Faith… Hope… Love…

Three Sermons by Pastor Orlie White

Introduction

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

LOVE: The First and Last Word

There probably are more books written about love than any other topic.

We are at somewhat of a handicap as we talk about love in the English language. The New Testament uses several different Greek words to talk about the many characteristics of love. For example, you remember the word “eros” is used to talk about sexual love, the love between husband and wife. The same word is used to describe ambition.

Another word which the New Testament uses is the word “storge” which is the love of a parent for a child, the love within the family between children and their parents.

“Philia” is the love between friends, brotherly love.

Then there is a word which is the special word for us, “Agape,” describing the grace of God, the eternal care of God for us and for creation. Agape is used as a noun one hundred and twenty times in the New Testament; as a verb one hundred and thirty times. This is the word when our faith focuses, when it speaks of the love of God in our life and in our world.

Jesus demonstrated agape again and again as he reached out and touched the leper, as he healed those who were blind, as he loved the woman who was about to be stoned because she was caught in the act of adultery. All of those who were marginalized and the children, were touched by his love, God’s love, which includes everybody, and never ends.

The first thing we want to say about love is that THE SOURCE OF THIS LOVE IS GOD.

It’s not within us. We cannot find the source of this love in someone else. The source, the beginning, is in God. We must draw on that source if we are to be renewed and refreshed.

That source is behind the act of creation as God created this wonderful, complex world which we live in; not just the earth, but all the vast space and the expanding universe.

In God’s covenant we are called to be responsible for caring for each other. God establishes a covenant with creation through which we learn that God loves us no matter what–no matter where we are, where we go, what we’ve done. God loves us, God wants to be in relationship with us, God wants us to receive that love and love each other.

The covenant love is seen in Jesus Christ, especially.

It shines brighter in the dark corners of our hearts in Jesus Christ more than any other place. The source of that love is God.

One of the hymns which focuses on the source of love in God:

Precious Lord, Take My Hand

Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn;
Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light:
Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

When my way grows drear, precious Lord, linger near,
When my life is almost gone,
Hear my cry, hear my call, hold my hand lest I fall:
Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

When the darkness appears and the night draws near,
And the day is past and gone,
At the river I stand, guide my feet, hold my hand:
Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

The second principal of agape love is that LOVE IS THE ONE THING THAT WE CAN LEARN ONLY FROM ANOTHER PERSON. However, for some people, it is experienced in another living being in God’s creation.

You can learn how to repair a car from a video; you can learn geography from a map; you can lean mathematics from a book but you can only learn to love from another person.

A year after I graduated from seminary, assigned to our first church, one day I received a call from my father telling me that my mother was critically ill. She had not been well all through her adult life. She had had asthma and phlebitis; and breast cancer when I was in high school. Now at the age of fifty-seven, she was terribly ill with multiple sclerosis. She had been in the hospital a couple of weeks and had come home. I flew to Silver City to see her. It was the last time she would be able to talk and communicate. I had just graduated from seminary and I didn’t know how to deal with this. So, as preachers sometimes do when they don’t know what to do, I quote scripture. I sat by her bedside and read from Romans, “There is nothing that will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus… neither height nor depth nor angels or principalities not things present not things to come nor anything else in all creation.” Her response was to say “I’m not afraid.”

Then she told me a story which I had not heard before. It was the last story she would ever tell me. I had always known that I was adopted, but I knew none of the details. She said that the doctor had told her after she had a failed pregnancy that she could never bear a child. She and my father, in 1933, went to a foundling hospital in Kansas City. There must have been a lot of available children during the depression because there were a lot of infants in bassinets all around the room. The nurse led them in and they walked around to peer into all of the waiting faces. Finally, my mother pointed to the bassinet where I was and she said, “This is the child I want.”

The nurse said, “Oh, no. He is sickly and scrawny. You don’t want that one.”

My mother said, “I’ll take that one.”

The scripture speaks of how in Jesus Christ we are adopted by God. It’s always been a very special scripture to me because out of that love of a mother who chose me against the advice of the nurse, who took me home and cared for me and gave me everything any child could ever receive from a mother, I learned how the love of God chooses us as adopted daughters and sons.

Another new hymn in our hymnal speaks powerfully of the love of God that chooses us:

Spirit Song

O let the Son of God enfold you with his Spirit and his love.
Let him fill your heart and satisfy your soul. O let him have the things that hold you, and his Spirit like a dove
Will descend upon your life and make you whole.
Jesus, O Jesus, come and fill your lambs.
Jesus, O Jesus, come and fill your lambs.

O come and singe this song with gladness as your hearts are filled with joy.
Life your hands in sweet surrender to his name.
O give him all your tears and sadness; give him all your years of pain,
And you’ll enter into life in Jesus’ name.
Jesus, O Jesus, come and fill your lambs.
Jesus, O Jesus, come and fill your lambs.

That “agape” love WILL DIE UNLESS YOU GIVE IT AWAY. It will not grow and change your life unless you give it away. Someone has written that “The final work of grace in the human heart is to make us gracious.”

