Not a people of The Book, we are people of books, we UU's. In the search for truth, for meaning, for celebration, we mine the Mother Lode of all human exploration. We confine ourselves in no way to one book or relic, but open the vast array of homo sapient creativity to our questioning, searching souls. In so doing, however, perhaps we neglect the possibility that the books that are sanctified by other faiths hold great gifts for us as well, Even as sources, not The Source, even as repositories of inspiration, not the one golden vein, but part of the eureka of human expression that limns the world's core beneath the topsoils of commerce and transaction that fascinate us too often and too well.
And so I come today to dwell on a famous text, Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, its 13th chapter, found in the New Testament of the Christian faith, because it has something to say. we would eschew, and I think rightly, the idea that inspiration is to be found in that text alone I rejoice in the diversity of our Lextionary but let us not neglect the inspiration that lies at our feet. I offer these reflections out of no hubris that my reading is unique or extraordinary these are oft considered words I would focus upon, I know that well.
Rather, my offering today is the thought that considering these elegant, timeless words, considering them carefully and honestly, is apt worship for this hour. Worship can be a cherished thing when we focus upon the familiar and see it for the first time. For what could be better to consider on such a dappled morning, Than the wonder of human love and what it can and does do for all of us on this, our journey through space, at this, our moment in time?
Not just an ode to love, 1 Corinthians 13 emerges from the ministry of Paul and speaks to the life of a church; more than offering an ode, even an evocative, famous ode: Paul speaks of a community, a community he envisions, a community of dreams; a community where agape, the love feast, motivates, enervates; a community where love is life and breath and food.
But that's the vision there is task here, too. The fledging community in Corinth has asked Paul, the itinerant preacher who visits, to answer several of their questions. And so, Paul addresses a present community about whom he cares in Corinth, A renewed and burgeoning metropolis bustling with cosmopolitan trade in Paul's day,
With a rather tawdry reputation of some years' history. He is concerned. He is concerned about their behavior. Concerned about the way they are treating each other, fighting about who possesses spiritual gifts, and who doesn't, drawing up sides, trying to own everything, holding on to everything, adding things up, Sorting winners from losers.
If I speak in tongues of mortal and of angels, and if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, and if I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
All of the wondrous powers at work in Corinth: speaking in tongues, prophecy, deep understanding, the material wealth of the Corinthian community: these impressive things, Are only so much tooting of the horn without love. Without the feeling that makes all things possible, nothing will work. Is that too extreme? Is that too simple? Indeed, how simple is it? This is not the Hallmark card Hershey's chocolate kind of love we're talking about here this is the real thing. And Love is not routine.
Love is giving up. Love is allowing. Love is not about adding, assessing, objective, rational decision making. Think of the ways in our lives that love has injured, has led us to ways and acts and cannot be understood or defended. Love causes pain. Love is struggle. Love is inexplicable. AND. And, love is a priority, an imperative, the best thing possible. Love is living: patient, kind, enduring living. Love gives us strength, real, tangible strength.
And it certainly isn't simple. For the blessed cacophany of words about the ephemeral wonders of love, Love is practical, down to earth, right here: EXTRAORDINARY.
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.
For all of the attention we pay to the feelings of love, love is doing; doing with the whole of one's soul, doing without calculation or anticipation of outcome, Doing, which is being, Being, carried outside of one's self to the care of another,
What ever the identity of that love: parent to child, spouse to spouse, sibling to sibling, friend to friend, Neighbor to neighbor, citizen to citizen, woman to man, man to woman, woman to woman, man to man. It is the same act, a generosity, a selfless, shared harmony that cannot justly be captured by words. Do we forget this, sometimes, when we treat each other as political categories? Do we forget this when we treat each other as objects over which to exercise power? Do we forget this when we defame and abuse because of sexual identity?
