By The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
October 14, 2012
Text: 1 Corinthians 13:1-7
I went to a store recently that often has music blaring from a sound system. It is one of those places where after a while, and if you visited it a number of times, you don't hear the music any more, It's just noise, and it is always there. The one thing I notice about this place, however, is that they seem to play the same songs over and over and over again. I suspect whoever is in charge of providing the music gives very little thought to its content, and has two CDs that they want to get their value out of. So, you go in, and it has got to be either this CD or that CD.
To my absolute surprise, however, this time I went in there was something being played that I had never heard there before. I paid attention: it really got me! It was actually from the great, Leonard Cohen. It was a song from Anthem, a song of peace. There is this incredible line: “There is a crack in everything, and that is how the light comes in.” He was thinking, I believe, of the great Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in one of his poems said, “There is a crack in everything that God has made.”
What they are both getting at is that in human existence and in creation, there is a crack, there is a gap, there is a fissure, there is brokenness, and that not everything is flawless. Cohen is talking about war. He is talking about conflict: the crack of the war, and the schism that exists between human beings when they are in conflict. Ralph Waldo Emerson is talking about creation, and the fact that in God's creation, though it has been made good, there is brokenness, there is a crack in everything that God has made.
They understand that human reality, that nature, that life has some brokenness to it. I think the Apostle Paul, in writing his passage in Corinthians I was thinking the same thing. He was not just thinking about it in terms of war and peace, nor of the environment and the earth. He was seeing it happen right before his eyes within the Corinthian Church that he had helped found that was vibrant but troubled.
He saw that there was a crack in this community of faith. The crack manifested itself with divisions and brokenness. There were divisions that were occurring over sexual morality, with some wanting to be libertarians and the others wanting to be ascetics: two extremes! They were dividing the Church. There were those who were debating the nature of the Resurrection, and they were split and they were broken and they were divided as to whether it was a bodily resurrection. There was debate about the use of what is known as “glossolalia” or “tongues” a spiritual language, and whether it actually builds up the Church.
There was a conflict, a division about leadership: who one should follow, this person or that person, and schisms were developing around different people in leadership positions. There was a schism about the meaning of the Lord's Supper, and whether, as I suggested last week, it should only be eaten by those who are righteous according to the law or those who are saved by grace. There was a schism between the Jew and the Gentile when it came to dietary laws. There was a schism about nearly everything! That Corinthian Church could take anything and divide it quickly.
Paul looks at this Church and he sees that schism and he understands that their divisions are a manifestation of human life and of brokenness and of sinfulness. The Apostle Paul would agree with Leonard Cohen: there is a crack in everything and there is brokenness in everything. The Apostle Paul was by no means negative! He knew that what was needed to mend that brokenness was a very, very powerful word, and the word was “Love.”
Paul understood that this word that generates and has great power, also is often so misunderstood, but nevertheless for Paul, there was a need for love, a love that would heal the crack within community of faith. It is not the love that we often think of ourselves. When we read Corinthians 1:13, we read that word “love” and our culture reads the word “love” namely that love is a feeling, that it is unintentional, that it is something that grasps you and holds you, and that it is something that is passionate and goes to your core.
I understand why young couples, when they decide to get married read Corinthians 1:13. If their thinking is in terms of passionate love, if they are thinking of it in terms of emotion and feeling, then you can see why they want to read it and why when they finally get to the end, the hope that they really have in their hearts when they join one another is going to be fulfilled, namely that this love lasts forever.
We know that feelings do not always last forever. People sometimes fall in and out of love and back into it again. Sustaining that emotion is so strong and so hard that it is something that even itself becomes broken. That is why we have the term “broken-hearted.” Who of us actually on our own will have someone to love us if it is a feeling, an emotion? Who can have the intention to say even to yourself, “I am going to love that person” and by love I mean that feeling, that brotherly, sisterly, sensually, emotional love and that connection that you have with people.
I think that is one of the secrets to what is euphemistically known as “chick flicks.” “Chick flicks” are movies that often pull on the heartstrings, so when you watch them, it re-ignites within you a sense of that emotional love you have forgotten it in your life. Believe-you-me, it is not just “chicks” that watch “chick flicks!” There are guys who go to watch “chick flicks” but they do so in very dark rooms so no one can see them.
