What is love?!

     To use the language of my classical studies’ days, there is a real Scylla and Charybdis to be avoided today in Paul’s letter.  If you are relatively new to Advent and do not get the classical reference, Scylla was a six-headed monster who ate 6 sailors if a ship came too close and Charybdis was a whirlpool that swallowed entire ships.  They bordered a straight between the Italian and Sicilian coastlines.  Captains had to be on their toes to avoid the danger on either side.  Before I get to the misteachings or dangers of Paul’s letter, though, I should probably share that I cannot use the single best illustration of the dangers presented in how we speak about love in the church from the last week.  I cannot tell you how agonizingly painful that is.  If you are visiting, you may wonder at my face and expressions.  But longer time Adventers know I was a Classical Studies major in college and pursued a PhD in Classical Philosophy a long time ago and in a galaxy far, far away.  My dissertation subject was on love, specifically eros, and its loss in philosophy.  So one danger today is clearly that I could give y’all a wonderful recitation of facts and understandings regarding love and bore you to death.  Another danger would be to ignore it altogether as something more fitting to discuss in the wider councils of the Church.  Certainly, my work on the bishop’s Task Force and with others regarding Christian Anthropology, could make the discussions of love far more important to me than to each of you.  That’s always a danger for preachers, right, that we focus on things that interest or bug us, but leave congregations just as hungry as when they entered the doors to the sanctuary.  But, my perfect illustration, which I cannot share yet, convinced me I was in the right place for a sermon, a place that many of us need to be considering.  So here goes:

     What revealed characteristic of God is the most important?  I’ll give you all a few seconds to do the rankings in your head.  Keep in mind, all the characteristics of God that we love and worship are revealed by Him—we could never rationalize or think our way to the fact that He has specific characteristics.  To hard?  Let’s try an easier one then: what spiritual gifts within the parish we call Advent do you esteem the most?  What spiritual gifts present among individuals who call Advent their church home do you prioritize in your head?  Again, I’ll give you a few moments.

     I will not ask for a show of hands for a reason that will become clear in a few moments, but doubtless some of you ranked the fact that God loves us as most important.  Certainly, Presiding Bishop Michael highlights God’s love in his sermons.  Some of you may have gone with His grace as most important.  Perhaps some of you considered the fact that He is just most important.  Maybe, just maybe if one or two of you were angry today, you valued God’s vengeance as most important.  When it came to ranking spiritual gifts among the parish, some of you probably wished there was a better preacher today.  Don’t hide.  I saw your faces.  I’m making you engage God and Scripture on Super Bowl Sunday.  This is not a time for deep sermons; this should be a quickie so that we can get to the altar of The Shield and start eating and drinking and eating buffalo winds and nacho chips, right?  Ouch!  Too close to home?

     If you found yourself ranking gifts in the parish or revealed characteristics of God then these words of Paul are as important to you this day as they should have been in Corinth some nineteen centuries earlier.  I understand when preaching on this passage the minefield into which I am stepping.  It is so famous that it has made its way into the secular world.  Certainly, it is used a lot in weddings, even weddings that are not particularly religious.  Truth be told, I find it a great passage for prospective brides and grooms.  I think it sums up much of the reasons we have argued in the Church for a few centuries over whether the joining of a man and woman in holy matrimony is a Sacrament or a Rite.  Is there an inward, spiritual grace present in a prospective bride and groom, or is the ceremony simply a ritual?  Hard questions, eh?

     Let’s ask an easy one, then: what is love?

     C’mon, why is everybody treating today like I’m interested only in rhetorical questions?  Just a few minutes ago, many of you were saying that love is the greatest revealed characteristic of God.  What is love, that we value it so much?

     Now, you are beginning to see one of the rocks upon which we may find ourselves cast and destroyed, if we do not pay close attention.  As I travel the diocese and the Church and ask that question, I am usually given that pornography answer—we know love when we see it.  People will often begin with something along the lines of “it is that feeling that lets us know we are valued, cared for,” and etc.  I see the nods.  Y’all like that stab.  Some folks will actually quote this passage to me in their attempts to define love.  Unfortunately, our translations are a significant part of the problem.  What do I mean?

