PRAYER: Oh God, who created this vast universe in a spirit of love, remind us today of the mandate to love one another and teach us to use our spiritual gifts, our abilities, our skills, always in a spirit of love, lest they be but a clanging gong. May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.
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Over the last few weeks, the New Testament readings in the lectionary have come from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Last week, and the week before were both in the 12th chapter about Spiritual gifts.
Paul was laying out a list of some – not all – of the spiritual gifts that we might recognize in ourselves or others. He pointed out that no one person possesses all of the gifts and no one person is without some kind of spiritual gift!
Also, Paul was writing to address issues that had arisen at the church in Corinth about how to interact with the unbelieving culture around them. The church was becoming somewhat insular, and he was responding to the specific problems of a particular group of believers. He was convinced that the Spirit graced believers with gifts for the continued building up of the body of Christ in faith, hope and love. And he rejected the idea that we should be separating ourselves from those around us who don’t happen to belong to the church body.
His message to us throughout chapter 12 is that we are all part of God’s vast and ongoing creation, living in this moment to use our gifts for those around us and those who come after us. We should celebrate that fact, and not shrink from the diversity of the world, but to live into it with courage and high purpose, with mercy and compassion bringing the love that we know in God’s world into the beautiful community that can be achieved, with God’s help, in and because of our diversity. That is a plan that offers our gifts to be put to great purpose, and God’s beautiful community will thrive well into the future.
Chapter 13 in First Corinthians is a very famous passage. Some people call it a needlepoint passage because parts of this chapter are frequently found within some home or church décor – often in needlepoint. Meanwhile, these three remain: Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love. If you’ve ever been to a Christian wedding ceremony, then chances are very good that you have heard this passage recited at a wedding. It make for a very easy connection. A new marriage, we would hope, is filled with love… and the greatest of these… you get the idea.
Chapter 13 is not meant to be a standalone passage. It is interconnected with what comes before it. Paul makes a connection between our spiritual gifts and the central core of Jesus’ message about God: love. All of the gifts he mentions whether it’s a gift of wisdom or healing, faith or discernment, tongues or prophesy, or any number of the multitudes of spiritual gifts that are present, if they’re not used in a spirit of love, then they are – as Paul described them – a clanging gong.
For many, that picture of two people on their wedding day is what we think of when we hear the word ‘love’. We think of the romantic connection. The holding hands and the embrace. We think of the flowers and the candlelit dinners. And in many respects, that’s all true. That’s what love looks like. For us, when we got married, the most difficult decisions we had to make were around who was going to do the cooking, or the cleaning. Who would vacuum and who would make sure my socks made it to the hamper. For us, in that moment, that’s what love looked like: finding balance, making compromises, asking questions.
But a few years later, we would find ourselves holding our first child. That precious bundle of joy, that angelic face and adorable little fingers and toes. That image of a new parent holding a baby, surely that’s what love looks like. That image is quite a bit different from what it was just a few short years before. When the baby woke up in the middle of the night, one of us had to change her and feed her. When she wouldn’t go back to sleep, one of us had to put her in the car seat and drive her around in the car because we discovered that the car worked like a champ. Those 3 or 4 AM drives up and down route 22… that’s what love looked like for us in that moment.
When the second kid came around, we had a hard time getting her to eat anything. Almost every time we tried to give her something to eat, she gave it back to us almost immediately. When she couldn’t eat breast milk, we had to try other things. And she didn’t just give us a little spit up, no no. She projected it up and over everything. One time, I was giving her a soy formula. It was our first time trying this product, and she took the bottle and drank almost all of it. I turned to Anna with the baby in my arms, just as she was starting to relax. I said, “I think the soy is….” I couldn’t get the next word out before soy formula was projected over me, over the chair, over the floor, and the baby was screaming, and we were at our wits’ end. The patience and the determination, the fear and the hope of trying new things. That’s what love looked like for us.
When one of our kids fell on a slick basketball court and hit her head, when one of them fell out of the tree in our front yard and broke her arm, when we found out that one of them was having a severe allergic reaction to their braces, or whatever the next thing was… we dealt with these things as parents throughout history have dealt with these things. Because that’s what love looks like. Couples loving each other. Parents loving children. That’s what love looks like.
