January 28, 2007

Aren’t These Words for Weddings?
 

by Rev. Dr. Jim Carlson

1 Corinthians 13

Story about our cat purring in the living room. I am reminded of those famous words, “Love is patient, love is kind…love bears all things, love endures all things.”

These words are some of the most well-known words in the Bible. But the thing about well-known words is that the more people know them, the more widely they are applied to life itself.

Here I am trying to let them inspire my when my cat does his business on the carpet. On the other hand, most of us associate this chapter with weddings. I can’t tell you how many weddings I’ve been to or performed where someone gets up and reads this chapter.

It’s widely regarded by the public as a chapter which describes the kind of love two people should have for each other in a committed relationship like marriage. Which is fine. There is a great deal married couples could learn about marriage itself by applying these words to their relationship.

At the same time, and I hate to burst anyone’s bubble on this, Paul had no intention of saying anything about marriage when he wrote this chapter. It was the furthest thing from his mind.

If you’ve been at church or in Bible study these last two weeks, you know that the chapter leading up to this one was devoted to helping Christians get along with one another at church.

As I said before, the problem which prompted Paul to write these chapters is that some of the people at the church he started in Corinth were convinced that their giftedness was more important than the giftedness of others because they could speak in a special language no one else could understand.

They believed the ability to speak in this heavenly language was given to them by the Holy Spirit. For that reason, they thought they were better than other people who had been gifted in other ways but could not speak that language.

As I said mentioned last week, Paul wants to downplay this idea of people elevating themselves over others simply because they can speak in tongues. In the chapter leading up to this one, Paul tells them that as a congregation, they are all like body parts, connected to one another and dependent on one another. One part is not greater than the other, and one person in the church is not greater than someone else in the church.

This chapter, which people love to have read at their weddings is actually intended to show that unless love is the main lens through which we in the church look at each others, nothing else we do will be of much value.

Of course every one of us would agree in principle that this is so. Of course we love one another. We do so because we believe that love, more than anything else we know about God, is central to who God is. It stands to reason that we in the church, who believe we are the body of Christ, should have love for God and one another as our defining characteristic.

That’s all fine and good. But lets be honest, when we hear the way Paul talks about love, we realize that he’s asking quite a lot of church folks. I want to take you on a tour of this chapter and show you some of the things Paul says about love.

He starts by saying that whatever good a person may do within the church, if it is not done with love, and he means love for the other people in the congregation, then it is a waste of time and may actually do more harm than good.

People would speak in tongues in Corinth, they would speak words of prophecy, they shared special knowledge given to them by the Holy Spirit with the church, and they even gave of themselves in very sacrificial ways. But Paul tells them that unless they do those very good things as an expression of love for God and the other people in the church, they are just being pious. And no one profits from empty piety.

I think we need to take a moment and think about what he’s saying here. Why do we give our time to the church? Why do we write a check? Why do we lend our abilities to the congregation in helpful ways?

Some people contribute to the church as a way of soothing their own guilt over something bad they’ve done. For others it’s a way handling grief over a trauma they have suffered in their lives. For some it is a way of manipulating others into liking or respecting them. For still others it’s a way of maintaining control over other people in the church.

You offer something so indispensable to the church that they can’t bear to live without it. So they reward you by giving you an inordinate amount of influence over the way things are done in the church.

I think many of you would say that in the past we have been so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of money being given to the church by certain individuals that we allowed them a greater level of influence than they really should have had. We ended up resenting the fact that we had to cede so much power to them, and those folks ended up leaving the church when we asked them to share the power we had given them.

Paul’s words in this situation would be, “If I give more money to the church than anyone else and if I underwrite the construction of a new church wing, but do not have love, I am nothing.” Whatever we give to the church must be motivated by love, with no selfish expectations in return.

We have come a long way in this respect, but it is important for us to be reminded that love is the only legitimate reason for doing things that help the other people in this congregation.

Paul goes on to say that love is not just about doing things for other people in the church. True love in the sense of the church is the main template for the way we interact with each other. It governs the way we behave toward one another in every single situation.

Into this very famous passage, let’s plug in either our own names or just refer to ourselves and see how it fits. Our congregation should be patient and kind with each other. We should not be jealous of one another. We should not boast to each other about what we do for the church.

