Live on the Level

Luke 6:17-38

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Please excuse what I am about to say as simply being a bit of humour.  I don’t want to sound arrogant or anything like that, but if I ever invite you over for dinner, please do not politely say to me, “What can I bring?”  If you do, I will politely say, “Just yourself”, which actually does mean don’t bring anything.  And then if you still show up with something in hand, well, of course I will politely accept it and act surprised and blessed and thankful and all that and politely say, “Oh, you didn’t have to.”  But, to be honest (and this is the humorous part), there is a “little me” in here that gets a little bit offended and inside my head “little me” will pass judgement on you for what I consider to be your inadequacy of character.  I will inwardly say to myself “You obsequious Roman”.  I’ll be petty like that unless of course, it’s something personal that you’ve brought like beets you canned yourself or homemade maple syrup – something where you’re trying to share a bit of yourself.  I will graciously accept and cherish that.  

This thing of never showing up at somebody’s house empty-handed, I loathe that.  I really do.  At my house you don’t have to put on pretenses or worry that I might think you ungrateful for showing up empty-handed.  I’m confident enough to say that when you’ve eaten my cooking, you will be grateful and if not, well that’s your problem.  If you come to my house to eat, it is my intent to pour on you grace and hospitality in the same way God pours out grace and hospitality on us – free and lavishly.  I don’t expect anything in return.  If I did, I would just charge you money up front.  The same is true if you happen to show up at my house uninvited around a meal time, I will cook for you and feed you expecting nothing in return. 

Now, I know you were all brought up that “don’t show up empty-handed” way.   There’s actually a name for it.  It’s the way of reciprocity.  The way of "do unto others as they have done unto you".  If someone has treated you mean, you treat them mean in return. If your neighbour’s a jerk, be a jerk back.  If someone has been good to you, be good in return.  And so it is, if somebody invites you over for dinner, you bring something because that’s what respectable, well-mannered, brought-up-right people do.

This way of reciprocity is ancient and it is based in the belief that nothing in life is ever free.  Romans used to give gifts, lavish gifts, to people from whom they wanted something in return.  The way you got things done back then was to make people obligated to you, make people owe you one.  It worked that way in religion too.  If you wanted the favour of a god, wanted a god to do something for you, prayer wasn’t enough.  You had to bring something, something sacrificial.  

On the upside, you would have thought that this way of reciprocity would just set in motion a whole lot of reciprocal kindness being done in society. That "pay it forward" sort of thing.  But in reality, it just made it so that you always had to be suspicious of people’s motives.  It’s like if I, the minister, invited you for dinner just to deepen the friendship, you would have to be asking yourself, “What’s he want from me?  What’s he going to rope me into doing?”  And so, to get yourself out of any obligation that I might make you feel obligated to, you pick up a box of TimBits on the way over.  That way if I were to ask you to do something for the church, you’re no longer obligated.  The TimBits got you off the hook and we would both understand that.  You would no longer owe me one.  I would be gnarled at seeing that box of TimBits, I would have the good wine taken off the table.  That was everyday life as a petty Roman but people still live that way today.

And so that leads me back to Jesus and his Sermon on the Plain, or better yet, his Sermon on the Level.  If I had to come up with what his key point to his sermon is, I would start by noting that he’s got word play of a title here.  We could call it “Living on the Level”.  And then, I would have to say that his key point is that to live on the level is to live mercifully, always showing unconditional love, forgiveness and generosity rather than living according to reciprocity.  The heart of this sermon is wrapped in Jesus’ statement that we are to be merciful as God is merciful.  Afterall, he is our Father and we are his beloved children so be merciful as God is merciful.  The word for merciful there isn’t the word we usually see in the Greek for mercy.  It should rather be translated as compassionate or sympathetic – to feel with somebody.  Be compassionate as God is compassionate.

