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In our day and in our nation, church and state are separate. Our Constitution properly requires that no religion shall be an established religion of any of our governments, state or federal, because in democratic societies it is not appropriate to require particular religious creeds of people who do not affirm them for themselves. So those of us whose faith is a biblical faith freely affirmed for ourselves have a dilemma. We have to deal with the fact that God said to Jeremiah, "I have appointed you to speak for me to the nations, and you shall tell the nations what I command you to say.... I set you this day over nations and over kingdoms.... Go and proclaim my Word in the hearing of Jerusalem." For those called to speak for God, there is no such thing as separation of the Word of God from the larger community. God speaks his Word not just to those of us in his church, as if to a religious corner of life isolated from the larger society in which we live. God speaks his Word to all his people, because, as we acknowledged in our collect just a moment ago, God governs all things both in heaven and on earth, including the nations and the kingdoms. So to speak the Word of God is to speak it to all the people of God -- to states, to nations and to kingdoms -- as the Lord sent Jeremiah to do. And Jeremiah said to the Lord, as Moses had said to the Lord before him, "Why me? I don't know what to say or how to speak!" And the Lord said to Jeremiah, as he says to all his prophets, "Don't sweat it. I'll put my words into your mouth." And that's what a prophet is, a guy with his mouth crammed so full of the words of God that some of them have to come out sometime whether he likes it or not and who sometimes ends up on the cover of Time Magazine but more often ends up in the bottom of a pit to be left to die as Jeremiah was, or taken to a cliff to be thrown off as Jesus was, or nailed to a cross. These, too, are some of the realities that attend the speaking of God's word to the people. There are, as we all know, lots of people who would speak to the state today, lots of people who would offer the words of God to the President or Congress, or to the City Council or the school board, lots of people who would offer words about what our laws should say about welfare reform or deficit spending, or about abortion or capital punishment or the war in Iraq, or about homosexuality or sex education in the schools or marriage, or about any number of other matters that affect our lives as individuals and our common life together in our nation and in our cities and neighborhoods. These are words that should and must be offered by people of faith, just as Jeremiah offered them to the nations and kingdoms of his day and as Jesus offered them to the nations and kingdoms of his day. For people of biblical faith, there is no such thing as separation of church from the rest of life. In a world where injustice remains, in a world where even slavery and terror and war still exist, Scripture makes it clear that God has sent his prophets into the world to speak to nations and to kingdoms, including the kingdoms of the United States and of Colorado Springs, including the kingdom of the Church, for God governs all things both in heaven and on earth. But God sends his prophets into the world to speak his Word in a particular way. This, too, must always be remembered, and this is where St. Paul speaks to us today with particular power. "Since you are eager to have spiritual gifts, excel in gifts that edify the body. Excel in gifts that build up and do not tear down," St. Paul urges. This word from Paul cannot be properly understood apart from its context, for context is everything. Paul's word about the use of spiritual gifts can be understood only in the context of the word he offered just one chapter earlier, those magnificent words of the 13th chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, words that are heard at the weddings of Christians more often than any other part of the Bible, Paul's word about love. Love, Paul reminds us there, is not sentimental infatuation. Love, for Paul, is not an emotion or a feeling at all. Love, for Christians, says Paul, is that which governs all things, both within the Church and without. Love is work, Paul reminds us, a matter of the will, not of the affections. We do not ask at weddings, "Do you love George?" or "Do you love Susan?" Instead, we ask, "Will you love George? Will you love Susan?" What's at issue is not the past or the present. What's at issue is the future. Will you seek not your own good, but the good of the one you are committing yourself to? Will you comfort, honor, and keep this person you are committing yourself to? Will you do so not only in health, but also in sickness, in bad times as well as good? This is love that sticks like glue beyond how you feel on your wedding day. This is love that binds, because it is based upon a decision about what is good for the other and not upon one's own digestion at the moment. This is the love St. Paul is talking about throughout this wonderful letter. It is the context for our gathering here this morning, and the context for Christian life in the Church and in the state, a context Paul first commended to a bitterly divided community of Christians. "If I speak in the tongues of men or even of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal." Without love, Paul insists, I might as well not use my spiritual gifts, for without love they will profit no one. Without love, I might as well not preach a sermon or talk to my children or give my report to the school board or write my letter to the Gazette. Without love -- if I am not seeking the good of the other and of the whole community I live in and am pursuing just my own self-interest or agendas -- then all my poetry and all my prose is only a pollution of the airwaves, like a cymbal dropped on the floor during a pastoral symphony or like handbells dropped from the loft during the prayers. Spoken without love, all the spiritual speech of the saints and all the orations of Cicero and Lincoln are no better than the first blast of a rented trumpet by a 12-year-old who has just picked one up for the first time. St. Paul, who wrote some of the loveliest words in the whole history of words, is saying that without love, without our genuinely seeking the good of the other and of the whole, then all our prettiest speech is nothing but noise. Paul's letter is his recognition that if we are going to speak the Word of God to the Church and the nations and kingdoms we actually live in, to the world as it actually is, then nothing less than love will do. Paul goes on: "If I have prophetic powers, and if I understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and even if I have all the faith that it is possible to have, so as to remove mountains, even if I have all the faith of all the saints, but have not love, then I am nothing and I gain exactly nothing." "If I have all the faith in the world, enough faith even to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing?" Does Paul really mean this? How much faith do you have this morning? Some of us here today would be satisfied if we had just enough faith to remove some of our doubts, or just enough to say the Creed with more conviction, much less enough faith to remove mountains. And yet Paul, who was big on faith, makes the sweeping claim that, in the absence of love, even faith is nothing. "There are those," says William Willimon, "who know everything about Jesus, except that