Hilton Head Island, SC – August 18, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
I Corinthians 13:1-13
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)
Many of the Christians at Corinth had thorny personalities. Some were the type of people whom other types of thorny or ordinary people would like to twist their heads from their shoulders. The apostle Paul may have felt that way when he was writing his letters to that obstreperous bunch of believers.
Without going further into any of that, Paul had previously suggested that the Corinthian Christians should avail themselves of what he called “the gifts of the Holy Spirit.” Among these gifts were faith, hope, prophecy, speaking in tongues, interpreting what was spoken in tongues, healing, and so on. In the last verse in Chapter 12, at the end of his list of the gifts of the Spirit, Paul says, “And I will show you a still more excellent way.” And then Paul launches into I Cor. 13, which is one of the best-known passages of scripture in the entire Bible. It is often called “the Hymn to Love.”
The Greek word which Paul employed for talking about love was rarely used in the first century. It is the word agape. Two other Greek words for “love” were much more common. Eros was male-female love, or erotic love of any variety. By the way, even though I Corinthians 13 is often read at weddings, Paul was not talking about erotic or romantic love in I Cor. 13. Then there was philia. Philia gave Philadelphia half of its name: the City of Brotherly Love. Thus eros has to do with erotic or sexual love, and philia connotes familial love: the love of parents for children and children for parents, or the love of siblings for one another, or the love of grandparents for grandchildren, and so on. Paul wasn’t talking about that either.
But agape was a different kind of love. It was love for the sake of love itself; for example, love offered to someone else with no thought of personal gain or reciprocity. This, said Paul, is the kind of love Christians should express toward everyone, whatever other kind of love they might also express. Agape is selfless love, non-subjective love, love solely for the other, whether or not the other returns our love. We don’t have to like everyone, but Jesus and Paul urge us to love everyone.
The soldier who rescues a fallen comrade under heavy enemy fire is engaging in agape. The stranger who donates bone marrow to someone she shall never meet is showing costly agape to a fellow human being greatly in need of the healing which only she can provide. The couple who intentionally adopt a child with a handicap are engaging in love of the sort Paul was talking about in I Corinthians 13.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that we should love our enemies. The word used there also is agape, certainly not eros, and not even philia. Christian love is above-and-beyond other forms of love. It is turn-the-other-cheek love, second-mile love. We have no reason to expect others who are not Christians to love us like that, but we are expected to love everyone else, including non-Christians or unchristian people or nasty people, like that.
But is it possible? Can anyone love like that?
I want to remind you of two men associated with Africa, and you are familiar with both. The first was a Frenchman who spent several decades in Africa. I have referred to him is previous sermons. Albert Schweitzer was surely one of the most brilliant men who ever lived. He was an ordained minister, an outstanding organist and musician, a theologian, philosopher, writer, and medical doctor. His vocational and academic prowess was suprahuman, and only a minute percentage of humans fit into that category, even though all of them are also just humans of the Homo sapiens variety.
Dr. Schweitzer’s early adult years made him world-famous for many reasons. In the 1930s he went to French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon) and established a hospital there. Later he organized a leprosarium. He risked his life working in conditions with no natural immunity to tropical diseases. His guiding philosophy was what he called “reverence for life,” and by that he meant all life: human, flora, and fauna. For his extraordinary intellectual gifts and humanitarianism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The second person I shall note was a South African, Desmond Tutu. As a young man, Bishop Tutu became the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches. In that capacity he evolved into one of the strongest opponents of Apartheid, the draconian separation of the races by the authoritarian government. He later was named the Anglican Bishop of Cape Town, the first black priest to serve in that post. He too was granted the Nobel Peace Prize. When Nelson Mandela was released from his long imprisonment and became the South African president, he appointed Bishop Mandela as head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That group, lonbg wit President Mandela, helped establish the political transfer of power from the all-white Apartheid government to the mixed-race government that has ruled South Africa ever since. Desmond Tutu called South Africa the “Rainbow Nation,” and with his leadership, and that of Nelson Mandela, also a Noble Prize winner, the Rainbow Nation has made many strides toward a peaceful future, though there is still much to be done.
Lois and I heard Desmond Tutu speak in Minneapolis twenty-five years ago. He was a very short man, but a giant is ability, diplomacy, humor, and Christian love. His countenance exuded an inner acceptance of everyone around him, whether friend or foe, and he was one of the most impressive speakers I have ever heard.