It's time to pull out my trusty level.  In Jesus’ Kingdom, which we have inherited and are to live according to in this world even if it means that what the world calls a blessing is a woe to us…in Jesus’ Kingdom the bubble in the tube on the level stays in the middle so that things are level meaning equal, fair, and just within the communities that bear his name and one day it will be the whole world.  Just like when you build a house, if the foundation isn’t level, if the bubble’s not in the middle, the house will lean and torque and eventually collapse in on itself.  So it is in our life together as followers of Jesus.  In Jesus’ Kingdom the way things keep level is that the people who call him Lord, who follow his teachings, live according to love, forgiveness, and generosity – off the scale unconditional love, forgiveness, and generosity.  

And there’s a huge rather than implied moral to the story here in Jesus’ sermon.  We live Jesus’ way rather than the way of reciprocity.  Rather than reciprocating hate for hate and love for love, we pour out compassion on everybody just as God does even on those who hate us and do us harm.  We pray for everyone, even our enemies.  We lend and give generously to everyone not just to those we think deserve it or we know will pay us back.  We lend and give expecting nothing in return.  We even give to those who take from us.  We wish well to everyone, even those who wish us harm.  We do good to everyone, even those who do us harm and when we do good, we don’t expect people to do good to us in return.  We treat others the way we want to be treated. 

We love.  We forgive.  We give.  We do good.  We do so unconditionally and generously because that’s the way God is and we are God’s much beloved children.

We also don’t judge or condemn.  Elsewhere in the Bible it says we are to leave those tasks to God.  And, it may surprise us what ultimately happens when God judges and condemns.  You see, God’s graciousness is surprising to say the least.  Here’s some examples from Luke’s Gospel of God’s judging.  A prodigal son who has offended his father in every way is welcomed home with a feast but it’s the unforgiving brother who can’t bring himself to celebrate.  A tax collector who has grown rich by overtaxing and skimming, Jesus calls to be one of his Twelve best friends.  Jesus routinely sits at table, fellowshipping over a meal with “sinners” and it’s an example of the way things will be when he returns to establish his reign.  

Tragically, Jesus himself was judged for doing such gracious things, pronounced cursed by God, condemned and hung on a cross by the religious authorities who assumed they had the right to judge and who expected God to operate according to the ways of reciprocity. 

We love.  We forgive.  We give.  We do good.  We do so unconditionally and generously because that’s the way God is and we are God’s much beloved children.

Finally, Jesus notes here in his sermon that the way we measure it out is the way it will be measured to us presumably by God.  If we measure out vengeance instead of love, forgiveness, generosity, and doing good, we will not know God’s compassion nor know ourselves as God’s beloved children.  If we measure out compassion scantily, so will be our experience of God’s compassion.  

So, rather than living according to the conventions of reciprocity, we love, forgive, give generously, and do good.  That is what it is to be merciful or compassionate as God is. So, since we are God’s beloved children: We love.  We forgive.  We give generously.  We do good.  Unconditionally and generously.  That’s living on the level.  Amen.

 

Abandoning the Heart

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Jeremiah 17:5-10

Back when I was in seminary doing chaplain work at The Medical College of Virginia Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, I got to be the harbinger of bad news late one night.  A young man 15 years of age was brought into the ER.  He had been shot in the heart.  Per protocol, the ER paged myself and the other chaplain intern to come down.  We arrived to the harsh sound of the ER Chief Attending loudly barking about this and that.  He was a gruff man in his late 50’s exhibiting little patience.  We rounded the corner into the ER just as he began to bark for us, “Where’s my chaplain?  I want that chaplain here right now!” “Present, Sir!”  “I want you right now to go tell that family that things are not going well.  Prepare them for the worst.”  I was told that medical staff should do that as to be able to answer medical questions, but the barker was too intimidating to argue with.  Off we went.

We met the young man’s grandfather and uncle in the ER family room.  The grandfather was a retired Pentecostal minister.  We told them that things were not going well and that the doctors were doing everything they could but it doesn’t look good.  The old man looked shocked and immediately fell on his face on the couch praying in tongues.  We sat with them and occasionally he would rise up and compose himself.  They recounted the events of earlier in the evening.  His grandson lived with them and had just left to go to a friend’s house.  He would start crying and then back to the couch he went.  That kept up a little over an hour until a resident, not the Attending who couldn’t be bothered, came to tell them the young man had died.  We prayed with them and walked out of the family room into the main waiting room which was now full of the young man’s friends.  In a voice, similar to the sound of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he said to them, “There will be no retaliation, No retaliation!  The dying stops now!”