     For starters, did you know that Paul’s teaching on love comes between his discussion of spiritual gifts in what you and I would call the parish and his teaching about how the Church, the people of God, should appear to the world around them.  It’s not a particularly romantic setting is it?  Paul spends a chapter discussing the various gifts of the Holy Spirit that are given to individuals.  Then he spends another chapter talking about why the Church needs or has all those gifts.  There is no feel good, no warm fuzzy feeling being discussed.  Paul is not speaking of happily ever after.  Heck, Paul never once says love necessarily feels good.  Love is what enables the local church to stay together, to work through their differences, to the glory of God.  Love is what enables the church to minister to the world around it, to work for the welfare and benefit of those who do not yet belong, to work for those who do not yet know the loving embrace of God.  What is love, then?

     Part of our understanding about the nature of love comes from the grammar.  Did you know that Paul uses love 16 times in this passage?  Did you know that each time Paul uses the word love, he does so with an active verb?  What, you thought Paul was using “to be” verbs?  In truth, it is no wonder.  The problem with using the predicate adjectives and the “to be” verbs in our translations is that it runs the risk of driving love into the incorporeal, into the theoretical.  When we read that “love is kind,” “love is patient,” “love is not envious,” and so, we really do not learn what Paul is teaching us.

     By using active verbs, with love as the subject, we begin to understand at a fundamental level that love is something active.  It is not passive.  We don’t stand there and hope that it “falls” on us.  Love is patient to others.  Love is kind to others.  Love endures all things.  And so on.  Mature married couples understand the work of marriage, and the teaching of Paul, right?  When couples in their youth agree to be married, do they have any idea what they are getting into?  Think back to the early weeks or months or your marriage, if you were married.  What was the biggest complaint?  He left the toilet seat up?  She burned dinner every now and again?  He leaves his dirty clothes on the bedroom floor when the hamper is less than three feet away?  She seemed to forget how to pump gasoline into a car when she drove it?  Rueful laughter?  Perfect, those of you laughing ruefully, I bet, get it.

      I get it.  The examples I used are a bit too stereotypical.  But they are true.  The warm, fuzzy, happily ever after feeling of a wedding was replaced after a few weeks or months with a recognition of these minor issues.  Of course, what many of us understand is that these issues really are minor.  The real fights will be over allocation of resources, how to parent, how to relate to extended family, and the other serious issues.  Where is love in all that?  Paul would remind us that if we are committed, if we are acting as true lovers, we would not be having those fights.  The wife would gladly put the toilet seat down with no complaint because she is bearing it for her husband’s sake, but she’d have no need to put it down because he would have put it down for her so that she would not fall in.  And if we are doing a good job of loving, with respect to minor issues, how much better will we be able to handle the major issues, the issues that really destroy marriages?  Can you imagine marriages if we tried to out-serve one another?  The world sure cannot.  From “starter spouses” to all kinds of jokes about marital spats to the simple statistic that more than half of all marriages end in divorce to the anecdotal evidence now that the young adults are avoiding marriage, we have all kinds of evidence that husbands and wives are not doing a good job of out-serving one another in marriage.

     Of course, active service is just a part of what love is.  Love is serving for the well-being of another.  To use the grammar side of this discussion, love acts upon something or, rather, someone.  For Paul, and for Christians, the well-being of another is ultimately related to whether the other person knows they are loved and redeemed by God.  Put in simpler terms, love is an active, working service of others for their well-being, their ultimate well-being.  Since the best well-being we can experience is the right relationship with God, love is best demonstrated by our abilities to serve others, that they might enter the saving embrace of God.  Heavy stuff, no?  It’s significantly different than the warm fuzzies the world proclaims when it speaks of love.

     Is Paul right?  Is love something far more significant, something far more important than warm fuzzies?