We must not be arrogant; we should not be rude to each other. No one in this congregation should insist on their own way. Instead, a loving group of Christians seek consensus solutions to their church’s problems. This is kind of contrary to the way in which success and leadership are often defined in our culture.

Insisting on one’s own way is rather admired, especially if it leads to our culturally defined idea of what it means to be “successful”. We hear about great leaders who come into an organization or a business or a team of some kind and insist on their own “transformational” plan.

They insist on their own way and “clear out the dead wood”, which is a euphemism for people who don’t see things their way. This way of thinking has seeped into the church and colored the way we think about “success” in ministry.

In the church, however, there is no such thing as “dead wood”. Love requires us to seek consensus here even if that means our results don’t look like the results in “successful” organizations and churches.

Church members should not be irritable or resentful, even when the Bears are going to the Super bowl. They do not celebrate when something bad happens to someone else. But they ought to throw a potluck when someone does the right thing.

People in the church should bear with one another and with adverse situations, even when it’s difficult. They should give each other the benefit of the doubt, rather than interacting with others based on their preconceived notions.

They should always have hope for the future. There isn’t any place for us to say things like, “Oh, we’re all getting older. What’s going to happen to us in five or ten years?” Let me let you in on a little secret. It’s going to be OK. Regardless of what happens, it’s going to be OK. I have faith in God, that God is doing good things in and through this congregation. I have faith in you, that whatever situation comes up in the church, we will make the best choices we can, given the knowledge and resources God has provided.

Anything short of that kind of hope certainly falls short of the kind of loving interaction Paul outlined here. I was thinking about this idea last week as I was enjoying the glow of seeing my team go to the Super Bowl for the first time in 21 years.

It was really eye opening, not just because my team is playing for the championship. I had been watching those guys screw things up year after year. They lost games they should have won, and even when they had a great season they found a way to self-destruct in the playoffs.

Part of the reason why I didn’t honestly expect them to win is because I’ve forgotten what that feels like. I had really closed myself off to the possibility that the Bears could make it to the Super Bowl. I honestly had a hard time believing what I was seeing on the TV last Sunday.

But isn’t that true for other things in life? We get so used to worrying about things and expecting them to deteriorate that we can’t even imagine what it would be like if they went the way we wanted them to.

We get used to the same people acting in the same self-destructive ways. We get used to seeing downward trends. And we get to thinking that life will never be any different. In the church we struggle with worry over attendance and worry over money and worry over the future of the congregation.

We have seen so much decline and have watched so many people either begin attending somewhere else or die off. We’ve seen budgets tighten and giving suffer. So what would it look like around here if we were a church where the giving was so good that we both expanded our current ministries and took in more than we spent?

What would our congregation look like if our non-profit organization turned a profit? Can you even imagine? Would that give us hope? Would that be evidence that God is at work in this congregation?

Well, you don’t have to imagine what it would look like because it already is. Imagine my surprise when I sat down at the Advisory Board meeting last week and saw on our financial statement where we turned a $2000 plus profit last year.

Between the Bears win and the financial news, let me tell you, last Sunday was a great day for me. Love believes all things, love hopes all things, love endures all things.

Paul says the difference between love and everything else is that love remains forever. Paul believed the current trends in that Corinthian church were going to come to an end. He thought people would eventually not speak in tongues anymore. He expected that they would not speak words of prophecy. He said the day would come when this heavenly knowledge they had been receiving from God would no longer be a part of their worship.

Yes, he believed they would stop because he thought Jesus was going to return in the first century AD, bringing an end to this world. You can decide how you want to interpret that question. But regardless of what how long it would be, Paul knew that love for one another was greater than any of the other things that went on in that church.

The same is true for us. People will come and go. Pastors will come and go. The ways in which we reach out to the community will change. The building will change. The American Baptist denomination will change. Waukesha itself will change.

But our love for one another in Christ is the one constant we will always have. The expressions of that love will be different in 20 years. But the love we have for God and the people of this congregation will not be different, regardless of what happens.

It’s great to have faith that God will transform us as a congregation. It’s nice to have hopes for who we might be 10 years from now because of God’s grace. But even those great things take a back seat to love, which will last forever.