Hilton Head Island, SC – February 9, 2014
The Chapel Without Walls
I Corinthians 12:31b-13:13
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. – I Corinthians 13:13 – (RSV)
The Power of Pauline Ethics: Love - THE Christian Ethical Imperative
The 12th chapter of I Corinthians is a litany of what the apostle Paul calls “spiritual gifts.” The most widely-known of these gifts are ones that most mainline Protestants personally observe the most rarely, either by doing them or seeing them. They are speaking in tongues, interpreting the strange words uttered when someone “in the Spirit” speaks in tongues, and the gift of healing.
Apparently the Christians of Corinth got into major spats about whose gifts were the most valuable to the greatest number of people. Paul excoriated the Corinthians for their arrogance and one-ups-man-ship in thinking what they thought. Besides, as good as their gifts might have been, Paul concluded I Corinthians 12 with a statement which is the introduction to the most famous of all Paul’s writings. “And I will show you a still more excellent way,” he said. Then he launched into what has often been called “The Hymn to Love.”
Of the several hundred weddings at which I have officiated over the years, I Corinthians 13 is by far the most requested biblical passage of the bridal couples, and with good reason. After all, love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage.
However, technically the love about which Paul wrote is not the kind of love which is found in a marriage. In biblical Greek, the language in which Paul wrote his letters to the 1st-century churches, there were three different words for three different kinds of love. Philia was familial love, the kind of love parents have for children, children for parents, and siblings for siblings. Eros was sexually-motivated love, the love of men for women and vice-versa, or in other words heterosexual love, or even same-sex love, although Paul would disapprove of that.
The third kind of love, and the one far-and-away most frequently mentioned in the New Testament, is agape. This was the kind of love Paul talked about in I Corinthians 13. It is love for everyone, for all of humanity. However, the ideas expressed there can also apply to filial or erotic love, which is why this passage is so often requested for wedding ceremonies.
Paul starts out by noting that we can have every spiritual gift in the book, but if we lack the gift of love, it is all for naught. Love is the Christian ethical imperative. But how can Christian love be best described? “Love is patient and kind,” said Paul, “it is not jealous or boastful, it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (13. 4-7).
This is magnificent prose, quite apart from the nuances of meaning in its content. It flows gloriously, it moves majestically, it soars triumphantly. Furthermore, says Paul, “Love never ends; as for prophecy, it will pass away, as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away” (v.8). All the spiritual gifts enumerated in I Corinthians 12, as vital as they are, do not last like love. Love endures forever. “All you need is love,” as the four lads from Liverpool announced when they came to America fifty years ago. And they were right. There is more to it than just that, but that proclamation is an excellent starting point. All we need is love.
But how, practically, should our love for others manifest itself? What kinds of things should we do if we are to show love toward other people?
Andrew Sullivan is an English news columnist who emigrated to the USA years ago. He lived in Washington, DC for most of his time here, but he lived in New York City for a year or so, and then he moved back to Washington, having concluded that New Yorkers were too rude and loud for him. In one of his columns a few months ago, he told of being back in London for a visit. He was going to walk across the street where there were no crosswalks or traffic lights. A taxi came quickly toward him. He stepped back onto the sidewalk, but the taxi driver came to a full stop and kindly motioned him to cross the street. Andrew Sullivan had forgotten how life was like in his native land. He was amazed at this tiny display of extraordinary civility.
He wrote, “Now one anecdote proves nothing. But the small moments of manners added up: the orderliness on escalators, queues at bus stops; small, endless ‘sorries’ and ‘so sorries’ that simply don’t happen anywhere else….Yes, mass courtesy is not just a tic, it’s a mild form of voluntary collectivism, which is perhaps why New Yorkers are so immune to it.” Oooo-eeee. N-Y-C: what is it about you? Referring to his former countrymen, Andrew Sullivan concluded, “It’s a simple quality, this decency, but the longer I have lived and the further I have traveled, the more I appreciate its quiet endurance – a little thing in a little island that still provides a residue of hope for the world.”
Kindness and good manners are small symbols of love in action. Such behavior tells others, “I love you, I value you, and I want to show you that.”
Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine and the author of Grace Notes. In Christian Century, he had an article called “Seating Chart” about fellow students in his class in a Catholic parochial school. He opened with these words: “In the first seat in the first row was a girl named Colleen who was the smartest kid in the class and always got the best grades and never punted a test even once. One time she got a 94 instead of 100, and she burst into tears right there in class. She was scrawny and did not talk much and had pimples, and her dad had cheated people and gone to jail. Her mother came to pick her up every day in a car that smoked and groaned.” It might be hard to love Colleen, first because she showed up everyone academically, and secondly because she came from a questionable family. But Christian charity (the word in Latin is caritas, or love) requires us to love all the Colleens of this world.
