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The Collect read in church on October 29 Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. These days, Monday Matters offers reflections on the prayers we say in church on Sunday, the collect of the day. We do this based on the conviction that praying shapes our believing, that what we pray forms us. We do this hoping that the prayers we say on Sunday will carry us through the week. |
Faith, Hope and Charity
If you’ve been to a few weddings, there’s a good chance you’ve heard a reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13. It’s a beautiful hymn about love. I hate to disappoint, but the fact of the matter, Paul did not write it about marriage.
Full reading of Paul’s letters indicates that he didn’t always think marriage was all that great an idea. That’s his issue. Paul wrote this hymn about love in a letter to a community of faith, to a church.
He had his work cut out for him. The community he was addressing faced all kinds of challenges. There was discrimination between poor and rich people. There were arguments about sexual ethics, about money, about leadership, about religious rules. In other words, there’s nothing new under the sun.
With all those arguments taking place, Paul proposed the image of the church as the body of Christ, a compelling vision of unity out of diversity. What will make that functional? Paul says it’s all about love, detailed in this chapter that is at once realistic and also hopeful about human interaction, especially in a faith community.
This hymn to love is punctuated by the mention of faith, hope and charity (love), referenced in the collect we heard in church yesterday, printed in the column on the left. Paul writes: And now faith, hope and love abide, and the greatest of these is love (I Corinthians 13:13).
Yesterday’s collect suggests that faith, hope and love are gifts. As we gathered yesterday as a faith community, we prayed for those gifts. That’s good for us to remember, as religious/quasi-religious/spiritual folks. Sometimes we take our experience of spiritual virtues like faith, hope and love as merit badge, as if God is lucky to have us on the team. And maybe, just maybe, God should show a little more gratitude.
As I reflected on what it means to pray for these virtues, I was reminded of Jesus’ conversation with his disciples on the night before he died. He told them he was giving them a new commandment, that they should love one another. That will be the mark of their discipleship. It’s always struck me that my own vision of love was not something that could be commanded.
But the kind of love which Jesus referenced is clearly what is expected of us as followers of Jesus, as part of the Jesus movement. It comes as decision. It comes as commitment. It’s as much an action as emotion. It’s not always easy, especially in the church. Left to my own devices, I fall short of fulfillment of that commandment. So we pray for the grace, the strength, the equipment to love what God commands, to love love.
And as St. Paul tells us, the greatest of faith, hope and charity is love. Both faith and hope will someday not be needed. Some day we will walk by sight, not by faith. Someday, hope will be fulfilled, not deferred. But love will always be at the core, central to our life with God and with each other.
Pray this week for an increase in the gifts of faith, hope and love. To the extent that you have those gifts, give thanks for them by exercising them. To the extent you wish to grow in those virtues, ask God to increase them in you, that we may more and more each day obtain what God promises.
-Jay Sidebotham
