Belief in God (1 Cor 13:1-13)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Jan 31, 2016, Epiphany IV)

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Not a Celebration, but an Exhortation

It is nearly impossible to hear today’s scripture and not hear, somewhere in the background, the heartfelt I do’s that nearly always accompany it. Hearing these words transports many of us to that special occasion in life when a couple who could not be more in love with one another commit themselves in marriage.

And if Paul lived among us today, I’m relatively confident he would approve of this use of his words. Only, he would probably approve of it with raised eyebrows and a bemused smile, taking it for an oddity, if not a comedy. Because when he wrote these words, a wedding was probably the last thing on his mind.[1] When the Spirit of God washed over Paul like a babbling brook, inspiring him with these poetic words, he was not envisioning a crowd of smiling faces, towered cake, and flowers in full bloom.

If Paul were around today, he would probably deem his poem more appropriate to be read at the dinner table of a family in heated debate, or in the fractured halls on Capitol Hill, or in the very place where Paul first intended these words to be read: a church split over its many differences. Paul didn’t write these words to be the icing on the cake of a happy relationship. They are not the celebration of a cheerful union, but an exhortation given to a community veering toward disunion.

A Community in Conflict

The Corinthian church, remember, were a potpourri of Jews and Greeks, rich and poor, slave and free. And if Paul’s words at the beginning of today’s text are any indication, the Corinthians are expressing their faith competitively, each championing their own way. Some of the Corinthians, probably the Greeks who had previously participated in the ecstatic ceremonies of local mystery cults, claimed religious authority by their expertise in speaking in tongues (cf. 13:1). Others, perhaps the rich Jews who had enjoyed tutelage under sage rabbis, boasted special knowledge of the scriptures and a more finely attuned faith (cf. 13:2). And yet others—the slaves and the poor are my guess—asserted the superiority of their faith on the basis of their poverty and their freedom from the material world (cf. 13:3).

But according to Paul, all of these rival ways of faith are lacking something. They are like skilled musicians who can manage nothing more than a discordant medley of random notes. They are like knowledge with no objective, like having a map but having no clue what your destination is. They are like an investment with no return.

All You Need Is “Love”

I don’t need to tell you what the Corinthians were missing. Paul spells it out, repeats it time and time again: love. And that one word is enough for most people. For most of the celebrants at a wedding, all you need is love. Love is feel-good and foolproof, the cure-all for our broken world.

Simple, right? Well, not quite. Paul understands that love is an abstract word. It can be made to mean anything. (Kids pick up on this quickly. One says, “I love these cookies!” The other retorts: “Enough to marry them?”) So Paul knows he needs to elaborate, to give love a face and a full body of flesh. He needs to illustrate love in action. And that’s exactly what he does, taking us through a slideshow of love’s deeds: “Love shows patience, love acts kindly, love does not envy, it does not boast…” and so on, for sixteen slides. And as his collage of images accumulates, we begin to discover that love is anything but the feel-good, foolproof panacea our world makes it out to be.

Neither Feel-good nor Foolproof

In fact, it’s the opposite. It is neither feel-good nor foolproof. This love is a way, Paul says, that “does not insist on its own way” (13:5). It is a wayward way. It wants to get lost in the goodness of others. Rather than following the closed path of its own happiness, it explores and cultivates the unknown paths of others. The wayward way of love is the difference between cutting a flower and watering it; between treasuring a wild creature in a cage and merely treasuring it in your gaze; between making somebody else word’s captive to your own agenda and letting it run free as a strange and mysterious idea; between controlling a situation and contemplating it. The wayward way of love is not feel-good, but make-good.