      His go to example of love is of course Jesus Christ.  Jesus makes it possible for us to be in right relationship with God.  Absent His work and ministry, absent His faith in the Father’s commitment to Him and us, how would we be saved?  The truth is, of course, we would not.  Jesus lived that sinless life, that life that never turned from the trust and purposes of God, no matter the cost.  Even at the end, when His death was impending, Jesus still trusted the Father.  Though He asked that the cup pass, still He agreed to the Father’s will.  Though we joined the crowds in the mocking, the spitting, the whisker-pulling, and the rejecting, still He will Himself to love us, to serve us that we might be restored to the Father.  Though we stand with the crowds at the foot of the Cross and mock Him with that devilish temptation, “If You are the Son of God, come down,” still He stayed.  His will to do what was best for us and our relationship with God rather than what was easiest or simplest for Him is the best example of love each of us will ever know.  And when we, joining the crowds, gave Him every reason to give up on us, still He prayed that God would forgive them because we did not know what we were doing.  That, my brothers and sisters, is the kind of active commitment Paul is describing.

     Nowhere in Paul’s teaching on love is love described as easy, or warm, or necessarily good for the lover.  How many times in Scripture, do God’s people reject Him?  How many times does God act to save His people despite themselves?  In that, Paul is reminding us that we could not truly love had not God loved us first.  God set the example.  And we struggle, feebly and darkly, to mirror that love.

     In my perfect example, an Adventer thought she was motivated by love to do something horrible.  Her proposed horrible act would have had all kinds of consequences for different people.  She knew that.  She needed to be reminded of what love truly was.  And let me say this, her motivations were not evil, as perhaps some of us might describe evil.  I suppose, were we considering her question in an ethics class, I would eventually come down on the side that she was being selfish, which is a rejection of God and the love described here by Paul.  But, I recognize that a chunk of her motivation was her concern was for someone else; she was simply trying to show that concern in a way that prevented her from serving them into right relationship with God.

     That enigmatic example, truthfully, left me floundering a bit.  How does serving play out in the world around us?  It is, ultimately, the answer for why Adventers work to feed the hungry or work to provide care for immigrants and refugees.  Ultimately, it the why we gather to wrestle with faith or share good books or even seek recovery from addiction.  Ultimately, it is the purpose of fellowship, whether we are playing banjos and fiddles or sharing chili and cornbread in social settings.  We serve so that others might know that God loves them, that God wants them in right relationship with Him, and that that right relationship is made possible only through Jesus Christ.

     Our wider church and denomination is, of course, living in the difficulty of this serving to draw others into the embrace of God.  Folks who are certain TEC is absolutely heretical have called to share their disappointment with our bishop’s decision to do his best to have us all walk together and to walk together with our national church.  Of course, as co-chair of his task force, a number of folks in the diocese have shared they are infuriated that his efforts have not gone nearly far enough to suit them.  Some claim to have written the national church to begin Title IV proceedings.  Two sides, both pulling apart.  Each convinced of its own rightness.  How are they demonstrating patience to another?  How are they demonstrating kindness to one another?  Where is the real quest for truth, that in which love delights?

     Further behind the scenes is the fact that Lambeth invitations went out before Christmas.  As you may or may not know, Justin is gathering the bishops of the Communion in England next summer.  Invitations had to be mailed so that bishops could get them on their schedules.  Predictably, folks are mad at who is invited and who is excluded.  Not a few have asked me “Who does he think he is that he gets to decide who is in the communion?” or that someone should be invited or excluded?

     Keep in mind, I am in no way diminishing the importance or significance of these discussions.  Many of the fights in the Church are, in one sense, of grave importance.  But the fights have existed in the Church at least since the time of the church at Corinth, which is to say that they will always be there.  Paul’s teaching that we read today comes about specifically because the members were rankings themselves and others based on their gifts.  Love, Paul says, shows that such rankings are flat out wrong.  Love is immeasurable.  Love struggles to bring others into right relationship with God, period.  Love shows patience to others.  Love shows kindness to others.  Love does not boast to others.  Love is not arrogant when comparing to others.  Love seeks and rejoices in truth.  Paul’s interjection of love is a reminder of how we are to treat one another.  We serve, as He first served us, to love them into the kingdom.  Given the way we do not love, we do not serve, is it any small wonder that we are now in the minority in our own culture?