I think in the movie Love Actually, there is this incredible line that keeps running through it from The Beach Boys: “God only knows what I would do without you.” That is the personal love that is so powerful, but is transitory and it ebbs and it flows and it is dependent upon emotion and feeling. Do not read Corinthians 1 like that, because you will misunderstand it. The love that Paul is talking about is a deeper love than that, a greater love than that: more than emotion and feeling, more than sentiment and eroticism, it is much greater than that. It is a love of God!
For Paul, the very thing that brings light through the crack is the love of God. You can see that in the way he uses the word “love” which in Greek is “agape.” He uses it throughout his letters, and as you see him use the word, you pick up a picture of what he has in mind. For example, in Romans, he talks about the love of God as seen in the Cross of Christ, in the self-giving love of Jesus. He sees it in the love that God has for the chosen, those he has bestowed his grace upon. He shows it in the love that he has for the broken, for those who do not feel love in their lives, but can experience the love that God has for them in their lives, even in their brokenness, even in their darkness, even when it seems no light comes through the cracks.
Paul talks about a love that is based upon the Resurrection, a love that does last forever and is eternal, because eternity is its source, not just its destination, a love that is a self-giving love on the part of God. When you read Corinthians 1:13, and you read it with that kind of love in mind, suddenly it takes on a whole new dimension. Paul begins this great passage, a passage probably penned by him, and done so in a time of conflict. He does it to help heal this broken Church. He does it to heal the broken-hearted. He does it to mend those who have cracks in their lives. He starts off by saying at the end of Chapter 12,” I am going to show you a more excellent way”- a better way than you think, better than all your virtues, better than all the things that you could conceive of, I am going to show you the power of God's love.
He starts off by writing to a Greek community with terms that they would understand. He starts off by saying, “Even if I speak with the tongues of man and of angels, but have not love, I am a clanging gong or a cymbal.” In other words, even if I have rhetoric, even if I have great speech to move people, even if I have the gift of the “spiritual tongues” that he talks about in Chapter 12, even if I have this great power of oratory, I have nothing if I don't have love.
I think what he was getting at was the way in which some of the pagan tribes of the time worshipped God, that they did so through their gods, Cybele and Bacchus and Dionysius, and one of the manifestations of the worship of those Gods was gongs and cymbals and trumpets and gibberish and nonsense and a lot of talk and sound that made no sense. If you were to go to the worship of Dionysius, it would sound like a cymbal or a gong going off. The Apostle Paul says, even if you do that, if you don't have the love of God, you have nothing. He knew, you see, that the Corinthians always put something else in the place of the love of God, and worshipped other things that were greater than the love of God.
As many of you know, I love to read biographies. I read a short one not long ago on the great Benjamin Disraeli, the politician from the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, the leader of the Conservative Party. Benjamin Disraeli was known for his wit and his humour, his caustic thought, and his debates with Gladstone make Biden and Ryan seem like child's play! They were incredible debaters in the House of Parliament.
Benjamin Disraeli was a smart man, and he knew that if he was going to get ahead politically, he needed money, so he decided that he would marry a woman called Mary Wyndham Lewis, who was a widow and twelve years his senior, because her former husband had been very wealthy. Disraeli married her in 1839 for the money. She knew it; he knew it.
Something happened, though! As they lived together as a married couple, they fell in love. He would often kid with her after this long and successful and beautiful marriage, and say, “You do know that I married you for your money?”
She would reply, “Yes dear, but the next time you would marry me for love!” Something had changed. The wrong idea had been transformed into the right idea: the desire for money had turned into love.
The Apostle Paul wanted that to happen with all these virtues. It was also true for the virtue of prophesy. He said, “Even if I prophesy, I have nothing if I don't have love.” Prophesy of course is the speaking of the truth of God to others. It is the proclamation of God, but even though you speak with the proclamation of God, and you have no love of God, it is nothing. Even if you have all the ingredients of prophesy - wisdom, knowledge, discernment - but you do not have love, you have nothing, for even your prophesy can be self-aggrandisement, even if you have faith.