Paul leaves no room for doubt on the waywardness of love. Instead, he asserts it even more boldly, proclaiming that love “believes all things” (13:7). And if our streetwise instincts haven’t kicked into gear yet, they should be kicking in now. “Believes all things”? The word that Paul uses here, pisteuo, is the same word that we use when we say, “I believe in God.” It means, more literally, “I trust in God, I entrust God with my life.” Except here, Paul makes no mention of God. Here, at the glorious height of his poetry, he proclaims that love believes in everything. Love believes in the neighbor as well as the stranger, in the friend as well as the enemy, in the kindly as well as the crotchety, in the strong as well as the weak.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, we must admit, as Paul does earlier in his letter, that this uncalculating kind of love is foolishness (cf. 1:18). This love, Paul says, takes no account of evil (13:5), turns a blind eye to danger.[2] It does not account for risk or reward. It simply believes in everyone, everything. A God of such love would have much more in common with a child or the people we push into padded homes than with the men and women who sit in seats of power and prestige, making calculated decisions.

Where Is God?

Speaking of God…it is a curiosity that in this soaring poem about God’s love, never once does Paul actually mention God. Where has God gone?

I may be wrong. But I believe that Paul is trying to overturn the traditional idea of God on high, that he is trying to bring God back down to earth. Most Christians identify the heart of their faith by nodding up to the sky and saying, “I believe in God.” But for Paul, the heart of faith is a love that looks all around and says, “I believe in everything.” Paul is pointing us beyond our little identities, our self-important proclamations. He is singing about a God that escapes our doctrines and creeds, a God that is lurking in every created thing. For Paul, saying “I believe in God” is no different than saying, “I believe in you…and him…and her…and even in that person over there whom I don’t see eye-to-eye with.”

A Methodist pastor in Montana tells the story of a woman in his small town who was “a terrible drunk, and also what is cruelly but aptly termed ‘a cocaine whore.’”[3] One day, she decided to sober up. Started attending AA. Soon after, started attending church. Before anyone knew what was happening, she was volunteering for every activity and ministry in the church, even those things that committees had to beg people to join. She was doing everything from “visiting shut-ins to teaching Vacation Bible School.”[4] She was transformed. And yet, as her Methodist pastor provokingly notes, “she was still a promiscuous person, still loving without discrimination.” It led him to rethink God’s love. Perhaps God’s love was, in its own graceful way, promiscuous.[5] For God’s love makes no distinction. It sees beyond all masks and pretense and risk, into the goodness and blessing at the heart of everyone.

By God’s grace, this woman modeled an incredible faith. A faith that said not, “I believe in God,” but rather, “I believe in everyone—the man at the nursing home who keeps forgetting who I am, the little children who run us ragged at Bible School, the Muslim family on the corner of the street.”

“Supper’s Ready”

And as it turns out, this kind of love, this kind of belief in everyone, is what a fragmented community needs the most, whether it be the divided church in Corinth or a broken world in the 21st century. There was a survey some years ago in which Americans were asked what words they most wanted to hear. The first choice? “I love you.” The second? “I forgive you.” The third is the most surprising. “Supper’s ready.”[6]

What a divided church and a broken world need most is not a more correct doctrine or a better theology or a people who can only proclaim “We believe in God.” What a divided church and broken world need is a love that believes in them and calls out the best in them, a love that is promiscuously given to all, a love that sets the table and calls out, “Supper’s ready.” Such love is foolish and difficult—and also divine. We see it in a former crack whore in Montana, and a broken body in Jerusalem. And we see it every week here, at this table, where God believes in everyone who comes forward, where God trusts in everybody regardless of where they have come from, where God hopes enduringly, unfailingly that we will become the body of Christ that will redeem the world.

Prayer

Your love has made believers out of us, God. We trust in you. But sometimes we have trouble trusting in the world you lovingly created. Open our hearts this morning to the wayward, promiscuous way of your love, a love that sees goodness and blessing in everything. May our belief in you grow into a love that believes in all things. Amen.

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[1] Never mind his misgivings about marriage in the first place (cf. 1 Cor 7:8-9).

[2] The word in Greek here is logizomai. From this word and its etymological descendent, “logic,” we might say that love is illogical, irrational. It does not hedge its actions according to the risks of evil.

[3] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead, 1998), 296.

[4] Norris, Amazing Grace, 297.

[5] Norris, Amazing Grace, 297.