About a decade and a half ago, Anna’s father was taken to the hospital. There were orders at the time, to take him to a specific hospital because that’s where his DNR paperwork was on hand. But the ambulance driver decided that he knew better and took him to the closer hospital who proceeded to revive my father-in-law against his wishes. Two days later, I watched in awe as Anna summoned the strength to sign the papers removing her father from life support. He died the next day, and that was an example to me of what love looks like, to make those difficult decisions, to be the truth teller and to compassionately let go. The deeper we travel in life, we find that love looks a lot different than what it used to. For us, it’s more complex; it’s more nuanced. It evolves.
For Paul, the greatest example of what love looks like is Jesus on the cross. Jesus, throughout his time on earth demonstrated what love looks like. As Jesus taught and spoke to people who resisted God’s demonstration of love made flesh, he demonstrated patience. Jesus was not envious, or arrogant. You might make the argument that he was rude; I would say that he was blunt. Throughout the gospels, we read stories of Peter and the other disciples saying things that are ill-informed or ill-advised. Jesus kept no record of these things. Jesus bore all things, he hoped all things, and he certainly endured all things.
Jesus, throughout his ministry demonstrated God’s definition of love in everything that he did. This makes sense of course, because Jesus is the very embodiment of God’s love. His first words in the gospel of Luke are about proclaiming good news to the poor, release to the captives, healing of the sick, the year of the Lord’s favor. When asked the question, Who is my neighbor”, Jesus gave a long explanation about a stranger helping another stranger, a person who the Jews tended to think of as unclean, showing mercy, sacrificing their own needs for that of an injured person.
In Luke 15, Jesus told two parables that demonstrated God’s unfailing hope and patience. One of a shepherd who leaves his 99 sheep to find the one lost. The other of a father who waits patiently for his son who has gone down the wrong path. In Matthew, Jesus gives us a perfect example of how we can use our spiritual gifts with the love that God offers. He tells us, “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothes to wear. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me.” And he reminds us that when we’ve done those things for the least of our brothers or sisters, we have done those things for him.
Throughout these two chapters in 1 Corinthians (12 & 13), Paul explains to us what love looks like. It is using our gifts and our abilities, not for our own benefit, but out of love, for the benefit of others. Love is not a fleeting feeling or emotion. Love is a decision. Love is a choice we make when we wake up in the morning. Love is an opportunity that we face that enables us to lift up someone other than ourselves. Love is a gift that we give without expectation of receiving something in return.
In the gospel reading from our lectionary today in Luke 4, we encounter people who reject God’s living embodiment of love. They don’t want to follow an example of love that is selfless; they’d rather their own definition of love which just so happens to look like our imperfect love. They want to limit it. They want to define who is in and who is rejected. They want to be the ones to decide who is loved and who is feared. They want to be the ones to determine who is included and who is left out. They want to have privilege that rewards them, and then follow an example of love that does not even closely resemble God’s.
Listen again to the words that Paul writes to the church in Corinth: 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; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.
It turns out that love looks like compassion… and mercy. Inclusion… and kindness. God’s love looks like attention for the outcast, and dignity for the oppressed. Love looks like forgiveness for the sinner and welcome for the stranger. Love looks like a widening of the circle that offers a hospitality based in abundance instead of rejection based on limits.
Paul describes a love that comes from Jesus that is offered to all, that includes all, that breaks down the very walls that we build that are designed to divide and delineate.
Love never fails when we demonstrate God’s perfect love even when we don’t feel like it. Love never fails when we make the decision to offer love and mercy over hatred and fear. Love never fails when we seek to provide hope and comfort, even when it may ironically be uncomfortable for us.
What would it look like for us to offer that kind of love in our lives? What would it look like for us to expand and then expand some more how we offer God’s love in our community, in our world? Perhaps for you, it means an increased involvement in feeding ministries. Perhaps it means that you will work for justice for immigrants and work to provide resources for those who are being targeted. Perhaps it means that you are called to a ministry of healing and will seek to offer hope to the sick. Perhaps it means a new ministry that has been on your heart, one that offers hope and mercy. Perhaps a ministry caring for the good earth that God has given us all, working to restore and heal the environment – or our little corner of it here in Hunterdon County. In Jesus, Paul says that love looks like a willingness to stoop down low enough to serve. May that be our call for this season in our lives.
To God be the glory.
