Title: Faith, Hope and Love
Text: 1 Corinthians 13
Theme: Jesus, Friend of the weary
Place: La Carlota Evangelical Church
Time: 9:30 am, September 10, 2000
Introduction:
Good morning!
Thank you for your prayers while I was in Bangkok. It was a great learning experience for me as a Filipino Christian being with people from 7 different countries is Asia. I learned a lot in terms of understanding the different contexts and situations wherein a Christian must live.
Mother Teresa once said and I quote “the poorest of the poor are those who feel that they are unloved.”
Some of us here are living in poverty in the sense of what Mother Teresa said. These unloved people feel that they are neglected by their families, rejected by society and despised by their friends. They feel that life has nothing good to offer them. They become outcasts in a sense that they are not accepted as who they are. They are just merely existing in order to be alive but not living a meaningful life.
Before I continue, let me first change the ‘they’ to ‘we’ so as to include every one of us.
Because of these feelings of weariness, we sometimes resulted to many diversions and cover-ups. We became violent and just started hating everybody around us. We rebel against the standards and norms of society thus becoming deviants and a menace to our government. We get involve in vices and make ourselves addictive in many ways.
We hide our reality by using illegal drugs, we poison our body with alcohol and nicotine, we engrossed ourselves in books and used all our time in playing video games. By using the Internet, we use nicknames and pseudonyms to hide our identity and pretend we are someone else.
Oftentimes we would say that it is unfortunate that we were born into this world. We blame our existence.
Religion is no exception to the addiction I mentioned. Karl Marx once said that ‘religion is the opium of the masses.’ I agree to what he said because we think that by having a religion our life will become worthwhile or by going to church we will have instant answers to life’s difficult questions. The church is being used as a drug in order to create an illusion.
Every one of us wants to have instant solutions to every problem. We get instant satisfaction when we are high in drugs. We get instant gratification when we are intoxicated by alcohol. We get instant relaxation when there is nicotine in our brains. We inject chemical in our bodies in order to feel good. We are transferred into a world of fantasy when we play video games, a world wherein we are in control and we are the master of every situation. By just a click we can become heroes, kings or champions.
But in our quite and solitude times when we have the time to ask questions and reflect about our life, we come into a conclusion that there are no instant solutions to our disturbing realities, we felt tired and weary by hiding behind all these cover-ups, illusions and fantasies. We often promised ourselves after these reflections that we will do good the next time, that we must try harder in order to make life meaningful. Some of us after this cycle would be successful in keeping the promises we made to ourselves and managed to got out from our hiding places but…this is again a big but…some of us got tempted again and began the cycle of hide and seek.
We are getting weary to this cycle of hiding in a mask and trying to find ourselves. Some of us here might be in that state of being the in the lowest now, some of us here are maybe making promises to ourselves to be better next time and some of us here are now accomplishing what he had promised to himself. Each and every one of us are in this process.
To put our theme into a question, we may ask: how can I be a friend to the weary or much better we should ask ourselves: how can I be a friend to myself who is also weary?
I am not proposing here instant solutions to bail ourselves out from this cycle of ups and downs but what I would like to share to you is on what the Bible is teaching us wherever we are in this cycle.
The delegates from Hong Kong, we called them Hong Kong sisters and Hong Kong brother presented the problems that the youths are facing in their country and after which they made a proposal. At the end of their presentation, on the last acetate paper, they put these words: faith, hope and love.
These are the three virtues that I would like to share to you this morning.
To be a friend to the weary and also to ourselves:
1. We must keep the faith and help in spreading it.
Manuel, one of the delegates from Indonesia, is a Christian who is living in a city wherein the Christians are the minority and the Muslims are the majority.
He told us his testimony being an Indonesian Christian. He said that every time he gets out from his rented apartment little children will throw stones at him and will say bad words to him. Parents are teaching their children that Manuel as a Christian is unclean and must be despised. I cried inside my heart when he said that in this part of Indonesia where he is staying, professing that you’re a Christian is next to committing suicide. Before he went to Thailand to attend the seminar, his church was burned down by fundamentalist Muslims.
In one of our conversations I asked him on how he can survive this hardships on being a Christian in a Muslim populated area. I would never forget it what he told me. He said that he would just get his guitar and sing some songs, pray, read the Bible and most of all keep the faith.
I often would hear these same words being uttered here in the Philippines but with little effect but when Manuel said it to me the words are somewhat engraved in my heart. My memory of him is a person who is always smiling. He dreams of becoming a priest one day. My prayers are with him.
My friends, we need faith to steady us when we are in the top of the cycle so that we can remain there and we also need to help spread this faith to our brothers and sisters who are situated in the lowest part of the cycle in order that we can pull them up.
To be a friend to the weary and also to ourselves:
2. We must continue hoping and assist in the ministry of instilling hope in the hearts of people.
I will now tell you about Betty. She is also one the delegates from Taiwan. Her struggle in life is that she is the only Christian in her family. There are sometimes conflicts that are inevitable because of different beliefs with the other members of her family. Her whole family would gather themselves in front of Buddha statue and would utter some prayers and she would be left inside her room, most of the times crying. One of the difficult times was when she asked permission to be baptized. There was a strong opposition at first but then she was allowed. This happened last year.
I asked her on how she managed to go on with this kind of atmosphere in her home. She answered me that besides having faith she continues to hope that someday God will make a way. I am now communicating to her and she said the other day that her sisters are beginning to understand Christianity through some of the sermons and term papers I sent her to read. She said that someday she hopes that all the members of her family would know Jesus Christ.
Here in the Philippines we would often neglect the importance of being a Christian since we are fortunate to be in a country where the majority are Christians. But in the life of Betty I can now fully grasped what the meaning of hope is. Hope is believing that God will make a way even when there seems to be no way.
We need hope in order for us to continue with our lives. Without hope life is seen in the eyes of a pessimist but with hope we can all be optimist even when we think that the situation is hopeless.
To be a friend to the weary and also to ourselves:
3. We must nurture our relationships with love.
Our text says that love is the greatest. It is even greater than faith and hope.
Maintaining our relationships with love is no easy task. We would sometimes substitute money to having quality time with our children, thinking that money is a good way of telling them that you love and care for them. We not only substitute money but also material things and earthly possessions. We only tell our children that I may not be here for you now but what I am doing is for your own good in the future. But as time passes your promise is proven wrong. Your child became a menace of the society because you neglected him or her.
Statistics would show that most of the young people of involve themselves in violence, illegal drugs and other addicting vices are results of a home wherein relationships are not nurtured with love.
The love that I am talking about is more than just feelings but it the kind of love that transforms into an attitude. But no one can achieve this kind of love if the love of God is not within our hearts. It is the love of God that gives us the will to love persons other than those from our family. It is the love of God that gives us the reason to owe each other nothing but love.
Countless times we are reminded of God’s love for us but let me give just another illustration.
One Sunday, a monk was invited to speak about the ‘love of God.’ He waited until it is dark and proceeded in the altar with a lighted candle. He first illumined the crown of thorns then the two hands that are nailed after that he continued to light the spear wound in the side and lastly he put the candle in the two feet of are also nailed in the cross. He put off the candle and left the altar. There was nothing else to say.
My friends, this is the reason why we must love one another. There is no greater love than this, a man laying down his life for a friend. The death of Christ in the cross is our driving force in loving each other.
Lastly, wherever we are in the cycle of ups and downs, we can be a friend to one another by keeping the faith and help spreading it, by hoping and having hope and by nurturing our relationships with love. Faith, hope and love.
Amen.