“In the fifth and final row first seat,” said Brian Doyle, “there was a slight boy named Matthew who had behavioral problems. He could not sit still under any circumstances whatsoever, and he muttered and talked to himself and laughed at inopportune times. Supposedly his mother cut his hair with a hunting knife. His house was filled with brothers and dogs and drugs. If you went to his house to do a science project you had to watch out for dog poop on the floor and on the stairs and even in his room.” The point of Mr. Doyle’s observations about the seating chart seems to be that if everyone knew everything in the story of each pupil in the junior high school room at St. John’s School, you world realize that there are reasons why people act as they do. Therefore it behooves you, if you want to be a Christian, to love each person in their unique circumstances, even as God loves them.
What does love look like for a spoiled or headstrong child? Should parents exhibit tough love toward such a child, or unlimited, arms-always-open love? Who can know, for sure? What does love look like for a spendthrift spouse? Do financial limits work? How does one love a friend who constantly drinks too much, and who resists all discussion of cutting back or ceasing altogether? Is it possible to love someone who regularly wrongs you, and takes advantage of you, and demands too much of you?
We often make an enormous mistake with respect to love. We assume in order to love someone, we must first like that person. It is simply not humanly possible to like everyone, but it is incumbent on us as Christians to love everyone. If you don’t believe Paul on this, then look at Jesus. Jesus encountered droves of people he strongly disliked because of their intentionally bad behavior, but he loved all of them nonetheless. And so must we. “For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” (Mt. 5:46) The love that does the most to transform the world for the better is always the love that is hardest to give.
Previously I have several times quoted Jonathan Sacks, who until recently was the Chief Rabbi of British conservative Judaism. In his last Credo column in the London Times, he talked about what he believes, since “credo” means “I believe” in Latin. He said, “I believe faith is part of what makes us human. It is a basic attitude of trust that always goes beyond the available evidence, but without which we would do nothing great. Without faith in one another we could not risk the vulnerability of love.”
Love often involves enormous risk. What if we love someone, and we are not loved in return? What if we love, and we get hurt by that love? What if we love, and it is perceived by the other not as strength, but as weakness: what then?
In Les Miserables, Jean Valjean sings, “To love another person is to see the face of God.”
But we should love, not because we want to see God’s face, although that is a great bonus, or because we expect love to be reciprocated, but because love is what makes us and others most fully human. Loves seeks the good of the other, whether or not it results in our own good. Love must always look first to the other, and never initially to ourselves. Love builds up, it does not tear down; it attempts to do for the other what we would want done for ourselves; it moves toward the other, it does not try to avoid the other. If we want to be loved, we must love.
Rabbi Sacks ends the last paragraph of his last Times Credo with these lines: “Faith is understood in the living and proved in the doing. We encounter the divine presence in prayer and ritual, story and song. These lift us beyond ourselves toward the infinite Thou at the heart of being, who teaches us to see His trace in the face of the human other, leading us to acts of loving kindness that make gentle the life of this world. Faith is the bond of loyalty and listening that binds us to God and through Him to humanity. Faith is life lived in the light of love.”
Love usually isn’t large, like the next-to-last scenes in inspirational movies or novels or plays. It occurs normally in small things, everyday things --- a kind word, an encouraging thought, an outreached hand to a burdened shoulder. If we don’t display love in small ways every day, we will never be prepared to show love in big ways when it is the hardest to offer but also the most likely to make a big difference. Small love changes the world more than big love, because most of us are small most of the time in the world, and therefore we do little things.
John M. Buchanan was the pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago for a quarter of a century. For the last several years of that time up to the present, he has been the editor of Christian Century. In one of his weekly editorials he told a story of serving a small church in a small village in Scotland one summer many years ago. The pastor of the church in the nearest village came to welcome him to the Valhalla of Presbyterianism. The other minister happened to mention that he was in a German prison camp in Poland during World War II. He said that conditions in the camp were deplorable. There was too much sickness, too little food, too little hope. Suicide was an option many of the prisoners considered. All they needed to do was to step over the warning wire which ringed the camp, and the guards would shoot them dead if they placed their hands on the perimeter fence.
John Buchanan wrote, “In the middle of the night (my new friend) walked to the perimeter and sat down beside the fence to think about going through with it. He heard a movement in the darkness from the other side of the fence. It was a Polish farmer. The man thrust his hand through the barbed wire and handed my friend half a potato. In heavily accented English he said, ‘The body of Christ.’” Then, quoting one of very, very few verses which Paul reported Jesus to have said, John Buchanan wrote, “This do in remembrance of me.”
Love makes the world go ‘round. All you need is love.
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 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, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (vs. 11-13).
There is great power in the ethics of the man who started out as Saul of Tarsus and ended up as the apostle Paul. He gives us a pattern to follow for doing the world over again, along with ourselves in the process. Whatever else we do, we must love everyone. Love is THE Christian ethical imperative. There is no spiritual gift greater than love, and there is none of us who does not possess the constant potential for this gift. When we exhibit it, it becomes an example of love divine, all loves excelling.