And I will show you a still more excellent way.
According to many people in my family, my
great-grandmother, Pearl, whom we all called Gram, had a problem, a quite
serious one. Gram was an “any friend of
yours is a friend of mine,” kind of gal.
And this did not mean that she was simply nice to them, she literally
treated them like family.
She
shocked us time and time again by doing that, sometimes long after our
friendship with that person was over. I
remember her going on a couple of trips with former girlfriends of my Uncle
Jimmy, her youngest grandson. We’re not
talking about a trip to Rochester to shop.
We’re talking places like the Rocky Mountains and Hawai’i.
The
family spent a great deal of time behind the scenes weaving various conspiracy
theories, mostly involving these people wanting to get ahold of Gram’s
mysterious, and mostly mythical, stash of money. There was a theory also that this was only an
ego trip for her. She loved these people
“fawning” all over her.
I
have no idea whether any of that was true.
I have no idea what the motivation was for those relationships from
either side. What I did and do know was
how easy it was to be absolutely devoted to that woman. If she could get me as a teenager to sit with
her and watch the Lawrence Welk show on a regular basis then clearly she was
someone people easily loved.
What
exactly is love? The apostle Paul
introduces his great piece about the nature of love by saying, at the very end
of chapter 12,
And I will show you a still more excellent way.
What does he mean?
Well, he’s writing to a community about which he is deeply
troubled. It seems to him they are
turning their backs on everything he taught them, all of the clear implications
of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the good news. There are factions, and hierarchies of
importance have developed, and not everyone shares the Eucharist in the same
way. In short, the radical equality
which made the Christian community so distinctive from the world around it in
his day, was shattered.
The last two weeks we have heard Paul speaking emphatically
about the necessity of all gifts—of whatever type or “importance”—to the
community, which needs to understand itself to be a body—Christ’s body, where
all the parts work together and none can say, “I have no need of you.”
That’s all very important stuff, but he knows that nothing
is actually likely to change without some serious conversion to what he calls
the more excellent way of love.
And he begins to talk about love by saying that all the
giftedness in the world, including generosity (!) and the deepest faith, is of
little or no consequence without love.
“Noisy gongs or clanging symbols,” he calls those of us who stray of
this most excellent way.
But, again, what is love?
He goes on to say in beautiful words that almost everyone wants to read
at weddings, which isn’t a bad thing, but Paul was not talking about marriage
here. He was talking about how you and I relate to everyone and anyone.
In the spirit of Paul’s words I want to talk briefly about
three things we often confuse with love, especially in a community like this
one.
First of all, we confuse love with agreeing with each other
or thinking and feeling the same way. I
experienced this in my Inter-Varsity group in college, where like belief, and
even like experience, was very nearly mandatory. People made up stories about being “born
again” that fit into a very distinctive pattern in order to belong. Eventually I was instead attracted to the
Episcopal Church, that did have this common experience of the Eucharist, but I
was told that different members of the Church believed different things were
going on when we celebrated and received communion. Conformity of belief was not necessary.
Second of all, we confuse love with loyalty. Now loyalty is not a bad thing. In fact, it
can be a very good thing. But loyalty
implies an exclusiveness that love seeks to break open. A key—perhaps the key—component of love is
freedom. How does this work in a
marriage, where we take vows of exclusiveness?
In marriage, two people covenant together to share the nurturing of love
that is to be shared with the whole world.
We think every couple is to be a self-sufficient world unto itself. No.
I love my spouse, fiercely actually, and I am steadfastly
loyal to him, but that does not mean that he gets all my love or that the love
we share stays between us. All of us are
called to generate love in ever more widening circles.
Third, we confuse love with attraction. We like to say, “It was love at first
sight.” No, it was attraction at first
sight. Love is a journey, not a
moment. Attraction may result in love as
a relationship grows. But it does not
necessarily do so. How many marriages
die when the attraction is over and no real, deep, abiding love had developed?
So those I think are things love is not. You may have your
own list. And no doubt you have a list
of what love is. What I settled on to
speak to you about this morning was this:
love is allowing the freedom from the fear of failure.
This came up for me this week when I heard just a bit of an
interview with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor about her new book, My Beloved World. She was speaking about how deeply the fear of
failure affects most of us, and I do believe she is right. Personally, I think it is almost universal,
at least in this culture, crossing differences of gender, race, ethnicity,
orientation, etc.
And I also got to thinking how prevalent it is in the
church. How much we foster it with this
sense that hangs in the air of most churches that if you do not behave
yourself, you’re going to wish that the worst thing that could happen to you
was your mother getting mad at you. One
of God’s favorite words is wrath, what he does best is judge, and when he gets
angry with you it’s for ever.
But none of that is true.
Listen to St. Paul.
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.
Love never ends.
Do you know what the most important truth is about those
words? First and foremost, they are how
God loves us. Paul does not say that
directly, but it has to be true. Surely
we do not hold God to a lesser standard than we hold ourselves when it comes to
love, do we?
The good news here is that you “are fully known” to God and
all those things about love are true for how God feels about you.
Now if we know that and believe down into the marrow of our
bones, can’t we do better about banishing the fear of failure from at least
this community? What if this were the
kind of place where people could shed their fear of failure like an old coat
just inside the door? Another way of
saying that is, what if this were a place, a community, where there was
absolutely no condition on our love for one another? None.
Paul obviously believed that such a community was possible,
although he was enough of a realist to know that it does not just happen
because you want it to, and it certainly does not happen with a snap of the
finger. That’s why he called it, “the
more excellent way.”
Let us pray that we may continue to learn this most
excellent way of love that banishes all fear.
No comments:
Post a Comment