That was the closest I’ve come to having a “Jeremiah experience”.  God called Jeremiah to be the harbinger of bad news to Jerusalem and the people of Judah.  Jerusalem and the entire nation of Judah.  They fell to the Babylonians in 586 BCE.  Jeremiah was one of the prophets God sent to tell his people that disaster was surely coming and why and the why was that they deserved it.  The Babylonians were going to destroy them and their city completely and the only chance they had to escape with their lives was to surrender without a fight and go into captivity and in 70 years they would return to rebuild.  God wanted Jeremiah to make it plain to this people that it was God, the God of their ancestors, who was doing this and it was because they had blatantly made themselves to be no longer his people.  

Their crime?  They were worshiping other gods to the extent that their leaders and leading citizens were practicing child sacrifice.  They worshiped wealth to the extent of abusing and enslaving their poor.  The rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer.  The Israelites were just like all the other nations around them.  There was nothing to distinguish them as God’s people other than the temple in Jerusalem.  Even there, their sacrifices they offered were just a show of hypocrisy.  God’s only recourse was to destroy them as a nation and kick them off the land he had promised their ancestors. In exile, he would prune away how they had perverted their faith.  Then, he would once again teach them how to trust his steadfast love by promising to bring them back to rebuild and keeping that promise. 

Well, the people didn’t respond to the bad news like my Pentecostal grandfather friend – with prayer and repentance.   Instead of believing Jeremiah and returning to God, they accused him of treason, persecuted him, jailed him, and even threw him into a muddy cistern where they left him to die.  Had it not been for one of the king's eunuchs being a man of faith and pulling him out, Jeremiah would have died in that cistern.  But Jeremiah’s story gets bleaker.   If you read his writings, you will realize that he suffered from what we would call clinical  depression.  I can’t imagine having to be the harbinger of such bad, hopeless news and being treated the way he was while being in the emotional muddy cistern of depression.  

Jeremiah was a prophet of the heart.  Paying attention to how he directed his heart is how he dealt with his depression.  He made it quite clear to God’s people that letting your heart turn away from trusting in the LORD only fills one’s life with a desert-like barrenness and, in their actual case, the reality of having their actual land trampled and reduced to a wasteland by the armies of Babylon.  This turning away of the heart to trust in something other than God and his steadfast love makes one unable even to see when relief comes.  There’s nothing worse than for your life to go dry in its pursuits to attain what your heart thinks it needs to be happy only to have relief come and not be able to see it because you simply haven’t got a clue of what God is doing in your life.  Jeremiah tells us that following the heart is like being a shrub in a desert.  The heart is devious above all else.  For decades they had been turning away.  God had tried to call them back by a number of prophets, but they wouldn’t listen.

Jeremiah warns that there is a cost that comes with following the heart into pursuing what it thinks will make us happy as opposed to remaining faithful to God so that God can give us what truly gives joy – a relationship with God.  The cost is that even though you have everything your heart desires, you still feel unfulfilled and you’ve no idea of where to turn for relief from that nagging discontent and so you medicate the malaise in your heart with more stuff or with substances or with looking for love in all the wrong places or just sitting in your little castle on your recliner throne of cynical bitterness like an angry little god condemning the stupidity of the idiots who surround you and pondering how you might get more stuff.  If you can realize it, that’s what happens to the heart when we make trying to follow it our source of happiness rather than disciplining it to follow God which requires we abandon our hearts and its desires.

Jeremiah presents us with an alternative to following the heart.  It is to trust in the LORD.  He writes, "But blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD, whose trust is the Lord.  He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream.  It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green.  It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit."  To trust in the steadfast love of God who leads your life according to the hope of a promise means a life of growth, a wellspring of confidence and joy – the wellspring of God living in us.  Jeremiah says the Lord is our trust.  God’s very presence in us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is the root of faith.  Without it we don’t know what or who we’re trusting.  

