Sermons

The Church in Love

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  February 1, 2004                                I Corinthians 13:1-13

Today, following the second hour of worship, this congregation will hold its annual meeting. It’s an important event not only as we dot our ecclesiastical I’s and cross our theological T’s, review finances and statistics and lists. It’s an important event more so because it invites us to pause and take stock of where we’ve been and where we’re headed. It’s also a nice moment to recognize all those who contribute to our life together. I hope you will be present, and then stay for lunch following hosted by the Congregational Fellowship Committee.

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I feel honored and blessed every day to be a minister, and to be the pastor of this congregation. Every day is an adventure, and even the days that are challenges offer some redemptive aspect, some little glimmer of grace.

One of the high privileges of my job comes at important moments – some filled with joy and some filled with heartache. They are mountain top experiences. The births of babies. The death of loved ones. To be present at moments of life and death itself is humbling, to say the least.

Another such moment happens when a couple comes to me. They have found one another, and in finding one another, they have found love. And now, they are planning a service at which they will be joined. They have bought books, scoured websites, hired consultants. Perhaps a visit to the minister is in order. We talk about everything. Flowers, photographer. I make my request for a carrot cake at the reception. That request falls on deaf ears.

We talk about the service. How many and who. Readings. Poems. Music. How about a little Bible, I innocently suggest? Yes, they vigorously agree! They go away to ponder these things in their hearts, still wondering who on earth would have carrot cake at a reception.

Days or weeks later, they come back to chat. About that Bible, I say. They pull out files, programs from every service they’ve ever been to. And then they turn sheepishly to the words we just heard, I Corinthians 13.

And here is what I say, without fail. There could be one million services on that given day, or only one. But yours is the one that matters. As far as I am concerned, Paul’s magnificent words have never been read, at such an occasion, and might never again. But it’s such a cliché, they say. It is a cliché, I agree, because it is true. “The greatest of these is love.”

I am rather sure that the Apostle Paul did not have these things in mind: Tiered cakes, video microphones hidden in cummerbunds, something borrowed/something blue. I am quite sure all this would be a mystery to him.

But love was not a mystery to him. He knew about love. Love experienced as romance between two people – eros, the New testament called it. Love experienced as mutual self-giving, deep friendship – philia, the New Testament called it. Love experienced as sacrifice – agape, the New Testament called it. Love experienced as what God had for the world, what Christ took to the cross, what exploded from the grave to redeem a world bereft of love. Paul knew from love, in his own life, as a mandate and ethical imperative, as the very nature of God.

And so these words are not a cliché. They are as fresh as this morning’s fallen snow, and equally as bracing. They are as comforting, and more so, as any Valentine’s Day sentiment.

The church at Corinth was having trouble conceiving of this love, let alone living it. And so Paul wrote them a love letter. The church at Corinth, now some 25-30 years following the life of Jesus, was experiencing every sort of conflict, not unlike the 21st century church. Theologically disputatious, internally disordered, fractured, some members claiming the rank of privilege and some members living on the margins. Paul is responding, therefore, to rumors about behavior, a reminder that this faith of ours is as much about a way of life as it is about a set of beliefs.

We have spent just a little time over the past several weeks on the words leading up to today’s. Paul’s sustained insistence is that we are given gifts, all of us, to use for the common good. This is more than a self-help treatise. It is, rather, an outgrowth of claims about the Holy Spirit that make the church what it is at its best – no respecter of persons but rather a respecter of God working through each one of us to achieve God’s purposes in the church and in the world.

Paul was fighting the reality in the church at Corinth that sought to distinguish people by what they owned, where they came from, social rank. By insisting that all were given spiritual gifts to use for the common good, Paul banished any other categories for membership.

And then, to make the point even more dramatically, he pursues the image of the body of Christ. That’s who we are, he declares, and then spins out words linking the importance of every body part to the importance of every member of the church. It’s not a bad image to consider on a day when a congregational annual meeting will review all of the parts of a congregation’s life.

Perhaps we could think of the annual report as a kind of physical check-up on the life of the body, with every different part, every different person, functioning together as the body of Christ. Again, read this soaring chapter 12 sometime soon, and perhaps repeatedly. Consider your gifts. Consider your contributions as a vital, invaluable, precious member of the body of Christ. Consider where you are called to live our your calling, in this congregation, in the world.