Oh, yes, we do. We forget. We forget that love is not category, nor the exercise of power. We forget that love knows no distinctions of identity. We forget what love is. And we wonder why we can't find it when the relatives gather for holidays, or why the public square is empty. Because we shield ourselves in private spaces.
Paul speaks of love's wonder, Its magnificent ability to keep on keeping on, Its unassailable resiliency. Unassailable belssedness within all our grasps, He says to the Corinthians, if you would just stop shouting and pointing at each other, lose your vanity and your pride and try to be with each other, right here and right now, As you walk the walk of life.
For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
These words I've just read have a long tradition in the Christian church of signaling our inadequacy, our incompleteness. they are used as signals, signs to work harder, pray harder, feel harder about ourselves and about each other, to feel uncomfortable in the present because of the sublime beauty of what will come. and feel guilty about what we've forgotten about the glorious past that we've lost, due to negligence or prideful sin.
And they have made their way, these words, these sentiments, just as surely into the Unitarian tradition; my friends, we know this well. Are we always as tolerant as we could be of those from whom we expect toleration?
But the words speak differently, I think: not of inadequacy, but of potential; not of unpreparedness, but the difficulty of the struggle; not of what we are not, but of what we may become if we can give up our selves, Try less to be more, If we can trust ourselves and each other that we are as beautiful as the creation around us.
Think of what we can do, believe it, concentrate upon it, and that halcyon future of which Paul speaks approaches us now; it becomes not the future at all, But the past, the present, the future, all brought together, all melded into one cycle of generation, decay, and regeneration; the eternal circle of which the Buddha speaks. Believe in our capacity to love; let love happen. Be patient when it does not. Know that love abides. This does not discount tragedy or avoid heartache, or solve problems in an instant or shelter us from the winds of effort, both triumph and defeat.
But there is no sheltering, really.The sheltering sky is an empty and heartless horizon, "blank and pitiless as the sun", as Yeats put it, without love. The hungry cannot be fed unless we feed them, and so feed each other. The sick cannot be cured unless we cure them, and so cure ourselves. The stridency of discord will never find harmony unless we trust our ability, imperfect, even awkward, to walk together.
The Great Hillel said it, Martin Luther King, Jr. said it: now is the time. Now is the time, says Love there is no other time. Love moves us; we do not move love. Possessions, aims, ambitions, careers these we create, we marshal, we assess, we judge, we control. Love will not so. Love cannot be controlled or anticipated. Love cannot be manufactured or packaged. It cannot even really be feigned there is ripe tragedy every time that chicanery is tried.
Love moves us: so fitting, then, it is that in some traditions love is seen to come from God. Where else, where else than in Schiller's words, adapted by Beethoven for his 9th symphony, Where else than from beyond the canopy of stars could something like love emanate? Where else but from the all knowing and unknowable could come the unaccountable which changes our lives so irrevocably?
Where, indeed, we ask within these walls, in this great tradition of liberal religion, a rightful and fruitful question in our midst. But let us not let the relevance of that question obscure from us the wonders of the sublime spirit of that which we call love. Its eternity, however couched, cannot be denied, nor praised too long or sung too loud.
And yet with all this, the greatest miracle is that love is not just poetry. Love allows us to sing and to soar, but love at its core is living, and living well with those around us. Paul's first words of 1 Cor. 14, the next chapter, say it all: Make love your guide.
Love is forgiving family transgressions. Love is a spirit of generosity first in the encounters we have, from the most profound to the most trivial, from those of the moment, to those we have hung on the generations.
Love is real, concrete, and here. The only way we can express its sanctity is to express it in our sanctuary that is, in the lives we live and with the people we know. The redemption of love that Paul so powerfully sees only can come through what we do now and here.
The warmth of acceptance, the immediacy of a good counselor, the first and passion of embracing, the selfless generosity of mother to child: out of these expressions of love, and many others, love's eternal summer will never fade.
It is here. It is now. Let it be. Copyright Terry Ward, 1999.