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Not Just for Weddings

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

February 1, 2003

¹If 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.

⁴Love 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.

⁸Love 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.

A Bride in white, with dreams of a perfect wedding day, surrounded by her family and all her closest friends, dressed just as beautifully and holding spectacular flowers.

A Groom, in formal black with family and strong, trustworthy men standing close at hand.

A church, a minister, words of scripture and hope, the extended family and friends, bearing gifts, many holding cameras, some clutching tissues or handkerchiefs to their eyes, beautiful music played on a wondrous organ, a beautiful sunny day for pictures that will be remembered for a lifetime.

Two shining faces turned toward each other, right hands clasped, two rings exchanged, words of promise exchanged too, to create a covenant, a bond and a marriage.

Rice thrown, a couple hustling down a white carpet, hands clenched tightly against a barrage of smiles and flashbulbs, faces smiling as they duck into the back of a waiting limousine.

The verses which I have just read from 1 Corinthians 13, whose nickname is the love passage, bring to mind images such as these.  It is at times such as these that the love passage is most often remembered.  And along with these verses are verses from famous and incomparable authors.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famed words: “How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.”

And Shakespeare:  “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.  Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.  Oh, no!  It is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken…If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ nor no man ever loved”

Our love passage of 1 Corinthians 13 brings to mind also other traditional stories of love.

There is an old and traditional Armenian story of love that I myself have told at countless weddings. 

A newlywed couple comes into their new home for the first time.  As they approach their threshold, they notice three grizzled old sage men sitting not far from their door.  They look over their shoulders at them as they enter their home and they wonder who they are.  Before they are able to do anything, they hear a knock at the door.  They go together to the door and see that it the three venerable old folks are standing at their door.  One of them speaks, “We are love, peace and prosperity.  You may invite one of us to enter your home.  You must decide.”

The couple closes the door and considers the offer for a moment, who would they invite into their home, love, peace or prosperity?  How could they choose from among these astonishing options? 

Together they decide and the open their door.  “We wish to have love in our home,” they announce.  Upon hearing this all three, love, prosperity and peace stand up and enter the home of this newlywed couple.  They are ecstatic and ask as these sages enter their home, “We thought only one would enter our home.”  The reply came, “Yes, if you had opted for prosperity, it alone would have come,  If you had opted for peace, it alone would have come, but since you opted for Love, we all three come together.”

Romance and notions of noble, affectionate, care and promises of a lifetime of commitment and mutual nurture, that’s what the love passage brings to mind.

But to frame this passage which clearly speaks of love, as only the “love passage” and to set it exclusively in the context of the wedding days of hopeful, lovebirds and their ready, giddy supporters is to sell it short and to limit it far more narrowly than the Apostle Paul, its original author intended it to have.

This passage when looked at within its larger context, the chapters that precede it and follow it, clearly speaks also of community - each person’s place within community and each person’s attitude toward others within the community.  It also speaks not only love but of all the gifts and blessings that God gives to people who wish to find him…

In 1 Corinthians 12, we find another famous passage, at least famous in the circles of Christian churches.  In 1 Corinthians 12, the Apostle Paul begins by speaking of the gifts of the spirit, he describes many varieties of gifts that come from God, from the “same Spirit” as he puts it: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, prophecy and on and on.  Once he delineates these, he then moves onto the famous part, to the verses we hear and read at every baptism in our church, at every reception of new members, at every occasion that we speak of the Body of Christ, the fellowship of the church or the quality of relationships, power structure or political structure within the church.

“¹²For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.  ¹⁴Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.

Before Paul speaks of love, before he gives us the home passage, he says these words,

“²⁷Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. ²⁸And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. ²⁹Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? ³⁰Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? ³¹But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.”

So the love passage, though appropriate for weddings, is actually even more appropriate and more properly set in the context of the church alive, the church at work, the community of believers as it goes along its pilgrimage with Christ, back to God.  Love, says the Apostle Paul, is the key ingredient to the Church of Christ.  Christ is the foundation and the head of the church, but preaching in a church without love is a clanging symbol, service and outreach and even charity in a church without love is a waste of time, a bustle of pointless, misdirected activity.

Love he says is the first and foremost of all the gifts God gives in the church. 

Love is the glue, love is the purpose, love is the power of the church, but God gives more.  Faith and hope are tied to second place among all the gifts.  Knowledge, healing, peace, patience, kindness, self-control, etc., etc. all come from God but the big three are faith hope and of course, love.

 True faith will produce real love.  In order to  be able to love truly, we must first ask ourselves: do we have faith? A young college student once was called upon to prepare a lesson for his speech class. They were to be graded on their creativity and ability to drive home a point in a memorable way. The title of this student’s talk, was, "The Law of the Pendulum." He describes what happened like this, “I spent 20 minutes carefully teaching the physical principle that governs a swinging pendulum. The law of the pendulum is: A pendulum can never return to a point higher than the point from which it was released. Because of friction and gravity, when the pendulum returns, it will fall short of its original release point. Each time it swings it makes less and less of an arc, until finally it is at rest. This point of rest is called the state of equilibrium, where all forces acting on the pendulum are equal.

He then attached a 3-foot string to a child's toy top and secured it to the top of the blackboard with a thumbtack. He pulled the top to one side and made a mark on the blackboard where he let it go. Each time it swung back a new mark. It took less than a minute for the top to complete its swinging and come to rest. When he finished the demonstration, the markings on the blackboard had proved his thesis. He says, I then asked how many people in the room BELIEVED the law of the pendulum was true. All of my classmates raised their hands, so did the teacher, who started to walk to the front of the room thinking the class was over.

