“The Greatest of These is Love”
Rev. Dr. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
May 2, 2010
Corinthians 13: 1-13
I Corinthians 13 is one of the best regarded passages of scripture. It’s often read at weddings and at funerals, as it will be this afternoon at Doug Forman’s. As we continue in our sermon series on love, we take a look at what Paul meant when he wrote I Corinthians 13 and what it means for us today. Let us pray. Gracious Lord, calm our anxious souls this morning. Open our hearts to your truth and to your love for us. Through Christ we pray. Amen.
Love is a subject that we all know about. We feel love for friends, relatives, pets, people, places, things. Humans “love,” love. More poems and songs have been written and sung about love than perhaps any other subject.
What is love? For one, it’s hard to define. When I was home in Ohio in April I found a book that belonged to my great grandmother. Written inside the back cover in what we think was her handwriting is a well known, but anonymous, poem which reads, “What is love? Love is something so divine; description could but make it less. It’s what we know but can’t define, it’s what we feel, but can’t express.”
Paul includes about some characteristics of love. “Love is patient, love is kind;” it “bears and endures.” Paul writes some statements about what love is not. It is not “boastful” or “rude” and “does not insist on its own way.” That last description can be particularly appropriate to share with couples at weddings.
We know love has a lot to do with God. The gospel writer John in his Gospel and in 1 John, writes about how love is the most fundamental characteristic of God for us. Our May 9, 16 and 23rd adult education classes will explore John’s depictions of God’s love. Yet a generation before John wrote, the Apostle Paul penned a letter to the church at Corinth and in it wrote eloquently about love. Paul wrote that we should do “everything in love.” I Corinthians 13 is interesting theologically in part because there is no mention of God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit in the passage. Yet it’s very much about the divine. Paul writes with an eschatological focus about the time when Christ will come again, writing that “the complete will come” when we will see God “face to face” and love will be present. He wrote to a divided church who were wondering when Christ would return and who needed to love each other. They wanted to put their trust in something permanent and they needed to find a way to get along. So Paul suggested that they focus on love. And its timeless advice. When in doubt, focus on love. When all else fails, focus on love. When we seek something that lasts, focus on love.
Love, while not being a “charisma,” or spiritual gift per se, is a gift. Paul writes that “the greatest of these is love.” Love is great because it transcends our faults, it lasts and it accentuates our other gifts.
New Testament commentators often lift up four types of love expressed through the Greek. “Storge,” affectionate love; “Eros,” romantic love; “Philia,” fraternal or brotherly love, and “Agape,” unconditional love, the word often used in the New Testament to describe God’s love for us. It is God’s “Agape” love which is consistent.
This news is encouraging because God’s love for us transcends our circumstances or actions. Rather than love being blind, which might be the case in romantic or Eros love, God’s love for us is not blind. God knows all our strengths and all our faults and yet through “Agape” love chooses to love us despite our faults. God’s love does not end when circumstances change. It becomes a loving model through Christ for our actions towards each other. It’s a model for how humans can treat each other with love that transcends each other’s faults.
One of you told me at Bible study this week of the woman in your family who came back from babysitting her nephew. It was a particularly difficult session and she said, “I do love that boy, but today I sure don’t like him.”
Whenever I am officiating a wedding and the couple chooses to have I Corinthians read, I talk about the unconditional characteristic of God’s love and how that can be mirrored in a marriage relationship.
There was a story of a women who got a new car and shortly afterwards was got into a fender bender. The other party was upset and asked to see the necessary information. The embarrassed driver was nervous. She rummaged through her glove compartment trying to find the envelop with her registration, which she only would look for if she were in an accident. She found the envelop, pulled it out to retrieve her registration, and a note fell out. It was from her husband and it read, “It's you I love, not the car.”
Love is great because, according the Paul, “abides,” it “never ends.” Sure we can fall in and out of love, and people do things that make us not want to love them. We also do things that make people not want to love us. Yet, because love is God’s great gift, it is always available to us.
