The only thing of eternal significance

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

2 And 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.

3 If 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.

4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant

5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;

6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.

7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 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.

9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part;

10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

11 When 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.

12 For 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.

13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

 

Ah, love! Moonlit nights and soft violins! Autumn walks in the park with your one and only. The first time he took your hand, or the first time she didn’t pull her hand away. Your first kiss! Love makes poets of lovers. Samuel Rogers wrote an ode to his sweetheart Jacqueline:

“She was good as she was fair, “None – none on earth above her!

“As pure in thought as angels are:

“To know her was to love her.”

Shakespeare observed that lovers can be oblivious to the obvious. In The Merchant of Venice he wrote,

“But love is blind, and lovers cannot see

“The pretty follies that themselves commit” (Act ii. Sc. 6.)

The praises of love are found in literature reaching back into far antiquity. Socrates philosophized about it, Virgil wrote about it, Jesus commanded it.

Watching soap operas or listening to pop music reveals that as a culture we are very confused about love. It’s easy to get the idea that modern Americans think that love is sex. We are very careful about to whom we say, “I love you.” Grownups can say it to their children innocently, and to parents, but cousins are probably off limits. Even in a church we make sure that when we tell each other of our love, it won’t be taken the wrong way.

Obviously, Paul isn’t talking about sex or romance in this passage. He’s not talking even about the profound thankfulness parents have when they consider their children, although that is probably pretty close.

We are called to love one another as Christ loved us. The love we are to have for one another and neighbor is a holy love that displays us in the image of God. God’s love for humanity is not based on the fact that we are lovable because, let’s face it, often we aren’t. God’s love springs from the nature of God’s own being; that’s just how God is. As disciples of Christ, we are commanded to love that way. We are to love one another and neighbor as an act of the will, not because the object of love can benefit us in some way.

There was a small boy who asked his mother, “How old is God?” His mother answered, “Well, no one can say, but he must be at least billions and billions of years old.”

“Wow,” the boy replied, “I wonder whether God ever gets tired of being God!” That stumped Mom until she remembered that the Bible says, “God is love.” So she answered, “No, God never gets tired because God is love and love never gets tired.”

Love, wrote Paul, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

Let me propose that godly love is the predisposition to desire the best for another, and to act accordingly. Thus, God’s will and God’s love can’t be pulled apart. The love of God for creation is found in God’s creative acts to lure each event toward its best possible outcome. I would say that God cannot will anything apart from his love, nor can he love anything apart from his will.

The supremely best thing for humanity is that we exist for all time in the presence of the one God who brought us into being. It is the best possible outcome for human life and has nothing to do with our own character; it has everything to do with God’s character. If that is God’s will – the Scriptures are explicit that it is – then it must be possible for God to bring it about. (If not, then God is merely a dreamer rather than true deity.) God so loved the world that he gave his only son that we might have eternal life. God’s desire for the best for us and God’s actions to bring it about are indistinguishable. God gave God’s own self to reconcile us with him. God’s love and God’s will are the one and the same.

A teacher examined the school enrollment forms of two brothers one day. The first brother had written his birth date as May 10, 1986. The second brother had written his birth date as May 22, 1986. “That’s impossible!” the teacher declared. “No, it’s not,” said one of the brothers, “because one of us is adopted.” “Which one?” asked the teacher. “We don’t know,” said the other brother. “Mom and Dad have never told us. They said it doesn’t matter.”

That’s how God’s love is. Paul wrote in Romans, “. . . we are God's children [and] heirs of God and co‑heirs with Christ,” (Rom 8:16‑17) and in Ephesians that we are “to be adopted as [God’s] children through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his delight and will” (Eph. 1:5). And it just doesn’t get any better than that for you and me!

