UCC Church of Charlotte

'To download a copy of this sermon please click here

'
If I Have Not Love
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30

Grace and Peace to you this morning.  Grace and Peace.
    
Love.

A word that evokes a rousing “bah humbug” from the cynics and a swoon
from the romantics.  A word that covers a multitude of attitudes,
meanings and usages.  How we define love usually comes from our
experiences.

Our first glimpses of love came from our parents and our family.  How
mom and dad acted towards each another, towards us, towards our
siblings, was our first example, shaping our view in profound ways.

This love might have been caring and nurturing, stern and forbidding,
gentle and tender, strong and protective, absent and misguided, or any
number of other combinations and options.  And it may have changed
over the years, or day by day, or moment by moment.  Welcome to the
human race, where for good or for ill, our humanity gets worked out in
our relationships, especially those closest to us.

These were our first glimpses of love, but not our only glimpses.  We
saw how our friends’ parents interacted with each other, with their
children, with our parents and with us.  We began to see myriad the
forms of relationships.  We started to detect that some were better
than others.  We started to see how we wanted to live, how we wanted
to love.

Somewhere along the way we made friends.  People it was fun to hang
out with; people with common activities, or common backgrounds, or
common likes and dislikes.  Friendship is a kind of love.  It is the
love that says, “Wow this whatever-it-is is pretty cool, I need to
call them and show them and share this with them.”  This love found us
being connected to people by choice, not simply by blood or birth or
happenstance.  There is the family we are born into, and the family we
choose for ourselves.

Yesterday, at the memorial service for Leone Gordon, we spoke of her
sister, Gladys Stacey.  They were not related by birth, but for so
many years they were joined at the hip.  Herb and Gladys were a second
family to Leone’s kids, both with guidance and correction.  They
shared the love we call friendship, and it was a profound expression
of love, as is the grief at such a friend’s passing.

Somewhere along the way, usually when we are most awkward, we start to
see some people around us in a new and different way.  We start to
become attracted to others.  We try to dress and look and sound and
smell a certain way so that a certain person will notice us.  We start
liking things that this other person likes so that we can find excuses
to hang out together.  We start asking a certain person out on a date,
usually timed to perfectly coincide with our own acne break-outs and
other such difficulties.

Romantic love, physical attraction, sexual impulses and other such
things turn us into raving lunatics, I mean teenagers, I mean people
“in love.”  And we know that this sometimes happens long past the
teenage years.  And for a relationship to last, it cannot be based on
romantic love alone.  Friendship and companionship are a must if a
relationship is to last.
    
And all of these experiences come to bear when we try and define
“love.”  However good, or not-so-good, however healthy or unhealthy,
however rich or spare our experiences are, we bring them to our view
of love.
    
But there is another description of love we find in the stories of our
faith.  We sometimes experience this love our moments of grace, in our
hour of forgiveness, in our experience of deep connection, in our
communion with God.  Perhaps it was modeled to us in our childhood by
our parents or grandparents or others.  Perhaps we came to it later,
whether we sought it out or it sought us out.
    
The Bible not only speaks of the love of God, but gives us insight
into thousands of years of people of faith trying to understand and
express it.
    
The first expressions speak of God’s love as covenantal faithfulness.
Living up to the promises made; seeking to fulfill the terms of the
relationship.  Many of the early covenants were expressed as one might
express a contract or a treaty.  Except that the covenant is a
different thing.

If we make a contract, we each have our own part we need to live up
to.  When two nations sign a treaty, it lays out what will and won’t
happen if the terms of the treaty are met or broken.  Contracts can be
litigated in the courts.  Treaties are settled by diplomacy or war.
    
A covenant with God, however, is different.  To what court shall we
appeal our case?  Job tried, but found that God was God, and therefore
also the judge of the case.  How do we practice diplomacy with God, or
declare war on God?
    
Covenants are mutual.  Both God and Abraham, God and Israel, God and
the Jewish people, God and the church, are each invested and mutually
connected by the covenant.  But this mutuality is not equality.
    
And so we speak of God’s love as a given love.  Closer perhaps to what
our parents gave us as children, for we cannot return it in equal
measure as we seek to do friendship or romantic love.  God has no
expectation of our ability to match it.
    
It is also a saving love, both in the miraculous moments of an
outstretched arm, as with the parting of the waters of the seas, and
in the quiet moments of hope, as in the still, small voice Elijah
found in the wilderness.
    
It is sometimes a mysterious love, as in the parables and teachings of
Jesus which sometimes enraged his listeners, or the presence of God in
the midst of our grief.
    
It is a love of deep caring, by the God who hears the cries of the
oppressed.  And it is more than sentimentality, as God provides for
all creation.
    
It is a love beyond measure, that God loved us long before we knew of
God, much less tried to love God back.
    
In one of John’s letter, he is moved put it bluntly: God is love.
    
Paul writes from his experiences of love.  The great stories of faith
in which he was brought up and also in his own conversion and opening
to grace are what allow Paul to write such an amazing description
beyond parental and collegial and romantic experiences of love.
    
If I have all the power of Jesus to heal the sick, and raise the dead,
and face down the empire, and tame death itself by being raised, but
have not love, then it doesn’t mean a thing.
    
If I follow all the rules, and live a good and upright life, and am
seen as a good person by all around me, but have not love, I have
nothing.
    
To understand this kind of love is to try and practice it.  It is no
mere coincidence that Paul’s definition of love comes as he is writing
to a church in all its beauty and messiness.  For this definition of
love is not only our goal, it is how we will get there:

Love is patient and kind;
love is not jealous or boastful;
it is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures
all things.
Love never ends.
So faith, hope, love abide, these three;
but the greatest of these is love.

And as God so loves us, let us seek to love God and one another the
same way, as best we can.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.