Sermon Text

January 31, 2010 -- The Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

LOVE NEVER FAILS
I Corinthians 13:1-13

Many ministers, myself included, are given at times to bewailing the state of religion in America today, and not without cause. Over half of the population has no church connection at all, and of those who do, too many are something less than half-hearted about it. But, believe it or not, that isn’t really my concern today. Today my concern runs in just the opposite direction to the widespread and growing interest in religion and spirituality of all sorts and kinds in our nation today.

You don’t have to look very far to see evidences of it. On the news stands and online there’s hardly an issue of the popular news magazines which doesn’t carry a section dealing exclusively with religion. Religious music, both traditional and contemporary, vies with pop stations for audiences. Religious books are big sellers in the bookstores and in the supermarkets. Television evangelists, for all their perennial peccadilloes, still gather audiences and millions of dollars. And, of course, there are the people who are “Christian, but unaffiliated,” “spiritual, but not religious,” “seeking, but not too seriously,” and many more.

And the current boom in religious curiosity offers us many things, aside from the traditional salvation, healing, and the like. There is also protection from evil and bad occurrences, finding your soul mate, prospering in business, or a place on the List of the Elect when the End comes on December 21, 2012 -- or even how the world after the big disaster will come either to worship or to fear a book carried around by a violent ascetic named Eli. We may not be in the middle of a traditional religious revival, but there is a lot of religious talk and activity going on.
And this doesn’t even really get us into the realms of religious pluralism, or religious bigotry, or religious fanaticism. If religion is anything, it is “of God.” How are we to tell, in all this welter of religious activity, what is “of God” and what is not?

Paul faced a similar question in Corinth in the middle of the 1st century. The church there was only a few years old, but it had been growing by leaps and bounds. People were expressing their religious convictions in all sorts of ways. And some of the Corinthians were perplexed. They couldn’t tell which of all these varied religious expressions was most clearly “of God.” So Paul wrote them a letter, and composed one of the most magnificent passages of Scripture in the Bible. Of all the expressions of religion, he wrote, the only one that really counts in the end is love. Other expressions of religion may have value -- preaching, teaching, healing, prophecy, even the ecstatic “speaking in tongues.” But unless they give expression to love, Paul wrote, they are quite worthless, because love alone “never fails.”

Love, says Paul, is the indispensable mark of true religion, religion that is unquestionably “of God.” Faith? You can have faith enough to move mountains, but without love it is nothing, because faith without love ends in witch hunts, exclusivism, and ugly religious wars.

Charity? You can give everything you have to feed the poor, but unless the motivation behind your giving is a deep concern for the well-being of others, you might as well keep it all. Oh, it helps the poor, make no mistake about that, but it does nothing to make you a better human being.

Self-sacrifice? You can feel great about all that you give to church and charity, you can even give up your life, die a martyr’s death, and yet without love it is to no purpose.
Knowledge? You can know Scripture backward and forward, be able to quote chapter and verse to support your arguments, teach theology to scholars, and yet without love, your knowledge loses its value.

“As for prophecy, it will pass away.” Even the most inspired religious insight is not enough. “As for tongues, they will cease.” Religious ecstasy is not enough. Only love never fails, never ends.

What does Paul mean, “Love never ends?” Well, in the first place, it simply means that love can outlast anything. You know the old saying, “There’s nothing sure in this world but death and taxes”? Well, Paul is saying that love is more permanent than death, taxes, or anything else you can think of.

Or look at it in another way. Here we are in a world anxious for some sort of permanent peace. So we fight our wars, write our peace treaties, arrange our alliances, build our stockpiles of “smart” weapons -- all in the hope of finding a permanent peace. But a hundred years from now, what of all that is going on in the world right now will actually have proved to be lasting?

Theologian Dr. Paul Scherer told of how he went one day to look up the Crimean War, with its charge of the Light Brigade, its drums and guns, its death and suffering. He was searching because he wanted to put against her proper background one solitary woman, a lantern in her hand, going from bedside to bedside in the hospital barracks, while soldiers kissed her shadow as she passed. He could remember her name -- Florence Nightingale -- but he couldn’t remember for the life of him what that war was about! What is finally permanent in this world? What is really lasting? Love, that endures.

Secondly, to say that love never fails means that love finally wins out in the end -- and that’s so hard to believe! So often love, kindness, and mercy seem to end up in a dead-end street while greed, suspicion, hatred, and violence take over. And yet if you think this is hard to believe, how much more difficult it is for people in some other parts of the world.

And the only tangible evidence we have of it is a cross. A cross: the symbol of love’s defeat. Men and women sneered at it, spit in its face, and finally nailed it fast. And yet, a cross! Triumphant symbol that love cannot finally be defeated!

Have you ever thought how utterly impossible it is to defeat love? You can ignore it, laugh at it, or get ugly and crucify it. But you can’t defeat it! “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” You can’t defeat that! It keeps on coming back, no matter what you do to it, to forgive you, to reclaim you. Love never fails -- it wins out in the end.

That’s why the New Testament keeps on talking about love. That’s why 1/3 of the Gospels is taken up with the last few days of Jesus’ life, telling of the suffering, crucifixion, death, and resurrection of the Christ. It isn’t the miraculous cures that are central; not all the prophecies and their fulfillment; not even the Sermon on the Mount or the parables and teachings of Jesus. The cross is central, because it opens the door and lets a person look into the very heart of God to see there a love that never ends, which outlasts everything and wins out in the end.

Are you bewildered by all the welter of religions and religious thought today? Are you confused by all the claims and promises which books and articles, churches and cults, preachers and gurus hold out to you? Are you tempted to think that God’s greatest concern is to heal you, or to give you a new car, or some ecstatic gift that will set you above other people? Do you wonder sometimes what God is really like, because you hear people say so many confusing things about God?

Here is the touchstone, the test for all of it. Don’t take it from me, take it from the New Testament. Ringing through every page of it, at the heart of the Gospels, in the center of Paul’s Letters, the theme song of the writings of John, it’s always the same. The love that is at the heart of God is laid perfectly bare and plain, on a cross.

I know that this isn’t Lent yet, but it’s always the right time of the year for the church to turn the light of its attention on the cross. The cross is the symbol of the love which never fails, the love that endures. The cross speaks no uncertain Word to you. It speaks to you in the kitchen with the children underfoot; it speaks to you in the office with reports and filing cabinets all around; it speaks to you in your apartment late at night when you feel the loneliness most; it speaks to you when you’re at your wit’s end and you don’t know how you’re going to make it through another day. The cross that looms large in the story of Jesus casts its shadow over all our days, and over the concerns of all our days, and it is the love that never fails, the love that endures. Do to it what you will -- forget it, ignore it, shoulder it aside impatiently as very nice but quite impractical; but it keeps on coming back like the return of spring, this amazing undiscouragable, eternal and triumphant love that is “of God.”

If any religion in the world today is truly of God, then this love will be at the heart and center of it -- the love that never fails, the love that endures.