Sunday 31 January 2016

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.

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