After our long and happy and intriguing and challenging journey through Corinthians we arrive at The Wedding Homily passage. Love. What is love..ahh.Love is a many splendid thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love.
What can I possibly say that’s new about love?
Good evening St Marks. Well done everyone for making it to October 2020. I am feeling at a low-ebb, maybe it is seasonally affected lock down blues, maybe it’s just being 34, maybe it’s the vast ennuie of late capitalism’s meaning crisis. I am at a low-ebb, but being at church, being present to church, being church is rich, there’s so much latent redemptive power in gathering as a Corinthian unity to bless one another, to fight the good fight, to love one another.. I do believe in a thing called love..
We could play pop culture bingo - but there will be no prizes
So, Love one another.
Paul has written this letter to the church in Corinth crucially containing this short sermon about love.
~ so, I’ve been thinking, about love.
~ and, I’ve been thinking, at length, about sermons and letters and preaching. In my own imitable and meta way. What am I doing here, “preaching”? I’ve been thinking about this strange activity? What is our relationship? What content am I carrying? What effect does it have?
I’ve already preached a sermon on love. If you’ll refer to my previous excellent talk from June broadcast from my living room ~ the church is a vine, a lego jug, filled with spirit, held together by love, with an emphasis on unity unity unity.
So, I thought I might try a different approach, an approach which risks being narcissistic in the extreme. I generally preach to myself, seeking to solve my own problems, generally offering lessons and exploring concepts which I think are interesting to me etc. But. What if I went further and made this whole sermon about me? Work with me.
I have two questions for us to discuss and if you’d like to join us on Zoom, at say, 8.30, we’ll be back home and online them.
Q1. What did you come out into the wilderness to see this evening?
Question 1 ~ which I’m borrowing from Jesus but thinking about church
“As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. What then did you go out to see? A prophet?” Mt11v7-9
What did you come here to see? Is this a meaningful question? Why are you here? Cold dark night. No singing. No coffee. No cake. Tier 2 risk of infection from an unprecedented global pandemic. What did you come out into this wilderness of Kennington to see? There are lower risk things you could be doing.
And, What did I come out here to see? Who am I talking to? Why am I here, speaking? I do like the sound of my own voice, but. Why am I here? What question am I answering, what service am I providing?
Question 1. What did you come out here to see?
Q2. Do you love me?
Question 2 ~ also borrowing from Jesus, and applying the question to all of us and to me in particular
“When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Feed my lambs.” He said to him a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” He said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” and he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”” Jn21v15-17
Jesus is talking about Jesus, but also
Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.
Everyone will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.. This command I give you, love one another..
Do you? love one another?
And, as one of those one anothers, do you love me? Did you love me today? Did I love you? Do you love me? Phil Pawlett Jackson is here all week. Do you love me? Not because I’m loverly or particularly loveable ~ I’m fairly disagreeable. But, rather, as a fellow church member.. Do you love me?
Icky question. It sounds needy. Aren’t we all. Don’t we all need to be needy sometimes? Shouldn’t we confess our weakness?
Question 2. Do you love me?
[1] What did you come out here to see?
Some part of what you came for is the doing of church life together, and some part of what you came for is a sermon. You’re in luck as we’re in the middle of a sermon series about church life together - we are learning as a church about how to do church through Paul’s letter of sermons on the topic of doing church.
So, regarding that sermon though - What did you come out here to see?
I’m going to speculate 5 possible answers why you might have come for this sermon, and you can tell my others later - on the Zoom.
[1.1] What did you come out here to see? [Vine unity Sermon Series theme]
We’re in a series on church - maybe you’ve loved that and have come out here for a sermon advancing this general enquiry into how the church is a vine-like unity which we presented back in John and which we have been building on through this series in Corinthians. Back in June, the end of John’s gospel concluding through Jesus’ departure discourses and high priestly prayer saw him speak to commission a church that should be a vine, and so bear fruit by a unity abiding in his love - that church is commanded to love one another aided by spirit. In this way, we, St Marks, are meant to be a vine with sap flowing between our limbs, to bear weight across our length and to bear fruit at our extremities - rather than potted cuttings vaguely proximate in the same greenhouse.
Is that what you came to see? An extension of a grand theory of church. I did. I want some plausible sense of if and how this vine of unity might be possible. How’s your vine? What did you come out here to see?
