Sermon from Sunday

1 Corinthians 13

Wedding of L and C

It is such an honor to be here, this afternoon, and to welcome all of you here, to celebrate this really beautiful thing that God is doing in bringing L and C together in marriage to each other. I know many of you have already been to church today and so you will be delighted to hear that I won’t be talking very long. But I do have a few things to say, and they will all come out of Paul’s 13th chapter in his first letter to the Corinthians and so, if you can lay your hand on a bible near you, you might turn there so you can follow along and not get lost.

Paul, you might remember, in this letter, is writing to a church very confused and gone astray. Their corporate worship is out of order, their relationships are troubled and broken, they are confused about marriage and sexuality, they are caught in dysfunction and trouble. As you read this letter you might feel at home. We, today, are in a similar place, culturally, of confusion and brokenness. In particular, we don’t know who God is and so we don’t know how to worship him, and in worshiping him, to love him.

The Love of this age, the ocean that we swim in, is of devotion to and care of the self. I need to care for myself, a normal person of this age might say, before I can care for another. I like the way you make me feel, we might say, and so I love you. Then we follow it up with sentiments like, ‘love is all you need’ and ‘I’ll do it my way,’ and ‘love love love love love’.

Let’s look at this text. Paul would say ‘I agree, love is all you need.’ But what is this love? And how do we get it?When we come to chapter thirteen Paul has just been in a long discussion about how worship should go. Don’t worry, I won’t take time to put this chapter in context. But Paul’s first line here, in verse one,

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. comes right out of what he has been saying about how and who is speaking in corporate worship, what we are all doing right now. If I stand up and speak with the tongues of men, if I’m really articulate and brilliant and I preach a sermon that is so wonderful your whole life is changed, and if I speak with the tongues of angels, if my speech is so elevated it is as the dialect of angels, of heaven itselfbut have not lovethe noise that I make will be hollow and jarring.

The word for love is ‘agape’. You may have heard this word before, agape. The word in greek doesn’t occupy the same space that it does in English. If I ‘love’ something or someone in English, I have a feeling of affection for them. Its the way that I would express my emotion about something. I love my children. When I gave birth I was quite overwhelmed by the emotion, by the feeling of love that I felt for my child. When I met my husband, my first emotion was real deep dislike, later it turned into an emotion of love. That’s not what agape means. Agape is the word that Paul uses through this whole chapter and it is usually the word to describe when Christians gathered for worship and a meal on the Lord’s Day, Sunday. They would remember God’s Love, God’s Agape, in sending his own Son, Jesus, to be broken, beaten, killed in place of them. God is Agape. He gives himself utterly and completely for the sake of the beloved. He doesn’t hold anything back. His agape is an action.

In other words, if my words are glorious and amazing and true, but I have not given myself for your sake, my words are a hollow and annoying clanging.You might see how difficult this verse alone could be in marriage. If L were to say to C every day, ‘I love you’ but has not love, has not given her whole self for him, her words will be a clanging. If C says, ‘I’d die for you,’ but does not in fact die to himself in those words, they are words that rattle and jar.

Paul goes on, 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 have not love, I am nothing.

Prophetic powers and all mysteries and knowledge are things the Corinthians claimed to possess. They claimed to have spiritual knowledge, to know and see and understand who God is and all the mysteries of the age. Paul calls them ‘wise’ with scare quotes, as in the opposite of wise. They had pretensions of knowledge. And faith, oh, they had faith. They knew what there was to know about God. Except they didn’t know the one thing that mattered, which is love, which is giving your life, your time, your knowledge, your understanding, your faith, for another person, a person who isn’t you, who you might feel doesn’t measure up to your knowledge and greatness. The great temptation, in marriage, is to measure the other person against yourself. Well, I am very good at this and he is not. I must be better than him, I know more, I work harder. But, says Paul, if you don’t have love, I AM nothing, not that I have nothing but that I have become nothing, worthless for the other person, of no use or help to them, because of my great regard for myself.

Paul continues, 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Marriage very easily falls into the trap of give and take. I cook dinner, for him, he does the dishes, for me. See, we each gave, and took. The key is not to take. If I give away all I have, and am willing to die, stop there. See, most of us would be willing to give away everything and die if it would bring us something greater, if we would get something better for it. So, sure, I’ll give away all my stuff and my house if someone will give me better stuff and a bigger house. And sure, I’d be willing to die, if I was going to get to live forever for eternity in exactly the kind of mansion that suits all my aesthetic preferences and with exactly the kind of people that I approve of. But let’s stop and look at Jesus for a minute. He gave up all that he had, which was heaven, a throne, a perfect relationship with God the Father where he never experienced any lack, any loss, none, perfection. And in his life here he had nothing. He had no money, no house. He had one beautifully woven seamless garment that was taken from him when he delivered his body over to be killed. You think burning is bad, crucifixion was the pits. What did he gain? Why did he give up all that? For what did he give up everything he had and finally his body also?

