“There's nothing you can do
that can't be done;
Nothing you can sing that
can't be sung;
Nothing you can say but you
can learn how to play the game;
It's easy!
There's nothing you can make
that can't be made;
No one you can save that can't be saved;
Nothing you can do but you
can learn how to be you in time;
It's easy!
All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need.”
So sang
the Beatles about 40 years ago -- and
Paul (the apostle, not McCartney) seems to say much same in his famous words on
love in First Corinthians that we have heard this morning: faith, hope, and
love abide, these three; and the
greatest of these is love.
Still,
the Beatles’ song begs a rather important question, as a final exam essay in my
seminary course in Ethics revealed. The question was: “The Beatles sang, ‘All you Need is Love’. Is Love by itself really all we need to make
ethical Christian decisions? Comment.”
The
professor’s point, of course, was that a vague and general notion of love isn’t
a clear enough guide for the complex choices we face again and again in the
world-- especially since we limited and
sinful human beings are good both at misreading one another and deluding
ourselves. “Love” by itself is not all
we need, and it isn’t as easy as the Beatles made it sound.
What,
in fact, is easy is for us to get
confused about what love is and how we are to love. For starters, there are many different kinds
of love: family love, love of friends,
romantic love, sentimental love, tough love, to name a few. In addition, there is in our time a strong
tendency to think of love primarily as matter of feeling.
The
Bible, however, sees love as more about what we do than how feel -- more about action than emotion. Otherwise, how could Jesus command us to love God and our neighbor?
Few of us can command our feelings; most of us can command our actions a fair amount of the time.
If
“Love” is to be useful in shaping faithful action in our lives, we need
guidance as to what love is and what it requires of us, even if that can never
be boiled down to a simplistic formula for right living.
Paul’s
words from First Corinthians give some of the guidance we need – but as we turn to them, I need first to say a
word about context. Most of us have
heard these words most often at weddings -- in fact, until the recent revision of the
Lectionary, this passage wasn’t normally read at Sunday morning services in the
Episcopal Church!
So we
tend to assume that Paul was writing about romantic love, or if not that often
fleeting feeling, its steadier companion:
the day in day out love needed for a marriage to survive and grow. The latter is much closer to the truth, for
the love Paul describes is essential for any community of people to live in
wholeness and, dare I say, holiness.
But
Paul’s actual audience when he wrote this letter was that competitive and
conflicted group of Christians in Corinth I spoke about last Sunday. Today’s passage continues his challenge to
their boastful, self-important approach to the gifts of the Spirit that they
claim for themselves, which explains the tone of Paul’s opening words:
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, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am
nothing. 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.
Without love, Paul says, the speaking in tongues, the prophetic gifts, the esoteric knowledge that the Corinthians think is so important is pointless. What matters, he says, is love – what it is and what it is not.
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. Love
never ends.
Notice how different this is
from the envious, arrogant self-importance of the Corinthians. Notice, too, how different it is from romantic
desire in which the lover yearns to possess the beloved. Such passionate yearning has its place in
human life and in our life with God -- but
that is not what Paul is speaking of here. Paul is speaking of love that is other-centered, not
self centered; love that is not about
getting what it wants, but in giving what the other needs -- patiently, graciously, generously, freely.
It
is the love that parents (at our best – and often we aren’t) give to children: getting up in the middle of the night to calm
a crying baby; playing a six year-old’s
game that holds little interest to an adult; being endlessly patient with the trials and
traumas of adolescence.
It
is the love that spouses (at our best) can have for one another: putting up with your partner’s really annoying
habit; supporting each other in good times and bad, in sickness and health;
accepting
your spouse as he or she is, while changing yourself to meet their needs; doing
what your life together requires when it isn’t what you want.
It
is the love of the medical and relief
workers who have gone to Haiti where they live in tents (if they are lucky) and work 18 hour days
trying to save lives, house the homeless and feed the hungry. It is the love, also, of those who give money
to support that work.
This love that Paul describes
is in Greek, agape: love that is unconditional, self-sacrificing,
active, chosen, and thoughtful. And, Paul says, it is the greatest gift that
human beings can give and receive.
And we do need to receive this love if we are to give it to others. That is why Paul writes about this love to the
Corinthians as the continuation of
what we heard last week about gifts of the Spirit. The love he describes is, he says, a still
more excellent way than all the other gifts the Corinthians are so jazzed
about. Love is the greatest
spiritual gift we can receive -- the
richest of God’s many gifts to us in Christ.
To say that agape love is a gift we receive from God says something
about us & something about God. About us it says this: Despite what the Beatles’ sang, living this
love often is not easy.
It is can be hard, challenging and costly. It requires the willingness to put another’s
needs ahead of your own; the capacity to
set your self aside for the good of another -- and to do so freely and generously, patiently
and kindly, without resentment or irritation, without counting the cost.
I don’t know about you, but I find
living this kind of love a daily challenge. Every day, I am offered many opportunities to
love like this: sometimes I do a decent
job of it; sometimes I blow it; sometimes I miss it completely– I simply fail to recognize an opportunity to
love that is before me. To love this
way, I need help, God’s help. I need the
spiritual gift of agape. I need
to ask for it and seek, with God’s help, to grow in it each day.
Maybe that’s true for you, too. Maybe
you, like me, are grateful to know that the capacity to love in the way Paul
describes is a gift God desires to give us – because we can’t do it very well
on our own.
And maybe you, like me, are grateful to know that God loves us precisely in
this way that we often find so challenging ourselves: that God loves us with a love that is
unconditional and self-sacrificing; that
God is patient, kind, and forgiving; not irritable or resentful; seeking our good with a love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all
things; a love that never ends.
We know this love not just through Paul’s words,
but through Jesus’ deeds. We know the
free and generous love of God in that when we had fallen into sin and become
subject to evil and death, God, in mercy, sent Jesus, God’s only and eternal
Son, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to the God and Father of all.
Out of love for us, Jesus stretched
out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, a perfect sacrifice for the
whole world. [1]
If we want to know what love
is, Jesus is where should turn our gaze. If we want to receive that love, Jesus is
where we should turn our prayers. And if
we want to love as we have been loved, Jesus -- not the Beatles -- is the one
whose guidance and gift we should ask.
The Rev. Jack Zamboni,
January 31st,
2010