[1.2] What did you come out here to see? [Cliff Hanger: More excellent way]
Maybe, more immediately, you came for a sermon to answer last week’s cliffhanger? What did Sarah preach about? /////// The end of Corinthians 12 promised “a more excellent way” to solving the problem of diversity of gifts and division around suffering? That passage offers a portrait of the fledgling church as a radically diverse group of recalcitrant individuals who were as spectacularly gifted as they were also perversely obstreperous, who were glorious whilst they were also terribly self-involved, who were the hope for the world whilst also being the walking wounded.
What did I come out here to see? Part 2 of a believably realistic picture of the problem of church and how to solve for it. Give me a sermon on an appropriate calibration of the difficulty of diversity - to count the cost and pay it forward. A more excellent “way” to grow in my measured awareness that the ways church can be a unity and to learn to try to remediate all the ways that I am an impediment to that unity.
What did you come out here this evening to see? Paul promises “And I will show you a still more excellent way.” I’m here for that.
[1.3] What did you come out here to see? [Cost benefit analysis]
Coming out this evening cost you something. Writing this sermon cost me something. What did you come out here to see? Something worth the risk, something worth the cost. So, this sermon should consist of costly and risky communication, proportional to the necessity, value and urgency of the content desired.
I was listening to a great lecture on Paul’s friendships with various women given by L’Abri’s Joshua Chestnut a couple of weeks ago. He describes at length the various named individuals who were involved in Paul’s project to plant churches across the mediterreanean - notably Phoebe.. Phoebe taking the epistle to the Romans to the Romans would have intensively involved her carrying the artifact at great risk and then of ‘delivering’ the message complete with spoken tone and translated interpretation. Then, in a throw-away comment which jumped out at me it was claimed that the cost of organising to send a letter like this at that time would have been about £2000.
I imagine, a similar cost, for the Corinthians. What’s the transaction cost for my epistle to the Kenningtones? If I was going to bill you, I’d need to charge a day rate of about a £1000 but I reckon I could make this sermon cost that.
I tend not to think of the cost of communication. I barely pay for anything: news, media, music, books, instant messaging, the bible.. I tend even less to think of the risk of communication: a squall at sea and that is a sunk cost with no two blue ticks, no signed-for delivery. Paul thought it was worth the high cost and the non-trivial risk. Paul thought that was a fruitful was to spend that money because of the benefit.
If I knew that a thousand years hence the church on Alpha Centuri was going to be reading my immortalised epistle to the Kenningtones, I might put more effort in. Paul didn’t know that I’d be reading his letter in 2020, he was paying it forward simply to tell a motley crew in Corinth how to love one another, because he thought saying that was necessary and urgent and would be valuable and effective. And, I suppose, within that, he considered the danger of not saying it. I think about this a lot. How much should a sermon cost me? How much value does it deliver?
What did you come out here to see? At the cost of a cosy evening in, and at the risk of spreading a lethal respiratory virus, you’ve come out here to listen to me criticise your lifestyle choices. I feel the weight of that expectation.
[1.4] What did you come out here to see? [Preaching that is “Preaching” because it is contextual and transformative]
You came out here to see preaching, or you came for the biscuits and can tolerate the preaching, but there are no biscuits. What is “preaching”? When is preaching “preaching”? And what is the point?
The best bits of what I’ll say on Corinthians this evening are just footnotes to Alastair Roberts’ commentary online (h/t). You could get his teaching at home, more intelligently ordered, more winsomely articulated and more efficiently conveyed. What did you come out here to see from me?
A dog-whistling pearl-clutching sabre-rattling sermon from the not-at-all-reverend Phil PJ? Maybe? What are you hoping to hear from me? Is my preaching making your life better? By my words, am I helping you make the world a better place? If I suggest a lifestyle change - will you do it? If I author a mnemonic - will you learn it? If I inspire a direction of travel for us - will you follow us? If I coordinate an activity in Oval - will you join it? If I say something wrong - will you correct it? If I ramble incoherently - will you constructively critique it? If my investment advice brings you to profit - will you share it? What is our relationship? Can I set you homework? If I can, the question is: ///// What did you come out here to see?
Preaching should force a severe choice and convict measurable action such that next week it would be possible to return and ask, what changed? Life is too short for bad preaching and mediocre limited ambition churching. Don’t keep showing up as morbid pew fodder in a morose perpetuation of self-sabotage. Ask yourself, what did I come out here to see, and then send it to me on a postcard.