[6] Philip Yancey, Vanishing Grace: Whatever Happened to the Good News? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), 71.

into the body

(inspired by 1 Cor 12:12-26 and Matt 6:25-34) 

look at the juncos of the air.
baptized to their bellies
in cold white.
jumping about
for no reason,
a flock all aflutter.

their faith is full
of feathers
unruffled.

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when water catches light
and sprinkles our heads,
or swallows us thirstily
in one gulp,
we are all baptized—
paul says—
into the body.

not into a holy idea
or godly doctrine.
not into a heaven
of ghostly reward.
not into an afterlife…
but into full-bodied life itself.

into skin and scar,
bones and breaks.
into birth and breakfast and bathing,
into loving and leaving and loving still,
into a cross and a grave and new life.

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look at the juncos of the air.
they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns.
they hop into the world’s frosty baptismal font
for no reason at all.

A Surprising Guest List (1 Cor 12:1-11)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Jan 17, 2016, Epiphany II)

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Worshiping Ourselves

Today we are transported by scripture to a colorful moment in history: the city of Corinth, just years after Jesus walked the earth. If Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is anything to go by, the community of Christ-followers there was a motley crew: rich, poor, slave, free, man, woman, Greek, Jew. And they were all bound together by a single tie: the simplest and probably the oldest confession of any follower of Christ, “Jesus is Lord.”

But apparently this tie that had bound them together had frayed to its last fiber. Paul’s letter indicates that when the Corinthians gathered together—for a meal, for worship—they congregated in cliques. The wealthy would eat well, while those in want nibbled at what little they had. The Greeks and Jews eyed one another warily, reading condescension and arrogance in each other’s expressions.

So, wanting to return the Corinthians to the heart of their faith, to the Spirit that bound them together in the first place, Paul opens with a little Spirituality 101.

“Now concerning the spiritual,”[1] Paul begins. In the everyday Greek of Paul’s world, the word for “spirit” usually meant something much more literal: “wind” or “breath”—that flow of air that you cannot see with your eyes. Paul then reminds the Corinthians that before the Spirit had brought them together, they had been enticed and led astray by speechless “idols”—which in everyday Greek meant simply “images,” what you can see with your eyes.

“Idols,” as our Bibles translate it, or “images”—it might seem like there’s a big difference between the two translations. But actually the two are closer than they might first appear: both have to do with how we see the world. An idol is just a special kind of image. It is an image that defines how we see the world. If money is our idol, then we see the world in dollar signs. If power is our idol, then we see the world in muscle and machinery and other means of control. If lust is our idol, then we see the world in terms of gratification. So in a way, an idol is nothing more than a reflection of ourselves, a mirror image of our values. Which means that when we worship our idols, whatever they may be, we are actually worshiping ourselves. We are actually worshiping a world where we are the center of gravity, where everything aligns itself according to our priorities.

To summarize, then, Paul tells the Corinthians, “You used to care only about images, idols. You used to care only about yourselves, how you saw the world. But now that you’re Christ-followers, you know that there is more to life than just what you see: you know that what really matters is the invisible wind and breath that animates the life of the world, that gives life not only to you but to others.” It is a gentle reprimand: “While your lips have been confessing, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ your lives have been professing that you are lord. So, look outside yourselves. Look for the Spirit of Christ in each other, especially in those who are different from you, be they Greek or Jew, rich or poor.”

Predictable Guest Lists

And Endless Reruns

In truth, the Corinthians were just living the way that most of us do. Look at any community around you: local theater gatherings, book clubs, fitness groups, quilting circles…any one of these tends “to attract like-minded people”—“the same way most churches do.”[2] In other words, for most communities, there is an unspoken rule: you can trust folks who look like you do, who think like you do, who will reciprocate your thoughts. They see the same images as you. We might even say, they worship the same idols.

Who among us hasn’t attended a new group and felt a wave of relief upon meeting someone else who sees things like we do?

And yet…if life is restricted to a guest list of people who look, talk, and think like us, then life would be little more than an endless rerun of the same old show. And as much as we might enjoy a good rerun, what we ultimately desire is a newness that will tease us out of the shells into which we so often retreat at the slightest whiff of difference. What we ultimately desire is that the Spirit that catches hold of us in unique and passionate ways, will also show itself in others and draw us out of our personal reruns into a beautiful new story.

