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.