Hope and love

I HAVE lost count of the people over the years who have said to me that they gave up on religion as they were growing up.

They would often say that they encountered a dry, cold diet of religious ideas, formulas and expectations. However, I have also come across numerous people who have changed their perspective when they have encountered Christian love and hope in action.

When people encounter the message of the Gospel lived out in practical ways with the words and propositions transformed into acts of love that engenders hope and builds caring, just and supportive communities, they think again about faith.

St Paul famously wrote to the Corinthian Christian community these words, ‘and now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love’. There have been times when we in the church have sometimes relegated love to a lesser position and elevated faith to the most prominent place. I believe wholeheartedly that faith emerges out of love and hope in action.

Some years ago, an elderly man appeared at Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh where I was minister for more than 20 years. At the end of the service, he clearly wanted to talk. We found a quiet room and he shared his story. He was a Palestinian, studying medicine in Edinburgh in the 1940s. At the establishment of the State of Israel, he lost his home and became a refugee. The communities of Greyfriars and the University became his home at this tumultuous time and he had never forgotten the love of these communities, and the hope that he found in a time of deep uncertainty.

He had returned to Greyfriars, now an elderly man, to acknowledge the hope and love he had found. As he spoke, I took a bit of a risk and asked him if he was here for another reason. ‘Have you come here to be baptised?’ I asked him. At this point, he began to weep and said, ‘Yes that is why I am here, thank you for understanding me. Years ago, I found such kindness here and it never left me. I am an old man now but this place has warmed my heart all through my life’. I baptised this man there and then.

A few years later, his wife returned to Greyfriars with their two sons to tell me that he had passed away a contented Christian. Faith had emerged for him out of hope and love.

“ Instead, the community offered him hope and love at a very challenging time and the Spirit did the rest.

We can be too ready to convert people, to recruit them into the church and make them like us. Sometimes it is we in the church that need to be converted. There was no attempt all those years ago to recruit this man to the church. Instead, the community offered him hope and love at a very challenging time and the Spirit did the rest. We should never underestimate the work of the Spirit who often works in spite of us with a purer motivation than we can often manifest.

Some people might say that kindness, engendering love and hope, is not enough and that we need to speak about faith but maybe that is what can turn people away. It is not a bad thing to remind ourselves from time to time about the order of priorities of St Paul. Prophecies, tongues and knowledge will cease, but love carries on. In the case of my Palestinian friend, I saw that love in action and it moved me beyond words to see the Spirit at work through his life that led to this wonderful day of his return for baptism. ¤