. In that way, faith is also an activity. It is not something we feel, it is something we choose, something to do in order to make life work for us.
All of us who place trust in something or someone have faith. Over time, and subject to life experience, the objects of that faith may often change. The only people who are without faith are those who refuse to, or refrain from giving trust or who may be so cynical and pessimistic about life that they place no value on, or confidence in, people or things outside of themselves.
Faith is not just a feeling, it is an action -- the act of placing trust in another person or idea or thing.
There are also misperceptions about hope, and some are similar. It is sometimes felt that having hope is something about which we have no control. Either we have hope about the future or we don't. Either we feel hope, or we don't. In some ways, hope is very close to faith, because it also involves some level of trust.
But like faith, being hopeful isn't just something we feel. It is something we do, something we have some control over. Being hopeful means looking at the possibilities before us, and choosing the positive over the negative. It means choosing the future you want, rather than letting it just happen.
Being hopeful is being positive, choosing to be positive. A somewhat dramatic expression of this comes from the great nature writer Loren Eisley. Eisley describes a community of sparrows facing the deadly terror of a raven that is eyeing them for food. The terror hung in the air as the raven circled its prey. But what shocked Eisley in this scene was the eventual resolve of the sparrow to protest through song. First one began singing, and eventually they all joined in. Eisley concluded:
They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth, they had forgotten the raven, for they were singers of life, and not of death.
This is a profound expression of hope -- the ability to choose to face the future with a positive approach, regardless of how threatening it may seem.
It is the business of the future to be unpredictable, full of a range of possibilities. If that is the case, then we have some choice in that future concerning which possible outcome we wish to see happen. Hope appears when we chose a positive outcome, regardless of the odds. We can=t insure a particular future, but by embracing the future we want, we can strengthen the odds of its outcome.
William James once said, "Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact." In a similar way, I believe that affirming certain possible futures over others, will help create that fact. We cannot be tied to what we've always seen or what we've always been told.
That ever-romantic poet Walt Whitman offers these images in his poem "Song of the Open Road":
Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the
open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune --
I myself am good fortune;
Hope is not just a feeling that happens to us. Like faith it is something we do, an activity we choose. In the case of hope, it means to choose the best of the possibilities before us.
There are also misperceptions about love. There is a common misperception, for example, that love just happens. Perhaps sometimes it does, but it is also the case, more importantly, that love can be created. We can decide to love. Yes, even Valentine's Day type love.
We can decide to love, for love is something we do far more than something we feel.. An interesting historical comment lends some credence to this conclusion. Princeton History Professor Lawrence Stone wrote on the history of love and made these observations.
"Love has a history. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, every advice book, every medical treatise, every sermon and religious homily firmly rejected both romantic passion and lust as suitable bases for marriage. In the sixteenth century, marriage was thought to be best arranged by parents who could be relied upon to choose socially and economically suitable partners.
"This assumption is not, it seems, unreasonable, since recent investigations in Japan have shown that there is no difference in the rate of divorce between couples whose marriages were arranged by their parents and couples whose marriages were made by individual choice based on romantic love.
"It was not until the Romantic movement and the rise of the novel, that society accepted a new idea -- that it is normal and indeed praiseworthy for young men and women to fall passionately in love. Once this new idea was publicly accepted, the arrangement of marriage by parents came to be regarded as intolerable and immoral."
It is surprising to me to be reminded by this historian that the current practice of marrying for love is in fact a fairly recent phenomenon. It is even more surprising, I suppose, to learn that marriages which are initially founded on love seem to be little, if any, more stable or solid than marriages which are arranged for other reasons, perhaps known only to the parents who concocted the marriage in the first place.
The clear implication of Stone's historical observation is the totally un-modern notion that love is something we have control over, it is something we can choose to nurture and develop and direct as we wish. It is not something that controls and directs us, or is beyond our power to control.
Pre-arranged marriages worked, he seems to say, not because the couples were drawn together by love, but because they found themselves drawn together for other reasons, they chose to love. Love is something we can decide to do, not just something that happens to us.
I am not suggesting that we reconsider the custom of pre-arranged marriages (though most of us parents are probably convinced we have a better perspective on this than our children). It will never work in our society of rugged individualists. But somehow, it seems to me, we might benefit from the reminder that love arises from our needs and commitments, and not the other way around.