The Spirit “Works” in Different Ways

Which is exactly what happens to a group of mice in one of my favorite childhood stories, Frederick, by Leo Lionni. The story begins with a family of five field mice who are preparing for the winter. They go out into the meadow and gather “corn and nuts and wheat and straw.”[3] And yet, on each page, there is one mouse who is not working: Frederick. He sits off in the corner pensively, his eyelids only half-raised. The rest of his family notice this difference and ask, “Frederick, why don’t you work?”[4] He responds, “I do work. I gather sun rays for the cold dark winter days. … I gather colors…[f]or winter is gray. … I am gathering words. For the winter days are long and many, and we’ll run out of things to say.”[5] And true enough, winter comes, and after the mice have finished off their reserve of food and their gossip, they are cold and despondent. So Frederick steps forward, tells them to close their eyes, and then begins poetically to weave words together: “Now I send you the rays of the sun,” he says. “Do you feel their golden glow?” And sure enough, the other mice begin to feel warmer. Is it magic? Then Frederick offers a vivid description of the meadow on a summer’s day. And by this wonderful vision, the other mice are transported into a much more enjoyable place than their cold, wintry den.[6]

The one mouse who does not see the world the way the others do, in whom the Spirit “work[s]” in a different way, with whom the others could not really relate in an easy, straightforward manner—this different mouse is not the problem. If anything, he is the one through whom the others encounter the Spirit, which gives them new life when their rerun lives had run out.

“The Same Second Wind”

The temptation in church, as in life, is to restrict the guest list to mice who work like we do—excuse me, to people who see the way that we do, who make sense of things using the same images and idols. It becomes a paradox: we seek safety and certainty for our lives, but in the process we lose life itself because we shut out newness and difference and growth. But the word of Paul to the Corinthians is the good news that, ultimately, we do not determine the guest list. God does. The one Spirit—the one holy breath and wind—sweeps over the face of our world and invites everyone into life.[7] The one Spirit animates us all, each with different gifts, different callings, different ways of living. And the gospel of this Spirit is that it makes life better for everyone, or as Paul says, it works to the “common good” (1 Cor 12:7).

Perhaps it’s comparable to a brass quintet. Ultimately, what makes the sound is one and the same thing: human breath. And yet that one thing sounds differently in different instruments, resulting in an incomparable blend of tones, the harmony of which is unlike anything we would hear from one single instrument alone. Or perhaps it could be compared to a sports team playing at the height of its game. On the team, you’ve got the artist, the player who works with the tightest of angles and completes impossible passes. You’ve got the workhorse, the player who covers every inch of grass and keeps things ticking. You’ve got the charismatic captain, whose enthusiasm saturates the entire team, who can grab the game by the scruff of its neck. But what makes each of these players who they are, and what unites the team, is the one and the same passion for the game. They breathe the same desire. They’re all gasping for the same second wind.

We too today are all gasping for the same second wind, the one holy breath, the Spirit of God. And that, according to Paul, is more than enough to unite and bless us across all our differences.

Prayer

Holy God, Spirit of life that swept over the earth at creation, breathing new life into the world—thank you for moving among us all in unique ways, breaking us out of our shells, pulling us out of our rerun lives, and building us up into a common good we could never imagine on our own. Unfold us this morning from the sameness in which we seek security, and draw us more deeply into the diverse and surprising Spirit that animates the blessed body of Christ. In the name of Jesus. Amen.

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[1] The word here is pneumitakos, used as a substantive adjective. It is commonly translated “spiritual gifts,” presumably because Paul goes on to discuss the gifts of the Spirit.

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 93.

[3] Leo Lionni, Frederick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), ebook loc. 27.

[4] Lionni, Frederick, loc. 31.

[5] Lionni, Frederick, loc. 33-41.

[6] Lionni, Frederick, loc. 57-65.

