Love.

1 Corinthians 13

January 31, 2016

I.

These are certainly the most beautiful and famous words Paul ever wrote.  They are among the most beautiful and famous words anyone ever wrote.  Unfortunately we have domesticated them into a sentimental reading for weddings, usually read rather poorly by the bride’s brother.  Or somebody.

These words are not written about couples or married love.  Paul doesn’t care much about that.  He writes them about the church.

Let me rephrase that.  Paul writes this chapter to members of a congregation of Jesus followers.  It is about them.  It would make way more sense to read these words at the Annual Meeting of a congregation, than at a wedding.

Paul is basically saying that love is all that matters in the church.  Faith and hope are important.  But they don’t hold a candle to love.  Faith is trusting in what God has done, hope looks forward to what God will do.  But they are empty and vain exercises without love, which has to do with our relationships right here and right now.  Love is about presence.  It is about what we do in this moment… which is, after all, the only moment we have.

So love tends to ground our faith and our hope, keeping them from becoming meaningless abstractions, theoretical postulations, cognitive games… which is why we would rather talk about faith and hope, because that’s all we can do with faith and hope: talk about them.  Love is not about talking so much as acting.  Without love, our faith and our hope are empty, as Paul says here.  Love is what makes our faith and hope real.

Now, love is probably the most awfully perverted and ambiguous word in the English language.  English is usually very good in its ability to have a different word for every nuance of anything.  But only this one word is supposed to bear the full freight of expressing how we feel about everything from ice cream, our favorite baseball team, our children, our spouse, our country, to God.  Which is absurd, of course, but there it is.

So we have to figure out what kind of love Paul means.  And in doing that we do not look just to a dictionary or a concordance of ancient Greek.  Like just about anything else in the spiritual life, we look to Jesus Christ.  He is the One who defines and reveals and demonstrates what love is… just as he defines for us other words like justice, peace, goodness, life, truth, and God.  If we want to know what any of those words mean we do not read about them, or take a survey of what other people think, and neither do we even reflect on our own experience of these things, all of which is conditioned by society in many ways.

No.  We look always and only to Jesus Christ, as he is attested in the New Testament.  The love that Paul describes and advises the disciples in Corinth to follow, is the kind of love we see revealed in Jesus.

II.

In the previous chapter, the apostle has been teaching them about spiritual gifts, how these should not be a cause for division among them.  Different gifts are given by the same Holy Spirit, because the church is like a body that needs many members performing many different functions.  Indeed, it is the supposedly inferior members and gifts that God gives greater honor to.  

Now he says that even the greatest, most spectacular, miraculous gifts — things like speaking in tongues, prophetic powers, understanding mysteries and having knowledge, and showing great faith — even these are pointless and immaterial without love.  We may be great preachers and teachers, we may demonstrate tireless and selfless acts of service and evangelism, we may be athletes of asceticism, we may even be martyrs who give up our lives for the faith… but without love, these behaviors don’t matter.

So all the things that we think are important, and in fact are important; they are things we would not want the church to be without… Paul is not saying don’t do these things at all.  He is saying that it is love that makes them effective and powerful and real.  Otherwise they may be just egocentric, personality-driven, self-righteous attempts to gain attention and fame and power.  

Everything must be done with love and out of love.  Whether we are musicians, or evangelists, or teachers, or manage the business and property of the church, obviously we should do what we do well… but it is most essential that we do what we do out of love.  Love is what makes all the difference.  Without love, even the best most amazing spiritual practices can actually divide and kill a church.  Because without love it is not about Jesus Christ but about the individual person.

Then he goes on to mention some of the characteristics of the kind of love we see in Jesus.  And in all of them we see a quality of deep humility and gentleness, an unselfish commitment to the good of the other, a radical not-about-me-ness, that allows the love of God to flow through us unimpeded into the world.  

He lists patience and kindness.  He says it is not envious, boastful, arrogant, or rude.  He says love does not insist on its own way.  Neither is it irritable or resentful.  And of course he lost most of us way back with patience.

This is advice, I remind you, about life in the church.  He is saying this kind of love should characterize how we treat each other in our congregation of disciples.  Focus on lifting up, forgiving, assisting, affirming, and helping the other members.  Especially the member or two (or more) who might be particularly annoying to you!  This accounts for Paul’s almost frantically urgent tone in this letter.  The health of the church, the well-being of the other members of the church, is way more important than our personal self-importance, contentment, privilege, and affirmation.  Paul is always about how each individual must decrease so the Body of Christ may increase.

III.

All these other things, all the very good things we do in church, will nevertheless come to an end.  Because they are stuff that we do.  Love — not the abstraction or the theory or the theological category or the emotion, but the love of God flowing through us — doesn’t ever end.  It doesn’t ever end because it is God… God’s Spirit or breath, God’s energy, God’s light, God’s presence.  Love is how we experience God in our midst.  And we experience God by our selflessness, by which we get out of the way and let God shine through us.

Jesus, of course, says exactly the same thing.  “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35).  Love is our participation in the presence and Spirit of God, for God is love, as we read in 1 John.

And love mainly happens in the little things.  The kind word, the overlooking of a mistake, the expression of gratitude, the letting someone else have the credit, the prayer for and service even to those you don’t get along with or agree with.  Dorothy Day once said that we only love God to the degree that we love the person we love the least.

We find this very difficult because of our chronic spiritual immaturity, which is to say our self-centered, self-righteous ignorance.  We get caught up in calculations that invariably put ourselves above that other person, and we convince ourselves that our hostility or judgment or criticism is actually good for them.  It will help them see the error of their ways.  Or something.

Love hurts.  It feels like weakness.  It feels like we are inviting people to abuse us.  It feels like cowardice that quickly caves in to evil.  It feels like we will lose all respect, if we become people of love and forgiveness.

And on one level, it just feels better to us if we reject, shun, or otherwise disrespect or punish that other person.  But take it from me, it only feels better to our broken, angry, fearful, shallow self.  It only feeds our addiction to our own ego-centric self-gratification.  It only props up the part of us that is getting in the way of God’s light, and leaving others in shadow.

There are of course times when we just have to stay away from someone who is violent and abusive.  That is a matter of spiritual discernment which we should also bring to the community.  God does not delight in the death of anyone.  But any vengeance always and only belongs to the Lord.

IV.

Paul would have us grow up into a spiritual maturity that does not build our behavior on the “partial” things, that is, the things that, though they may be good, are not the fullness of God’s energy or presence, and that will eventually fade away.  We do not see things clearly now.  We are mortals and limited in our perceptions; we therefore react to existence out of fear, with anger or violence.  We are mired in ignorance.

But in Christ we will come to see things as they are.  We will see each other, and even see God, face-to-face.  Our task for now is to live in faith, trusting in the truth God reveals in Jesus, and to live in hope, anticipating the coming of God’s fullness into our lives.  And most importantly we need to live together in love, the kind of love that sees from the perspective of the other, and lifts up, cherishes, celebrates, forgives, and delights in the other.  For it is that kind of love, the love we see in Jesus Christ, that has the power to transform lives.  For to be loved with this kind of love changes people.  Hatred and disrespect only generates more of the same.  But love begets more love, if we trust in the One who reveals to us the fullness of God’s love, Jesus.

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