In reality it had just begun. Hanging from the steel ceiling beams in the middle of the room he had fashioned a large, crude but functional pendulum - 250 pounds of metal weights tied to four strands of strong cord.

He then invited the instructor to climb up on a table and sit in a chair with the back of his head against a cement wall. He brought the 250 pounds of metal up to his nose. Holding the huge pendulum just a fraction of an inch from his face. Once again he explained the law of the pendulum to the teacher who had applauded only moments before, "If the law of the pendulum is true, then when I release this mass of metal, it will swing across the room and return short of the release point. Your face will be in no danger." After that final restatement of this law, he looked him in the eye and asked, "Sir, do you believe this law is true?" There was a long pause. Huge beads of sweat formed on the teacher’s upper lip and then weakly he nodded and whispered, "Yes." He released the pendulum. It made a swishing sound as it arced across the room. At the far end of its swing, it paused momentarily and started back. The students in that room say that they never saw a man move so fast. He literally dived from the table. Deftly stepping around the still-swinging pendulum, the student making the presentation asked the class, "Does he have faith in the law of the pendulum?"

Faith means putting it all on the line.  Faith means risking something.  In the Hebrews 11:1 we hear, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Without faith, love in the church is not possible.

Did you know the turn signal on a car is an amazing example of faith?  Every time you drive up to a stop sign and see another car, perhaps one who will soon cross your path suddenly flip on their turn signal to announce that they’ll turn out of your way, you are forced to use faith. 

Once I came to just such a stop sign.  I looked left and right and ahead and noticed that there was a minivan coming from my left.  It had its turn signal on, it was announcing to the world that it was going to turn right, come up and turn down the street I had just come up.  It was signaling to all who could see that it would not cross my path.  Believing myself safe, I began to pull out into the intersection. 

Imagine my shock, however, when I did pull out into the intersection, to find that minivan right in front of me!  By the time I slammed on my brakes, I had clipped his rear bumper as he drove by.  It fell off and we both ended up at the police station! 

Believing in turn signals is an act of faith.  Forgiving someone is an act of faith.  Loving someone is an act of faith.  They are each actions which leave the actor vulnerable and exposed, susceptible to slamming into trouble if the act of love or forgiveness are not received or reciprocated.  Without faith, turn signals would not work.  We wouldn’t believe anybody was going to make the turn until they actually did.  We’d sit around waiting for others to actually make their move and never move ourselves.

Without faith, nobody in the church or anywhere else would have the courage to love.  Its too risky.  There’s too much at stake.

 Without hope, there’s no love either.

Do you remember the story of Pandora's Box in Greek Mythology? The lovely Pandora was sent by Zeus to be the bride of Epimetheus.  One of Pandora's more endearing charms was her curiosity, but that quality also proved to nearly be her undoing. One day Mercury, the messenger, sent a box to the young couple. It was meant for them to enjoy, but under no circumstances were they to open it. Well, of course, it is the old story of the forbidden fruit. Told that she could not do it, it became the thing that she desired to do the most. So one day she pried it open and peeked inside. Suddenly out flew swarms of insects that began attacking them. Both lovers were stung with the poison of suspicion, hatred, fear and malice. Now the once happy couple began to argue.  Epimetheus became bitter and Pandora wept with a broken heart. But in the midst of the quarreling, they heard a tiny voice cry out: Let me out, to sooth your pain. Fearfully they opened the box again, and this time a beautiful butterfly flew out. It touched the couple and miraculously their pain was healed and they were happy again.  The butterfly we are told was hope. It is hope that sustains us; it is hope that sooths our pain.

Staff, www.eSermons.com, February, 2001

Its hope that motivates love and love which tucks all the horror back into Pandora’s box.

Without hope, there would be not reason to love, nothing to shoot for, no fantasy, no desire, no vision, no image in ones mind of the perfection and ideal that love hopes to achieve.

And by the way, what is it that love tries to achieve?  Is it that romantic notion of love, the dream relationship glamorized by Hollywood and Harlequin romance novels?

⁴Love 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. ⁸Love never ends,” Says the Apostle Paul.  This is the love of Christ on the Cross, the sacrificial, self-denying, other-centered love that Jesus illustrated so well.

Another good illustration of Christ like love is seen in the life of Abraham Lincoln. From his earliest days in politics, Lincoln had a critic, an enemy, who continually treated him with contempt, a man by the name of Edwin Stanton. Stanton would say to newspaper reporters that Lincoln was a "low cunning clown" and "the original gorilla". He said it was ridiculous for explorers to go to Africa to capture a gorilla "when they could find one easily in Springfield, Illinois." Lincoln never responded to such slander; he never retaliated in the least. And when, as President, he needed a Secretary of War, he selected Edwin Stanton. When his friends asked why, Lincoln replied, "Because he is the best man for the job."

Years later, that fateful night came when an assassin's bullet murdered the president in a theater. Lincoln's body was carried off to another room. Stanton came, and looking down upon the silent, rugged, face of his dead President, he said through his tears, "There lies the greatest ruler of men the world has ever seen." Stanton's animosity had finally been broken. How? By Lincoln's patient, long-suffering, non-retaliatory love.

Faith, hope and love says the Apostle Paul, but the greatest of these is love.  Faith, hope and love stand the tallest among all the spiritual gifts given by God.  They also make any human relationship, any creation of human groups, be they within the institutions of marriage, church, family or any other you can think of, have even an inkling of a chance for success, for happiness, for prosperity or health.

So as the Apostle Paul says, “Abide in these three, faith hope and love.”  And choose love first in all that you do.

 Amen.

All illustrations, except where noted, from “eSermons.com illustrations@ministersmail.com: Sermon for January 25, 2004” e-mail to Ara Heghinian, January 21, 2004