Love is a verb: February 3, 2019

Year C, Epiphany 3                                      

1 Corinthians 13:1-13    

                                                      

            As some of you know, I had a last minute drive to St. Louis right after Christmas.  I was officiating my niece’s wedding and planned to fly out early Saturday morning as that was the day of the rehearsal.  We missed the flight due to a couple of factors. So we started our drive at 6am, already slightly sleep deprived with a very disappointed 2 year old who was really looking forward to a plane ride.  We were in no way prepared for a drive that long and I knew I would be missing the rehearsal. One of my big fears as a pastor is that I will be late for a wedding or funeral.  Another fear is missing my flight. This was those two major fears wrapped into one tidy ball.

            Needless to say, I was not in a good mood and I really wanted to yell at my husband. I wanted to make sarcastic comments.  I wanted to be snide. But here was the problem. I had written the wedding sermon the day before. It was all about how important it is to be kind to your spouse. Presumably, I was going to have to preach this sermon the next day in front of God and my husband, and I was going to have to do it without feeling like a big hypocrite. So I didn’t yell. I didn’t make snide comments under my breath.  I was nice. It was really really hard. It took a tremendous amount of effort on my part.

            One of the readings for the wedding was this reading from First Corinthians that we heard today.  “Love is patient. Love is kind…it does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable and resentful.”  We all know this one. You have probably heard it at 90% of the church weddings you have attended because it’s beautiful and poetic.  It’s about love, which is what we are celebrating when we attend a wedding. The Apostle Paul wrote this letter and he was by no means a romantic.  He was never married and even discouraged people from getting married. However, he understood the importance of Christian love in the context of our relationships with one another and our relationship with God (which is primarily what he was talking about).   

            I am going to get a little detailed on grammar, but I want you to stick with me.  When we hear the word kind or patient, we would classify those words as adjectives. They describe something. Therefore, we might read this passage and think that Paul is talking about the attributes of love.  He is describing love. However, Paul did not speak English, nor was the Bible originally written in English. This was Greek. In Greek, those are verbs---action verbs.  Usually when we think of action verbs, we think of words like run, walk, talk, laugh.  We don’t think of being patient and kind as an action verb.  You see Paul was not describing some romantic form of love that would easily fit on a greeting card. This was not descriptive.  It was prescriptive.  He was telling us how to love. So often when we talk about love, we portray it as a feeling, a feeling that can come and go.  But Paul was quite clear. Love was more than a feeling.  It was about action and effort.

            In 1995, Gary Chapman wrote a book called: The Five Love Languages.  The premise of the book is that we each have a primary language we use to express our love, which is not-so-coincidentally the same way we prefer to receive love.  The five love languages are: receiving gifts, words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time and physical touch.  In the Old Testament God showed his love in a number of ways. He gave humanity the greatest gift by actually breathing life into us.  The prophets provided words of affirmation and judgment on behalf of God.  God also served his people by providing food and water in the desert, parting the sea, and even winning military battles. 

            In the New Testament, God’s love language shifted a little.  He began by giving another huge gift…the gift of his only son. Then his son shared his time with people.  He provided words of affirmation through parables and conversations.  However, if I was to pick Jesus’ primary love language, it would be acts of service---whether it was washing the feet of his disciples, providing food to hungry people, healing the sick or turning water into wine. His greatest act of service was his death, his willingness to die for his people. That was how he ultimately showed his love.

            Paul understood all this. He talked a great deal about Jesus’ ultimate act of love.  In our reading from Corinthians, Paul was talking about how God’s love is manifest in our words and actions.  He wasn’t saying we need to do anything drastic like sacrifice ourselves.  He was not trying to recruit martyrs. In fact, he is giving us very tangible and accessible action verbs.  In the 13 verse we heard today, Paul provided 15 action verbs….15 ways that we can express our love for God and one another.  Being patient, kind, truthful, and never giving up are just a few of those actions.

            These are not easy things.  I am not sure that I would have been as kind as I was during that car trip had I not had a sermon looming in front of me about kindness.  The people of Corinth were facing far more difficult challenges than a long car ride.  These new Christian communities were unique in that they included a tremendous amount of diversity.  Previously, communities had formed around blood relatives, ethnic groups, socioeconomic status or religious upbringing.  The people in the Christian community of Corinth were coming from all kinds of different perspectives and they were having a hard time loving one another.  Even when they worshipped God, they still found ways to compete.  They were competing over who was more spiritual, more gifted.  We still do that. We are often comparing ourselves to other denominations and churches.  How often have you heard… “well at least we are not like those Christians.”  Even in our Christian communities today, we still have a hard time acting with and in love.

            In six days, Night’s Welcome will begin.  It is the week when we host the homeless in our parish hall.  We feed them. We provide lodging.  We treat them like our guests and show them the respect they deserve as our brothers and sisters.  It is a perfect example of how Jesus taught us to love.  It’s not easy.  We are forced to see things that we normally try to avoid.  I want to encourage you to take part in Night’s Welcome or in another one of our outreach ministries.  Or if you can’t do that right now, perhaps just reach out to someone who might be hard for you to love.  We all have those people in our lives.  We might be those people.

My hope is that the next time we hear this reading, we won’t envision a bride and a groom, but instead we will see a person who we loved even though they didn’t really deserve our love, perhaps someone we only saw once.  Or maybe we will remember a time when someone showed us kindness when we ourselves could not show that kindness.  Let us stop describing God’s love. We can let the poets do that.  Instead, let us show God’s love.   Let our faith be a verb—an action verb.   