Much confusion about love seems to arise because the word is so broad as to encompass almost everything -- parents love their children, lots of people love nature, spouses love each other, some people love their work, and so forth. It is hard to believe that we can share the same feeling, love, for this variety of different objects.
But if we cease to think of love as a feeling, and more of an activity, something we do, a common thread seems to appear. When we love someone, we approach them and treat them with respect. Those who love their children treat them respectfully, those who love nature treat nature with respect, those who love their spouse act with respect toward them, and even those who love their work approach their job with respect.
So just as the foundation for faith is trust, the foundation for love is respect, and it is something we do far more than something we feel.
So there is the great Trinity of abiding human values -- "faith, hope, and love." They are often misunderstood as simple feelings, when in fact they are choices -- decisions we can make, activities we can choose. We can choose to live by faith, to live with hope, and to live to love.
One closing observation is worth making. The greatest of the three, said Paul, is love. I believe he is correct, but it also turns out that this is, to my mind, a profound theological insight. It is a direct challenge to those traditions who say salvation comes from faith, or that what we believe is the most important. There are schools of Christianity which say correct belief is more important than anything else, and here is Paul, who is arguably the founder of Christianity as we know it, telling us in no uncertain terms that love is greater than faith.
This question was, and is in fact, one of the defining distinctions between Unitarians and the religious tradition from which it arose. When the creedal traditions were claiming that what you believe in religion is the most important part of life, the Unitarians dissented and said that who you are, how you live, and how you shape your personal character and integrity is more important than what you believe. Over the years, we have more or less agreed simply to disagree on this, but I can't help, whenever I hear this passage, to reflect on how this great Saint of the creedal traditions clearly sides with the Unitarians in this passage. It couldn't be less ambiguous:
"I may have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but if I have not love, I am nothing.... Now abides faith, hope, and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love."
Faith, Hope, and Love sometimes seem like extremely high aspirations. Sometimes it may feel like they are beyond our reach as fallible human beings. But perhaps it is helpful, at times, to realize they are things we can choose to do. If we want have faith, choose to trust. If we have to be hopeful, we choose the positive of all possibilities. And if we be to be loving, we choose to show respect to those we love.
OPENING WORDS
We give thanks for this most amazing universe and for the life within us:
For our minds and the capacity to learn which never ends.
For our hearts and the capacity to love, which is also endless.
We are grateful for nature, of which we are a part: for its symmetry and simplicity and order.
By enjoying life, we give thanks, through singing and sharing of ideas, and in quiet solitude.
We give thanks for this one, never-to-be-repeated lifetime, and for our moment here, now, together.
--Gary Kowalski, adapted.
CLOSING WORDS
May we never lose the sense of blessed connectedness we share, upheld by the web of being. May we offer light where there is darkness, and where fear and confusion are, may we bring love.
Mitchell Howard
NOTES:
From sermon 2/11/01 "More Than Love"
Consider this. It is only recently, in the last couple of centuries or so, that marriages were formed because of love, that love played a role in the creation of marriage. For most of human history, and in most cultures, they were pre-arranged by parents. Such a circumstance does not mean that there is no love in those marriages, it means that creating love, and then sustaining it, was the central task of marriage. If you wanted to have love in your marriage, you'd have to make it happen. Love had to be created and built. In some ways, it might be safe to say, love was the result of an effort to make marriage succeed, it was not the cause of a successful marriage. If people wanted their marriage to have the added element of love, they would have to work to create it -- to practice it.
This seems to me to suggest that if you depend on love to make a marriage work, you are putting the cart before the horse. Love doesn't happen, it is created, it is nurtured over time.
From the Symposium, by Plato:
(Plato explains the myth of Aristophanes. According to the myth of Aristophanes, human beings originally had four hands and feet, with back and sides forming a circle. Because arrogant human beings attacked the gods, Zeus decided to punish them. He split human beings into two pieces, with two hands and feet each. The myth, as Plato told it, continues this way):
"Each of us, when separated, is but the indenture of a human being, having one side only, like a flat fish, and we are always looking for the other half. And when one of us finds the other half, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy. Our intense yearning for our other self seems to be something which the soul desires, but cannot tell. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were whole, and the desire and pursuit of that whole is called "love."