[7] Paul’s discourse in 1 Cor 12 is limited to the Christ-follower community in Corinth, so it is difficult to determine in the context of this passage the scope of the Spirit’s activity. Judging, however, from other Pauline passages that set the Spirit’s activity in a cosmic context, I read the message of 1 Cor 12:6 in a universal sense: God activates the divinely inspired activities of “everyone.”

"A Star, a Star, Dancing in the Night" (Matt 2:1-12)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Jan 10, 2016, Epiphany Sunday)

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“Listen to Your Food!”

One of my good friends in Sheffield, Barbora, is just now finishing her PhD in neuroscience. As you perhaps would expect of a neuroscience doctoral student, she is an extremely attentive, thoughtful, and diligent person. About a year ago, she decided to enhance her experiential knowledge of the mind by taking a mindfulness class. Her first report about the class has become the stuff of legend among our circle of friends.

The class began, she said, with the teacher ceremonially passing out raisins among the students. Then the teacher solemnly took a raisin in the palm of her own hand. She lifted the raisin to her ear, tilted her head attentively in its direction, knitted her brow…and asked, “Can you hear your raisin? Listen! What do you hear? What is your raisin saying to you?”

To this day, Barbora cannot help but laugh when she tells the story. And she will quickly admit that her first impression of this exercise was a mixture of doubt and dismissal. It seemed a bit hippyish, or new-agey. But even so, she persisted with the practice of listening to her food, and a little while later, she would admit that, actually, she sort of liked it. It made her eat more slowly. More deeply. More appreciatively. Food was no longer simply food, a mechanical necessity, something she took for granted. It became a gift, a treasure, a reminder of life in all its fragile beauty.

Nature’s Deep Eyes and Ears

I hope you won’t mistake me for a hippy or a new-ager, but…there’s something to be said for having “deep eyes” and “deep ears,” for attending deeply to the world around us. Winter makes a great case for the value of deep attentiveness.

We all know that the weather channel is hardly ever right. I learned this the hard way. As a child, I would be glued to the weather channel practically 24/7 in the winter, feeding my desperate hope for snow and school cancellations. In the evening, it would promise a 100% chance of heavy snow. The next morning? Nothing.

And yet it seems that, while humanity has somehow lost touch with the natural world, our furry and feathered friends around us remain particularly attuned.

The sky might be impassively blue, the air might be warm and still. There might not be a single thing on the horizon to suggest a storm. But if you see birds rushing to their nests and squirrels scurrying about more frantically than usual, then you know. They have “deep” eyes and ears. They see more than a blue sky. They hear more than silence. Somewhere beyond the surface of things, they sense a winter storm.

"Do You See What I See?"

There’s a beautiful song we sing at Christmastide that ponders nature’s deep eyes, its awareness of things unseen:

Said the night wind to the little lamb, ‘Do you see what I see?
Way up in the sky, little lamb: do you see what I see?
A star, a star, dancing in the night,
With a tail as big as a kite, with a tail as big as a kite.’ [1]

In this song, it is the night wind and a little lamb who see with deep eyes. They see not just a cold, indifferent star, but rather a star dancing for joy. And within that star a mysterious and wonderful story about a newborn child, a story that will charge the heart of a hurting world with hope.

Which brings us to our scripture, to the “wise men from the East” who “observed” that dancing star “at its rising” (2:1-2). If the night wind had asked them, “Do you see what I see?”—and who’s to say it didn’t?—I imagine they would have responded enthusiastically, “You see it too? How it dances!”

