“Love” - January 31, 2016

I Corinthians 13

            I knew a group of organists who got together one time and drew up a list of music that they would not play at any of their friends’ weddings.  They had heard them all too often and could play them in their sleep.  (I’m not totally sure, but I think in one case I actually saw that happen.)  I won’t tell you what the pieces are, because you probably love them.  I know that I was not entirely amused at one or two of them, which I honestly enjoy, but that they had played and played and played until the music was just notes.

           I Corinthians 13 is a passage that makes me feel a little bit that way.  Before you think I’m talking down scripture, hear me out.  When I ask a couple before their wedding what passage or passages they would like read, this is the one.  Certainly it has good advice for holding a marriage together.  The problem is that it was not written about romantic love at all, and in the context of the whole letter, Paul doesn’t speak too highly of marriage at all.  In chapter 7 he says, basically, "A single person who doesn't have to worry about a family has more time for God. If you're married, stay married; and if you just cannot help it, go ahead and marry, but don't expect me to applaud." That's not someone who's writing poetry to plaster onto a "unity candle".

           “The love chapter”, as it is known, is actually directed not at people who are in love already, like a bride and groom, but at a bunch of church leaders who have been trying to outdo one another as far as whose spiritual gifts place them closer to God.  Where the love comes in is when Paul writes to them (again, I'm paraphrasing), "I don't care what your talent is. Unless you do what you do out of love, neither people nor God will be impressed." Of course, he put it far better:

“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.” [I Corinthians 13:1-3]

What would it be like if the leaders of Christianity in our own day took that idea seriously?  What if committee meetings were not about convincing people that your own ideas are the best, or the idea that you came across on the internet last week?  What if programming was more about content than about having a slick presentation?  What if powerpoint were left at the office?  What if we considered the fumbling words of a teenager who’s asked to pray to be as pleasing to us as they are to God?  The Christian Church is a community of redeemed sinners, not a contest. 

Of course, we should always give our best for the Lord, but I assure you that he already loves us, and we don’t need to prove anything to him.  Just love him back and the details will fall into place.  There will always be disagreements and differences, but they won’t always need to escalate into win/lose situations.

“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.”  [I Corinthians 13:4-7]

Like I said, this is good advice for marriage, too, even if that isn’t its focus.  It’s good for any kind of human relationship.

            It’s especially important for the Church, because it’s God’s love that we have seen and known in Jesus that brings us together.  One of the signs of a church being a church, not a social club, is that there are a lot of different people in it.  Sometimes you can tell the differences right away.  Age is one.  How people are dressed is another.  Maybe you can hear more than one language being spoken.  Look at the cars in the parking lot and see how many are new and how many are held together with bungee cords; check out the politics indicated by bumper stickers; consider if they’ve allowed proper parking for cars with handicapped plates.  If there is a whole lot of diversity, then chances are that what holds these people together is something more than sociability.  It takes love to stay together when so many other considerations push them apart.

            All those other considerations are going to go away eventually, anyhow.  Politics ebb and flow, and what is liberal one year is conservative the next, and vice-versa.  Praise music that was cutting-edge ten years ago is mainstream now and will be old hat ten years from now.  It is no longer an issue if a woman does not wear a hat and gloves to worship and I know men who don’t even wear a tie to work but whose middle-school-age sons insist on wearing them to church.  We go back and forth on the value of sending short-term missionaries into the field.  Youth groups grow and shrink with the birth rate.  One year we support the Souper Bowl of Caring and the next year the need has moved over to providing heating assistance.  Each season of discipleship calls for a different gift to become prominent.

            The only one that never goes away?

“Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”  [I Corinthians 13:8-13]