Pastor’s Corner: It Gets Better

July 3, 2018

“And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13)

Love may be the greatest (and the greatest challenge), but faith and hope may be the virtues of our day.

A few years ago, social, religious, and political leaders began circulating short videos on the theme, “It Gets Better.” A series of young people – gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or questioning – had lost their lives to suicide. The “It Gets Better” campaign sought to instill a sense of hope in young people’s lives, to persuade them that their future was not marked with endless suffering, that they could have faith in the goodness of living.

I suspect many of us need that reassurance – “It gets better” – from time to time. When jobs or relationships end, when well-laid plans fail, when income doesn’t meet expenses, when loved ones reach their ends of their lives. Yes, I know what it means to yearn for the words, “It gets better.”

In Puna, they yearn to be told, “It gets better.” In the detention camps along the Mexican border, both united families and the weeping parents deprived of their weeping children yearn to hear, “It gets better.” Those contemplating the loss of their full status as citizens of our society to the forces increasingly hostile to those not white, male, or wealthy, strive to hear, “It gets better.”

And we yearn to believe it.

I think that is why Christianity has stressed the joys of heaven since its birth, when force of law made Christian witness dangerous: because even if we never see it get better on this Earth, we will see it get better in the realm of God.

Paul’s praise of faith and hope, however, came as encouragement for the daily lives of people he knew and loved. With those words, he summoned them to believe in a world better than the one they knew – the possibility that it could be shaped by grace, by God, and by their own determination into something new. With those words, he summoned them to a courage which would stand against the powers and principalities, and even at life’s end, trust in God’s promise.

With resolution, let us hold our faith. With hope, let us take courage. We can make it better.

With aloha,

Pastor Eric