Love is a hackneyed and often over-used word in our culture. In this sermon I explore the relevance of the Bible’s great passage on love (1 Corinthians 13) for our lives today. What can this ancient writing on the nature of God as love offer us in this often hardened and hateful world? Come and see.

“God is . . .” A Sermon on 1 Corinthians 13.1-13. Davis Community Church. January 30, 2022

Our reading today, or at least a few verses from it, is among the best known passages in the Bible. That’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s a good thing because, since it’s so well-known, it must be saying something that’s universal. It’s a bad thing because it’s so familiar that we’re likely to take its meaning for granted and miss what it can teach us about living well today.

I read the text several times this week with several different groups. We were practicing Lectio Divina, the divine reading of scripture. Lectio Divina is a way of listening spiritually for the holy whisper of God coming to us more intuitively through the biblical text rather than by studying the Bible intellectually. We practice Lectio Divina by reading a short passage of scripture at least three times, each time deepening our listening until something comes to us we didn’t expect—an insight, a nudge, a question, a concern.

I was doing Lectio Divina with one of these groups when one of you said that you’ve heard the text at so many weddings that when I started reading it, you just tuned out. “Been there, done that,” you said. You figured you knew what it said. But you stayed with it, and by the time we were done, something new had emerged for you.

Things that become familiar can become boring even if they’re beautiful. But beauty can break through the familiar.

Consider the glory of a California sunset—the sky lit up with various shades of orange, red, pink and purple, with who knows what else—the clouds, big and billowy, floating like great white islands in a vast sea. Surrounded by such natural glory, people like you and me, so familiar with our sunsets, can walk into the grocery store at sunset, head down, fumbling for our N95 masks, muttering to ourselves about how tired we are of all this trouble.

Meanwhile, if someone in Detroit (who’s still stuck in a long, cold, dreary winter) saw what you and I could see if we would just lift our heads, they might weep in wonder and awe at the beauty sprawling limitless and free across the sky.

Familiarity can breed boredom—and sometimes contempt. And neither boredom nor contempt support the kind of life we want and deserve.

Today I want to rescue this well-known scripture passage from familiarity. I want us to encounter its timeless wisdom for the days we’re living through so that we can live well no matter what we’re facing; so we can taste true wonder, live with awe, and experience the divine energy we call “love” flowing through us and around us with less inhibition and more liberation, so that we can break the spell of desperation that seems to hold so many people captive these days.

The person who wrote this section of the Bible wasn’t writing the Bible. The Apostle Paul was writing a letter to a troubled group of early Christians living in the city of Corinth in southern Greece. He had no idea then that we would be reading his letter thousands of years later and treating it as Holy Scripture.

Here’s the story behind the letter: Paul, the writer, had been transformed by a mystical encounter with Christ while he was on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus focused on his mission to eradicate the followers of Jesus. Paul was a Jewish man whose name at the time was once Saul. He was a leader of a conservative religious sect within Middle Eastern Judaism; they called themselves “Pharisees.” The word means “set apart or separated.” They were religious people who were passionate about a pure devotion to God. They avoided anything that might water down that devotion or threaten it. Jesus, according to Saul and many others, was a threat to their pure devotion to God. Jesus challenged the religious customs and ideas the Pharisees held dear.

And so, Saul hated Jesus and he hated the followers of Jesus. After he presided over the killing of a man named Stephen, the first Christian martyr, he went with authority from the religious leaders in Jerusalem to stamp out the new hotbed of heresy in Damascus which was arising from the teaching of Jesus.

Believing he was doing God’s work, Saul was on the desert road to Damascus when he had a mystical experience. Here’s part of that story taken from the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament:

Now as Saul was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Saul asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”

Can you imagine the astonishment Saul must have felt, the confusion, the absolute renovation of thinking he had to undergo in order to simply process this scandalous vision?

Here was Saul, going to Damascus to persecute a renegade band of people who followed the teachings of a dangerous heretic. Saul knew that Jesus the heretic was dead and buried. But here was Jesus appearing to him in a vision and speaking to him and telling him that he was somehow persecuting this same Jesus.

“I am after them,” Saul must have said to the Voice. “How is it that by persecuting them, I am persecuting you?”

“I am in them, Saul,” the Voice told him. “They are in me. We are one.”

It’s a wonder he didn’t reject all this as an apparition of the devil or as a desert mirage or the effect of heat exhaustion. The story says he was somehow aware that he’d been overpowered by a holy force; he’d been turned from his disastrous ways; his zeal to serve God was turned on its head and he suddenly realized that his hatred and violence were making him an enemy of all that is good and truth and just. He had no option but to yield.

Saul had an encounter with a force that completely reoriented his life from a hater to a lover, from a killer to a champion of life—not just some lives, but all lives because he came to understand that all lives matter to Jesus. And because of the encounter, Saul changed his name to Paul as a sign of this new beginning.

Hatred put an end to Saul. Love gave Paul a whole new life.