Paul says, “To move mountains but not have love, you have nothing.” Even great faith, the faith maybe of a Moses as he went through the Red Sea, or maybe he was thinking here of the great Archimedes, who existed 200 years before Christ, who said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” Great intellect, great insight, faith in his own abilities, but even if you have all of this so as to move the mountains, even great spiritual power, but have not love and the love of God, you have nothing.
Even if you are a martyr and you give your body to be burned, you have nothing. This of course is powerful language. This is the language of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in The Book of Daniel. These are the men who went into the fiery furnace and would not disavow their faith in God even though Nebuchadnezzar put them to the flames. Even if you give your body to be burned and are willing to lay down your life, but you don't have love, then you have nothing. Even martyrdom, which one would think was one of the highest of all virtues, cannot compare to the love of God.
Even philanthropy, as marvellous and as wonderful as that is, and needful as it is, without the love of God, profits us nothing for Paul says it causes us sometimes, both as martyrs and philanthropists to boast and to brag about what you are doing. Paul knew very well what Jesus meant in Matthew, Chapter 6, when Jesus said, “If you give alms to the poor, if you give to people do it quietly, do it silently” and then comes that famous line, “do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” In other words, do it discreetly and quietly.
Why? It is because it can be ostentatious even to be a great philanthropist, and to draw attention to yourself and not to the needs of those to whom you are giving or the source of everything in the first place. “Even if I give everything, but have not love it profits me nothing.” You see what Paul is getting at is that all these great virtues - rhetoric, faith, prophesy, martyrdom, philanthropy - all in and of themselves good things - nothing wrong with any of them - but all of them can be used or abused if they are not under-girded by the love of God, by the sacrificial power of God, to the glory of God, and the honour of God. So often, these things can become a sham.
Marial and I this past week were reminiscing about something that happened to us with a friend some years ago. It was during the time when Marial was writing her CA exams, known as the UFI's. One of the people going through the program with her was a very good friend of ours, but it was the third time that he was writing the exam. He had failed it the first two times, and basically, this was it! The firm wouldn't keep him on. So, he was desperate! Marial and I would take him and fill him full of caffeine in the thought that this might help someone who was stressed beyond belief.
We had a great friendship, and we kind of took care of him, and Marial helped guide him through the process. But, my poor friend unfortunately, because he had spent all his time for three years studying accountancy - Lord have mercy on his soul! - didn't have an opportunity to date anyone and he was lonely. He didn't know what to do, because he had been a recluse during all his hard work.
He decided that there was something that he thought he should do. You see, he had a very fancy car. It was a Corvette Stingray with a glassed-in back window, and was bright red and went like a streak - I know - I drove it! He thought that he would go down to Point Pleasant Park, one of the great parks in Halifax, and that people would see him there in this beautiful red car and would be drawn to him. It made no difference at all! Sitting in this cool car, he was still alone and lonely, and bereft of love.
Then he had another idea. It was to ask for our assistance. The form of the assistance was that he would take our cocker spaniel, Monty, put Monty in the back of the car window, where everyone could see him, and then he would take Monty to the park. When women saw him with this beautiful dog, there would be a great conversation, and he would have a wonderful relationship as a result. I was always envious of my friend, because he had the great car. He had the great car; I had the great wife! I was not sure which was really the better of the two? No, it was the wife! No, maybe it was the wife with the dog? I'm not sure if it's the combination!
He wanted the dog and lo and behold, first time at the park, he meets a woman, falls in love and gets married. How utterly disingenuous though of my friend to try and trick, and use a virtue, a beautiful creature, for the sake of his own gain. We're all like that. It is part of the brokenness of being human beings.
It is part of the brokenness and division in the world. We take virtues and good things, but if we do not have love, we have nothing. If we don't have that sacrificial self-giving love of God in Jesus, we have nothing. Even if we have all the sentimentality in the world, even if we have all the great feelings in the world, even if we are able to manipulate all things to our benefit, if we have not the love of God, we have nothing. But, when you have that love, according to Paul, you have the most excellent way, and I will show you more next Sunday. Amen.