Roger Ray, pastor
January 27, 2013 Epiphany 4
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And 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. 3If 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 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7It 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. 9For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11When 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. 12For 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. 13And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
In the wee hours before dawn, while most of you are still sleeping, the doorbell rings at my home and I pull on heavy gloves, a mask and hooded coat, and head out into the darkness to walk with Russ Venable while the wind chill factor is still in single digits. We walk four miles through the darkness at a fairly rapid pace.
Russ and I have talked about losing weight and exercising for several months. Most of those talks took place in the back yard over adult grain beverages and hand rolled Nicaraguan cigars. I cannot remember exactly what moved us from months of talking about it to actually meeting at an unholy hour before we go to work but I can tell you with existential certainty that there a lot of difference between talking about exercising and actually exercising. And most of the difference can be found in the exercising part.
I wish that exercise and dieting could be more like sitting in the back yard, eating and drinking on a warm summer evening but the truth is that it is hard work. Some people enjoy it more than others. Almost every enjoys it more than I do evidently. But we both know that we need to do it and so we are challenging one another to do it and we are committing to do it together and the $100 wager on who loses the most weight by May 1 is really just a friendly side bet and I'm willing to split the proceeds with anyone who can get Russ to eat a fist full of donut holes before he comes into the sanctuary each week between now and the first of May.
I wish it were easier. I wish that lettuce and carrots tasted like steak and baked potatoes. I wish that cross country bike rides were all down hill and that weight lifting felt more like getting a full body massage. And I wouldn't mind winning the lottery or having Halley Berry return my phone calls either.
But we all know that the fact of life is that exercise and following a healthy diet are what it takes to be the right size. And that money actually comes from hard work and sacrifice and yet when it comes to love we still seem to believe that it should be something like winning the lottery.
We talk about "falling" in love or "finding" love as if it were like tripping on the curb or spotting a penny on the sidewalk.
In Eugene O'Neill's play, "The Great God Brown" The character, Dion, articulates the cynicism that many of us feel so existentially when he says: Love is a word, a shameless ragged ghost of a word, begging at all doors for life at any price!
Love is supposed to be so important to us.... It is the subject of movies, music, poetry and art and yet the most powerful statements about love in those mediums almost always seem to be about broken hearts, disappointments, infidelity and abandonment.
My contention is that being in love is not an adjective describing a condition or a feeling but that it is necessarily a verb describing action and, in all seriousness, action that involves sacrifice and concentrated effort.
It feels good to be in good shape, to be strong, to like what you see in the mirror, to wear the size clothes that you think look good on you but that good feeling doesn't just fall out of the sky. It takes work. For me, it takes deliberative, painstaking choices about what to eat and what not to eat. It takes getting up in the dark and cold and walking, walking, walking, day after day, week after week, month after month.
If talking about it, wishing for it, defining goals and processes over beer and cigars would get you there, Russ and I would look like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon..... I'm the Ben Affleck one because I'm taller.
Our scripture lesson today, Paul's "Ode to love" from I Corinthians 13, is most commonly heard in weddings which is one of the most ironic moments in biblical interpretation when anyone brings up the Apostle Paul in reference to any romantic setting.
But in weddings I like to invite couples to substitute their own names where the passage says "love" and read it aloud and see how it sounds to them. How does it read if you say, "Michael is patient; Michael is kind; Juli is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Jim does not insist on having his own way. Ann is not irritable or resentful......
So you want to keep that in mind if you ever want me to read that passage in your wedding. None of us read our own names in that list of adjectives and get to stand up straight by the end of the reading. It has become a bit trite in its over use but that famous quote from Gandhi that says, "You must be the change you want to see in the world," applies no where more than in this topic.
It should be clear that Paul was not writing this, or copying it..... a lot of us assume that Paul is borrowing this text from another source because, frankly, it is a bit lofty sounding for Paul.... A bit out of character for him.... And yet he clearly is not talking about marriage or just family relationships. He is talking about love in the global sense, as a dimension of character and spirituality.
A lot of young people wear images of Che Guevara on their shirts because of his reputation as a defiant, even a militant socialist revolutionary but I actually keep a quote from Che hanging in my office that says:
At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality... We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.
We're more used to thinking of Che as an armed revolutionary but whether you are talking about Che, or King, or Dorothy Day or any one of us who have sought out this church because we want to be prophetic, we want to be a part of the people who defiantly carry signs in protest in front of city hall and the Bank of America.... I have my Guy Faulks mask, hat and cape at the ready for the next Occupy demonstration but, men and women, anger is not enough.... Sure, we have things to be angry about.... But anger is not enough.
We rage against the injustice that keeps hundreds of people living on the streets at the edge of death from hunger and exposure but we can't just go back down to Commercial Street with hundreds of meals to share because we're angry. You know that the real goal here is not just to feed people but to be able to love them..... the ones who complain about the food.... "did you put onions in that?" The ones who want special consideration, "When are we gonna get fried chicken again?" Or even the ones who ask for a different color of gloves when the wind chill factor is in single digits.
It usually falls to me to say the prayer before we serve the meal each day and I tend to be a bit repetitious, not so much for them as for me.... "Lord help us to be patient with everyone we encounter today, especially for the one who deserves it the least and needs it the most." Because, it's not about the food..... it is about the love.
I'm back in full swing in professor mode this week so I am going to leave you with an assignment, just be sure that you don't quote me out of context. What I want for you to do this week, and I want you to sincerely work on it, sacrifice for it, devote yourself to doing it..... I want for you to be better lovers.
