Faith, Hope, and Love Abide                                       March 22, 2009         

            The man and woman sat hunched over, holding on to each other, desperation lining their faces.  In the icu their little girl, all of five years old, lay not moving, not responding, hooked up to machines that ran from her small body like huge tentacles.

Just a few hours ago she had been full of life and love, laughing as she took off on her small bike.  But for some reason she had disobeyed her parents' strict rule and she had veered off the sidewalk and into the street where the unseeing driver, a teenager all of 16, ran into her, ran over her, and now they were here, begging for her life.

            The doctors had come to say they had done everything they could.  It was now in the hands of God, and the parents wondered as any parent would, if they could trust God with the life of their child.  Still it was their only hope and so they bent over with their pastor in prayer.

            In that moment, in the midst of their desperation, in the midst of their doubt, they discovered the true meaning of faith, for faith is often most evident in the moments of our greatest doubt, for faith is trusting when nothing is certain.  It is believing in the good in the midst of the evil, believing in love in the midst of hate, believing in life on the verge of death.  It is believing when all the evidence around you screams out the question "How can you possibly believe?"

            And in the moment of that question, in the moment of our greatest challenges, we see the truth that Paul Tillich once saw when he wrote, "Doubt is not the opposite of faith. It is an element of faith."

I remember, I once had a Sunday School teacher who gave us great gifts of wisdom which have helped me throughout my life, and one thing she would often say is, "If your faith cannot stand up to questions and doubts, it is not faith at all."

Faith is not a belief in a provable, scientific fact.  It is much more like a journey without maps, not quite knowing where you are headed but moving ahead any way, climbing the mountains hoping to see the vistas ahead.

So in our faith, we can cry out with the father who appears before Jesus in the scriptures, begging for the life of his child, "Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief."

It is in those moments, those pivotal moments of our lives when everything hangs in the balance that we know that faith is not merely praying upon your knees at night.  It is moving through the darkness keeping our eyes on the light.

Which brings us to hope - the perseverance in faith, the belief that helps you manage to put one foot in front of the other.  It is desire and expectation rolled into one, the parent of faith, for without hope, faith could not be born.  But hope is more than just wishful thinking.  It is believing that God is faithful no matter what our experience is telling us.

There is a story that Max Lucado tells of a day, like any other day, except on this day, he noticed a blind beggar standing on the street singing.  Max stopped and gave the man some change.  The man stopped his song just for a moment to say thank you.

After walking away, Max found himself turning back and what he saw was this man continuing to sing as person after person passed by, some averting their eyes, some looking downward, some busy thinking only of their own agenda unable to hear the song in the midst of their concerns.  After all, they had things to do, people to see, and this man --- well, he was just another blind beggar.

After a few moments, Max went up to the singer and asked if he had had lunch.  "Well, no," the beggar replied and so Max went and got him a sandwich and a cold drink and they sat side by side on a park bench while they shared lunch.

"Were you born blind?" Max asked.  "No, I had an accident when I was a child."  No more details were forthcoming.  For the man, it had long ago ceased to be an overwhelming tragedy, but merely a fact of life.  But for Max it raised all sorts of questions.

Questions like, Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night wondering why this happened to you?  Do you ever lash out in anger against God?  Do you ever give in to despair?  But he didn't intrude on the man's privacy with intimate questions like these.  Instead he just shared his sandwich and the two ate in silence.

Finally the man stood up and said, "Well, it's time I got back to work."  And he stood and he sang.  He did not sing out of desperation.  He did not sing in ignorance about his condition.  He sang for all those who hurried around him.  He sang a song of hope for any who would listen.  He sang a song of courage and love and life.

And so we have faith and hope that together make the unbearable bearable, that keep us going in spite of it all.  But as necessary to our lives as these two are, there is one thing that is even greater and it is love.

Let me tell you one more story.

The small boy was hungry and cold, wet and tired as he stood in the food line in the village in Haiti, but when it was his turn, all they had left to give were bananas and they only gave one of those to each person in line, trying to make them go as far as possible so everyone would at least get something.

For some reason unknown to her, the small boy touched the relief worker's heart.  She had thought that by this point she was hardened against the desperation all around her so she could do her job without her heart breaking each and every moment of the day, but she watched as the young boy walked slowly back to where two children, even younger than him, sat.

Slowly he peeled the banana, broke it in half and gave one to a small girl and the other to the boy she assumed was his brother.  Then finally he gave each of them the peel to eat as well, leaving him with nothing.

She went over to the child, knelt down, and asked him what he had done.  "You've left nothing for yourself," she said.  "How could you do that?"  The child looked at her with eyes that were far too old and said simply, "It wasn't my turn to eat today."

In that boy, the worker saw the face of God and heard a voice say in the depths of her heart, "For I was hungry and you gave me food.  I was thirsty and you gave me drink.  For I was lonely and you visited me, sick and you healed me."

And she remembered why she was there, working long hours with next to nothing to give, without luxuries she had almost forgotten like hot showers and flush toilets.  She had come because her heart had once been touched by love, calling her to live a life of faith, giving hope and love to even the most desperate around us, the poorest of the poor.

She lived the lessons we have learned over these past few weeks: "faith, hope, and love abide, but the greatest of these is love.  Make love your aim."