If only more of us in this world could have such an encounter—our violence, our bigotry, our hostility, our destructiveness to each other and all we hold dear might cease as quickly and powerfully as it did in Saul’s life. And the world would be changed.

This kind of encounter and transformation is what this letter of Paul’s aimed to do for those he was writing to so many centuries ago. It could do that for us today.

Paul wrote this letter a couple decades after his visionary encounter with Jesus. He was writing as a pastor to a house church he’d helped form a few years earlier. Paul was in another part of the Mediterranean when he learned that there were great divisions among the Christians in Corinth. They’d come together through their own encounters with God’s love revealed through Jesus. But they came from different walks of life—some rich, others poor, some sailors, others soldiers, some prostitutes, others Jewish converts, some converts from Greek religions, others from Roman ones. They’d come together as a community of equality, no one better or more important than another because God’s love made no distinctions; they learned that God loved all of them equally and totally.

But because there were social differences among them, it didn’t take long for them to start dividing up again. That’s the way we all are, isn’t it? There’s the ideal, and there’s the reality. They knew they were loved by God, but they weren’t yet practicing the love of God; love was flowing to them but not yet through them. Instead, they were jockeying for power, allowing the old conventions and patterns of society to pull them apart. Before they started following the Way of Jesus, they knew the ways of society; they disliked, despised, and even hated others, and they were falling into those old patterns and behaviors and prejudices all over again.

Hearing about it, and knowing himself how easy it can be to imitate the old familiar yet destructive ways, Paul wrote this letter to show them a better way to be human. He wrote to remind them that love is divine. It’s not just an emotion; it’s not merely romantic; love is the very nature of God and therefore love is the way the cosmos works. Not to love is to move against the current of nature; when you don’t love you actually run your hand against the grain of the universe.

I did a graveside memorial service yesterday. A 41 year old man killed by a hit-and-run driver.

Death is always a wake up call, an invitation to open more fully to love. In over thirty years of pastoral ministry, I’ve never heard anyone as they’re dying or as they’re standing at a grave say, “I wish I’d made more money. Or why didn’t I climb the ladder over more people? Or if only I’d hurt, angered, and hated more people.” The fact is, death has the power to strip us of pretension, illusion, and vain ambition. Sometimes I can see it for just a moment in the eyes of those who are dying or on the face of someone who’s having to let go of a loved one. It’s that look of regret: “Oh, God, if I could just have had another chance at this, I’d have loved more. I’d have given anything to love more.”

And then that look fades.

The person dies. It’s over for them. No more chances.

Family and friends walk back to their cars. They leave their resolve behind, fall back into old patterns.

And here you and I are. We’re hearing the eternal truth: “If I don’t have love, I gain nothing,” and something stirs in our souls. The eyes of our hearts flutter open as if we’re awakening from sleep to what matters most.

But soon we’ll jump off Zoom. We’ll close our web browser. And we’ll go back to the way things were, the way things are in the world. Our divisions and hostilities. Our petty gripes. Our vain ambitions. We’ll mutter about the way a neighbor drags their garbage bin to the curb at midnight. We’ll rundown a coworker. We’ll skewer a politician. We’ll revel in a social media meme that ridicules the kind of people we don’t like.

We’re slowly killing people with a thousand little cuts. And we’re killing ourselves. And we’re perpetuating a way of being human that fosters the dysfunction of society. And that dysfunctional way of being human keeps us locked in attitudes and habits that are harmful to human life and problematic for all life on this planet.

“Saul, Saul. Why are you persecuting me?”

“I’m not, Lord. I’m ridding the world of your enemies. I’m fighting for a cause.”

“They are not my enemies; they are all my creation,” says the Voice. “There is only one true cause. I love them all, even those who reject love, who refuse to love, who cannot love. Even those who hurt and hate. I cannot hate or hurt anyone,” says the Voice, “for I am love.”

“I am patient. I am kind. I am not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. I do not insist on My own way; I am not irritable or resentful; I do not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoice in the truth.I bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. I never end.

“I am love.”

“And you are too. Love is your true nature.”

Let us grow still. Become prayerful. Join me in this meditation. Begin by becoming more aware and intentional with your breathing. Slow down. Become deliberate. Give yourself space to encounter God. There is no hurry. There is only now. Be here. Now.

Breathe God in…

Now, breathe God out…

Breathe love in…

Now, breathe love out…

Breathe God in…

Now, breathe out any fear that you may hold…

Breathe love in…

Now, breathe out any anger or resentment that you cling to…

As you breathe in, think of someone you have trouble loving, someone who may have hurt you or frightens you, someone who may be easy to hate…

Take note of that feeling inside you. What do you sense inside? A tightening? A tension? A burning? Sit with that for a moment. Feel the dis-ease within you...

Now breathe out and let go of the anger or resentment or fear you feel…

Breathe love in…

Now, breathe love out…

Breathe God in…

Now, breathe God out…

[Silence]