Normally I'm not one to publish a sermon online (or anywhere else) after preaching it in a particular setting. I believe the words written do not have the same meaning when not spoken. It's hard to embody a sermon electronically. However, since I got a huge assist on this one from my Facebook friends, I thought I'd share for folks to see what our online conversation produced. Thanks again for everyone that helped answer my question about love. Enjoy!
Arlington Community Church, January 27, 2012
Perhaps, like many of you, I
feel I have a special relationship with chapter 13 of First Corinthians. When Kelse and I were married almost five
years ago, verses four through eight were the only scripture we had read in our
ceremony. When I was in Phoenix later
that year, exploring a mall near the hotel I was staying at, I found a large
heart shaped wall hanging with those words inscribed in the middle, surrounded by
flowers and vines. So often I hear those
words echo within my soul, starting so simply, telling me that love is
patient. And love is kind. And it is not envious. And on and on. It’s a wonderful meditation on love that I
fully embrace. But there is more to this
chapter, and it starts by telling us that if we do not have love, we have
nothing. Naturally, not wanting to be
nothing, I asked myself: what is love?
What do I need to have, or, more importantly, what do I need to do so
that I can be more than a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal?
So over the last week, I’ve been
on a quest to discover the meaning of the word “love.” As Christians we talk
about love all the time, but do we really fully understand what it is? I’m not sure that I do. So I began researching love so that I might
better know. First, I consulted the
scripture. In this chapter we hear so
many different things here of what love is and what love is not. Love is patient and kind. It is not envious or prideful. It rejoices in the truth. It bears all things. It believes, it hopes, and it endures,
without end. In this scripture, love is
one thing and many things, and it is all over the place. In fact, in chapter 13 of First Corinthians,
the word love appears in my translation nine different times. There are another five times in which it is
referred to with a pronoun. Put another
way, a full five percent of this scripture is simply one word: love. That’s a lot of love. But I always argue for more love, and I wish
Paul had given us a little more to go on here because these words he gives us
are not definitions but instead personifications of love. They are abstractions, not descriptions. I cannot touch kind. I cannot hear patience. I cannot put love in a cookie jar and place
it on my coffee table and say, “See, there it is! I have love!
Would you like to have some? I
made it just for you!” These
abstractions in this didn’t give me enough to go on, so I realized I had to go
somewhere else. Where else do you go
when you want to understand the meaning of something? I consulted a dictionary.
I found fourteen different
definitions for the word “love” when used as a noun, including “a profoundly
tender, passionate affection for another person” or “a feeling of warm personal
attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend” or “affectionate
concern for the well-being of others” or even “the benevolent affection of God
for His creatures, or the reverent affection due from them to God.” Then I found six more definitions of how to
use love as a verb, including “to have a profoundly tender, passionate
affection for” and “to need or require; benefit greatly from.” After reading the dictionary, I felt closer
to understanding love, but there was still much left to decipher. Which of these definitions of love should I
settle on? I needed to do some more
research.
Next, I consulted popular music,
for where have some of our modern conceptions of love been told to us but
through music? I discovered that all you
need is love, that I can’t get enough of your love, that love will keep us
alive, that your love keeps lifting me higher, and that I would do anything for
love. I also learned that love hurts,
that only love can break your heart, that love is a battlefield, and that there
are fifty ways to leave your lover. (pause)
Confused yet? I certainly was. I was almost back to square one. So I tried something new again, and I
consulted my friends.
Rather than asking a few folks
face to face, this was a question I crowdsourced. By that, I mean I took to the internet and
asked the nearly 400 people I am connected to on Facebook to fill in the
following sentence: love is (blank). Very quickly I received a number of responses,
some growing off of others. Here’s some
of what I got: Love is where we want to
be. Love is the best chance that we’ve
got. Love is ferocious. It is a verb, something that you do. It is intense, it is hard to catch, it is the
great revealer. It is a choice, it is
elusive, it is rough, and it is messy and disruptive. Love is underrated, it is justice and mercy,
and it is family and friends. Perhaps
the most abstract response was that love is blue. Perhaps my favorite was almost as abstract:
love is not bound by geography…and frequently smelly. In retrospect, I enjoyed hearing from my
friends on this subject, but as I thought about it more I realized this
exercise didn’t give me insight into what love is so much as it gave me insight
into the current emotional state of my friends.
