Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
February 14, 2010
1 Corinthians 13
“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels…” Strong words to one who makes his living trying every way he knows to speak in the tongue of angels. Or, at least, maybe preach a little bit more like Billy Graham or my preaching idol, Fred Craddock, I suspect I could die happy if one day after one of my sermons I overheard someone in the front turn to her significant other and say, “Didn’t Gene just sound like an angel today?” That’s me. I’m in the tongues of mortals and of angels business.
Except Paul won’t give me a break. He’s not going to let me off the hook. If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I’m a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. I might speak some of the sweetest and most challenging words ever to fall on the human ear, but, says Paul, if those words are not filled with love, are not supported and surrounded by love, they’re nothing more than another contribution to the ever rising level of noise pollution. Without love, even the greatest sermon, is a cymbal dropped on the floor in the middle of a symphony. Without love, love sounding words are nothing but noise.
Now, I’m aware that this is one of the most familiar texts in all the Bible. Even people who know nothing about the Bible recognize at least some of these words from Paul. What are those scripture words on love? I want to hear those at my wedding. I suppose one good thing you could say about this text is that we all know it and love it. And the bad thing about this text is that we all know it and love it. It is so easy to sentimentalize it, to miss how it challenges us and our popular, Hallmark-inspired concepts of love. And so today, on this Valentine’s Day, I just want to ask, what is this love that Paul is talking about?
This day, originally meant to honor a martyred third century priest, St. Valentine, has morphed into a commercial phenomenon. You, and by you I probably mean you men, ignore Valentine’s Day at your own risk. Only Christmas produces more greeting card sales, and if you are planning to stop by the store on your way home and pick up a tasteful, yet meaningful card, good luck. I am well aware that this is a commercial day supported and invented by commercial interests. But, since it has fallen on Sunday, and since Valentine’s is all about love and our text is all about love, and the advertisements at least for the past month have been all about love, maybe we should talk about love. Just what is this thing called love…not just on February 14th but all year long? Better yet, as I have already asked, what do Paul and much of the Biblical word mean when they talk to us about love?
Now on this day I don’t want to sound like a total curmudgeon, or maybe I do, but, it seems to me that the love we hear touted in Valentine’s ads and extolled in greeting cards is a pretty sentimental and sugar-coated kind of love. The overarching attitude that is encouraged on this day is the affection, sentiment or attraction we feel toward another – feelings we have for another person when we “fall in love,” a romantic, candlelight, soft music kind of love. And this is not bad by any means. What intimate relationship doesn’t need a little candlelight and soft music once in a while? But from this perspective, you see, love is seen as a powerful emotional state over which we have little, if any, control; it is something we “fall into” or, by the same token, something we “fall out of.” In the words of that touching love ballad, “Love Potion Number Nine” – “I didn’t know if it was day or night; I started kissing everything in sight.” It just comes on us and we don’t have any control. But is this the kind of love, in all its ecstasy and agony, that Paul is talking about – is this the love Jesus is talking about when he tells us to love our neighbor?
I don’t know if you have ever heard the name Lewis Pitts. I’ve mentioned him once before. He’s an attorney who has spent much of his career involved in poverty law in the South. Over the years he has gone throughout that region defending people without money or friends. He has defended communists against the Klan, Native Americans against the sheriff, blacks against whites or even blacks against blacks. And as you might guess, in that part of their world, his work doesn’t always make him the most popular boy in school. A college friend of his who is now a pastor sat down with him for lunch one day, and he had to know, Lewis driving around in that old car, living hand to mouth, facing death threats virtually everywhere he went. “Why do you keep doing it?”
Pitts replied, “God is love and we ought to love others.”
To which the pastor responded, “God is love? That’s it? Lewis you’re not saying enough.”
“It’s enough to get you shot,” he answered. Then he continued, “Look, I’m from Bethune, South Carolina. When you’re a Methodist from Bethune, you don’t have a chance to learn much theology, except what you might pick up in Sunday school. All I learned was God is love and we ought to love others.” For Lewis Pitts love isn’t some sentimental feeling, love is a decision – a decision he makes each and every day.
