Sermon by:
The Rev. Pamela Dolan
“Faith, Hope, and Love”
September 9, 2024
Rooted in faith, growing in hope, reaching out in love. I imagine that most of you have heard me talk about our mission statement at least a couple of times in the past, but since today is the beginning of the program year, I want to bring it up again. It seems to me that mission statements are like good silver; the best way to keep them from getting tarnished is to use them! They don’t do anybody any good locked away in a drawer. So, if you are new here, or if you need a refresher, once again, our mission statement says that we are a parish that is rooted in faith, growing in hope, and reaching out in love.
I always think of the shape of a tree when I say our mission statement out loud. It all starts with being rooted in faith. No tree can be healthy for long without good roots, and no church program or ministry makes any sense unless it is grounded in our faith. Being rooted in faith means that we remember to put the first things first, to keep God at the center in everything we do.
The trunk of the tree, in this analogy, is hope. You know how a mighty oak starts off looking more or less like a little stick? Hope can seem fragile and scrawny at times, too, but we shouldn’t be fooled. Hope is tough, determined, maybe even a little pushy. Some trees find ways to grow in the most inhospitable places, just as some people manage to hold onto hope despite tremendous obstacles and stresses. Without hope, no community or individual can grow into what God desires them to be.
Finally, then, we come to the branches, which are reaching out in love. The branches of a tree are its glory, its crown; the love that we share with the world, human and non-human alike, is the way we give glory to God and follow God’s primary commandment, that we love our neighbors as ourselves. Branches are where birds and squirrels make their nests, where fruit and acorns grow, where leaves spread out to give us shade and instigate the process that cleans carbon out of the air and gives us back life-giving oxygen. Love has that same power, to reach out into people and places and situation that seem toxic or desperate and transform them into something life-giving.
Today’s Gospel reading illustrates the point. The nameless woman who confronted Jesus, begging him to release her daughter from the grip of an unclean spirit was, if you’ll allow me to be blunt, going through hell. A child’s suffering is torment to a parent, especially when you are powerless to do anything about it. It’s easy to sentimentalize motherhood, but the best mothers I know are fighters. They are scrappy. This mother wasn’t waiting around for her daughter to get better—she had likely tried everything in her power and then some to find someone who could end her daughter’s suffering.
Professor Matthew Skinner makes a compelling argument that this Gentile woman exhibits a deep and unwavering faith[i]—not faith in the sense of a shared religious practice or set of beliefs, but faith as in a deep trust in God. This woman’s faith, her trust that Jesus will help her, not her rhetorical cleverness or her humility, is what prods Jesus into changing his mind. Her faith allows her to see things about Jesus that he doesn’t yet even see about himself: that his salvation is for all people, for all creation, and that it only takes a scrap from under his table to be fed and healed.
Closely related to her faith, and perhaps springing from it, is hope. There had to be a little spark of hope somewhere in this woman’s soul for her to reach out for help. If she had already given up hope, she would not have come to Jesus at all. This kind of hope is “the blade of grass pushing up through a sidewalk” kind of hope. It’s about grit and persistence, not about simple positive thinking. Remember, Jesus was not a part of her community, her tribe, but she didn’t let that stop her. She just wasn’t going to take “no” for an answer. That’s the gift and power of hope.
Finally, and most profoundly, this story is about love. I think we can safely assume that everything this woman did was motivated by love. If she didn’t love her child so much, she wouldn’t have gone to extremes to find help for her. If she didn’t love her child so much, she could have moved on with her life, accepting that there was nothing she could do. But because she loved that child, she could not look away and she could not give up.
I think most of us know what it’s like to love someone who is suffering—we know, whether through empathy or hard experience, what this mother was going through. It can be a husband, a wife, a parent, or even a dear friend. Some of us are feeling this way about our country, our democracy, our social fabric. Some of us are feeling this way about our planet, “this fragile earth, our island home,” which is clearly hurting. Grief is a real part of love, whether it is eco-grief or grief over the loss of a relationship or the grief of watching someone you love suffer.
The bottom line is that love makes us vulnerable. And you know what? Love makes God vulnerable, too. God loves the world—the whole world, you and I and every creature under heaven—with a love so deep we can hardly dare to imagine it. The proof that that love makes God vulnerable is found in the incarnation, in the person of Jesus, who was not spared from the hardship and hurting of life. God’s love was there at the cross, as well as there at the empty tomb.
We live in a world where faith, hope, and love are not optional: they are required of us. We need faith, hope, and love in order to face things like the horrible event this week at Apalachee High School in Georgia, or the ever-growing climate emergency, or the ongoing sin of systemic racism—to face them and find ways to make them stop. No matter how hard things are, we must not lose faith, or give up hope, or stop opening ourselves up to the power of love. That is what is going to make the repairing of our hearts, our relationships, and our planet possible.
In a reflection for “Love God, Love God’s World,’ Stephanie Spellers said something that captured my attention. She writes, “And let’s be clear: There is nothing soft or easy about loving the world as God does. If anything, when we tap into God’s love, we become more fierce, compassionate, bold, and powerful. Faithful people have changed societies, communities, and worldviews because we are inspired by God’s dream of beloved, flourishing community and because the Spirit propels us to join God and make that dream real.”
What a message for us in this time of so many challenges and so much potential: “When we tap into God’s love, we become more fierce, compassionate, bold, and powerful.” Love transforms. Love heals. Love is what finally triumphed over death and the grave and is the unwavering promise that God makes to us all. And love is all the power we need to do the work we have been given to do, for the healing of the world.
[i] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-23-2/commentary-on-mark-724-37