(Preached on Sunday, January 31, 2010)
Love is always supportive, loyal, hopeful, and trusting. Love never fails. -1 Corinthians 13:7
1 Corinthians 13! One of the most familiar and fond passages in the Bible! Used so often at weddings it is commonly referred to as “the love chapter.” Someone has described it as the Psalm 23 of the New Testament: everyone recognizes it! The problem with this familiarity is that we no longer really listen to the words when we hear this passage read. We slip into a nodding autopilot mode and confuse this description of love with society’s saccharine, romantic view of love. Also, having heard the passage so often at weddings, we have divorced the passage from its true context. In actuality, Paul was not describing romantic love or love within a marriage at all. Nor, as some have suggested in trying to rationalize away the difficult call of these words to us in our lives, was Paul describing the love of God for us.
No, Paul was offering very concrete, practical guidance to the church members of Corinth. This chapter was written to a church in conflict. The Church in Corinth was one messed-up church. There were factions in the congregation, with people trying to show one another up. If you go back and read the first 12 chapters of 1 Corinthians you will see Paul taking up one issue after another as he tries to offer guidance to a very conflicted group of people. Then in Chapter 13 Paul begins to pull all his guidance together. Paul says that none of the problems faced by the Corinthians would be straightened out until they began to show some love for each other – until they did some loving things for one another.
Of course, we realize that is easier said than done. Paul is engaged here in the equivalent of spiritual weightlifting. He points out that while love is about what we do – all about action and not just feeling – it is also all about how we do what we do. Collecting food and water for the people of Haiti – as noble as that is – doesn’t matter much if we don’t show love for one another. All the work done on the Board of Trustees to care for the church property doesn’t amount to much if we don’t love one another. Sunday morning classes for children don’t matter if they don’t reflect God’s love. The projects undertaken by the women’s group are wonderful, but don’t matter much unless the women have abiding love for one another and for those they are trying to help. No amount of monetary giving is equal to a gentle heart. No amount of hymn singing or praying on bended knee is equal to a charitable soul.
Paul wants us to understand that love involves our attitude, our motivation, and our outlook on life and the world. If we love, in order to be loved, that is not love. If we love, because we hope to receive something in return, that is not love. If we love out of obligation, or duty, that is not love.
Love is at the center of our Christian identity – it’s how Jesus said they would know who we are – and it’s at the center of who God is, too – for we are told that God is love. Bishop John Shelby Spong, who just completed a month of lectures at the Coral Gables Congregational Church which some of us attended, suggests that what Jesus tapped into was the next step in the evolution of life – from matter, to conscious life, to self-conscious life, to universal consciousness, which is love as Jesus and Paul were teaching it. The awareness and embracing of the oneness of all life – all humanity, all creatures, all matter and energy – is universal consciousness.
This universal consciousness is very clear in Jesus’ mission and life. Everything he did was inclusive: he welcomed with love even the hated Romans and the mongrel Samaritans, the Greeks and Phoenicians as well. He included all those disgraced Jews, the outsiders who would no longer have been welcome at the synagogue. His love was inclusive. He refused to classify people on racist, cultural, religious, or any other lines. He did not categorize people as pure or impure, righteous or unrighteous, worthy churchgoers or unworthy outsiders, Israelites or pagan Gentiles, God’s people or the unwashed mob. His love was radically inclusive.