Probably not every Nobel Prize winner has been filled with agape love, and certainly such an award is not a y for requirement for exhibiting such love. Some of the stories of the Olympic athletes illustrated great love on the part of athletes themselves, their parents, their siblings, and the people who encouraged, coached, and mentored them.
We all have known ordinary people who loved a parent or spouse or grown child through their years of alcoholism or mental illness. The founders of our local philanthropies have made a huge difference in this community, and the same is true in other communities. There are couples who are incapable of having their own children who adopt children from other countries or cultures or social classes, and who give those children opportunities they never would have had without their adoptive parents.
I Corinthians 13 love is a possibility for everyone. That kind of love is surely a spiritual gift from God, but we must accept the gift in order to give it to others. Love transforms those who demonstrate it and those to whom it is demonstrated.
Edwin Stanton was the Minister of War in the cabinet of Abraham Lincoln. Stanton thought he, not Lincoln, should have been President. Recklessly and abusively, Mr. Stanton often referred to the beleaguered President as “the original gorilla” and as “a low, cunning clown.” Early on as a cabinet member, he did whatever he could to undercut the Great Emancipator. Lincoln never once publicly chastised Stanton, because he believed he was the best man in that crucial assignment at a crucial time in the nation’s history. Eventually Stanton’s attitude toward Lincoln softened, and when, with others, he stood beside Lincoln’s lifeless body after the tragedy at Ford’s Theater, through tears Edwin Stanton said, “There lies the greatest ruler of men the world has ever seen.”
If we love our enemies, really love them, in time they may become our friends. Whether or not that ever happens, God and Jesus command us to love them anyway with a love which never dies. Abraham Lincoln was more loving than most Christians, and he did not even consider himself to be a Christian at all.
Is Christian love really possible? Think about the life of Jesus Christ. Think about how he lived and loved. “Agape is patient and kind,” said Paul. Think about how patient and kind Jesus was toward his disciples, especially when they acted like a crowd of uncomprehending dullards. Or consider how loving Jesus was to public sinners and prostitutes, to despised Gentiles, to little people who otherwise had been overlooked by everyone else. He brought back to life the dead son of the widow of Nain; he healed the daughter of a Lebanese woman who begged him for help, even when the disciples tried to dissuade her from approaching Jesus; he cured the slave of a Roman centurion who asked him to take a mere moment out of Jesus’ harried life to assist one for whom the centurion had compassion but no ability whatever to effect a cure. “Love is not arrogant or rude,” Paul wrote, “it not jealous or boastful.” And in his trial, when Jesus was berated by those around him and was beaten and spat upon, Jesus said not a word in anger, or lifted a finger in self-defense. He simply endured it, loving those who spitefully abused him.
Jesus was as we should be. He was not divinely good; he was humanely, humanly, good. We are capable of loving as he loved But to do it, we must do it. Agape is not engendered by feeling or emotion; it becomes enacted only by will. As those great theologians of Broadway, Rodgers and Hammerstein, said (or if you insist, as Maria Von Trapp said, or more correctly as Oscar Hammerstein said she said), “Love isn’t love till you give it away.”
The old song says, “What the world needs now, is love, sweet love.” I choose to believe the lyricist was thinking about agape. What the world really needs most is agape, sweet agape. We must treat everyone with compassion and respect. If we can learn to love as Jesus loved, if we can turn love into what Paul said love is, then we’ll be less likely to feel the need to invade countries or defend honor or show strength or protect self. Our faith should be in God, not in ourselves. Our hope should be in what God can do through us, not in what we can do by ourselves. Our strength should be in our love, not in our weapons.
Our last hymn says that “to worship rightly is to love each other,” and so it is. Sadly, none of us will ever exhibit the right kind of love to everyone all the time, because human nature renders us incapable of doing that. But we are all capable of trying to love with agape love, because that kind of love is a choice, not an involuntary action, like breathing.
If we show more love to anyone we meet, it will become easier to love everyone we meet. Christian love, wherever it is truly offered, makes Christian love that much easier to offer again. The more there is, the more there is. And the less there is, the less there is. It is the mathematics of agape. Show more love, and you’ll have more love shown. And even if this mathematical formula doesn’t always work like that, we should love more anyway, simply because it is what God commands us to do. And it’s what Jesus shows us how to do.
So faith, hope, and love abide, these three: but the greatest of these is love.