Last January and February, during our sermon series on spiritual gifts, we talked about prophecy, miracles, healing, knowledge and other spiritual gifts. Paul writes that all of these gifts are important. However, he says they are all temporary. That they don’t last. Paul writes that the gifts that do last longer are faith, hope and love and that the greatest of these is love. Even hope doesn’t last forever because as soon as the thing hoped for is realized there is no need for the hope. In the New Testament, faith is about putting trust in the God of the future. As the writer of the Book of Hebrews put it, faith, or “pistis,” is the “promise of things unseen.” But Paul writes in this section that our knowledge of God will be “complete” someday and then we will actually see God face to face. At that point, we won’t trust something unseen or un-experienced. Paul is saying we will see and experience God. And that isn’t faith. So even faith will end. The one element, quality and gift that does not end, that lasts, is love. God’s love for us existed before we were born, God loves us today despite our brokenness, in our deaths, God loves us, and God will love us in Heaven when our time comes.
Love is great because it is the gift that amplifies all our other good characteristics; it makes all the other gifts work, valuable and helpful. Moreover, when Paul writes that if he has gifts of speaking in tongues or prophecy, but lacks love, he is like “a noisy gong,” or that even if he has “faith to move mountains, but lacks love, he is nothing,” he is saying that no matter how talented we are and no matter how many gifts we have, if we lack love, those gifts won’t matter. If we only use our gifts for our own gain, as Paul was concerned the Corinthians were doing, and don’t share them, then the value of the gifts is minimized. God gives us gifts so that we can share them with love. If they aren’t used for love, than each of the other spiritual gifts becomes selfishness.
What matters, therefore, is not the gifts we accumulate, but the love we share. Paul measured all the gifts and concluded that love is the greatest. So perhaps we should measure what we do by how we love.
In the signature song from the musical from the mid 1990’s, Rent, “Seasons of Love,” the chorus goes, “Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes, 525000 moments so dear, 525600 minutes, how do you measure, measure a year? In daylight, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee, in inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife, how do you measure the year in a life? (Then it concludes) How about love?”
To share a story I heard from John Buchanan, NPR’s Krista Tippett writes in her book, Speaking of Faith, about her experience in Berlin in the 1980’s and how she was so impressed with colleagues and friends in that difficult time who were able to live with joy and find happiness and meaning despite the challenges of living in East Germany. That led Tippet to Yale Divinity School and brief work as a chaplain with Alzheimer patients. The patients didn’t know or care about her background. They cared only about the love she showed to them. What she realized was that the greatest gift she could give was to love people. Tippet concluded, “When all is said and done, none of us will be measured by how much we accomplished, but on how well we love.”
I was at a lunch on Friday to honor the volunteers of the Friend’s Club, an organization that supports men with early to mid stage Alzheimer’s and their families. It is a mission housed in our church. I heard volunteers and staff, the ones who were giving the support; speak about what they received from their visits. What they received was love.
This week we as a congregation had many pastoral care challenges. The love you shared with each other this weekend is a reminder to me of how special this congregation is and how gracious God is.
One of you shared a story with me this week of two doctor friends in Haiti who were taking care of earthquake victims, amputees, in a makeshift medical unit. The people in that particular area of Haiti were afraid to go to hospitals because after the earthquake they did not trust any building with a roof. The doctors shared an experience of treating one man who was going through the pain of an amputation. They said that as that procedure was going on, a number of people, men and women, on crutches, amputees, people who had gone through similar pains and experiences, came and surrounded the man’s bed in sympathy and love. And they said the love of those people in sympathy, some of whom might have gone through the horrific emotions and procedure that the patient was going through, made all the difference. The doctors felt overwhelmed by the circumstances and said all their medical training was only partly helpful, that they could “try and mend limbs, but only the love of the people who came could really heal.” Without love, our gifts are nothing. With love, we can make all the difference.
Love is where God is. And where love is, God is. Love transcends our challenges and amplifies our best characteristics. Love speaks to our souls. In a world where there is too much hatred, if you are going to invest your time in something, invest it in love.
Paul wrote, “The greatest of these is love.” Love is the greatest gift we receive. It is the greatest gift we can give.
Let us pray.
Gracious God, fill us this morning with love for you and for each other. Amen.
