In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Love
is perhaps one of the most central messages in our Christian faith. We say
things like “God is love” and hear commandments such as “love your neighbor as
yourself.” But what is love? We get a new phone or sweater and say that we
“love it.” Does using the same word to describe our feelings about a disposable
object somehow diminish the power of the love to which we are called? I think
it does. “Love” is an overused word; and so if we are going to properly read
and understand these famous words from 1 Corinthians, we need to understand
what love is.
In
The Four Loves, CS Lewis writes about
four types of emotions that are often distilled into the word “love,” though
each really is distinct. The first is affection, and it is a familiar sort of
love. Often this is the love of parents for their children. It is a beautiful
sort of love because it is unearned; we love our children because of who they
are, not because of anything they do. But this sort of love is often restricted
to familiar relations. We feel affection for our children, and those feelings
rarely extend to strangers.
The
next type of love is friendship. It’s often less intense than the previous
sort, but is broader because it extends to people to whom we are not related.
It is a less instinctual sort of love. The third sort of love is eros, or romantic love. This is a
desirous love and isn’t just erotic. This is the sort of love that we refer to
when we say “I’ve fallen in love.” Eros
is a sort of love that involves the totality of our bodies and minds.
The
final sort of love is sometimes translated as “charity.” Sometimes you’ll hear
this type of love referred to by the Greek word agape. This is the love that St. Paul writes about. Agape is the love that was nailed to the
Cross in Jesus. Agape is the love
that conquered death and finds joy even amidst sorrow. Agape is a self-giving sort of love. It is Divine love. When we
speak of Christian love, we speak of charity, of agape. That isn’t to say that the other loves are bad or unholy,
but they find their perfection in this final type of love.
And
it is this kind of love that is needed in Corinth. Paul is writing to a church
that is embroiled in disagreement. The Corinthians are fighting about nearly
everything and division is a very real possibility for them. You’ll recall that
last Sunday, our reading from Corinthians came from the chapter leading up to
today’s. In it, Paul wrote about the Church using the metaphor of a body. He
said that in order for a body to be complete, it needs all members, the
respected and the less honorable. You need the eyes as much as you need the large
intestine, even if it doesn’t get any glory. Then Paul spoke about the various
gifts and talents that people have, and says “but I will show you a more
excellent way.”
Before
we move into exploring this “more excellent way,” we need to rescue this
passage from its natural environment: weddings. These verses on love are read
at nearly every wedding, even secular ones. These poetic lines beautifully
capture the power of love, and so it’s understandable why people would choose
such a reading for their wedding. But really, Paul’s words are better suited
for divorce court than a marriage ceremony, as that is more analogous to Paul’s
context. This is a highly polemical passage, and Paul is furious. This isn’t a
gentle teaching on love, it is an exhortation to stop fighting. Paul is calling
the Corinthians to a love higher than affection, friendship, or romance, but
rather to charity. This passage has been domesticated by weddings, robbing it
of its transformative and radical message: love is about living with tension
and disagreement without succumbing to division.
In
Jesus’ ministry, he spoke about having the sort of faith that can move
mountains and he told a rich young man that the path to his salvation was to
sell of his possessions and give the money to the poor. But here Paul says,
“Even if I do exactly what Jesus tells me to do, but do it without love, then
it is for naught.” Even if I can do differential calculus in my head (which I
can’t), or preach the best sermon ever, or win the Super Bowl, or become the
top salesperson in my company’s history, or receive all excellent feedback from
my students, or get all A’s in school, or win all sorts of awards, if I don’t
love, then those become empty actions.
It
is also worth pointing out some of the grammatical nuance of this passage, as
most English translations get it wrong. We read a series of statements with the
formula: “love” as a subject, the verb “is”, and some adjective or description
of love. And read that way, love becomes passive and something on which to
meditate; love becomes cerebral. But that translation structure betrays Paul’s
writing. In his own writing, Paul has love as the subject of 16 different
verbs. So it isn’t “love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious,” but
rather, it should be read as “Love practices patience; love does kindness; love
does not act with envy.” The way Paul wants us to understand love is through
action. Love is not a kind thing to do, but rather to be loving is to act with
kindness. Love is active.
This
is a very messy sort of love though, not the sort that you’ll find on the
Valentine’s Day cards that are starting to show up at the store. The sort of
love that Paul is talking about is self-sacrificial, it might not feel good, it
might make you do things that you’d prefer not to do, it will open your eyes to
issues that you’d rather ignore, but it is also the only sort of love that can
transform and save the world. This is the love that was crucified. It is the
sort of love that Jesus proclaimed last week in our reading from Luke when he
said that he came “to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the
captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to
proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Today’s reading from Luke is the
conclusion of that story.