If you cannot be kid, what good is your faith? As long as there is hatred in your heat you’ve not grown as far as God wants you to grow in Christ, and God’s work of love has not completed its work in your heart.

Starr Daily, years ago, was a newspaper reporter who ran afoul of the law and was put in prison for a time. His job in prison was to work in the prison hospital. Somehow he conceived the idea of using I Corinthians 13 and each week focus on one verse to to learn what it meant for him and allow it to influence his life as he worked with those who were ill in the prison hospital.

For example, one week he would take “Love is patient” and all week, as he worked with sick people, he would try to be patient. “Love is kind” the next wee, and he would try to be as kind a person as he could be. He found it transformed his life. It changed the way he saw things, the way he lived. He wrote a book about his experience, The Way of Holy Affection, because he found in I Corinthians 13 the power of God’s “agape” love, God’s affection, holy affection.

At Annual Conference this year one of the highlights for me was the return of Bishop Tuell to celebrate the repayment of money which the churches of our Annual Conference had raised to bail out Pacific Homes, the network of homes for the elderly which our conference once owned. Nine and a half million dollars was raised in this conference alone to put the homes on a firm financial foundation. Now this money has been returned to the Annual Conference. All the other parts of the church which helped us have received their money, and now we have received nine and a half million dollars back.

Bishop Tuell told us something that I had forgotten. He said when the homes were in trouble and they worked out an agreement between the church and the residents of the homes and their families, the settlement would cost nine million dollars. It was approved by everybody except the State of California. They refused to accept this agreement and the homes declared bankruptcy. It eventually cost twenty-one million dollars to pay out the settlement which would have cost nine million dollars if the legal system had not gotten involved.

That was part of the story. The good news is that the money has been returned to the Annual Conference. On the wall in the narthex of the chapel where the conference meets, every church’s name and what each church raised for Pacific Homes was listed. This church raised, in addition to apportionments and all the local expenses, in less than a year, because it had to be done in about nine months–this church raised seventy-four thousand, three hundred and ninety dollars. Well, no, that’s wrong, that’s what we needed to raise… we actually raised eighty-five thousand five hundred sixty dollars and twenty-four cents. This church gave 115% of what was needed.

It was a sign of love. When there is a crisis in the church and people are in need and a heroic effort is called for we do it, we give of ourselves, we give of that which we felt we could never give in a heroic effort. That’s the story of this congregation.

As I looked at the chart almost every church in this Annual Conference gave more than 100%… maybe not 115%, but more than 100%. Love will die unless you give it away.

Let us sing of the gift of love:

The Gift of Love

Though I may speak with bravest fire,
And have the gift to all inspire,
And have not love, my words are in vain,
As sounding brass, and hopeless gain.

Though I may give all I possess,
And striving so my love profess,
But not be given by love within,
The profit soon turns strangely thin.

Come, Spirit, come, our hearts control,
Our spirits long to be made whole.
Let inward love guide every deed;
By this we worship, and are freed.

The fourth principal I want to share with you is that THE LOVE OF GOD IS THE ONLY POWER ABLE TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD.

It’s not by our wisdom, not by our work; it is the love of God working in us, one person at a time, one place at a time, which transforms the world.

Glenn Beelman gave me this quote this week from William Gladstone, “We look forward to the time when the power of love will replace the love of power, then our world will know the blessing of peace.”

I’ve been guided in my ministry by an important passage in I Peter, the fifth chapter, beginning with verse one. I wold like to read it to you because it points to the call to us as human beings, whether as a pastor or any other vocation, to point to the love of God in Christ and then allow that love between Christ and another to have its way, do its work. We talk about the love, tell the story of the love, then step out of the way.

"Now as an elder myself and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as one who shares in the glory to be revealed, I exhort the elders among you to tend the flock of God that is in your charge, exercising the oversight not under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you do it–not for sordid gain but eagerly. Do not lord it over those in your charge, but be examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears, you will win the crown of glory that never fades away. In the same way, you who are younger musts accept the authority of the elders. And all of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another, for

‘God opposes the proud,
but gives grace to the humble.’

Humble yourself therefore under the might hand of God, so that He may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Discipline yourselves, keep alert… And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever."

That’s our opportunity in life, to point to the glory of God. Let that glory flow into every heart and to every space in the world., not because of who we are, but because of the great grace and love of God.

The passage which I quoted at our retirement party was one I saw within the last year at a retreat center in Orange. It was on a poster in one of the dormitory rooms. The saying, very simple, said, “Finally, it is not a matter of reason, finally it is a matter of love.”

That is what Jesus Christ wanted us to see and that’s why he came, to call us to understand it’s not what happens here (pointing to his head), it’s what happens here (pointing to his heart) that makes all the difference.

Let us join in our last hymn of praise:

Alleluia

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia,
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

He’s my Savior, He’s my Savior, He’s my Savior, He’s my Savior,
He’s my Savior, He’s my Savior, He’s my Savior, He’s my Savior.

I will praise Him, I will praise Him, I will praise Him, I will praise Him,
I will praise Him, I will praise Him, I will praise Him, I will praise Him.