They'll know we are Christians by our love

Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 3, 2013 (Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Franklin, TN. (Scripture for the day: Jeremiah 1:4-10, Psalm 71:1-6, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-30)

The passage about love from 1 Corinthians 13 that we heard today is familiar to Christians and non-Christians alike for its eloquent statement of the attributes of genuine love. But although we hear it most often at weddings, the Apostle Paul was not writing specifically about romantic love or marriage when he wrote it.

This passage actually comes directly after Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts and of the oneness of the church as the body of Christ in chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, which we heard last week and the week before. At the end of last week’s reading, after describing the various gifts and vocations given to people in the church: apostles, teachers, miracle-workers, healers, the ability to speak in tongues, Paul exhorts the people to “strive for the greater gifts.” “What greater gifts?” you may have wondered. Which of the gifts Paul just listed does he consider to be the greatest? The confusion comes due to an unfortunate choice of the editors of the lectionary to stop the passage there. The second half of that verse goes on to say, “And I will show you a still more excellent way,” and then Paul launches into the reflection on love in our passage for today. The flow of Paul’s message really continues seamlessly from the last verses of chapter 12 into the first verses of chapter 13, so let me read those for you together, so you get a sense of the flow. After Paul has just listed the variety of gifts given by God to the church, and pointed out that not all people have all of these gifts, he goes on to say:

“But strive for the greater gifts, and I will show you a still more excellent way: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith [these are all spiritual gifts Paul was just talking about], so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 12:29-13:2).

Can you hear what Paul is trying to say here? The “greater gifts” he was referring to at the end of our reading from chapter 12 last week were not the gifts of working miracles or being an apostle or speaking in tongues. The “greater gifts” are “faith, hope, and love – and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). All the seemingly impressive spiritual gifts in the world are worthless if the person using them does not have love in his or her heart. Paul is echoing a biblical theme we heard recently from John the Baptist during Advent: intentions matter. The spirit in which you do things matters. Our faith is ultimately a matter of the heart. No matter how many gifts we have been given by God, if we do not use them in a loving manner, they are utterly worthless.

So as we continue to consider, during this season of Epiphany, how we might make Christ manifest in the world, Paul takes us a step further than he did two weeks ago when he first introduced the idea of spiritual gifts. Yes, the unique gifts and talents that we each have can be used to make Christ known to the world, but one sure way that all of us can make Christ known is to love – and to love in a very particular kind of way, with a selfless, giving love that has at its heart a concern for the well-being of others. That kind of love, that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13, is the ultimate spiritual gift by which we make the presence of Christ known to the world.

It’s like the refrain to that song you may know from your days in church camp or youth group: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” That’s essentially what Paul is saying here: it is not the things we do, but how we do them, that testifies to our faith in Christ. They’ll know we are Christians not by what we do, but by how we love.

And how we love flows directly out of our faith, for, as the first letter of John puts it, “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Our model for love is found in a God who was willing to take on our humanity, to suffer with us, a God who “came that we might have life, and might have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

This divine love often stands in contrast to much of human love, which can carry with it selfish desires for security and control. People can and do justify any number of sinful actions based on their love for something or someone. The community who sought to throw Jesus off a cliff in today’s Gospel reading probably did so out of a love for their religious tradition that they thought Jesus was challenging or disrespecting. The intense attachments that we develop to things or people that we love can lead us to lash out against anything that seems to threaten them. But as with the crowd in Nazareth, our intense attachment to those things we love can sometimes blind us to the presence of God among us. When we want to cling tightly, God sometimes asks us to let go. When we want to save ourselves and those we love, God tells us that we must lose our lives in order to save them.

And so what might first have seemed like a fairly easy task – all we have to do to make Christ known to the world is to love – suddenly becomes an even more difficult task than using the spiritual gifts we have been given. Paul’s message in chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians both simplifies and intensifies his message about the essentials of life in Christian community. “All you need is love,” yes, but the love that he describes is in essence a picture of divine love – the kind of love that we see in Christ but which we see less frequently in ourselves.

As Christians, we are called to imitate and model this kind of love in our lives. But it is important to keep in mind, as we strive to do this, that although we are members of the body of Christ, we are not Christ himself! As limited, finite human beings, we will not be able to manifest fully and completely the selfless, giving love of Christ that Paul describes. And Paul acknowledges this: in our current state of being, he says, we see “through a glass, darkly,” and know “only in part” – the fullness of God’s glory and love and God’s great design for all humanity will not be known to any of us until the next age. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to try – it just means we should be gentle with ourselves and with our neighbors when we fall short of living up to the ideal picture of love in 1 Corinthians 13.

And the good news is that, as Paul describes it, the ability to love like this is a gift – the “greatest” of spiritual gifts. We do not have to, nor are we likely to be able to, love this unselfishly of our own willpower. It is one of those things which, like the vows we make at our baptism, we can only promise to do “with God’s help.” Such love is a true gift of the Spirit, and, as with all things of the Spirit, it requires intentional prayer to cultivate. May we all open ourselves to the work of the Spirit, so that, with God’s help, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.