[1.5] What did you come out here to see? [Joint Attention]
You came here to view something together, because listening and applying preaching is a collective activity. Paul’s letter is to a multiplicity about them being a multiplicity. We, St Marks, are gathered as a multiplicity, not because it is an efficient way to disseminate info, but because listening together is qualitatively different to watching the youtube at home alone.
If I stand up here at the front and say, you, Boris, stop looking at porn. Then that individual can go and make that lifestyle choice. But if I stand at the front and address yous plural, and say love one another, forgive one another, cooperate as a diverse distributed team with one another - you can’t do that on your own. 1 Corinthians 13 is not simply about being christian, but rather, more challengingly: about being church
This is Difficult - because who it means coordinating with people who are not you.
This is Easy - because they’re all here in this room, they’re on your side and we are working for the same ambition. And,
How? Well, what did you come out here to see?
The application of any imperative Paul offers, has to be worked out together. How? You must join a discussion after this service, you must join a zoom call, go to a small group, get a socially distanced pint in a pub. You must be in the lives of others. If you cannot find a context to do church, multi-personally vulnerably interrogatively, you are a fantasist and Sunday evening is just cathartic colocation. So much better is possible.
(I speak to myself at my own low-ebb of multi-personal church immersion.)
What did you come out here to see: possible answers
[1.1] A sermon in a series about the churchiness of church.
[1.2] A detailed commentary that explains that specifically that excellent way to the unity diversity question
[1.3] You’ve come for costly sermon delivering high value to honour the cost of your coming out this evening
[1.4] A tailored sermon that is preaching towards bespoke personal transformation not merely teaching content for education ~ I’m doing my best
[1.5] You’ve come to jointly attend of a sermon, the interogative interpretation and joint application of which benefits our mutual life ~ that’s up to you
What did you come out here to see?
[2] Do you love me?
So Paul has written a sermon, and I’ve tried to interrogate why we sermon. He’s written a sermon about love, and I’ll try to draw out love in a rich and challenging way through this question, where the rubber hits the road: Do you love me?
Corinthians 13 is a familiar passage about love, invoked often with romantic sentimentality but what makes it more than a fridge magnet tautology ~ that love is lovely - is the context in Paul's argument about spiritual gifts and their place in the church. Paul’s strong emphasis is over against the Corinthians’ inappropriate spirituality, he wants to put the practise of gifts in the appropriate place. Love is not an alternative to spiritual gifts - it is The (more excellent) Way that such gifts must be exercised.
Love is the antidote to inappropriate spirituality in a church? Is this the word you need to hear? Is this a word for St Marks? Do we have such an inappropriate spirituality? Do I? Is this me? Puffed up? Unloving? Bickering? Grandstanding?
[Church /// Multiplicity /// Love]
We are theorising about church - difficult in a time of Covid, difficult for lots of reasons. That theory of church is resting on an understanding of reconciled multiplicity, church is where God has made the two one - all gifts playing in harmony - the gift prophecy working alongside the gift of administration, those who think they are an eye cooperating with those who identify as a foot. This is achieved not be technique, but by love.
This edifice of the church, and it’s multiplicity sits on the bedrock of a theology and practice of Love. Love as well as difficult and easy mentioned above, it’s also presuppositional:
Loving one another is Essential - because the functional interconnected life of the multipersonal church members is the primary illustration of the multi-personal infinite personal God that we espouse. We love one another to make a God of Love plausible and visible.
Loving one another is Good News - because the challenges to the representation of God (sin) happen between us. We demonstrate that there is an effective ingredient between us, that reconciles us, that overcomes shame, that pays the price for sin.
Learning to Love is Urgent - because the world needs love and needs to know what love is and that it is available. So many in the world self-understand as unloved and unlovable, so much destruction in the world is caused by sentimental surrogate substitutes for love sought for lack of a demonstration that a God of love is substantial
However, as well as being massive and cosmological, Love must also be bespoke and peculiar - hence, do you love me. Not do you love. Do you love me, because that is where it is difficult. That’s the deal breaker - a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link - and we’re not a very big or complex chain, we ought to be able to work this out. Do you love me.