Our hearts are deceptive and will be that way until they are firmly rooted in the heart of God.  Faith recognizes that we all have needs and desires.  That is the way God created us but those needs and desires will mislead us and leave us unfulfilled if we seek those desires for the sake of themselves.  The way past the heart problem that we have is what I call abandoning the heart to follow God's promise to give us what we really need.  In that following, God will recreate, renew, and even redirect our heart so that it wants and desires rightly.  We all have need of and desire for companionship, meaningful work, material comfort, and so forth and God promises to provide these things.  We’ve no need to doubt or to be afraid of lacking them.  The problem is that if we pursue them apart from God’s leading, we fall back into relying on our own strength and in turn heading towards the arid wasteland that Jeremiah spoke about.  

The first step of abandoning the heart is letting go and leaving things in God’s hand.  Be warned, for to learn how to let go usually requires going through some difficult times.  But as you come through those difficult times you realize God’s purpose in it, that he was recreating your heart to desire rightly.  Along with letting go, begin to spend time with God.  Sit with God reading the Scriptures daily.  Pray and express your needs even to the extent of saying “God I’m mad as hell at you for not meeting my needs.”  You need to get that out of your system and saying it is about the only healthy way of doing that.  It will pass as God begins to reveal himself to you.  

Along with letting go, focus on God’s presence and trying to see God's work in your life rather than on the pain or the void brought about by the need you're leaving behind.  This is most important.  Spend time with God wanting to know him.  Ask God to give you himself.  God uses the hurt-filled times in our lives to build a relationship with us.  To create in us a sense of his presence with us.  It is his presence in us that cures the heart problem.  

As we draw closer to God, we will find that some needs and desires become more acute while others fade and go away.   When God determines we are firmly rooted in the knowledge of how much he loves us, he will start prompting us to ask and even to ask for certain things even if it seems impossible.  He will even make known to us what he’s doing for us.  The closer God brings you to himself and the more you strive to get close to God, the more you find that the entirety of this creation is held together by God’s love for it and when you begin to see that you’ll know what Jesus meant when he said nothing is impossible with God.  Let God give you a new heart.  Don’t waste your life pursuing property in the desert.  Go riverfront on the river of life.  Everything else will come in God’s time, according to his promise. It really will.  Amen.

 

When God Speaks

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Luke 5:1-11

Putting together a sermon is an interesting task.  It’s more than an exercise in creative writing or constructing a history lesson or a theology lecture.  In a sermon I need to be able to accurately communicate what a particular passage of Scripture says and prayerfully hope God somehow speaks through it.  I have to avoid the temptation of the sermon just being something I want to say and backed it up with a passage or two from the Bible.  It's a form of spiritual abuse when a preacher spouts out agenda-ed opinions with a couple of verses to back it up instead of a sermon that's based in Scripture.  

In seminary, I was taught that the surest way to go when preparing a sermon was, to the best of my ability, try to determine what a passage of Scripture said to the original hearers and then try to find a creative way to convey that message to my congregation in its current context today.  Being honest, I try to do that, but too often it’s not a straightforward exercise for it is rare that a passage of Scripture says just one thing.  Every passage is wonderfully multi-faceted.  So, I have to approach the Scripture with a bit of humility asking “Lord, what would you have me to say?”  Then I read the passage over and over, work with it in its original language, and listen and wait.  Usually, there’s something in the passage that sticks out to me.  I hear the Word of God so to speak and feel the nudge.  Something inside just gives me the feeling of, “Yeah, that’s it.  Amen.”

This week it has something to do with hearing the word.  There in the first verse, it says that Jesus was standing there on the lakeshore and the crowd began to press in on him “to hear the word of God.”  The Greek word for “press in on” means simply to lie down.  My child-like imagination then saw a huge crowd wanting to lie down on Jesus, you know, reposing on him like it’s the Sabbath or the seventh day of Creation, when God rested.  But you folks can just go with the image Luke has here of a very excited huge mass of people crowding up against Jesus and each other like a huge catch of fish in a net.  They are excited to be with Jesus wanting him to speak because they just know that when Jesus speaks, somehow God is speaking through him.  

