Four Jerks, a Wedding and a Funeral: What's love got to do with it? ~ 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

¹If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² 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. ³ 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.⁴ Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.⁸ 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. ⁹ For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; ¹⁰ but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹ 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. ¹² 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. ¹³ And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. ~ 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

1.     In vss. 1-3 Paul warns us, “Don’t be a gifted jerk.”

In Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, he acknowledges that the Corinthians are a gifted bunch “not lacking in any spiritual gift,” he says in 1:7. In 1 Corinthians 13, however, he makes a more astonishing claim that real spiritual power and success can be had by unloving people. That gifts for ministry, powerful ones no less, can be wielded by the immature, the broken, and therefore aren’t proof of good Christian character. Heavenly speakers can be blowhards, super prophets or teachers or miracle workers/ forgettable, and even radical activists who give away all their possessions / of no account. I struggled with this truth this week. I want spiritual gifts and power to be evidence of love and good behavior. Paul, however, says, “Nope. These people can be real jerks.”

But then I realized that Paul’s remarks actually made sense of my lived experience in the church. How many of us can resonate with this reality of observing gifted people with weak characters? We’ve all seen great gifts given by people who remain untouched by the true needs of the world or their own needs, incapable of sharing themselves. I’ve seen great power for good offered by people who believe that they need nothing so they receive nothing but their own smug self-satisfaction or self-righteousness. I’ve watched powerful people, gifted by God, actually helping others, yet stuck in their own misery, incapable of breaking chains of greed, anger, or lust. I’ve observed people perform good works that don’t benefit their souls. And what would be the benefit? Patience, kindness, contentment, humility, etc. In their lack of love – they get nothing in return.

In the movie The Doctor, starring William Hurt, Dr. Jack MacKee is a successful surgeon at a leading hospital. His skills are without question – regularly saving people’s lives. Yet his bedside manner with his patients, many who are seriously ill, is appalling. The decorum in the operating theater is very casual, filled with loud music and rude banter between him and other doctors about patients who are being operated on. In one painful scene, a patient sadly shares that her husband is not close to her anymore after her double mastectomy, Jack responds that she should tell him that she is just like a “Playboy centerfold, because she has the staple marks to prove it.” The point of the matter is that Jack has great gifts, can even save lives, but those gifts yield nothing in return. He may help others, but he in no way finds any help for himself. He is not transformed and has no peace. He has all the trappings of success, yet his family life is a mess – his son hates him and he remains emotionally distant from his wife on the brink of divorce.

Yet more than simply Paul’s words or our own experience, Jesus would also agree that one can wield great power without a deep relationship with God. In Matthew 7, he speaks of  those who prophesy, cast out demons, and do many deeds of power and yet says, “I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you.”  Friends, don’t be gifted and not be known by love, by others who sit on your right and left, or by Jesus. Don’t be a jerk.

But I also have good news this morning. Paul, echoing Jesus, is also saying something else, “You can be gifted, jerk.” You could also read Paul in another direction and, at the very least, thankfully declare that God uses people – sometimes even miraculously – who aren’t loving at the time. How many of us could stand and claim that we have been helped by just such a person, a person truly gifted by God but broken, messed up, lacking in true love? How many of us could stand and claim that we’ve helped others yet felt nothing at the time, may be even resented it? It’s a reminder that we need not always be perfectly sincere folks to be instruments of God’s grace and healing. God’s bigger than that.  So you need not read Paul as necessarily speaking about intent but might also read him talking about effect. Does your service produce love? Sometimes you have to act yourself into a feeling and sometimes the love comes later. But make no mistake – it has to come.

The point is this – if your gift-giving doesn’t produce love, if it doesn’t draw you closer to others and to God – then even if it yields things for others it will yield nothing for you. And guess what, Paul and Jesus are saying, “You matter, your heart matters, your life, apart from what you give, matters!”

2.     From vss. 4-8 I want to encourage us, “We are married.”

Many commentators bemoan the simple fact that these words of Paul – poetically powerful – are continually unmoored from their immediate context of spiritual gifts and the church – often being used for romantic promises in marriage ceremonies. How many of you heard these words read at your wedding or someone else’s?

But I think that there is a worthwhile comparison here to make. Now, what if that marriage context of love and oath making – “in sickness and in health, in poverty and in wealth, for as long as you both shall live” – helped remind us what it means to be the church? What if you were married to the people you sit with today? What if your understanding of love and spiritual gifts were grounded – through these words – in that context of committed, married love? Paul reminds us here that love is not an abstract quality, but actions. And yet I believe that many of us don’t have a problem with the actions per se but the social context. We feel much more comfortable associating this kind of love with a spouse rather than the church. So marriage can serve as a prophetic image –even for the unmarried among us – of love within the church and all it demands: work, romance, pain, and joy. Love  “that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Look at this list – does this reflect your commitment and actions to this group of people?

 

 Paul is saying, “Love is acting out these things toward those people you are sitting with today.”

I feel like many of us love the church but would rather just date and see other people. "O the church is fun," we insist, "but why commit when I can play the field?" Or if marriage is talked about so is a pre-nuptial agreement. Why else would we want to read this passages in a wedding and not as a passage describing what our life as a church should truly look like? It would expose most of our complaints, conflicts, and lack of commitment as simply petty, if not outright harmful or sinful.  

