Exodus 19.2-8a                                                                                                                                      Carol A. Solovitz

Psalm 100                                                                                                                                               Pentecost 4A

Romans 5.1-8                                                                                                                                        June 12, 2005

Matthew 9:35-10.8 [9-23]

 

 

Faith… Hope… Love

               

 

          Dear Friends in Christ, today I want to focus on the second lesson, from Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 5.  Have you ever noticed that sometimes it is difficult to follow the words and the logic of St. Paul?  For instance, in the 7^th chapter of Romans, he confesses that “the good that I want to do I do not do, and the bad that I do not want to do is what I do.”  Or in 1 Corinthians 15, he says, “When all things are subjected to [God], then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who puts all things in subjections under him, so that God may be all in all.”  Okay, we think… let’s take it again, slowly, word by word, and maybe we’ll understand this eventually.

Thankfully, today’s reading from the 5^th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans does not leave us scratching our heads and making Homer Simpson noises.  With an economy of words and an extravagance of poetry and depth, Paul takes us on a journey of grace – a journey of faith, hope and love.  These words that we also see in 1 Corinthians 13 – Paul’s well-known “love chapter” – are familiar:  faith, hope and love.  Here in Romans 5, he also intersperses them with other strong marks of faith – grace, glory, sufferings, endurance, and character.

It is tempting to rush through the reading of these familiar verses 1 through 5, “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.  And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produced endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us…”  But we cannot rush this journey, especially the journey from suffering to hope.

Elaine Ward tells of a young man, aged 19.  He was a former football player, but he’d had his leg removed to save his life because of bone cancer.  He came to visit a psychotherapist angry and bitter.  Consumed with the “unfairness” he had been dealt by life, he felt a deep sense of rage and injustice.  The counselor worked with him for more than 2 years, slogging through grief and pain and rage one slow step at a time.  Eventually he began coming out of himself.  He started to visit other people who had suffered severe physical losses.  In one case, he saw a young woman who was so depressed over the loss of both her breasts that when he entered her room, she would not look at him.  He had been running before his visits and was in shorts, and his artificial leg was visible.  Hearing the music on her radio and desperate to get her attention, he took off his leg and danced around the room on one leg until she finally burst out laughing and said, “Man, if you can dance, I can sing.”

A year later, viewing his file and the work they had done, he smiled and handed his therapist one of his earliest drawings.  It was his image of his body, a vase with a deep black crack drawn over and over.  It was a vase that would never again hold water.  “This isn’t finished,” he said, and picking up a yellow crayon, he put his finger on the crack and said, “You see here where it is broken?  This is where the light comes through.”  With the yellow crayon he drew light streaming through the crack in his earthen vessel.

This young man had moved beyond his suffering to know hope and love.  The draw of hope and love is powerful, and we want to rush there.  But anyone who has suffered knows that hope and love often seem elusive.  One feels that the only things to come out of suffering are anger, sadness, pain and depression.  It is not a smooth journey from suffering to endurance and from endurance to character and from character to hope.  No, the journey has steep climbs, narrow roads, dizzying curves and falling rocks.  Sometimes, the process goes in circles, and you end up right back where you started, in the middle of suffering.

Paul knows the dangerous road out of suffering, and as a person who believes in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he can describe with confidence the path from suffering to hope.  It begins with faith – a gift from a God of grace, which makes it possible to endure the suffering, to grow from it and emerge stronger, and to live in hope.  This faith is made possible through the love of God given to us in Jesus Christ and by the Holy Spirit.  Faith, hope, and love: Can the formula be so simple?

Well, no… It is not simple at all.  The truth is that most of the time, we wonder why we should have to suffer, or why our loved ones or the innocent do.  But when we get well on the road to hope, we sometimes begin to wonder why we should be the recipients of God’s immense generosity.  We know ourselves – our deepest, darkest desires and inclinations.  Even the most pious among us know how easy it is to step over the threshold of sin.  Yet in spite of our sinfulness and weakness, we hear good news.  “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly,” and “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”  And we know salvation.

It is not our faith, hope and love that save us, however.  It is the faith, hope and love of Jesus that allowed him to trust that the Father would not abandon him in death but would raise him and all the dead to new life.

Dear fellow sinners, hear the good news that “faith, hope, and love abide – these three – but the greatest of these is love.”  Let us open ourselves to these gifts of the Spirit and live as children of God.

 

Let us pray: Lord, your faith, hope and love make us pure and holy.  Give us strength in our suffering, faith to endure, and hope in your love and goodness that bless and keep us.  In the name of Jesus, Amen