A More Excellent Way

I am in a preaching class this semester, and thought I would share one of my sermons here.  It was on 1 Corinthians 13, the famous "love chapter."

“Love isn’t a state of perfect caring.  It is an active noun, like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”

These words of wisdom come from Fred Rogers, or as I remember him, the red-sweater-wearing, title character in Mister Roger’s Neighborhood.  And what I love about this advice is that it gets to a deeper truth about love. 

It is not perfect, without fault, or a misty-eyed world of butterflies and rainbows. Real love, perfect love, the kind of love Paul is writing about in 1 Corinthians, is strong enough to get messy and allow space for disagreement.    

So I want to steal back the misconception that this text is about romantic love or marriage, that this text is the perfect sermon text for a wedding.  Paul’s audience in the text is not happily joined hand-in-hand at the altar, dressed in white and their Sunday best, gazing lovingly into one another’s eyes. 

Quite the contrary actually…

The people in Corinth are arguing about whose gifts are the greatest; leading them to be angry, frustrated, and divided into factions. Paul’s lesson about love is issuing a call, an admonition, and an exhortation to follow a more excellent way.  This more excellent way is a path rooted and established in the love and leadership of Jesus.  For the Corinthians reading this letter and for us today, Paul’s writing gives us an example to follow, and a goal worth striving towards. Love is a more excellent way precisely because it is agape love, the Divine love that can only come from God.

What distinguishes agape love from other forms of love is that it is oriented towards both God and neighbor.  It is lived out in the life and ministry of Jesus.  The one who lived without sin, perfectly committed to God’s will, even when it led to death on a cross. The sacrifice and obedience of Jesus are what allow our relationships to be reconciled and restored.  Our horizontal relationships with our friends and enemies and our vertical relationship with God are transformed by the perfect love of Christ.  The life of agape love is one of building unity in a community of division. It is a life of loving God and loving others with radical hospitality. And God is calling us towards a wonderfully multiplicitous unity that allows for difference and celebrates diversity.

We can honor and celebrate differences within Christian community because they are signs of the creativity of our Creator.  God has given each of us gifts that are highly individualized and unique.  Like thumbprints, no two people are exactly the same.  But despite our ranging idiosyncrasies and gifts, everyone bears the Divine love Paul talks about.  The gift of love, like all the other spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians, comes from God.  Whether preaching, teaching, prophesying, serving, or loving, we are dependent on the grace of God to empower us to use our gifts faithfully.  The unique truth about love, is that it can undergird all of the other spiritual gifts and become a way of life - a state of being - a condition of the heart even. 

So what does Paul mean when he talks about not having love, as if love were something tangible that we can hold?  When he goes on to talk about what love is, it is a verb, with thoughtful, deliberate, and caring actions.  Paul is not using patience, kindness, hope, and endurance as mere adjectives to describe what good, Christian love looks like.  Paul is painting a picture of the love of God, perfectly embodied in Jesus.  And he is giving voice to the transformational way this love acts, moves, and gets its legs. I think substituting the “love of God” for simply “love” might do a better job of expressing Paul’s point here.

Without God, and without love, we are nothing. Devoid of love, we become nothing more than empty shells of people going through the motions of life. Numb to the depths of love. And numb to any hope of human or divine connection.  But love and God are two in one; inextricably intertwined in a grace-filled lavishing of our broken places. 

Dr. Ellen Ott Marshall gave a lecture on Responsible Hope during Ethics class last semester.  In a lecture that was more of a sermon and act of pastoral care than anything else, she shared these words from Barbara Kingsolver, a well-known author and writer.

“In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window.  And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.” 

Love is something that must be learned.  In colorless worlds of despair and loss, we must deliberately teach our hearts to see love and hope in single, glorious things. You see, it’s not that love has somehow left when we find ourselves in dark nights of the soul, marked by depression, anxiety, grief, shame, or other pain.  What has happened is that we have lost, however briefly, temporarily, or chronically, our ability to see love.  In these times, we see dimly, even darkly, as though in a mirror.  We see distorted images of unworthiness, rejection, disappointment, failure, or unlovability.  And these imperfect, puzzling reflections have the capacity to shatter our souls into pieces.

Like using spiritual gifts of prophecy, giving, or speaking in tongues without love, these distorted images lead us into nothingness.  While this nothingness is different, it is equally dangerous.  I believe these dim reflections lead us into the dark space of believing that we are nothing; nothing worth loving, no one worth caring for, and nobody that can find meaningful connection in the world.

In spaces like this, prophecy, speaking in tongues, and generosity seem virtually meaningless.  While they might be able to illumine truths about God, with fragile souls and deadened senses, it can become hard to actually hold on to the wonder and awe these truths contain. This past summer I worked as a chaplain intern at UNC Hospital.  I was completing a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education as part of my preparation for life in ministry.  Seminary teaches us a lot about how to write exegesis papers, how to interpret passages, how to preach a good sermon, how to lead a congregation, how to lead worship, and other skills for whatever the future might hold for us. But when I got into the halls of the hospital, the wings of intensive care units, and rooms of scared or grieving families, these “how-to’s” went out the window.  I’m sorry, but no family facing the death or illness of a loved one gives a damn if you can exegete Scripture well or talk about the transmission of church beliefs throughout history. Sure these are still important skills to learn and hone.  They are an important foundation of being effective leaders, teachers, or witnesses of the Gospel.  But when the rubber meets the road and real people’s needs are involved, these things just aren’t as important as they might seem to be right now.

I’ll never forget the weeks I spent ministering with and visiting the family of a young dad fighting for his life in the Neuroscience ICU.  He came in after a serious motorcycle accident where his head hit a tombstone, knocking his helmet off after being thrown from his bike.  I never got to meet this father and husband awake and talking, never got to know his personality, or hear about the things that brought him joy in life.  I was there for the pain; the weeks of standing with family members crying at his bedside, wrestling over his plan of care, and waiting for news from medical teams.  I was there when things really took a turn for the worse and his wife wanted help letting his daughters come see him to say goodbye.  I was there when his daughters walked tenuously into his hospital room, confused by the machines, and unable to wrap their young minds around the reality of death.  I was there with the staff; whose hearts broke as they watched these young girls face their father dying. I heard a nurse whose own father had died when she was young, but never got to say goodbye tell me what this case brought up for her.

I showed up, I prayed, I listened, I asked questions, I counseled that family, and I prayed for the Holy Spirit to help me love them well.  But you know what, I never proselytized, exegeted a scripture passage, or offered an empty, conciliatory platitude to them. Oh trust me, I wanted to – I mean, wouldn’t you?  It is crippling and challenging to be present with people in places of lament, loss, and grief.  I mean to really be present with them. We naturally want to do something for them. We want to fix it, and make it all better.  We want to take away their pain. But we can’t. 

No matter how many letters or credentials we have before or behind our name, we cannot take away the reality of pain and suffering in life.Sure we can do things to care for them, do acts of hospitality or service for them, or help them process through their grief.  For people wrestling with questions of unworthiness, we can remind them of the truth that they are beloved children of God.  For ourselves, in times of colorless despair, we can look hard at single, glorious things. These things we do might be good, holy even, but they are incomplete.  Like the gifts Paul talks about, they will become useless and come to an end.  There will be times and points when they are not enough, when our hearts are too shattered for them to mean anything.

When we find ourselves in these places of despair, numbness, or shame, let us head the call Paul issues before his poetic excursis on love.  Let us “strive for the greater gifts.” And Christ will show us a still more excellent way, the way of love

Amen.