THE GREATEST OF THESE IS LOVE
Rev. Dr. Dennis Winkleblack
Prospect United Methodist Church
Bristol, Connecticut
John 14: 23-29 I
Corinthians 13: 1-13
On Mother’s Day I’m always reminded of the little gifts I would make for my mother as a child in an elementary school art class that she would receive as if I’d given her something expensive. So, today, even though all of us are not mothers ourselves, we all have or had mothers and we give thanks to God for the woman who birthed us into life.
St. Paul wrote: “If I speak in human tongues or even the speech of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy going or a clanging cymbal.” Familiar?
This morning, on a day associated with what some say is the greatest human love that can be known – that between mother and child – I want to wander with you through perhaps the most famous chapter in the New Testament, I Corinthians 13, the “Love” chapter. I say I want to wander because to give even minimal justice to all the powerful words and images of love in this chapter would take us well into the afternoon. So, we’ll wander. And let’s see how God might show us something brand new in this wonderful, most famous chapter of the Bible.
To begin, I want to remind us that “love” in the New Testament is not a sentimental thing. It is not a feeling or emotion. It is an attitude that leads to an action.
Secondly, I’d like to suggest that whenever you read or hear the word, “love,” from Jesus or in the New Testament you translate it as “self-giving.” This is the action that the attitude of love yields. Not just a warm feeling, but an act of self-giving.
And so Paul writes in verse 2: “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, … but do not have love [but am not self-giving], I am nothing.”
Apparently, we are overhearing a problem Paul was having with the new Christians in Corinth to whom he wrote these words. Somebody seems to have come to the church in Corinth saying he had the key to life and it was some hidden, esoteric wisdom that you couldn’t know unless you joined up with them. But once you did, they boasted, then you would be as smart as they were and be instantly happy and successful.
What really complicated things was that they used the language of Christianity and sounded most authentic. As a result, many church members were following these false teachers who taught that if you believed as they did all your problems would vanish.
Sound familiar? This kind of bogus religion is still among us. It’s often most noticeable when a minister (usually with a television show or a book to sell) touts his spin of the gospel as a way to help you to surmount all your troubles instantly. It sounds so authentic. Uses the Bible. But it’s misleading, counterfeit.
Be sure: anything about religious practice that sounds easy isn’t! It isn’t the gospel. Indeed, such teaching that promises blessings without putting your life on the line, without putting your faith into self-giving, love-action on behalf of others is not the whole Gospel of Christ.
Jesus said: “There is no greater love than for someone to lay down his life for others,” This is the kind of costly love that Jesus was pushing.
Of course, we may not be called to literally give up our lives. But you get the idea: to love as Jesus loved is to give up something we’d rather not – our pride, our preferences, our money – for example.
There are no magical beliefs. Only lives lived by the power of God betting that the power of love lived out is God’s way to change the world.
Paul writes further in verse 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.”
Once again it’s helpful to know the original circumstances surrounding Paul’s letter writing. He was writing to people who had lost just about everything when they became Christians. Writing to people who had been disinherited, divorced, forsaken by their families because they had become followers of Jesus Christ. To me, this makes what Paul says about love even more astounding!
I mean, what if you had lost everything, your family was shunning you and you were in the congregation in Corinth when these words from Paul were read: “If I give away all that I have, deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing?” Nothing? Are you kidding me?
What if you had witnessed as no doubt some in Corinth had, your parents or siblings burned to death for being a Christian and heard Paul claim that, without love . . . meaning that you had to give even more.
Say whatever you want about Christianity, but its founders were not given to shmoozy sentimentalism, were they?
And Paul gets even bolder in verses 4-7: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
The play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” by Lorraine Hansberry tells the story of a poor black family from Chicago’s Southside. After the father’s death, the mother wants to use his insurance money to move her family into a little house on the other side of town. Her son, however, wants to use the money to go into business. He’s never had a break and never had a job. Now he has a friend who has a “deal.”
He begs for the money, and although his mother refuses to give it to him at first, she eventually relents. How she can deny her son’s pleading for his first chance to do something for the family? Soon, though, the family learns that the son’s “friend” has taken the money and skipped town. The son is humiliated.
His sister wastes no time tearing into him. Pouring out her contempt, she screams at him for having lost, for them all, the only route out of the hell in which they’ve lived for years. When the sister finishes her tirade her mother speaks, “I thought I taught you to love him.” And the sister responds, “Love him? There is nothing left to love.”
And the mother replies, “There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don’t mean for yourself and for the family ‘cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he been through and what it done to him? Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well, then, you ain’t through learning – because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ‘cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.”
The sister is seeing her brother through the eyes of self. She can’t, won’t, try to see what it’s like through his eyes. The mother, however, feels her son’s pain and humiliation. Her love is patient and kind; doesn’t insist on its own way; isn’t resentful; is hopeful, is unconditional. She’s some kind of mother.
Next we move to what, for me, is the most challenging claim of the text in verses 11 and 12: “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. 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.”
Stated simply, Christian love is not for babies. It isn’t easy. It isn’t about doing what comes naturally. It’s not just about being a nice person. It can be as tough a thing to do as it is tender. As the late William Sloane Coffin once said, “Unlimited love doesn’t mean turning yourself into a doormat so that people can walk all over you. But it does mean returning evil with good, violence with nonviolence, hatred with a love that is obliged to increase because it hurts so much to love less.”
The world is convinced that the way to deal with violence is to return violence in one form or another. Such stupidity is the ongoing so-called strategy in the middle-east that has not worked yet, but which all sides keep trying. It is also the thinking behind the belief that to take a life through capital punishment somehow evens things up, makes things better. But, it doesn’t, not for anybody, perpetrator or victim’s family. As someone has said, an Old Testament practice of an eye for an eye and pretty soon everyone is blind!
As Jesus affirmed: “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” This is so, for individuals and for nations. Always. Forever. Without exception.
This love business is no child’s play. This kind of love doesn’t come easily. It’s not for the squeamish. But, it’s the only way God has to fix the world.
Methodist Bishop William Willimon of Alabama tells about renewing his acquaintance with a person whom he had known when they were students in college in South Carolina. Willimon was a senior while Lewis Pitts was a freshman. All Willimon remembered about Lewis was that he was from Bethune, S.C., and that he had gone on to law school somewhere.
He says it began when one day he was watching the 6 o’clock news and there was this face out of his past -- little Lewis Pitts on TV, the lawyer for two men who were tried and then acquitted for a crime they didn’t commit. So Willimon invited Lewis to lunch. There he found out that since law school Lewis had been involved in poverty law. Found out that Lewis goes anywhere to defend people without money or friends. That he had defended communists against the Klan, Native Americans against the sheriff, blacks against whites and blacks against blacks. Found out that he lives in an old car, living from hand to mouth, with death threats an almost everyday occurrence.
Willimon says he had to ask him what made him live like he did. And Lewis Parks answered, “My mother and the church taught me that God is love and we ought to love others. That’s it.”
Willimon said he responded, “Lewis, that’s hardly enough of a reason.” And Lewis said, “It’s enough to get you shot at.”
Then Lewis said, “Look, I’m from Bethune, South Carolina. When you’re a black man from Bethune, you don’t have a chance to learn much theology, except what you can pick up in church. All I learned was God is love and we ought to love one another.”
Which is the way St. Paul basically concludes his famous chapter: “And now faith, hope, love abide, these three. And the greatest of these is love.”
What could be better than hope? Love. What could be better than faith? Love.
Love, non-sentimental, self-giving love is the greatest of all to receive and to give in God’s good creation.