Friends, I don’t believe that the church has a cultural problem, a lack of money problem, or an attendance problem, though all of these things may be true. I believe that myself, you, we, us – have a love problem. Notice I didn’t say a “conflict problem.” There will always be conflict but how do we act lovingly in the midst of it. Do you truly love this group of people and its individual members? Some of you may be rightly frustrated with the church. You see the need for change and that’s good. But the question remains, “Do you love us? All of us?” If you want to test yourself, to check your love meter, perhaps the point of Paul could best be captured by putting your own name in place of the noun “love,” and not neglecting to find a proper place for repentance and forgiveness. In other words, can I say in front of all of you, “Jon is patient; Jon is kind; Jon is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Jon does not insist on his own way; is not irritable or resentful”?

Jesus said, “³⁴I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. ³⁵By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:34-35

A story from the early church might illustrate Jesus’ and Paul’s understanding of love in the church. In the third century church in Rome, a pagan actor became a Christian, but he realized he had to change his employment because most Roman plays encouraged immorality and unchristian behavior, often involving pagan ceremonies. Since this newly-converted actor had no other job skills, he considered establishing an acting school to teach drama to non-Christian students. However, he first submitted his idea to the leaders of his church for their counsel. 

The leaders told him that if acting was an immoral profession then it would be wrong to train others in it. Nevertheless, since this was a rather novel question, they wrote to Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, for his thoughts. Cyprian agreed that a profession unfit for a Christian to practice was also unfit for him to teach, even if this was his sole means of support. Makes sense, right?

But that isn't the end of the story. Cyprian also told this neighboring church that they should be willing to support the actor financially if he had no other means of earning a living—just as they supported orphans, widows, and other needy persons. Going further, he wrote, “If your church is financially unable to support him, he may move over to us and here receive whatever he needs for food and clothing.” Cyprian and his church didn't even know this actor, yet they were willing to support him because he was a fellow believer. As one Christian told the Romans, “We love one another with a mutual love because we do not know how to hate.” Friends, that’s committed love in action. That’s love that “never ends.” That love will have our gifts, talents, and service flowing in the right way, doing what they are supposed to be doing.

3.     Vss. 9-13 suggests that for love to grow we need to acknowledge what we don’t know.

This last point is a bit of an out-of-the-box sort of reading. Paul’s point is that the Corinthians need to focus on love because their precious gifts of knowledge and prophecy are not eternal, they won’t last or be a part of the kingdom come. However, Paul’s words also hold a different warning - it’s dangerous for our love to imagine we know more than we do.  I have to confess that I am not always sure what to do amidst the ever-changing political, social, cultural landscapes of our world but I do know this – our current climate of certitude, our failure to acknowledge our partial ability to see, is not helping the church, it’s hurting it and our witness of love. Paul knows, he remembers how religious certainty led him to kill Christians because he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, they were not of God. Yet, this side of heaven in order to truly love we need to die to the idea that we can always completely know – that’s what’s meant by the funeral in the sermon’s title.

And Paul isn’t the only one who feels this way. Take our companion text from the Gospel which is also a part of today’s lectionary reading, Luke 4:21-30. It’s the story of Jesus teaching in the synagogue about God’s love for the outsider to those who clearly believed they knew God and what God wanted. And what was their response to Jesus’ message? Verse 29 says, “When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.” It’s a sobering reminder of what can happen when religious people, fueled by anger, are more certain than loving, more interested in being right than caring. Those who build their town on hills of certainty have little use for humility and no time for love. The Gospel’s point is pretty straightforward. What do those who refuse to acknowledge that they only “know in part” do with love? They try and hurl it off a cliff.

Acknowledging Paul’s words in verse 13, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t strive for correct doctrine – right belief – proper faith. It will abide. Nor would I in anyway wish to say that we should give up our confident belief in what the future holds – our assured hope. It will abide. But friends, the greatest of these, the greatest of these, is love. So Paul ends with a clear, and important teaching for how we can be transformed, we must acknowledge what we don’t know. My wife is always quick to chide me when I speak to strongly about a person who I believe is acting irresponsibly, or irritating me. She always reminds me to ask, “What don’t I know?” Without this question, without the presumption of my own ignorance, it’s hard to love people. Without that question, I can imagine that what I see dimly in a mirror is all there is to see. 

But there is good news even in this warning. We may not know all there is, we may not see face-to-face at this time, but God does. For what our future holds may be somewhat mysterious to us but Paul states that one day this fog will lift from our eyes and that each of us will know even as each of us “have been fully known” (vs. 12). God knows you already. You are already “fully known.” He knows what you need, he is faithful and loving.

So here is the promise you can know – God is love, 1 John says, so I invite you to return to our text one last time and substitute “God” for each verse with “love” in it. God is patient, God is kind, God is not envious, or boastful, or arrogant, or rude. God does not seek his own advantage, is not irritable nor resentful but rejoices in the truth. God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things – God never fails. Can you hear that today? This whole love project called "church" demands much of you but is not fundamentally dependent upon you because God never fails.

I would like to end our time with a prayer by Thomas More:  

O Lord, give us a mind that is humble, quiet, peaceable, patient and charitable, and a taste of your Holy Spirit in all our thoughts, words and deeds. O Lord, give us a lively faith, a firm hope, a fervent charity, a love of You. Take from us all lukewarmness in meditation and all dullness in prayer. Give us fervor and delight in thinking of You, your grace, and your tender compassion toward us. Give us, good Lord, the grace to work for the things we pray for. Amen. ~ Thomas More