Paul was captured by the same vision and his teaching on love in this chapter is also radically inclusive. Paul’s description of what love is and is not offers no limits on where or when or with whom it is practiced. Listen again to Paul’s description of what love is and is not, but this time from the NRSV (it helps expand our understandings to hear various translations of passages of scripture). “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
This is such a radical ethic because nowhere else in the world is this ethic considered seriously for guiding life. The big lie the wider world tells us is that the universe is connected by trade agreements, electronic banking computer networks, shipping lanes, and the seeking of profit – nothing else. But the truth of God as Jesus and Paul teach us is that all creation is one holy web of relationships and gifts meant for all. Creation vibrates with the pain of all its parts, because the true destiny of creation is joy. Increasingly the ethic of this nation is competition, one-upmanship, tribalism and sectarianism. Supposedly, (and perhaps some of you are old enough to remember if this is true or not) we once had a free exchange of ideas – political, economic, social, cultural, religious – in the public square, with people listening to one another and learning from one another. If that was ever true it is no longer true, for we don’t listen but rather shout one another down and cling to our own positions as though they were a matter of life and death. We are far removed from the ethic of love or universal consciousness that views all creation, all humanity, as one.
That is the world around us. What is even sadder is that we know very well that many, many people, including many of us here today, have been hurt by the church. Not just by parents and families, playmates and friends, but by the church, the Body of Christ that is supposed to be one, to be a community “better together,” not “more hurtful together.” Sometimes this hurt has been institutional, and other times it’s been the work of individuals who failed to live up to Paul’s ideal or Jesus’ example. In addition to the many people today who are “un-churched,” never raised in a religious tradition, there are countless thousands who have left their childhood faith not because of intellectual doubt but because they were not loved there. Perhaps they felt judged, excluded, or insulted. Perhaps their gifts were not recognized, or perhaps they felt misunderstood, or they did not feel listened to with respect.
I hope you agree with me that this church does not want to be that kind of a church, but instead this church is a beginning-again place of love. I hope we can be a place where love is offered as a gift of healing and hope – a promise of what can yet be in all our lives, in the life of the church, and in the life of the world.
If we are serious about embracing this attitude then we are not talking about a few additional good deeds or a few extra Christian courtesies. We are talking about being consistently more patient and more kind with one another. We are talking about taking no more overinflated ego trips. We are talking about making our mouths smaller so we’ll have trouble fitting a foot in there. These are real personality changes. How do we get there?
We begin by seeking this heart of love in prayer. Paul understands that love is a gift from God. It is not something we bring about by sheer force of will. It is something we seek in prayer, seeking to open ourselves more and more to the universal consciousness of God which understands the deeper connections between all of life and allowing that understanding to guide our hearts, our actions, and our lives.
As that awareness of our unity with all creation develops in us through prayer we may be better able to focus on how we are all alike as human beings, rather than focusing on our differences. We may be able to begin paying more attention to how much we all so greatly need love from those around us and to how lonely it is when others do nothing but argue with us or ignore us.
Let us also pray for the gift of humility for this gift lays a foundation for a more loving heart. Paul emphasizes this three times in this passage. First in the description of what love isn’t: it isn’t boastful or proud and does not insist on its own way. But he also reminds us twice more later in the passage that “We don’t know everything.” If we can remember that truth it will greatly help in opening our hearts to a greater capacity to love. Quaker theologian Parker Palmer has written: “At the heart of any authentic religious experience is recognition that God’s nature is too huge, God’s movement too deep, ever to be comprehended by a single conception or point of view. … God’s truth is singular and eternal, but the forms in which we give it expression are as finite and fragile as clay pots, and we must always be ready to break them open on behalf of a larger vision of truth.” If we can remember that then we might be a little more generous with those, whom Barbara Brown Taylor describes as the “people sent to yank our chains and upset our equilibrium so we do not confuse our own ideas about God with God.” Generous, both in being able to listen to them with open hearts open to possible change and by not being threatened and taking their views and ideas as a personal attack.
In the United Church of Christ we are very big on covenant. This is different from a contract where we seek to protect our interests, define expectations, and secure what we hope to gain for ourselves from the relationship. A covenant is a commitment we enter into for the sake of the other. We are equals – we each bring something to the table – and we enter into a covenant to care about one another, to travel with one another on this spiritual journey, to be, or to become a church together. God is building a church here and we are helping. It is love which is the glue and the grease which holds us together in covenant and helps the rough edges mesh together. Let us pray for the greatest gift of all, love.