Rather, I suppose, like the woman who celebrating a 40th wedding anniversary with her husband, in a quiet dinner for two, raised her champagne glass and said, “To us, in spite of everything!” Love as a decision, in spite of everything, a decision renewed each and every day, in good times and in bad. I believe that’s what Paul is talking about. “So faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” Love as something deeper, greater, stronger than simply our feelings. Love as something that is beyond mere sentiment.
When I officiate at a wedding, I never ask the couple if they love each other. Instead, I ask, “Do you John, take Susan, to be your wedded wife and will you promise to love, honor and cherish her…” Not do you love, but will you love? Again, we aren’t talking about a nice, warm feeling here. We’re talking about an act of will, something you decide to do, promise to do, something that will take work and effort and commitment if it is to deepen and grow. As one pastor has said, “Love at first sight – that’s easy to understand. It’s after forty years that it becomes a miracle.”
In his classic book, The Art of Loving, Eric Fromm notes how we speak of “falling in love” as if love is stumbled into or we talk of “being in love” as if love is some kind or permanent human condition. Both phrases imply that nothing is easier or more natural than love. Yet, says Fromm, there is hardly any human enterprise which begins with such hope and expectation and which fails so regularly as love. We must be clear, he says, that love takes time, effort, even training. In his words, words which I believe echo our text, “Love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music or painting, or the art of medicine or engineering.” But he sadly notes, in our society, “In spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power – almost all our energy is used for learning how to achieve these aims and almost none to learn the art of loving.”
Christian love isn’t for sissies. It’s not easy, it isn’t “doing what comes naturally.” Love of the kind described by Paul takes every once of your maturity and hard work over a lifetime, waking up every morning and asking God for the grace to help you love despite others, often despite yourself. This love is not a blind unwillingness to look at the world as it is. In fact, it is the recognition that, because the world is as it is, nothing less than love will do.
I once heard a speaker share that once on a plane, he found himself sitting next to Martin Luther King, Jr, He introduced himself to Dr. King and as the journey progressed he shared that he was now a new professor and was very active in the Civil Rights movement on his college campus. However, because of his work for racial equality, he had become estranged from his father, who simply could not understand why he was doing this. “What can I do,” he asked Dr. King, “to raise my father’s consciousness, to help him see he’s a racist and that all his pious talk bout loving others is just a lie?” King put his hand on this angry young man’s arm and said, “Your father is doing the best he can. He hasn’t had any of your educational opportunities, opportunities which he has provided for you. As a Christian, you must be patient with him and love him.” “Love is patient, love is kind, love bears all, believes all, hopes all, endures all. Are you ready to love like that? Am I?
Little wonder that one scholar insists that I Corinthians 13 is closer to hard-eyed realism than simpering sentimentality. That would be a great thing to say in the middle of a wedding, don’t you think? But it’s true. Paul calls us to something deeper and stronger than that emotion; to stay at this business of loving others no matter how difficult and disappointing it may be at times. To look and act out of the power of this love means to act in ways to build up others and community. Even when we don’t really feel like it. It means intentionality. Again love as intentionally deciding to let love be active in our lives. Says Jay White, a Disciples of Christ minister,” Practicing this love is a decision to do what benefits the other. Even when I feel the urge to do otherwise. Even when we don’t feel like loving and others may not be acting in a loving way toward us. Practicing this love is loving in the way that God loves us.”
I believe that Barbara Brown Taylor, as she so often does, pretty well sums up our text and what I’ve been struggling to say this morning when she says, “So love God. Love a neighbor, and let us not complicate things by arguing about the specifics. You know what it means to love because sometime or another you have been on the receiving end of love. If you want the world to look different, next time you go out, do some love. Do a little or do a lot but do some, and do not forget to do some for yourself. Just do it, and find out when you do, you will live and live abundantly, just like the Man said.”