Love, Hope, and Faith

It still feels strange to me when I write 2026 on the top of my notes for meeting, but I’m starting to settle into it at least enough that this week won’t center on time travel like we did last week. This week I’ve been completely obsessed with John Green’s Vlog Brothers video from four days ago, Hope Is Not a Feeling. I don’t always watch Vlog Brothers, but Lina sent me this one in the middle part of the week, and I just loved it.

John’s idea, of course, is that hope is not only a feeling, but also a decision. The quote that sums it up for me, “I think hope is and must be a practice.”

He connects the practice of hope to the practice of love in the video. If anyone hasn’t already watched it, definitely press play, and if you’ve only watched it once, it might be worth watching again, I really think it’s one of John Green’s finest works.

As is the way of such things, a bunch of threads connected together for me this week - that video from John Green, our family FaceTime call when we were all talking about The Symposium, and a podcast called Learning How to See. I was listening to where the guest was Parker Palmer.

What kept turning over in my head was that the practice of hope and the practice of love form two parts of a trio. Faith, hope, and love. John Green covered hope pretty well, and in the podcast, Parker Palmer talked about love as a lens through which we can view the world, I was pretty satisfied with that, too. And in the end, I felt a little hungry to talk about faith. As a side note, it’s Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians where he coins this trio, a passage that Lina and I and lots of other couples have read at their weddings, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

I think maybe faith, by extension, is the least of these, and I got to thinking about why we haven’t talked about faith more during our meetings. Of course, then I searched through all the notes for meeting over the past nine years, and realized we’ve had about forty meetings that at least mentioned faith, all the way back the first one in 2007 when we decided to try out doing it every week.

And here we are talking about it again.

Riffing off of John Green’s idea that both hope and love are both a feeling and a practice, I think the same can be said of faith, and today I want to talk about what kind of a practice it is. What does it mean to practice faith? For that does it mean to feel faith? What does it mean to be faithful, or the most mysterious of all to me, what does it mean to have faith in God? That’s one that has been weaponized by so many churches to mean, “Do what Authority Figure says.”

Needless to say, that’s not what I think faith means as a decision or as a practice.

It’s interesting to note that there are lots of ways that we talk about faith in our day to day language that can give us hints. I have faith that you all will generally make good choices. The King James Bible was described as faithfully translated, I think that’s an interesting one, a faithful translation meaning that it’s true to the original, or at least as true as we can make it. And then there are other ways that we sort of use faith interchangeably with hope, but with a slightly different connotation. “I hope AFC Wimbledon will win their next game” and “I have faith they’ll win” sort of have different implications, right? One makes more sense than the other.

Broadly, I think faith is the one that relies on a bit of evidence. And that’s not always how we use it, is it? I’m trying to square it with the way my own religious sensibilities have at times demanded faith with or without any evidence either before or after it. James wrote it this way in a letter:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

But that’s really only half of the evidence, the part that comes after the faith. To me, the part that comes before the faith is the evidence of repetition, or the evidence of observation. When I plant tulips or alliums in the ground in the fall, I have faith they’re going to sprout and grow, because that’s what they do. It’s their lifecycle. If I were to plant an African Violet at the same time in Maryland, it would be pretty stupid to have faith that it would thrive, even though I might hope that it will. I think hope is for when we don’t know, faith is for when we do, and love is for both, that’s why it’s the greatest.

I’m happy to admit that faith in God is a complicated one for me, in part because the way I’ve understood it for most of my life isn’t really compatible with my own understanding of God. For a long time, I’ve needed a new understanding, and here’s what I’m circling around.

Just like the faith that the tulips will grow during the winter, I want to have a faith that is based in what is. An absolute confidence to walk in it.

Jesus said to have faith in God exactly one time that is recorded in the Bible.

“Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them.

I believe I’ve misunderstood this my whole life to be a command from Jesus that we ought to come up with something absurd and gin up enough faith to make it happen anyway, but what if that’s not what he meant at all when he said this. What if what he meant is that we can only have faith in the things we actually believe in? Immediately after this, he makes a weird and abrupt transition to saying that if you’re asking God for something and you remember that you’re holding a grudge, to go find the person and forgive them?

I think faith, hope, and love are connected, all three of them are feelings and decisions, but I think faith is actually the easiest one, not the hardest ones. We have faith in what we know to be true. We have hope when we don’t know. And we have love, always.

I love you all, I have hope for you all, and I have faith in you all, in descending order of importance. Let’s light our candles together.

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