So, Paul’s going to go on in praise of love - superlative, must govern everything. There are three sections to 1 Corinthians 12
[2.1] Verses 1 to 3 are Love’s Absolute Necessity
[2.2] Verses 4 to 7 are Love’s Varied Glories
[2.3] Verses 8-13 are Love's Enduring Fruit
[2.1] VERSES: Love’s Absolute Necessity 1-3
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not LOVE, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. v1-2
[2.1.1] Love is vital to effective appropriate speaking
Consider, from this verse that we communicate in various ways, speak in various tongues, with more or less poetry or spiritual import. Verbal or pre-verbal - Love is the key.
Tongues of Men. Christianity is verbal, Christianity is spoken word, Christianity is a living word, and words create worlds. Faith comes by hearing. Use words because you have to.
Tongues of Angels: Christianity is pre-verbal - all of creation is groaning, as the spirit is groaning, so we the sons of God groan waiting. By such tongues, by art, by symbolism, by precognitive yowling for joy and pain. This pre-verbal communication is prayer. Christianity is right to speak out the legitimate exclamation of a thing broken - in this way, Christianity is translation: *Praying tongues translates what we do not see into what we cannot say* Rendering the invisible in the inexpressible, expressly and gloriously declaring the impossible in the imminent.
So. Make some noise.
But.
Without love your noise is just noise, your words and your tongues are worse than empty. They are a damaging cacophony of Pagan ritual worship, gongs, cymbals
Love is what’s left in the signal to noise ratio. Love is what actually lands when the grandstanding of Look-at-me Look-at-me Pagan Christianity subsides.
In this very sermon, my flustering, effusing, poly-syllabic cascades are worse than silence, they are anti-communication, if I don’t first love. WIthout love, then my words are part of the problem. In my life at large, and in this sermon, if I don’t have love my words are kerosene rather than water on the simmering fire of resentments in our community.
Do you love me?
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not LOVE, I am nothing.” v2
[2.1.2] Love is vital to the effective appropriate use of gifts (gifts: power for understanding & faith for miracles)
Power for understanding knowledge - You can know the Greek, you can have all the letters after your name, you can be a masterful knowledge worker but without love, that power is all power-play and power-over, it is an abuse of power.
Paul has said this already in 1Cor8: knowledge puffs up but love builds up. Knowledge without love is just grade inflation.
Love must be the logicians regulating principle. Love counter-intuitively should be non-trivial, non-optional in our academy’s pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Love should be the binding glue in your mental constructions, love should be the lubricating oil in your machine for learning. Without love, the life of the mind is a heartless abstraction - worth nothing.
The same applies to the power for miracles. Human beings in their glory and spiritual gifting are spectacular - we regularly move mountains - lovelessly.
In the first chapter of Corinthians, Paul said Jews seek signs and Greek seek wisdom - but we preach Christ crucified. It’s interesting to see this similar pairing here. Churchianity devolves to two possible predilections - a neo-Greek cerebrality of doctrine and cognitive assent or a new-Jewish somatic preference for embodied experience, affect and spectacle. The antidote to both is love: (seen in Christ crucified). Which are you? I tend to idolise knowledge-as-power. And when I do. Paul says I am nothing. The void. The tumbleweed. The yawning gaping hole on the balance sheet of joy. An exasperating net zero.
Do you love me?
“If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not LOVE, I gain nothing.” v3
[2.1.3] Love is vital to effective appropriate sacrifice
Gary Chapman has a book ‘the five love languages’ if you’re familiar: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Gifts, Quality Time, and Touch (although, in 2020, we have cancelled Touch). We’ve found it useful in the past at the house to survey one another on this. My love language of choice is acts of service. It is also my passive aggressive unlove language. I’m sure Sarah and others can attest that Phil is capable of performing an act of sacrificial service, delivering his body up to be burned at the washing up bowl just so others incur debt I can charge with interest. Sacrifice performed without love is the worst.
I gain nothing. If you give to get, you get nothing. Martyrdom, service, social care, sacrifice without love is just accruing negative karma of the ledger of your moral being, you are just draining the tank of a zero sum game.
I’ll hammer this, because I’m addressing myself largely. Without love, Christian sacrifice is just masochism and passive aggression. In church, without love, we’re just charity muggers defrauding one another on commission and embezzling the windfall. I can seek to serve and even lead a community house of ten people without love. I can just grind it out as a marathon slog. Justify my existence and earn my reward - and the wages of this self-centred sacrifice is death and nothingness.