     If love is important for those who are inside the church, think of how important it is for those outside the church.  Paul sure does.  Paul will remind us, after this brief discussion on love, that our ability to love one another in the midst of these fights, and that the purpose behind all those gifts of the Holy Spirit described in chapter 12, will bear fruit in the world around us.  Others will see us, others will hear us, and they will want what we have.  Does anybody here today think that a real danger for the Church, for this parish, right now?  Are people beating down our doors begging us to share what we have?  In truth, if we are going to take Paul seriously, if we, like Peter in his second letter, think Paul’s writings are inspired by God, we should be living in that danger of being overwhelmed by those seeking to know they are loved by God.

     What does it mean to you to know that God did all this, that God nudged and whacked and judged and nourished our spiritual ancestors, to get us to this point?  What does it mean to you to know that God is working salvation history to your own redemption, to those who share the title of Adventer with you, to those who claim the mantle of our denomination in this diocese, to those who claim the title of disciple no matter the modern expression of denominationalism?  It’s called a Eucharist because it is good thanks.  It is right and a joyful thing always and everywhere to give Him thanks for what He has done!  And our response ought to be so overwhelmingly joyful, so overwhelmingly awestruck that God would love us THAT much, that we would be motivated internally to shout it from the rooftops, to share it with strangers, to risk the things of this life confident that your Lord, our Lord, wants nothing more than the next person to claim Him as Savior and Lord.  Yes, such a way of living can be embarrassing.  Yes, such a way of living can be costly.  Yes, such a way of living can allow others to take advantage of you.  Yes, such a way of living will likely lead to death.  But so what?!  The One who calls you to that way of life is the One who lived that life first for each of our sakes, who gave us that perfect example, and who demonstrated that failure and isolation and even death are not the last word for any of us who claim Him as Lord.

     In my first sermon, I had a castaway line that resonated with Carey this morning.  As I work through this sermon I cannot remember how I got there.  But Carey impressed upon me its importance to her, and she thought I needed to be even clearer at the second service.  Only Abe would dare argue with Carey, so maybe she discerned rightly and her seed of encouragement has caused me to be a bit more blunt.

     Some folks wondered why, if Paul says love is immeasurable, does he proceed to rank these wonderful gifts of God and declare love the greatest from among faith and hope.  Paul is not ranking these wonderful gifts.  In fact, he is reminding us of life on the other side of the Day of the Lord.  What is faith?  Wow!  Hebrews 11!  The evidence of things hoped for; the assurance of things not yet seen.  Great answer.  Will there be faith after we are re-united with our Lord?  Of course, not.  All that He promised will have come true!  It will likely not have come true as we hoped or expected, but it will have come true.  There will be no faith on that side of the Resurrection.

     How about hope?  Will there be hope on the other side of the Resurrection?  I’m seeing the nods.  That’s right, there will be no hope because God’s promises to us in Christ Jesus will all be fulfilled.  Those things for which you hope for, seeing a departed loved one, knowing how the next life plays out, will be before you.  There will be no need for hope just like there is no need for faith.

     Love ranks above faith and hope not because Paul is ranking them as particular gifts.  No, love will continue beyond the Resurrection.  In truth love will be fulfilled beyond the Resurrection.  We will not have hope and we will not have faith because we will be with God.  For all eternity.  But love will remain.  We will all be engaged in the perfect worship, the perfect seeing, and the perfect understanding of the love of God.  Those things we misunderstand or misapprehend will be corrected.  Those sinful desires which cause us to doubt, which cause us to listen to the whisper of His enemy, will be gone.  And we will bask in the perfect understanding that we each were those for whom He worked salvation history towards its end.  We will know that He moved the heavens and the earth, literally, to bring us back into that right, loving relationship with Him.  When hope and faith fade to knowledge, love will still abide.  That is Paul’s teaching today, and it is God’s teaching every day.  Would that it were our way of life each and every day.

In Christ’s Peace,

Brian†