TRUE LOVE

I Corinthians 13: 1-13   Luke 4: 21-30

The Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

Bernice Powell Jackson served as the President of the World Council of Churches for North America.  She directed Bishop Desmond Tutu’s Scholarship Fund. She is currently working with a New Orleans congregation in a poor parish hardest hit by the floods from broken levees.  She spoke Wednesday at the Earl Lectures of the Pacific School of Religion here in Berkeley.  She told stories of exciting interfaith global community emerging out of risk-taking hospitality in war torn and devastated lands.

In the question and answer period someone asked her how it is possible to overcome all the obstacles to interfaith relations, how to overcome acts of war and fear and hatred done in the name of religion.  She answered: “Love.” 

Someone asked her where she found hope.  She said,  “That love thing really is the key.  Keep teaching the Love.”

One young adult wept as she talked about settling, year by year, into a smaller, less meaningful life, less challenging goals, and an ever less diverse circle of friends.  Jackson’s response? “Keep working at it.  Keep trying to unlock the love.”

“Keep trying to unlock the love”... that resides within us ... that extends beyond us ... the ground of our being that claims us, transforms us, and strengthens us ... that shakes us to our foundations and sometimes confronts us in silence.

The thirteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth ... is the “love chapter.”  It begins “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

If I articulate, if I create, if I use all my spiritual and intellectual gifts on a daily basis,... but don’t love, I’m nothing but noise.  If I advocate for justice at every opportunity but don’t love, my actions are incomplete.

A few moments ago we read some verses from that chapter, and several other biblical texts on love ... “love is stronger than death” ... “Love is patient and kind” ... “do not love in word or speech only; love also in deed and truth” .. “Love does not rejoice in the wrong but rejoices in the right ... love is faithful.  Love never ends.” 

Paul is writing to a church in a wealthy and culturally diverse port city known for challenging sexual boundaries and social values. Hmmm.  The church, in Corinth, was filled with those who were “spiritual but not religious,” those who wanted religious experience without religion, and tensions arose over which gifts of the Spirit were most important, which techniques of love worked best.

The attempt to use a sense of spirituality without taking its substance seriously has reached new heights today.

I saw the most mind-boggling example of this in Las Vegas earlier this month.  I saw a vast billboard for the Venetian Hotel advertising “Religious Nightlife” and  “Spiritual Dining.” 

The love Paul describes is not the love one can find at the Venetian or in a greeting card in February or in self-help shelves.  The love Paul describes is a challenging verb of concrete action for the well-being of the other, not vague spirituality or self-interested sentimentality.  I Corinthians chapter 13 is read most often at weddings, and well it should be.  But it might also be read on Wall Street, in jails, in church councils and in Congress.  The elasticity, tenacity and enduring power of love is in doing love. 

Love means taking risks.  Love means always saying you’re sorry.

Love means hospitality especially when it is inconvenient, when we cannot afford it and don’t feel like it.  Love means showing up at the point of need, in the words of Bernice Powell Jackson.

In the 4th chapter of Luke, Jesus begins his public ministry by returning to the synagogue in Nazareth ... his home town ... He opened the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and read to his former neighbors and family friends words that had to be familiar to them.  The prophet Isaiah had written, and Jesus read, “the spirit of the Lord is upon me, because (God) has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  (God) has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” And then Jesus said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

His home church, I mean synagogue, loved it.  His neighbors were “amazed at the gracious words” that came from that boy’s mouth.  So how did proud neighbors, amazed at Joe and Mary’s son, turn into a lynch mob when Jesus preached his first sermon on this gracious text?  Jesus preached to them of God’s grace for others, not for them.

Imagine this: Cory reads these words of the prophet Isaiah, then says to us, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  How proud and inspired we would be.  Then imagine our response as Cory goes on to preach God’s grace for the people of Iraq, that God’s release for all all immigrants currently detained, for every third strike prisoner.  He preaches God’s purpose, not being worked out in churches, but in temples in North Korea.

Cory does not preach for donations to the Bishop’s Appeal for the children of Africa, but quotes Bishop Mvume Dandala of the All Africa Conference of Churches  “Poverty in Africa is the direct causal effect of the wealth of the North.” Good news to the poor disturbs unexamined assumptions and privilege.

Jesus’ listeners in his home synagogue in Nazareth were those who assumed that God’s promised blessings were intended for them, while the judgments would befall others, especially enemies. When Jesus brings up Elijah and the Phoenician widow and Elisha and the Syrian leper, it is to underline that God’s actions are for others, for outsiders, even for enemies.  Jesus took their beloved texts and gave them to others!

Dr. James Sanders, in his work, God Has A Story Too, describes it this way,  “It must be stressed that the faithful at Nazareth were no more selfish in thinking this way, no more mistaken in their theology, than we are. ... “To suggest that in the final analysis God, our God, is the God of everybody else too, is entirely too much.  We ask, like the folk at Nazareth, ‘What’s the use?’ And we do so because our normal view of hope and of truth is partisan.  The church, which is charged with the message that God is God, is the institution most in danger, precisely because of that mission, of domesticating God.”

As we read the Bible, the Daily Message, or Sunday texts, Dr. Sanders gives us a helpful key -- “Whenever our reading of a biblical passage makes us feel self-righteous, we can be confident we have misread it.”

May God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial sentiments so that we may live deep within our hearts and unlock love that never ends.