We are not God and what comes naturally to God doesn’t come so easily for us. We continually ask, “What’s in it for us?” or “Does the other person deserve it?” We are finite and limited while God isn’t. And so we have to realize that the best we can do for another is also going to be finite and limited. We will rarely know what is truly best for another. We will often fail to act on what we do know. Sometimes the simple perversities of the human spirit will overcome even the strongest predisposition to give of ourselves. Even so, the fact that we cannot do everything must never hinder us from doing something. Love in the name of Christ is a verb, not a noun.

One month a woman in my congregation named Maxine had foot surgery and was fairly immobile for some time afterward. I took her communion one first Sunday. Maxine and her husband and I shared the Lord’s table together in her upstairs room. I visited for awhile and it was just a wonderful time. We joked and laughed and talked about the church and what her recovery would be like, and we prayed together before I left.

As I pulled out onto Murfreesboro Road to head for the nursing homes I had a sort of epiphany. It suddenly struck me what keeps me doing this pastor thing. I answered God’s call out of fear – I was afraid to say no to God. I began the ministry from duty – I had made a promise and had to keep it. But soon after I left Maxine that day, I had a revelation that I am staying in this vocation from neither fear nor duty. I suddenly understood what my job description is: It is to fall in love every day with Christ’s friends in Christ’s name. That’s it.

My only real job as pastor is to fall in love with God’s people every day. And that’s why I do what I do – because love never tires and every day someone needs whatever of Christ’s love I can share. Being in love in Christ’s name is the best thing about being his disciple; in fact, I guess it’s the only thing about it that matters.

Years ago, every Thanksgiving my family and I joined my brother, Will, and his wife at my parents’ home for dinner, altogether nine gathered around the table. My older brother and his family live in Delaware, too far to come for such a short time. Will and I had a running joke one of us always told Dad whenever we gathered with him and Mother for such celebrations, whether Thanksgiving or birthdays or something else. Sometime during Thanksgiving dinner either Will or I said to Dad, “Of course, you know that all your children who truly love you came home for Thanksgiving.” And Dad responded, “Oh, sure, I know that.” We all laughed because we know it isn’t true.

But at such times, if you looked closely, you could see fleeting sorrow flicker across Dad’s face, and a wisp of wistfulness in his eyes. For the breath of one sentence, Dad’s heart was in Delaware because while the table was crowded, it was not full. Not everyone was there who belongs there.

That moment lingered with me when I read something author Bob Benson wrote in Come Share the Being. He and his wife had three children, and he told of how they grew up and went away to college and then got married and made their own homes. They were proud of their children, he wrote, but after their youngest son moved away, “our minds were filled with memories from tricycles to commencements [and] deep down inside we just ached with loneliness and pain.

“And I was thinking about God,” Benson wrote. “He sure has plenty of children – plenty of artists, plenty of singers, and carpenters and candlestick makers, and preachers, plenty of everybody . . . except you, and all of them together can never take your place. And there will always be an empty spot in his heart and a vacant chair at his table when you’re not home.

“And if once in awhile it seems he’s crowding you a bit, try to forgive him. It may be one of those nights when he misses you so much, he can hardly stand it.”

At the end, says Revelation, there is a family reunion. All God’s children are there, seated at the banquet table.

“And yet,” writes David Lowes Watson, in this day “our joy remains guarded . . . for the homecoming celebration has not yet begun in earnest. There are still empty places at the table. There are sinners who still need to come to their senses. There are millions of God’s family still without enough to eat. There are countless of God’s little ones who are still being sinned against with all the demonic ingenuity” of the human race. “We must help invite them home. We must help Christ dry their tears and heal their wounds” – everyone. Should there be even one empty place at the table, even one person whom we have neglected to invite to the banquet as our brother or sister in Christ, “then God’s cry of anguish will rend the cosmos, and the heavenly feast will be eaten in terrible, terrible silence.”

I think the love we are called to have is a love that gives Christ away and invites people to God’s table, to prepare the reunion of God’s children, to leave no vacancies at the heavenly banquet.

Do we dare to say to each other, “I love you”?

I love you.