It was time again to look somewhere else.
As part of this process, I even
consulted our President. I listened
intently to hear what President Obama had to say in his inaugural address on
Monday. I was inspired by his words as
he named the struggle for equality this country has seen, from women, to
African-Americans, to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Beyond that, I heard him say that if “we are
truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be
equal as well.” (pause) Ah. Now I feel like I’m getting closer to the
truth. Out of all of this research I’ve
learned that love is many, many things, but here I find that the love we give one another must
be as equal as we are to one another.
Put another way, love is a communal effort given individually.
Armed
with this mindset, I went back to the scripture and discovered more that I was
missing. As I said earlier, the
thirteenth chapter is more than just verses four through eight. In the end of the chapter, we hear that
prophecies and tongues and knowledge, these spiritual gifts that Paul has been
addressing and we have been discussing over the past few weeks, they all come
to an end. But what about love? Love never ends. Love is with us from the moment we are
conceived, grows with us as we age, and remains as we continue on into what
comes after this life. Some might think
of this as the love we carry with us into the Great Beyond, but I think of it
as the love we leave behind as we travel onward. It’s the love that is poured into us, grows,
and comes bursting forth with every new person that we meet.
This
is why I was so inspired by our President’s speech: the more love we give to
each other, the more we understand it and know it for ourselves. That’s the nature of equal love: we get just
as much as we give. That’s what kept
tugging at me all week as I explored my own understanding of what love is. Love is a feeling that can’t be quantified. Love has layers upon layers of meaning,
meaning that is found with each new connection of love that we make, from one
individual to another.
That
concept of new and growing love echoed true for me last week as we baptized Jay
Sunday afternoon. After we spoke some
traditional phrases and gathered around the baptismal font while Jay had water
and oil sprinkled on his tiny forehead, there was a moment in which the entire
community was given a charge in caring for Jay.
Pastor Jim Mitulski spoke of the love gathered in that place, connected
to Jay through the touch we surrounded him with. And then Jim said something I will never
forget: he turned to look directly at our six week old baby and said, “Jay,
there is nothing, nothing, nothing that you can ever do that will break this
love for you.” (pause) Love endures, for
there is nothing, nothing, nothing we can do to break it. (pause) Now, if Paul had written that, and
that was all that Paul had ever written, it would have sufficed for me. But even then, it still does not tell me what
love is, or tell me how I should love.
After a baptism, a Presidential speech, some scriptural and cultural
research, and asking some friends, I’m still back to the beginning again: what
is love?
I
went back to the scripture in my bible one more time to see if reading this
passage again and again might bring new light to this subject. That’s when I saw it: a note I hadn’t
followed up on before. It told me to
relate this scripture to First Corinthians, chapter eight, verse one. Here, in this one verse, my quest came to an
end, for is says in that verse, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” Love builds up. So there it is. After all my searching, three little words
that tell me all I need to know. Love
builds up. Shall we try some of chapter
13 again with that in mind?
“If I speak in the tongues of
men or of angels, but do not have love build up, I am only a resounding
gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the
gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have
a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love build up, I am
nothing. If I give all I possess to the
poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have
love build up, I gain nothing.”
It makes sense to me now. If love is that which builds up, then that is
what I must do, and what we must do.
That’s what I heard last weekend when we baptized Jay. That’s what I heard from the President on
Monday morning. That’s what I heard when
I asked my friends. When we love, we are
building up each other, equally. As I
think of the charge I was given to love Jay, I think of how, over his lifetime,
I have the honor of building him up to be the best Jay Basil Hills he can be,
whatever that may mean. In the process,
I get to build up myself, and my wife, and my family, and my friends, and my
neighbors, and the folks at church, and the strangers walking by on the street,
and the person halfway across the world that I have yet to meet. I get to build them up just as they get to
build me up. That’s the love we share
for one another, and that’s the love that I give to you. Take this moment, and every moment, to love
those around you. Remember the community
of love you are an important part of, and share with them as equally as we are
created equally. Build them up as they
would want you to build them up. With
patience. And kindness. Without envy or pride. By rejoicing in truth. By bearing, and believing, and hoping, and
enduring. Without end. Amen.