For his bride. For the church. For us sitting here. Most people looking in at the church from the outside don’t think it was worth it. The Son leaves heaven, his Father, all the love in the universe and dies naked and alone to gain…a bunch of hateful jerks. Because isn’t that what we the church are? We are broken. Sometimes we’re mean to each other. We do the wrong thing. We make the wrong decisions. We hurt each other unspeakably.

Why did he do it? For agape. He did it for love. He did it because he loves you. He has an emotion for you, a feeling of affection for you, AND an action of complete self forsakenness.

4 Love is patient writes Paul, patient like God is patient, waiting for us to turn to him, bringing us along to himself in the slow way that allows for our weakness and sin. He is patient.and kind; He is kind. He gives good and beautiful gifts. In places of darkness and trouble, he comes and brings light and life and healing. He is kind. Love does not envy or boast; Love is so busy being patient and kind that it does not have time to worry about that better thing over there. Love is not going to try to make other’s envious. it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It is not unseemly. Love does not do outrageous and jarring things to get attention. Love is not bridezilla,beating people out of her way. Love is not a husband in his man cave, smoking his pipe while his wife struggles with the laundry and the finances and the troubles and concerns of her life. Love does not belittle the other. Love does not shock and embarrass. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;Jesus did not insist on his own way. Not my will, he said to his father, but yours. Love does not insist on its own time table. Love does not impatiently nag. Love is not resentful. It does not reply unkindly or hold a grudge. Love quickly forgives, immediately in fact, and makes excuses for the other to always be letting them off the hook.

6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.Love does not watch out to catch other person in stupidity for embarrassment. Love does not want the other person to sin and fall. Love is delighted when the other comes closer to Jesus, or lets fall a burden or succeeds at something difficult.

In short, writes Paul 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

All things.

Except that sometimes it won’t.

Someone once said to me, when you read 1 Corinthians 13, put your own name in the place of the word love. So, ‘Anne’ for instance, ‘keeps no record of wrongs, Anne is patient and kind and not irritable’.

I won’t go on because I can hear my husband snickering to himself. If ever a great lie was told in church, it would be all of us reading these words and putting our names in here. If you try to do that, you will give to yourself a burden you cannot bear. The fact is that you cannot love each other as Paul is laying out for you here. You are not love. You cannot give yourself to the other person in the way that you should.No, don’t put your name there. The name that goes there, the only name under heaven by which you can be saved, by which you can be agaped, is Jesus.

Jesus is patient. Jesus is kind. Jesus endures all things, believes all things, hopes all things, bears all things, even you. His name is love.And

8 Love never ends.

His love for you is forever. And in so far as you cling to him,and hang onto him and walk towards him, both of you together, you will be able to agape each otherwith the love that he gives younot with your own, but with his.

As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge,it will pass away.

All the stuff of this world isn’t going to last. You both know that. You’ve let go a lot of things already. This new gift that you have, this marriage, like all things in this life, is meant to to be for a time. But it is given for a reason, for a glorious reason, for an eternal reason. The reason that you two come here to promise to Agape one another, to give yourselves totally, completely, imperfectly, brokenly, humbly, truly, is because what you two together represent or show, to the whole world is the wonder of Jesus’ love for his church. The two of you, as you love each other, as you are patient and kind and forbearing and losing of yourselves, you paint a picture of Jesus and the work he does, the love he has for his bride. You two together preach the gospel, day in, day out, in sickness and in health, in easy days and hard ones, in richness and poverty, your love shows the whole world the truth about Jesus and us.

Is it always a perfect picture? Is it always the clear truth? No.

9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.

It is a painting. Sometimes it might seem like the picture has too many filters on it and you can’t make out what it is. Sometimes you might want to get out from the picture. You might want a simpler way.

11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child,I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

When you put all that away, slowly by slowly, the childish selfish sinful, the dim impatient reasoning, when you put it away and walk slowly and steadily and faithfully toward Jesus, the picture will come more and more into focus.

12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

The mirror, scratched, stained, badly lit, made out of something less than good reflecting glass will finally break as you stand, together, on the last day, looking at the one you love,Jesus, who perfectly loves you. You know each other in part, but Jesus knows you perfectly. You know God in part, but God knows you perfectly.

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

All you do need is love. But the love is the giving of the self for another, and that other is Jesus. Amen.