Jesus
was speaking about an intrusive sort of love that would upset the way the world
worked. No longer would the poor be ignored or the oppressed be trampled over,
instead God’s favor would rest on all people. That would mean changing the way
we live, and love. It is a radically inclusive sort of love which calls us
outside of our comfort zones. Jesus then tells a story from the Old Testament
that is example of how God’s love intrudes into our boundaries. We set up
distinctions between “us” and “them,” thinking that God must prefer us. We
proclaim falsities such as “God helps those who help themselves.” We classify
others as different from us so that we can feel justified in our judgment
against them. We judge others based on their actions, but ourselves by our
intentions. And God intrudes into those ways of thinking and being by saying
“there is a more excellent way.”
The
crowd that heard Jesus’ words didn’t like love’s intrusion into the comforts of
their lives, so they were ready to throw him over a cliff, and I think we’d have
joined them had we been there. We’re in the season after Epiphany, and our
readings have been presenting us with early stories from Jesus’ ministry about
the ways in which he is revealed to the world. Today’s passage is a reminder
that not all epiphanies are welcomed. Sometimes we’d rather be left alone,
content with the way things are. But love always calls us to go deeper.
As
an example of what this sort of charitable love might look like in our world,
I’d like to share part of a book that I recently read. The social scientist
Brené Brown asks in her newest book, “Do you think that people are doing their best?”
Since I read this particular chapter a few months ago, it has transformed the
way I see the world to be more charitable. She tells the story of going to
speak at an out of town conference and having to share a hotel room with
another speaker. She opens the hotel room door to see her roommate sitting on a
white sofa, with her muddy boots digging into the armrest. She’s also eating a
gooey cinnamon roll, and after stuffing the last bite into her mouth, she wipes
her sticky hands all over the couch. Brown stood here with her mouth open
watching this happen. The roommate replied “Don’t worry, it’s not our couch.”
Over
the next few days, Brown observed other situations which astounded her, and we
all have witnessed these sorts of things – racist remarks towards a bank
teller, people cutting in the school carpool line, people saying idiotic things
on television. Brown writes that she went to her therapist to say that she was
fed up with scofflaws, sewer rats, and scumbags. Her therapist did what any
good therapist would do, she pushed back and invited Brown to go deeper into
her reactions and emotions. The therapist asked “Do you think those people are
doing the best they can?” Brown’s answer was a resounding “no.” The rest of the
chapter tells the story of Brown struggling with that question and eventually
coming to realize that the answer really is that others really are doing the
best they can.
She
came to a place where she could empathize with others, a place where the
realities of their lives could intrude into hers, a place where she could
charitably love them, as Paul suggests to the Corinthians. It has been said
that there is no one whom we could not love, if we just knew their story. Do
people still do stupid, annoying, selfish things? Absolutely! But given their
upbringing, over which they had little or no control, their current stresses
and fears, I, too, think that people are doing the best they can. When I first
read that chapter, my response was “No way.” But as I’ve been observing myself
and others, I believe that we really are doing the best we can in each moment.
Is our best always good enough? Nope. Is our best perfection? Not even close.
Does it mean that we don’t try to do better? Of course not. But love is about
focusing more on grace than sin.
Charity,
or agape, is about seeing the best in
humanity. That is what God sees in us. Not our darkest moments, our worst actions,
or regrettable decisions. No, God sees us for who we are- fallible, broken,
mistake-prone, but more so as redeemed and beloved. God had such great faith in
humanity to come among us. God assumed the best in us by coming to us in Jesus
to show us how to follow this more excellent way. If God saw us as hopeless
sinners, why would God come to show us this more excellent way if we were
destined to fail? Perhaps, God knows that we are doing our best, and knows that
even if it isn’t consistent, we are able to live into this sort of charitable
and transformative agape love. God
sees the best in us, Paul invites us to see the best in each other. The Good
News is that God has faith in humanity; and so, our challenge is to also have
faith in humanity.
Let
us pray: O God, intrude into our hearts and minds with your love. Strengthen us
to put love into action. Guide us to see each other the way that you see us – a
beloved units of your grace. Thank you for showing us the power and depths of
your love in Jesus. And help us to be a part of your transformation of the
world through participating in your Divine Love. Amen.
