Can You See Love?: Sermon Preached on 10th August 2025 (Eighth Sunday After Trinity)

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Hebrews 11.1–3, 8–16; Luke 12.32–40

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

How can you be convinced by something you haven’t seen? Well you can’t see love, but I married a couple yesterday and they seemed pretty in love to me. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews, whose identity remains a mystery to us, says that faith is “the conviction of things not seen”. When people are convinced about things they haven’t seen, others often dismiss it as blind faith, or even as wilful stupidity, at least if they don’t agree with them. But everybody has faith of some sort. Even if they don’t believe in God, even if they don’t think they believe in anything that can’t be measured or proven, everyone has some set of assumptions about the deeper nature of reality and how things work beyond the merely physical.

Of course we might say we can see the effects of love; they’re often rather wonderful. I don’t just mean romantic love mixed with sexual attraction – although that certainly is wonderful – but also the selfless love of a parent for a disabled child or the brotherly love of two old friends who’ve been meeting for a Saturday afternoon pint together for the last sixty years.

But you can’t physically measure love itself, in the same way you can measure electricity, or helium, or radioactivity. These things are undetectable by our five senses but we understand the physical processes behind them and have devices that can measure them all accurately. But you can’t buy a love meter from Amazon, or go to Google and look up today’s love maps and find out where the hotspots are.

So how do we know that love exists? Only because we have faith that love exists; we are convinced it exists although we can’t see it or measure it scientifically. We might say, as I noted, that we can see the effects of love – but we can only say that they are the effects of love and not something else because we have faith that love exists in the first place.

The Letter to the Hebrews also connects faith with hope – “faith is the assurance of things hoped for” writes its unknown author.

Like love, we can’t see faith or hope, or measure them. There aren’t standard units for them –I can’t say you’ll gain 10 kilofaith from my sermon or say things have been tough and I only have 0.26 microhope left. But when I read St Paul’s great hymn of praise to love from First Corinthians at funerals, stone-cold atheists don’t come up to me afterwards to argue with me that you can’t measure love so they can’t believe in it; they come up and tell me how lovely the reading about faith, hope, and love was.

Some of the most important things in this life can’t be measured, can’t be put into numbers, can’t be subject to a legally watertight definition, can’t be proved. But we wouldn’t want to live without them. You may not have faith that Jesus Christ was God incarnate, and you may not have faith in God at all, but believe me you almost certainly have faith in some unseen and unprovable things—and the tiny number of people who really don’t have any faith in anything except material things are always pitiable and sometimes frightening.

The author of Hebrews commends the experience of Abraham and Sarah in today’s reading, how God did seemingly impossible things for them and through them when they were at a ripe old age. I often think of Abraham and Sarah when people tell me I should panic because a majority of the people in my congregations are older.

And as a majority of you have seen more than a couple of dozen summers in your lives, by this stage you’ll know that part of long life is lost loves. On a home visit recently, someone told me how awful it was that she had outlived nearly all of her friends. I said that, all things considered, that was better than it being the opposite way round, but maybe that was too flippant. Lost friends, lost old flames, lost parents and siblings, lost husbands and wives—they all mount up as we get older. This is an agonising process and the world of our youth starts to be become a lost country, one to which we cannot go back.

In their old age, Abraham and Sarah went forward into a new country. Towards which new country will we set our compass as we get older? Sometimes we get the feeling that we were not truly made for this world, but for somewhere different. We sometimes feel we were made to live in a place where our better lights aren’t undone by our worst instincts in the way they so often are. This is a common feeling, and not just for Christians. The author to Hebrews tells us that Abraham and Sarah lived as strangers and foreigners on this earth, for their true country is heaven.

We can’t see heaven or measure it, or sense it at all, except by using our faith. If we have faith that Christ will lead us to our true home in heaven, then we can hope that others will see the effect of that faith in how we live our lives on this Earth. In our materialistic age, people might dismiss a conviction that we are made for heaven as blind faith or wilful self-deception. For that reason, Christians often emphasise the worldly aspects of Christ’s teaching and downplay the supernatural. That’s looks like a sensible approach in a materialistic society, but only on at first glance. For people are losing faith in the materialism that have defined the last couple of centuries in Western countries, and the confidence in progress that went with it. That’s why there is such obvious unease at the moment; people no longer have faith in the things that once gave them hope for the future, which were about trying to make heavenly lives in our short time on Earth.

Jesus Christ – in this morning’s Gospel reading and in many other places – told us instead to build treasure in heaven, to live a life not built on pure materialism but on faith, hope, and love. Remember such prosperity as God has blest you with is worth nothing in its own terms – it is only valuable for the enduring and eternal things it allows you to create for yourself and, still more, to share with others. We can give love away to others forever and it might hurt sometimes but it can never run out. The same is true of hope and faith.

And if our faith in Christ is true, then the Son of Man is coming, at an unexpected hour. Switch on the news – it might be soon; but it might not be for ten thousand years. And for all of us, whether we’re as old as Sarah and Abraham or have only just started shaving, the years we have on this Earth are short and you will have to give an account for how you used them. If you fear judgement, remember that our coming judge was also our loving saviour on the Cross; Jesus says in this morning’s Gospel, “it is your Father’s pleasure to give you the kingdom”—He seeks to save you, not to condemn you. Remember also that you will be judged as you judge others. If you worry there is much you need to be forgiven of when you meet God face-to-face, then be sure to forgive generously on this Earth.

Fuel your lamp with faith, to light your way in hope that your brother Jesus, your judge and your saviour, will lead you to heaven, the kingdom of eternal love, and your true home.

Can You See Love?: Sermon Preached on 10^th August 2025 (Eighth Sunday After Trinity)And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.