A Still More Excellent Way
1 Corinthians 13
Love, love, love. Love is all you need. Recently I received an email from several friends showing people from all over the world singing those words. Those musicians were all filmed at the same time from many countries all over the world. Over 150 countries in all. It was part of a project put on by Starbucks to help fight AIDS in Africa. As I watched those film clips, seeing so many different looking faces, styles of music, and costumes, I got a very warm feeling in my heart. After all; love is all you need!
I don’t get such a warm feeling in my heart when I read the letters of Paul. Most of what Paul has to say to the churches he has founded is a little less warm and fuzzy than the video in my email. It took me many years of study and reflection to realize how difficult Paul’s job was. He was a leader of churches he could rarely visit. Many churches. I have enough trouble keeping track of things in one church I can visit every day. I can’t imagine trying to do it long-distance. In one of his letters, when Paul lists some of the ways he has suffered in his ministry, he mentions the burden of having churches that don’t always get it “right.” Indeed, Paul describes weeping on several occasions for some of his beloved, yet troublesome churches. One of those churches was the one in Corinth. Our Scripture for today is part of a letter to that church. It is one of the most glorious readings in all of literature. Listen, with me, to 1 Corinthians 13.
Often, we read this chapter of Scripture apart from the chapters before and after it. Today, we will consider the context of these words of Paul about love. Some 17 years after the death of Christ, Paul, a Jew, who had become a believer about 14 years earlier, preached the gospel to a few Jews and Gentiles in Corinth. The letter we call “first” Corinthians is the second letter Paul wrote to that church. The first letter to the Corinthians has been lost.
Corinth was an important city in the Roman Empire. Whether justifiably or not, cities sometimes get a reputation. Corinth was known for a generally superficial cultural life. People from all over the empire would travel through Corinth, bringing their religions and lifestyles along. Corinth was known for wealth without culture and for the abuse of the poor by the wealthy. Corinthians were described by writers of the day as persons “without grace or charm.” The wealthy people were coarse and objectionable. The poor had to grovel for the smallest morsels of food. Corinth was a city where the line between the haves and the have-nots was sharp and clear.
The character of the city of Corinth also had an impact on the church Paul founded. The church in Corinth was riddled with strife and division. Much of First Corinthians addresses major problems in their church life: the poor being excluded from full participation in the Lord’s Supper, sexual immorality, and competition among the members over who had the most impressive spiritual gifts.
These problems and the question of spiritual gifts are the issues that gave rise to chapter 13. Some of the members of the Corinthian congregation seemed to believe that speaking in tongues was a gift of higher status, so folks who were able to speak in tongues felt superior to their “less gifted” neighbors. They focused their attention on themselves and their superior gifts and ignored, neglected or disregarded others. That behavior was something Paul could not abide.
So, a Christian community in conflict was the grain of sand that served as the irritant that created one of the loftiest passages of Scripture ever written. Such is the nature of God’s work in our lives. During the most exasperating struggles is the seed of a something new and beautiful.
The context of this chapter of Scripture is a community. The Corinthian community. We often hear these words read at weddings, but individual love is not what Paul is concerned with. This chapter is all about how we love one another. And it isn’t the warm and fuzzy…soft and cozy…love we call romantic love. It isn’t the love, love, love of our internet song. It is tough love. Paul makes that clear in the first few words of the chapter. “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love…I am nothing.” That would get his readers’ attention. Since Paul refers to himself as the one who is nothing without love; he can lay out some stern warnings without risk of offending his Corinthian readers. His point here is that extraordinary gifts, grand abilities and skills, extravagant actions…all these are emptied of any worth without love.
What does this love look like? Today, I want to look at only one of the adjectives Paul uses to describe love. He says love is patient.
During the years of Abraham Lincoln’s political life, no one treated him with more contempt than did his Secretary of War, William Stanton. Stanton called Lincoln a “low cunning clown.” He nicknamed Lincoln “the original gorilla” and said that scientists were a fool to wander about Africa trying to capture a gorilla when they could have found one so easily in Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln said nothing. He made Stanton his war minister because Stanton was the best man for the job. He treated Stanton with every courtesy. The years wore on. The night came when the assassin’s bullet murdered Lincoln in the theatre. In the little room to which the President’s body was taken there stood that same Stanton, and looking down on the silent face of Lincoln in all its ruggedness, Stanton said through his tears, “There lies the greatest ruler of men the world has ever seen.” The patience of Lincoln in the face of Stanton’s ridicule and criticism had the last word.
We live in such an impatient culture; we usually think of patience as a lack of impatience. Seeing things this way can cause us to believe patience is passive. Not so. Waiting patiently is not like waiting for the bus to come, the rain to stop, or the sun to rise. The word patience comes from the Latin verb patior, which means “to suffer.” When we love one another in Christian community, there are times we must suffer through. Times when we must place our desire to “get the job done” aside so we can see the needs of the people in the situation. But there is something we receive, too. As we act with patience, we encounter the very nature of God. The God who waits for us. Who woos us. Who welcomes us home, no matter how long we have wandered away. It’s tough. Patient love is not for the faint-hearted. But we do have each other. We have the Christian community. We have this very chapter in Corinthians because the patience of an apostle was being tested by a bickering people. Paul’s writing is a testimony to his own struggle to express a patient love to them.
Patient love works its miracles quietly. Lincoln didn’t live to see the outcome of his loving actions toward Stanton. Yet, those very actions are still remembered today, even as we reflect on them here. Each whisper of love echoes through the ages. These are the things that are remembered. These are the things that are eternal. Patient love is the character of God, and when we show that love to one another, we are participating in the very life of God.
How would our lives be different if we remembered that our expressions of love to each other were the only things that would survive after our life was done? Not the love, love, love that is “all we need.” The love that changes lives, and changes life itself.