Three Sermons by Pastor Orlie White
These three sermons are the last ones I preached before my retirement from active ministry at Escondido First United Methodist Church. They are printed as transcribed from the tape recording of the Sunday morning service. While some references are specifically related to First UMC, Escondido, I hope the meaning will be relevant to you.
These three issues, faith, hope, and love, are the foundation on which our lives as followers of Jesus is built. I hope you will find some note of grace in these sermons, which will shed a bit of light in your world.
Orlie White Pastor Emeritus, The United Methodist Church of Vista
We live in a world where we communicate with bumper stickers, t-shirts, and notes on a refrigerator, expressing moods or guiding principles of life, or maybe just a good joke. Betty Lewis, a couple of weeks ago, gave me a bumper sticker she saw in Texas when she was there visiting family last summer. It read, “I wasn’t born in Texas but I got here as fast as I could.” That sounds like a Texan, doesn’t it?
The apostle Paul did essentially the same thing in I Corinthians 13:13. In a short phrase he summed up the basic issues of life… faith, hope, and love. That’s something you can put on your refrigerator, or your bumper sticker, or your t-shirt.
Three decades ago, and more, I was sitting beside the bed of a woman who had terminal cancer. She had been through a slow deterioration in her life, and now she was at a time when it was really just a matter of days before she joined the Church Triumphant. Her body was filled with pain, she couldn’t sleep lying down, she was unable to help her family who needed her and whom she had cared for through all the years.
I asked her, as we were talking, what her thoughts about the future were. She responded, “What I really hope is that I don’t lose my faith.”
Obviously for her faith was more than something she thought with her mind. Sometimes if we’re skeptical about something, did Jesus really walk on water? someone urges us to believe the unbelievable saying, “Well, you just have to have faith, you know, just accept it.”
That’s not what this woman meant by faith. She was talking about a conviction which would be an anchor in the midst of a storm, a compass into the unknown which she was facing. Faith, as she knew it, was a deep assurance.
This is what the New Testament writers were talking about most of the time when they used the word faith. It’s not so much what we think as where our loyalty lies. That which we count on when everything else is gone.
For Jesus, faith was essentially trust in God. It was dramatically portrayed at the beginning and the end of his ministry. In a time of two temptations, the temptation at the beginning was in the desert after his baptism; the temptation at the end was in the garden. In both of these times Jesus was tested, pushed to choose where he would place his confidence and what he would count on as the ultimate value in life.
In both cases he gave himself to God freely, fully and gladly, confident that he would be sustained. He was not disappointed.
For Jesus, faith means a commitment between God and human beings which holds us together. Faith for Jesus is a bridge over which we move, one to the other.
For us faith centers around Jesus. For many it may begin with the belief that what Jesus said is true. “No one can serve two masters.” “Don’t be anxious about tomorrow.” “Judge not.” “Love your enemies.”
Jesus’ message was that God’s creative power brings order out of chaos; his kingdom is in the midst of all the kingdoms of the world.
Of all the garbage we hear, Jesus’ words ring with authenticity. The world may not think much of them but the Christian finds this challenge to a higher life the real truth that makes sense of confusion and aimlessness all around.
A number of years ago I was a counselor to a group of high school youth who were a work team to Bolivia. One of the people we met there was a fine lay member of the Methodist Church who had been converted from Communism to Christianity and became a Methodist. He told us his story.
He said, “I was working in a used book store. One day I came across a Gideon Bible.” He had never seen a Bible or read the Bible before. He opened this Gideon Bible and began to read it. The words which Jesus spoke grasped his heart. He became convinced that Jesus was telling the truth about life. He gave up his communist ideology and became a Christian and now is a strong member of the church in Bolivia.
Faith moves one from the process of believing Jesus’ words are true to trusting ourselves to follow Jesus. We see this in the experience of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus where his life was turned around one hundred and eighty degrees. He set out to persecute the Christians but had an experience of the presence of Christ that changed his life and gave him a new motive for living.
In Acts 26:18a Paul describes his new vision “to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.”
So, faith moves beyond the level of words and ideas to an awareness of a living presence… the presence of Christ that is as real to us as a mother or father, brother, or sister.
The presence and purpose becomes real to us through the interpreters of Jesus. Paul the apostle, Herbert Rasey in my own life, Aoelia Tuttle in my first church, members of this congregation whom I have seen through the desperate circumstances of life live hopefully and with courage, with strength and confidence in God. Whatever problems I may have with Christian doctrine, in the end I want my life to be like their life. I want my life to be like those who trust themselves to Jesus Christ.
There is one more step, and that is in following Jesus I find that I can trust myself to the mystery of God.
You start with Jesus’ words. We move in faith to an awareness of Jesus’ presence who is living with us, day by day. We move from that to being able to trust ourselves to whatever God holds for us as part of our future. When we touch Jesus we approach the creative power of the universe.
It is not always easy because God is unseen and often, except for Jesus, unknown.
Remember the story of the little boy who was flying a kite which moved behind a cloud? A man going by said, “What are you doing?” The boy said, “I’m flying a kite.” The man said, “I don’t see any kite.” The boy said, “Well I know it’s there because I can feel the tug of the kite in my hand.”
We cannot point to God and show someone the physical reality, but we know the reality of God because of the tug of God’s love and grace on our hearts. Trusting Jesus, the one we know, we are led to trust God, the one we do not know.
Read II Corinthians 5:7 with me. “FOR WE WALK BY FAITH, NOT BY SIGHT.”
That is the life of a Christian. We don’t have a visual image, but we walk by faith because we sense the presence of God tugging on our lives.
I hold my faith; I choose where I will put my trust and confidence, where I will rest all the weight of my life and my future. I choose that. But the time comes when my faith holds me.
Let’s read aloud the passage from Hebrews 11:1. “NOW FAITH IS THE ASSURANCE OF THINGS HOPED FOR, THE CONVICTION OF THINGS NOT SEEN.”
The faith we are talking about is an assurance; it is a conviction which leads us into the unknown.
That woman whom I spoke of at the beginning of the sermon, Mildred, did not lose her faith because it was built up patiently through the years. She was a charter member of a church out in the desert. A group of people held the first meeting of the church in her turkey shed on her farm. She cared for her son who was a casualty of the Korean War, day after day. She gave of herself to God with Bible reading, prayer, and regular attendance at worship. A generous person, she was a tither. On the last check she gave me when I visited her, the signature was so shaky that I could barely read it, and yet she felt at that time her faith in Christ was important and she wanted to maintain that witness.
She had affirmed her faith by a life of sacrificial love, and in the end that faith confirmed her and blessed her life and was the bridge over which she walked into God’s promised future.
Now, last, these three things… faith, hope, and love. You can build your life on that. I hope you will. Amen.