Body of Christ: January 24, 2016

Year C, Epiphany 3                                                             

1 Corinthians 12:12-31                                                                      

            In my junior year of college, I studied in Italy.  I was living in Florence, but had several opportunities to visit Rome.  I was able to attend one of the Wednesday papal audiences.  It was in a huge auditorium with thousands of people from all around the world.  The pope, John Paul the II, spoke in several languages and the Bible was read in several languages. The energy in the room was powerful.  Part of it was the presence of the pope, but part of it was all the Roman Catholics in one room singing, praying, and rejoicing.  It was one of the most profound religious experiences of my life and one of the reasons that it was so hard for me to leave the Roman Catholic Church.  What I loved about the Church was that I was part of some bigger and I knew that almost wherever I went in the world, I would be able to find a Catholic Church to worship in.

            Then I took my first class at seminary in Episcopal history.  That was where I learned that we are part of something bigger…this thing called the Anglican Communion.  We are part of a communion that covers  165 countries and we have our roots in the Church of England.  What appealed to me about the Anglican Communion was that there was a relationship, but not the same kind of hierarchy as in the Catholic Church.  Each country celebrates their faith in a different way, yet we share the same history and very similar liturgies.  This is an overly simplistic depiction of the Anglican Communion and I will talk about it in greater detail in our adult forum next Sunday, but this covers the basics.

            For this reason and others, I, like others, found it very distressing when the primates of the Anglican Communion reprimanded the Episcopal Church last week.   Many news outlets have reported it as: “The Episcopal Church gets kicked out of the Anglican Communion for approving same sex marriage.”  This is not accurate, but we have been reprimanded and this is not the first time. We were called out in 2003 after consecrating an openly gay bishop and we never resolved that difference of opinion.  It’s not that the Episcopal Church didn’t care that there was now tension in the Anglican Communion, we just were not willing to make a compromise.  We believed, and still believe, that while we have this common heritage and this relationship, we also have differences.  I would contend that those differences are not a bad thing.  If handled well, they can make us stronger.

            When Paul wrote his letter to the Corinthians, there were not multiple Christian denominations.    There was a group of people who had been inspired by Jesus and his followers.  They believed that Jesus was the Messiah and that he had died for them and was resurrected.   Yet this does not mean that they did not have divisions.  Their divisions were not between large groups, but individuals.  Their divisions were often based on things like class and ethnicity. 

Previously, people who worshipped together shared more than merely a way of worshipping.  They were in the same social class, the same ethnicity, sometimes the same family.  When Jesus came along, he opened God’s love to everyone.  As Paul said, “It was in one Spirit that all of us, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, were baptized into one body.  All of us have been given to drink of the one Spirit.”  The Christian Church became a montage of people who would never normally spend time together…but there they were in the same room, sharing a meal together and drinking out of one common cup.  What Paul was saying was revolutionary.  Today that would be like putting together senators and homeless people with mental challenges—tea party members and Bernie Sander’s campaigners--vegans and strict adherents to the paleo diet.  That would be an interesting church! 

            Paul even went further.  He wasn’t simply telling people to look past their differences, but to honor those differences.  Now we consider diversity to be something that we somehow find a way to live with.  Paul was saying that this diversity was God ordained.   This glorious montage was God’s gift to the church.  I am not just talking about diversity in terms of ethnicity (although that is a very important topic) but diversity in all things--how we think, how we live, even what our gifts are.  One of the things that the Corinthians were arguing about was what gifts were most important.  Paul was saying that all the gifts were important, that we needed all of these people with these different gifts to work together.  Furthermore, we needed to honor each of these gifts because they were gifts given by God.

            Paul used the metaphor of the body.  This was not a new metaphor.  Previously the metaphor had been used to describe the hierarchy of a community.  Even today, we use that same language.  The leader of a group is the head of the group.  Paul was not using the body to describe how the community was organized, but how the community worked together…how they were in relationship with one another.   The toe never seems like a big deal until you break a toe….and then you remember that toe and how important it is with every step you take.    Recently I had a problem with one of my teeth, which messed up my jaw and then gave me a two week headache, which made it a lot more tempting to procrastinate writing my sermon.   Small parts of the body can make a really big difference in how we live our life.  It is the same with a community of people.  When one member of the community is upset, it can affect the whole group.   When one person is ostracized, we lose part of what make us beautiful.

            One of the things our new Presiding Bishop likes to talk about is the Jesus Movement.  He tells us that we (the Episcopal Church) need to be part of the Jesus movement.    That transcends politics.  It transcends denomination.  It transcends everything.  But here is the thing about the Jesus movement…there is movement involved. And we all know that for a body to move, it has to have all its parts working together.  When the Anglican primates sanctioned the Episcopal Church, they also said something that the news’ outlets are not reporting.  They said that we will continue to walk together…side by side.  There will be times when we find that we are too different to walk as one, but as long as we are a part of the Jesus movement, then we must find a way to walk side by side. 

            Some of you might be wondering how this relates to us at St. John’s.  We are not as diverse as we could be, but I guarantee that  if you were to poll the people here in this church, you would find that we all have different back grounds and a wide variety of opinions.  Even when it comes to what is happening in the church, there will be some things we might never agree on.  That is not a challenge to overcome. It is a gift that has been given to us.  It is an opportunity to model for the rest of the world how different people can still find ways to worship  together, to have fellowship together, to communicate. There will be moments when we do not always feel as though we are moving as one body.  The knee might be mad at the thigh because it’s not doing enough, the ear might be irritated by the mouth it just won’t stop talking.   Yet we cannot give up.  Because on Sunday morning, we all come to this altar table and we share the same bread and drink from the same cup.   We pray that we can find a way to love one another not despite of our differences but because we are different.