So, overall, Paul is arguing for love’s strong necessity. No one thinks love isn’t a nice thing. Paul is making an argument on very much more ultimate terms. All or Nothing, nothing! Because it really is that stark. Paul is arguing much more strongly against any insinuation that love can be cost-engineered out of your practice of church.
And so it is interesting the way he targets specifically what love stands over-against ~ which is against the religiouse impulse of the Corinthians, and so in me, and St Marks.
Religion tends to honour/police these: speech, identity, morality. Religiously, we want to be 1 saying the right thing, 2 having right identity or ultimate experience, 3 we want to be seen as giving to charity. But trying to be speaking right, being right, and giving right without Love is all in vain. You will end up saying nothing, being nothing, gaining nothing. Brutal.
[2.2] VERSES: Love’s Varied Glories 4-7
What then is this love that is such a deal breaker?
Glad you asked. Paul goes on to describe the glories and qualities of this crazy little thing called love.
He says these things at cost, because they are worth saying, because they are not automatic, and there is a great risk of taking-for-granted that love is love is love. Love is process, love is practiced, love is learnt gradually through many mistakes.
Finally then to address: do you love me?
“LOVE is patient and kind; LOVE does not envy or boast; it his not arrogant” v4
[2.2.1] Love is Patient
Patience takes time with people, gives time to people, makes time for people. Love is practiced in the dimension of time. Time is a funny thing. So subjective in our experience of it. It is literally ephemeral. You have agency over the choices you make about how you spend your time. Patience costs time. Do you love me? Are you patient with me? In what possible context would you need to be patient with me? (will this sermon ever finish?) How entangled would our lives need to publicly be, for it to be apparent that you love me through patience? Love makes time for people. But you only have a finite amount of it. If you are going to afford to be patient with me, you may have to sacrifice secondary commitments, you may lose other races for the survival of the fittest and most expedient.
[2.2.2] Love is Kind
Kind is generous, Proactively Benevolent, Noble. Love initiates an alternative to anger and resentment. Love breaks the cycles - interrupts and starts new. Love is spending in the currency of grace on the basis of abundance. Do you love me?
[2.2.3] Love does not Envy
Love is not status seeking, advantage over others - self-forgetting. This is a disposition. Just as man with hammer everything is a nail, to a man in the rat race, everyone is a rat. You are not in a rat race. You are performing before an audience of one, and he is a massive fan. Love chooses not to envy. Love opts out of the arms race of consumerism’s one-up-manship. Do you envy me?
[2.2.4] Love does not Boast
Compared to the Corinthians with their moralising slogans and sense of having spiritually arrived. Love needs no claim, over against.
[2.2.5] Love is not Arrogant
Love knows its own gifts and weaknesses and opportunities to to serve and to emphathise. Love lives without any sense of inflated importance. Love knows that it’s life is not it’s own. Love takes responsibility for those who suffer in hierarchies. Love seeks to build up the least. the last and the lost. Do you love me?
“or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;” v5
[2.2.6] Love is not Rude
Love is mindful of the manner of treating others. Love is submitted to appropriate social order, by contrast with the Corinthians improper behaviour at table. Love is sensitive to culturally relative ways we might neglect and signify dishonour - as seen in the Corinthians attitudes to headcoverings. Love is not rude, it is courteous, it honours decorum and politeness ~ do these things seem gratuitous to say? Yet, this claim Love is not rude - seems to me the hardest to pin down.
Love is only really and finally love if it is received as such. And it is only received as such through the culturally relative channels and personal lenses. You cannot love generically, you can just love bomb. You do not love in a vacuum, you love unique individuals in their cultural milieu, collective unconscious and linguistic hegemon. You have to be involved with people and speak their language. The onus is on the lover to ensure their love lands. Love does not mansplain and goes to pains not to. Love reads the room. Love does not victim blame. Love does not punch down, it steps down to build up. Have I failed to love you like this? Undoubtedly.
[2.2.7] Love does not insist on it’s own way.
Love surrenders its rights for others. Love is willing to become all things to all men. Love is prepared to make sacrifices for a weaker brother. Love does not insist on it’s own way?!
What is my way? What is your way? Whose way is St Mark’s following? What forum do we have for negotiating that? The opposite of insisting is listening. Love listens. Do you love me? Do you hear me?
[2.2.8] Love is not irritable
Love easily provoked to anger or bitterness, love governs its moods and its hormones, its tiredness and sugar level. Love follows from mindfulness. Love happens in the moment, love is tested by fire, love is what comes out under pressure. Love is a high bar.
