Faith, Hope and Love
Tessa Winter
Acts 17:24-31
24"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 25 And He is not served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27 God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'
29 "Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone-an image made by man's design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."
Supercooling water is a very delicate and difficult process. You must start with completely pure water. Even a single impurity, a dissolved salt crystal, a grain of sand, makes supercooling impossible. Very slowly, without disturbing the equilibrium of the water, you cool it down from room temperature: 50 degrees, 40, 32-then below the freezing point-20 degrees, 10, 0 and the water thickens ever so slowly, but still remains a liquid. Water that lacks any sort of nucleus for crystallization, like an impurity or rough surface, can remain liquid until around - 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Drop a single test seed into the supercooled water and the liquid will crystallize almost instantly.
My journey of faith has been, in many ways, like supercooling water. The author of Hebrews wrote: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen" (11:1). So then, by this definition, faith is the stuff, the substance, of hope. What then is hope? What do we hope for? Or rather, more importantly, what do we hope in?
The Psalmist King David, in his anguish over the betrayal of his son Absalom, wrote: "Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him, my Savoir and my God (43).
The writers of the Bible, like David in the preceding verse, often used the word hope as a noun, a concrete thing that we can possess rather than, as we use it today, a verb, indicating a tentative desire. The dictionary defines hope as: intention with some possibility of fulfillment. David does not sound like he intends to praise God; he states that he will. Indeed, in Romans, the apostle Paul writes, "Hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us" (5:5). So then could faith be a hope, an assurance, a certainty in the unchanging, saving love of our God and Savior?
I have understood that God loves me almost my entire life. I grew up in a Christian home and my father continually told me how much he and Jesus cared for and treasured me. As a child, I never doubted that my earthly father as well as my Heavenly Father loved me. I believed with a childlike certainty that God is Love, the Giver of Love and that He truly loves me. It was something I took for granted.
My parents' tumultuous divorce during my sophomore year of high school shattered this certainty. I questioned the very nature of love in my life. And my faith, my certain hope, in God's unchanging love for me, wavered. But even still, I clung to that faith, desperate for what I could not see. I struggled with this uncertainty throughout high school, never really knowing what to do with it, assuming that doubt and fear were just another part of life. During my first year at Dartmouth, my pastor helped me intellectually to see that God does love me, but my hope in that love remained verb-like, tentative and amorphous rather than concrete and substantive. I was like water in the process of supercooling-thickening, but still liquid.
My junior fall, I found myself on the sociology exchange program in Copenhagen, Denmark. I arrived there in the beginning of September, very excited even if a little nervous. When I got to my apartment, I found it completely empty: no furniture, no dishes, no Internet, nothing. I didn't know what to do. There I was entirely alone in a foreign country and without even a bed on which to sleep. Later that day, my bed did finally arrive, but the feelings of absolute loneliness and despair did not disappear. In fact, as weeks passed, I felt more and more hopeless-disconnected from everything and everyone around me. I could not find a church community, it was incredibly difficult to make friends at the university, and on top it all off, it was dark constantly. In fact, one of the Danes' favorite self-descriptors is the word hygge, which captures the image of a group of people sitting around a fire, facing in toward each other and away from the outside darkness. I felt more than anything like a person caught in that darkness.
I felt betrayed by any sense of hope, completely abandoned by my very concept of love. I had been stripped of everything that I held dear, not knowing if I had had it all wrong. Still, I had this lurking theoretical construct that would not die, this idea that God loves me, but nothing could convince my heart of it. I was like increasingly viscous water, supercooled liquid, just needing a tiny grain of sand from God Himself, a mustard seed, if you will, to crystallize my hope and convince my heart. Then, from the depth of my hopelessness, God reached out through my darkness and somehow communicated to me that Yes! He is Love, that He loves me and that I could be certain that love would never change. From that point on, it was like the scales fell off my eyes and I could see finally how God had been showing me His love, giving me the substance of my hope in Him. God transformed all my solitude from a prison of loneliness to a sanctuary where He and I were the only residents. I prayed often and read my Bible hungrily finally seeing it as the love-letter that it is.
From Denmark, I went home for the Christmas holidays and then shortly after that left the country again for Nairobi, Kenya. I assumed that in Kenya, God would continue to show me His love in the same way He did while I was in Denmark, in a deeply personal and private way. When I arrived in Nairobi in mid-January, the country was experiencing ethnic violence due to tremendous political upheaval. People were attacking and killing their neighbors because of their tribal background. The community into which I arrived was huge, multiethnic and suffering deeply. Almost everyone I knew was in some tangible way wounded and broken, devastated really, often having personally experienced the violence. My private, personal experience of God's love was dwarfed by their need, their collective and individual pain. In that moment, God again burst the limitations I had placed on Him, teaching me that His love is greater than the privacy of my own heart. He again opened my eyes to His love, this time, its manifestation in the love of other people.
God has grown me in faith by challenging my ideas of Himself and His love for me. Like supercooling water, He prepared my heart for Himself and brought me to a place where I was ready to see Him and have faith in His love. He then crystallized that hope, that tentative desire, into a solid, substantial faith and certainty. Since then, He has been continually showing me the countless facets of that crystal-that He is enough for every situation and that He will never fail to show up. That in fact, as our text for today reads: "He Himself gives all men life and breath and everything else," and again "He is not far from each one of us," and even "For in Him we live and move and have our being."
For me, faith is: knowing, feeling, being certain of the boundless, changeless sufficiency of God's ever-present love. Paul in Romans wrote, "For I am convinced that neither life nor death, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (8:38). It is through Jesus that my faith in God is perfected. He is the grain of sand that crystallizes my faith because He entirely understands the depth of my humanity. He has been here, knows intimately my struggles and my sin, and loves me unconditionally. It is He who gives me faith and in Him-Who is Love-that my hope rests assured.