Real Magic

But there’s more to the story than simply a handful of wise men who pay special attention to a star. In the Greek, Matthew calls these men magi, from which we get the English word “magician.” Which suggests that we should really rethink our understanding of magic. According to our story in Matthew, true magic is not creating something out of nothing or altering reality with the wave of a wand and an “abracadabra.” Rather, it is seeing deeply. Seeing more. A magi is someone who sees beyond the surface of the world, who treasures every molecule as evidence of something more, a sort of holy forensics expert who sees the trace of the divine in things as ordinary as a grassy sand dune or an elderly person shuffling down the hallway. A magi is someone who sees not simply a star but a star-touched child, and not simply a child but a future king. Which is why a single star and a simple child can bring the magi to their knees, falling down before an infant who, if you set it on its feet, would just as soon fall down before them.[2]

If today’s story is any indication, real magic is not the ability to change reality. Real magic is the ability to see reality for what it really is: a divine playground. A magi is none other than someone playing a divine game of hide-and-seek, searching for a God who is “hidden deep” within creation, “yet hoping to be found.”[3]

Following the Magi Outside the Church

It would be easy enough to draw the simple lesson, then, that we should be like the magi, that we should keep our eyes peeled and our ears to the ground for signs of God in our world. Which, by the way, is what we’re doing here at church, right? We’re here to encounter God.

But there’s another twist in the story. These divinely attuned magicians are not Israelites. They do not practice the Jewish faith. To translate that into our own setting: these magi are not part of the church. They are strangers from afar, with different prayers on their lips and perhaps different names for God. Yet in this story, it is they—not the Judean king Herod, not even the chief priests and scribes—who detect the joyous trace of God in our world.

The magi, then, are a beautiful and gentle reminder that while the story of God might be contained in the church, it is certainly not contained by the church. In fact, sometimes the church gets in its own way, which is really to say, it gets in the way of God. So it is that another Barbara, the thoughtful theologian Barbara Brown Taylor, muses:

I worry about what happens when we build a house for God. … Do we build God a house so that we can choose when to see God? Do we build God a house in lieu of having God stay at ours? Plus, what happens to the rest of the world when we build four walls—even four gorgeous walls—cap them with a steepled roof, and designate that as the House of God? What happens to the riverbanks, the mountaintops, the deserts, and the trees?[4]

And we might add: what happens to that solitary star, singing for joy in the night sky, or that gurgling infant?

As Simple and As Crazy as Paying Attention

Just to be clear, the magi’s story is not a criticism of the church. Rather, the gospel of the magi is the good news that, while we may occasionally limit church to certain times and places, God does not. The whole world is holy; the whole world is a sanctuary, filled with dancing stars, singing rivers, infants whose gurgles grow into gospel.

According to the ancient rabbis, “every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, ‘Grow, grow.’”[5]

How do we see these gardening angels? How do we see the stars divinely dancing in the night? How do we find God in our world? We follow the magi. The secret of the magi, remember, is neither some secret knowledge nor some cold scientific method. It is simply having deep eyes and ears. It is as simple and as crazy as paying attention—even to your food! It is as plain “as looking twice at people and things you might just as easily ignore.”[6]

The saw a star dancing in the night. But as the mystics and poets and lovers of the world will tell you, God is dancing in much more than just a single star. So it is that Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet and minister whose spirit was tenderly attuned to the divine dance in our world, writes about the real magic of creation: “The world,” he says, “is charged with the grandeur of God”[7]—“Christ plays in ten thousand places.”[8]

Prayer

Your creation, God, dances to a tune and a vision that our ears and eyes so often suppress. Even so, you insist that the song continue, that the dream not be relinquished. Grant us the patience and faith and attentiveness of the magi, that we too might see glimpses and hear echoes of your saving grace, in things as simple as an honest word or a cup of tea or shining star; that we too might be overwhelmed with a joy that we cannot help but share with the world. Amen.

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[1] “Do You Hear What I Hear?” Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne, 1962.

[2] The word for “pay homage” (NRSV) in the Greek is proskuneo, more literally rendered “to fall down to worship.”

[3] This image was inspired by a passage from Haruki Marukami, South of the Border, West of the Sun (trans. Philip Gabriel; New York: Vintage, 1998), 6: “But I detected something else—something warm and fragile just below the surface. Something very much like a child playing hide-and-seek, hidden deep within her, yet hoping to be found.”

[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 9.

[5] Taylor, An Altar in the World, 14.

[6] Taylor, An Altar in the World, 33.

[7] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” in “God’s Grandeur” and Other Poems (New York: Dover, 1995), 15.

[8] Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” in “God’s Grandeur,” 36.