Epiphany 4C 2007

It’s a brave or a foolish preacher who attempts to say something fresh about chestnuts such as today’s Corinthians reading. It is unarguably amongst the all time favourites of bible texts, right up there with the 23rd psalm and the beatitudes in the popularity stakes.

In our liturgical life, you’ll hear this glorious hymn to love found most often at weddings. Some of you may remember the stirring reading of the passage at the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Dianna Spencer by the then Speaker of the House of Commons George Thomas, later Lord Tonypandy. As well as at weddings, it sometimes also gets a Guernsey at funerals.

Perhaps its very familiarity masks for us a little of the depth of its meaning. So let’s take a moment today to unpack the familiar words – and if I have nothing startlingly new to say, then at the very least we can reflect afresh on Paul’s glorious description of the essential nature and the power of love – that special love called agape in the Greek of the New Testament, which receives paradigm expression for us through the person and work of Jesus our saviour.

The passage speaks to us at least at three levels. First it gives us a standard or measure by which we can gauge our own conduct towards others. It’s not unusual to see tears in the eyes of members of congregations as the reading unfolds. . . . Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (NIV UK)

Is the soul moved to weep because we know how easily we fall short of its ideal in our relationships with those who are closest to us – the one to whom we propose to commit in love for life; the ones we presume to mourn? We set out with such high hopes for ourselves and firm resolve in our relationships. But at the sharp edge of the everyday things don’t always go as we want them to, and our hopes and dreams can look all too ragged as they bump up against life’s harsh realities. We seek the best of ourselves and for our closest – too often we deliver second best.

At the same time, the tears engendered by our engagement with Paul’s hymn to love can be deeply consoling. Most of us have experienced those life transforming moments when we tasted its truth; we have known the freedom that this love brings, we have felt its healing power.

At a second level, the Corinthian passage can offer us the deepest personal consolation and security. Our patron John the Evangelist tells us that ‘God is love, and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them.’ No matter who we are, how gifted we are, no matter how flawed we are, whatever our achievements and whatever our failings our God, who is love, is ever kind and patient with us, endless in mercy, not prone to anger or resentful brooding. This God knows us intimately, at the deepest level, knows all we are and all we can be – ‘before I formed you in the womb I knew you’, he says to young Jeremiah as he calls him to ministry. And this God who knows us is for us in love and not against us – ‘I am with you to deliver you.’

When life is really tough, when we struggle to keep head above water, when it seems that everything is against us, our dearest friends desert us, how comforting it can be to bathe in the love of this God who loves us absolutely and beyond limit – who keeps nothing back but gives his all to us. Ultimately we are not alone. The deepest human drive to intimacy finds its expression in our experience of the limitless love of God.

But Paul is not just speaking to us as individuals. Here is the third level of the reading, and it’s a staggering thought. The love which Paul describes, the love which Jesus lived, such love as this should mark the way we live as social beings. Christians are called to love others as God has loved us. And this, it seems, is a command of screaming impracticality.

For we do not live in a world where love dominates. The world we inhabit is too often a mean place, a loveless place, driven by ideology, self interest, violence and hatred. It’s easy to get caught up in the ways of the world, and act out its values, voluntarily or involuntarily.

What does our Christian profession have to do with the way we engage with this world in our everyday life? Many would argue that faith is not a real world issue. The spiritual and the secular divide is an effective means of disempowering the primacy of faith. We’ve all heard it…Religion and politics don’t mix; The Church should concern itself with the soul and leave the business of the world, the real world of race, nation, class, gender, and money, especially money, to those who are equipped to deal with it. Love seems to be so alien to the political processes and global economics that one might seem a fool or worse to suggest it has its proper place.

It’s not hard to make the case that our economic and social way of life is not only joyless, but unkind, impatient, and rude. There’s just too much arrogance, boasting, and pomposity in human relations, in the media, in marketing. Just listen to the radio or watch the TV – political posturing, aggressive rudeness hiding under the cloak of investigative reporting.

Not love forbearing, but resentment is spewed forth by sectarians who would have us blame somebody – blame the government, blame the opposition, blame the rich, blame the poor, blame the parents or the children, blame the lawyers or the judges or the politicians. It must be somebodies fault. So let’s blame.

Not love delighting in truth, but a cult of deception marks so much of our social discourse. The truth seems less important than the spin. It’s not what is, rather it’s what you can make ‘em believe. So, for example, the now generally accepted notion of core and non core promises. It is almost as if we presume that we are always being lied to.

Not enduring love, but the endless celebration of unfettered choice and unrestrained accumulation grounds the so-called moral discourse of modem times.

We Christians are called to make a difference in a world like this. We are called into a community of love, and inevitably where there is the love that Paul describes, there is a longing for justice, and a determination to live in generosity and truth and integrity. The challenge for us is to live out this love, first in the church, in our dealings with each other, and then into the world, in the way we live our everyday lives.

And for as long as we, in our public dealings with our fellow Christians, fall short of our calling to live in love, by sectarian abuse, by imputing bad motive, by undermining and criticising and belittling, then we forsake our mission and spit in the face of the Christ of God. For love is paramount.

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. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

Of course it is not easy to live up to love’s high demand. Jesus himself, after he set his mission statement of love by announcing good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed first amazed, then angered his audience to the point where they threatened him with death. He was, after all one of them, too ordinary and too close to give such prophetic utterance. So it went when he began his ministry.

And so it may be today if we seek to live up to love’s high ideal. Love confronts; but love endures. And in a world which largely seems to have forgotten about the primacy of love, isn’t it the most important thing that we in the church can do is to live out this transforming reality, to the glory of God and for the service of God’s people. Until we see the fulfilment of Paul’s words; ‘And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.’