The following homily was given at Grace Episcopal Church in Collage Hill, Ohio on October 12, 2011. The service was an ecumenical Celebration of Wholeness and Healing and was led by Hawley Todd TSSF, the executive director of EHM.

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:12-13

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.  So faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Open with prayers of thanksgiving, worship, and adoration.

Pray for a special anointing of the Holy Spirit upon all who are here.

Welcome and brief explanation of the service and the flow of the evening.

Peace and all good to you

So faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Faith, hope, and love abide.

Faith, hope, and love abide.

These are gifts of the Spirit - gifts of God

They are a complex of spiritual attitudes and orientations that are so critical to our healing and wholeness that they are gifts of the Spirit.

And they are to abide in us.

Abide in every aspect of our beings - body, emotion, mind and spirit.

They are to be who we are - words that describe how we move and act in the world.

I often preach and talk about love.

Love is the foundation of the spiritual life and the wellspring of our healing.

The Love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5)

And at times, I talk about faith.

Faith is trust and arises from the experience deep in our bones, deep in the innermost parts of our beings, that we are truly loved by God.

Tonight I want to focus on HOPE.

Yet please hear me - faith, hope, and love are all intertwined.  They grow together and each nourishes and blesses the increase of the others within us.

So what is hope?

Hope is an orientation in life that arises from our trust and love within the Holy Spirit.

Hope is the EXPECTATION that God wants and will do more for us than we could ever imagine or dream.

Hope is the opening of all that we are to the Spirit and trusting that we will be made every bit whole.

Hope is seeing the glass full - seeing ourselves filled with the Spirit of God -

Seeing ourselves

Renewed in God's Love

Restored in God's Image - male and female

Serving in God's Kingdom as daughters and sons of the most high God.

Hope is the presence of God fully manifest in our lives.

Faith, hope, and love are all gifts of the Spirit.

They are already in our spirit.

Yet all gifts require choices on our parts.

Have you ever received a gift and not used it?

Ignored it and put it away in a closet?

You got the gift, but it really is not operative in your life.

To fully come alive, a gift needs to be used and nurtured.

That requires us to choose to use what we have been given.

It may mean that we need to become intentional about what we do and think - that we choose to give time and space to whatever nourishes hope within us.

I often find that an attitude of gratitude fosters hope within me.

In healing, focus on the solution, not the problem.

Pray the solution, not the problem

Pray and envision complete health and wholeness, not the diagnosis of your doctors and others.

To be honest, I much prefer those seeking healing to give me an image of how s/he wants to be rather than a long litany of gloom, despair, and hopelessness.

None of us need to have a dismal picture painted of all the terrible things that are possible.

Having worked with people for many years, I have noticed that people's lives often go where their thoughts and emotions are fixed.

People often are self-fulfilling prophesies.

We are a whole of body, mind, thoughts, and emotions.

Those who are offering you healing love, light, and grace truly are giving those to you.

So help us in the healing process, leave the negativity alone.

Choose hope and bridle your tongue and thoughts when they move in areas that speak against hope.

It may take work.

Some of us have spent a life time nurturing worry and anxiety.  We have trained ourselves well.

And it will take time and effort to turn our natural inclinations and thought patterns to ones of hope.

When I had problems with my eyes, I tried very hard to focus on healing and wholeness for them.

Yet at times, I got sucked into the diagnosis of the doctors.

Mother Gwynne admonished me to stop talking about going blind and to focus on the complete healing and restoration of my eyes.

And the more I created an image of God totally restoring my eyes - the more I let hope permeate my being - the more I trusted in God's love and healing - and then hope grew even more.

I believe that my hope helped to create the openings within me to receive the fullness of the healing that was being poured out.

The eye doctors tell me that the healing for my eyes is remarkable!

I think of my sister who was diagnosed years ago with what is thought of as a "terminal cancer."  She has had a complete recovery and is alive and healthy years beyond what the doctors would have predicted.

I recently asked her why that was the case.

She said that research showed that there was a 1 in a 100 chance of recovery.  And she decided she would be the one.  She banished doubt from her consciousness and focused on being the one who got well.

So when we pray tonight, come in complete assurance that God will and is doing more for you than you can hope or imagine.

And then choose to imagine and center your thoughts and emotions on being made totally whole.