[2.2.9] Love is not resentful
Love suffers wrong without acting out of grievance or vengefulness or entitlement. Love is not litigious as Corinthians in chapter 6. Love does not keep a score, tally petty grudges in mental register. Do you love me? Do you remember that thing I said? It was cruel and thoughtless - and you’ve held on to it. As I do. I hold on to your sins against like a sort of dark currency, leverage, for the settlement. Love lets it go. Love takes the bit of broken glass out of clenched fist.
“it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.” v6
[2.2.10] Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing
Love grieves rather than gossip about other’s sins. Love does not click like the tweets of scoffers. Love takes no pleasure in the downfall and comeuppance of other humans. Love is not partisan. Love is not clickbaitable. Love cannot be whipped into a media frenzy. Love never scandalmongers. Love is a firewall.
[2.2.11] Love rejoices with truth
Love wishes good on all and her enemies. Love is not about self-interest but rather truth. Truth is bigger than both of us. The true truth, of objective beyond us, an infinite personal God, the stranger outside of myself. Truth doesn’t tidily align with self-interest. In this way love allows self interest to be compromised for the sake of something great. Love is not defensive. Do you love me?
“LOVE bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” v7
[2.2.12] Love bears all things
All things. Love never ceases to support. Love keeps holding up relationships with others, even under burden and pressure. Know that in these things, God’s burden is light and he will not test us with more than we can bear. Do you love me? Can you bear me? At my worst? At my darkest?
[2.2.13] Love believes all things
All things. Love never surrenders faith - not a naive faith in human goodness, but a faith in God and a confidence in future hope. Love perseveres in and through all things, even when it might seem beyond recovery. Love is certainly more optimistic than my native disposition. Can you love me despite that?
[2.2.14] Love hopes all things
All things. Love never despairs of people. Love never despairs of situations. In order to love, you have to hope, you have to hope for others - seeking to love without hope is mere sympathy or vague benevolence. To love, you must hope. Do you love me? Do you hope for me?
[2.2.15] Love endures all things
Love never gives up on, and never abandons. Love is permanent. We are here for the long haul, the hell or high water, the harrowing yet to come. Love is a light house in the storm of 2020. Love is capacious, because in loving, you are channeling an ultimate reality which is God, who is through all and above all things.
[3] VERSES: Love's Enduring Fruit 8-13
“LOVE never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.” v8-10
There is a partial-ness and a temporary-ness to the present church and the way it engages our gifts and our persons. The legacy we are leaving is only the love that we spent on it. The artefacts we build as a church, the great coordinatings of gifts, the details and the rotas the orchestral arrangements, will be forgotten. Gifts are scaffolding - they will pass. What will be left is the love by which the building is established.
Do you love me more than as a means and more than a gift? Do you call others to love or to merely behave?
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” v11
Maturity is a transition from a focus on the gifts to a focus on the giver - who is love. Our spiritual gifts are a means to an end, and that end is maturity, and that maturity is Love in all things. We’re all in process. Giving up childish ways is a slow process. Do you love me? Do you, from a place of maturity, call me to maturity? Do I?
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” v12
There is a not-yet dimension to seeing the fruit of love.
We think we see ~ in our preeminently visual age, we are snared in our own neon oblivion, so busy sightseeing we're blindsided. Or I am, plank-in-eye religiouse, blinkered and navel-gazing, short-sighted and eyes-averted from the real of the world's needs, I blacken the darkened glass we see through dimly with my own grime. I’ve reflected elsewhere, King Lear’s Gloucester stumbled when he saw while the Australian blind professor John Hull lectured in the prophetic.
“So now faith, hope, and LOVE abide, these three; but the greatest of these is LOVE.” v14
Paul elsewhere combines these Faith Hope and Love - Christian Virtues:
Rm5 - since we have been justified by faith, rejoice in hope.. .which doesn’t put us to shame, because of Love through the Spirit. Gal5 by faith we wait for hope.. Works count for nothing and only faith working through love.
Ultimately, love is supreme, front and centre, core to solve for difficult church.
So. That is all. Join us for tea on Zoom. Ask me if I love you, and, where I don’t we can and we must work on doing that better. And, if this sermon is not what you came for, let me know, what did you come out here to see?
🎙️ 1 Corinthians 13 - Love in a time of Covid