Paul concludes that extraordinary metaphor with a promise: “I will show you a still more excellent way.” And he will.

It would seem that every story we read in the newspapers that has anything to do with religion is about conflict. 2003 was a pretty good year as marked by religious conflict. Religious fundamentalism leading to political extremism leading to violence. Issues of church and state, the Ten Commandments. Issues of religious leadership, whether the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church or who may serve as bishop in the Episcopal Church or ordination standards in the Presbyterian Church.

Differences are important, I will continue to argue. That would seem to be an underlying point of Paul’s body imagery. And yet difference leading to conflict leading to pain in the body of Christ simply cannot be Paul’s “still more excellent way.” Paul knew it then. We must know it now.

And so Paul’s “still more excellent way," beyond conflict in the church and beyond, must take us somewhere. And so he lays it out for them, for us, simply, elegantly, powerfully. It is not sentiment. It is not a cliché. It is not casual by any means, thrown off readily as in “I love chocolate” or “I love football.” (Panthers in an upset, by the way!) It is not love as defined by reality television, affection turned into a commodity, or measured by whether Ben and J.Lo will ever tie the knot. Nothing excellent about any of that.

Listen… “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

And then Paul defines it, in words that we embrace in the living of every relationship, including the way that the church should live its life. “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.”

If we need a recipe for how to live, here it is. If we need a recipe for how to be the church, here it is as well. Biblical scholar J. Paul Sampley writes that two convictions are embedded within these words: that love’s nature is to seek not one’s own needs, but the needs of others, and in so doing, love ultimately secures not only the other person but also one’s own self. (New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume X, page 953)

Everything else will end. Wealth. Ideas. Even our lives. But love never ends. Paul’s still more excellent way, lived out by Christ and lived by us in the body of Christ, is love’s more excellent way. It is this love, to quote a sappy 70s love song, that there is just too little of.

Paul tells us what it is not – not envious, nor boastful, nor arrogant, nor rude. He tells us what it is – patient and kind. And we will know it when we see it. We will know it as we love a person through cancer or Alzheimer’s. We will know it as we love a nation, perhaps this nation – regardless of our politics – in the face of choices and decisions with which we strongly disagree. We will know it as we love a church, even, as it seems slow to get it.

That is the love about which Paul spoke. It is tough and tender and tenacious. It is the love we seek to express to our children, to our loved ones, even when we are less than our perfect selves. It is the “as yourself” part of the “love your neighbor as yourself” equation, when we perceive ourselves to be absolutely unlovable, and not deserving of love. It is love which loves with reckless abandon, the song of love unknown, love to the loveless shown, that they may lovely be – others, ourselves, the institutions that mean so much to us and can make such a difference.

The church in love, even, as it seeks to live into this vision every day, in all ways.

That is why it is never a cliché to read these words at any occasion whereby children of God, beloved members of the body of Christ, are joined together, or at a funeral, whereby our beloved ones are joined to that greater love, or even as a prelude to an annual meeting of a Presbyterian congregation, when statistical reports and financial news and committee work becomes the vehicle through which this love is made manifest.

Perhaps you remember the film Dead Man Walking. It tells the story of a young Louisiana man, Matthew Poncelet, who is on death row for the brutal murders of two young people. He writes a letter to a nun, Sister Helen Prejean, who befriends him, and in the process has her own transformation. In her first visit to the penitentiary, she empties her purse, her pockets, and still the metal detector goes off. Finally, it is discovered that it is her cross, her metal cross, a portent of things to come. The state, the victims’ parents, even her church, are not sure what she is doing. They resist. She persists.

At the close of the movie, as Matt Poncelet is escorted to the death chamber, a “dead man walking,” Sister Helen says to Matt: “I want the last thing you see in this world to be the face of love.” He looks down at the floor. “Look at me,” she says. “Look at me. I’ll be the face of love for you.” That is who we are, and who we are to become. The face of love. A church in love.

“Faith, hope, and love abide, these three,” Paul wrote a very long time ago. And the greatest of these is love. Love never ends. We are the face of love, which never ends. Never. Amen.