he is love," those who would use the Bible as a bludgeon with which to beat others over the head, those for whom Christianity is a way to divide, a way to separate, a way to crush. Without love, you see, the Christian faith can become cruel and ugly, for as William Temple observed, and as I'm sure all of you here remember, "It's possible to be right repugnantly." Paul moves on: "Even if I give away all that I have and deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing." We need to remember that when Paul said this, he was probably talking to people who had lost everything when they became Christians, people who had been disinherited, divorced, forsaken by their families because they became Christians. What if? What if you had witnessed your parents or children being torn away from you because of your faith, as some in Corinth no doubt did, and you heard Paul claim that without love all that was nothing? We dare not sentimentalize what Paul is saying in this text, either at weddings or here in this church this morning! Paul continues: "Love is patient and kind, not jealous or boastful, not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way. Love is not irritable or resentful. Love does not rejoice in the wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love is always ready to make allowances, to trust, to hope. And, finally, love is always ready to endure whatever comes." And this, it seems to me, is where Paul especially speaks to our other texts this morning. It is true that God's prophets -- including Jeremiah and Jesus and Paul, and including his prophets today -- it is true that God's prophets are called to speak God's words to the world. That's who prophets are. Prophets are people who speak God's words to the nations and the kingdoms, to Congress and to city councils and school boards, and to the Church. But if those words are spoken without patience and kindness, if they are spoken with boastfulness or arrogance or rudeness, if the words of God -- even if God himself has put them in our mouths, as he did with Jeremiah -- if those words are spoken to insist on their own way, then we who speak them are nothing, and we gain exactly nothing. We are like a clanging cymbal, like a cymbal dropped on the floor in the middle of a symphony, like handbells dropped from the loft in the middle of the prayers, like the blast of a trumpet from untrained lips. Willimon tells of something that happened at a meeting of his church's Social Action Committee. All of the people there, he said, were committed to working for justice and peace. And during one discussion about the management of the soup kitchen, one person was so rude to another, so cruel in her criticism of the way the other person had been doing her job, that she caused her to leave the meeting in tears. "Well, so be it," some would say. "After all, justice and peace are bigger than the tender feelings of one individual. If we're going to bring justice and peace to the world, we've got to work for systemic, even global change, and if an individual or two gets hurt along the way, well, that's just the cost of doing the business of justice and peace and righteousness, because justice and peace and righteousness, after all, are bigger than little one-on-one love. If a few individuals happen to get chewed up in the process, so be it." But I don't know.... I wonder.... I wonder if Jesus or Paul might not remind us of that famous question of St. John: "How can you hope to do justice to your sister whom you have not seen, if you can't show love to your sister across the table?" Whether we're at home or at the school board meeting or in the parish hall, we find it easier to talk about justice or righteousness across town or far away in Iraq than to do love across the table. Whether in the state or in the church, it's so much easier to make laws than to make love. With laws, I can act as if I am helping my neighbor while still keeping him a stranger. With laws, I can send out the social worker or the priest to do the work for me. Justice and righteousness, as tough as they are to do, demand less of us than love demands, and achieve less for us. If a word of justice or righteousness is spoken, either to nations or to kingdoms or to the Church, in arrogance or rudeness or resentfulness, then whatever it is, it is not love, and therefore it is nothing and gains nothing. Willimon goes on to tell about a well-known theologian who was asked to speak on the subject of "Peacemaking in the Nuclear Age" to the seminary he graduated from. When he arrived, what he chose to address was the problem of gossip within the seminary, the problem of the way we wound other people with words. "You were supposed to speak on global peacemaking, not on petty moral issues like gossip!" they complained to him after his talk. But I don't know.... I wonder.... Paul concludes with this: "When I was a child, I used to speak as a child, to see things as a child sees them and to think as a child thinks. But now that I have become an adult, I have finished with all childish ways.... So these remain: faith, hope, and love, the three of them. But without one of them, without love, the rest is nothing." Stated simply, Christian love is not for children. Paul has absolutely nothing to say about the joys of what we call "young love." 1-Corinthian-13 love isn't easy. It isn't "doing what comes naturally." Love isn't an adolescent screaming of "That feels so good!" Neither is it a childish demand for justice: "That's not fair!" The kind of love Paul describes takes every ounce of your maturity. It requires hard work over a lifetime. It means waking up every morning asking God for the grace to help you love despite others, despite yourself. This 1-Corinthians-13 love, which can make or break our speech and make or break our lives, is, as Elizabeth Achtemeier says, "closer to hard-eyed realism than to simpering sentimentality." This 1-Corinthian-13 love is the recognition that because the world is the way it is, because nations and kingdoms and the Church are the way they are, because my sister across the table is the way she is and because I am the way I am, nothing less than love will do. In a world where the prevailing manner is to be "in your face," either with a sharp knife or a sharp tongue, what can possibly bring hope except that which is patient, that which is kind and not boastful or jealous, that which is not arrogant or rude? What can possibly bring peace except that which does not insist on its own way and is not irritable or resentful? What can possibly bring peace except that which rejoices in what is good and right, but which is always ready to make allowances, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes? What can possibly bring hope and peace except that which is love. That's why we will sing, as we will in a moment, that "Jesus came a Savior to his own, the way of love he trod; he came to win us by good will, for force is not of God." And that's why Jeremiah was willing to be thrown into the pit to be left to die, and it's why Jesus was willing to be nailed to a cross, because God, who put his words into their mouths to speak to nations and to kingdoms, sent them to speak his words, but to do so with maturity, as adults, with patience and kindness and humility, rejoicing in what is good and right, but not insisting on their own way and always ready to make allowances, always ready to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes. Even the pit. Even the Cross, which is love. Let us pray: "Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." |