This crowd of people really, truly needed to hear God speak.  This was a huge crowd of Galileans.  Just everyday people...but people who had had enough.  Roman soldiers bullying them.  Those traitorous tax collectors were overtaxing them to get rich.  Everybody owed.  Everybody knew the slavery of having too much debt.  Then on top of the Romans.  The religious authorities would come up from Jerusalem and police them about the silliest things all the while offering them no hope.  They would say, “God will get you if you do that and if we catch you doing that, there will be a heavy penalty fee to pay to the Temple.”  This crowd of people were done.  They needed God to intervene.

In the midst of those oppressive circumstances, Jesus showed up healing people and casting out demons.  Things only God could do.  Jesus would also say things like “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me” and that the Kingdom of God is at hand, things for which he was kicked out of his hometown synagogue for saying.  The people, crowds of people, just had this sense that God had heard them crying out and somehow through this Jesus God was speaking and acting.

Well, Jesus commandeered Peter’s boat and sat down and to teach from it, just like the rabbis did in the synagogues. They fluffed their frilly robes and sat down to teach.  There’s no mention of what Jesus said, but for his “sermon illustration” he sent Peter out on a little fishing trip.  Jesus told him to put out into the deep water and let down his nets for a catch.  You know, go out to where you can’t see the bottom or whether there is fish down there.  Go out to where it just seems you’re looking into a greenish black void and there do what you do...fish.  Let down your nets for a catch.

Peter was reluctant but respectful.  He said to Jesus, “Sir, we’ve been fishing all night and…nothing...got skunked.”  I imagine Peter, that he was exhausted, discouraged, and like everybody else there…up to his eyeballs in tax debt to the Romans.  Here he has worked all night long throwing the nets out and pulling them in, throwing them out and pulling them in and they were wet and heavy like December snow.  On the plus side, it may have been beautiful on the lake that night, looking up at the billions of stars and the moon as it rose and set, and then the sunrise.  

And here’s something else to consider…that he was fishing at night may have meant that he was fishing on the Sabbath and not wanting to be seen.  Getting caught doing that would just get him in trouble with the religious authorities only to be punished with fines and public shaming.  Peter likely needed that extra outing of fishing to help pay the Roman taxes.  I can’t help but imagine Peter as being demoralized, hopeless, and borderline dysphoric.  “Why am I here?”  There was nothing meaningful to all that working for nothing.  Why live?  But you keep going because you have responsibilities, you keep going even though life seems to be nothing…a deep void like the deep water."

But all hope is never lost.  Peter was willing to give Jesus a chance. He said to Jesus, “…yet, if you say so, I will let down the nets.”  If “you” say so.  Peter was hearing something more than words here.  He was hearing Jesus, hearing Jesus, and against all the physical and emotional fatigue he was feeling, he went and did what Jesus said do…Jesus, the one the crowds were flocking to, the one the Spirit of the Lord was upon, the one kicked out by his own synagogue, the one who was healing people and casting out demons, the one who was the peaceful, calming presence sitting in his boat talking about God whom he called “Father”.  There was just something there that Peter wanted.

Out to the deep water they go and over into that greenish, blackish void they let down the nets for a catch.  When they began to draw the nets in, it suddenly became clear that they needed some help or the nets would burst.  The catch was unbelievably huge to the point of almost sinking their boats.  This catch would likely get him and his friends out of debt.  Peter heard the voice of Jesus and as an act of loyalty, did what Jesus said to do.  Just like the hoards of people thronged to Jesus to hear the word of God so also even the fish in the deep, dark void of the lake heeded him.

Suddenly, Peter realized who Jesus is.  Luke points this out by calling him Simon Peter instead of just Simon.  He fell at Jesus’ knees (an act of worship) and exclaimed, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”  What else are you supposed to do and say when you suddenly realize that you are in the presence of G_d?  Peter went from calling Jesus, a respectful, “Sir”, to calling him "Lord".  G_d is the only One a Jew will address as "Lord".  And so, Peter, his brother Andrew, and their two friends James and John left everything…their boats, their nets, even family…to follow Jesus.

Turning the camera onto us, what do you do when you get that sense that God is speaking to you? It’s probably the case that for most of us when we think about hearing the word of God we approach it more like, “Just tell me what it says in the Bible and I’ll do it or at least take it into consideration.”  Yet, this approach reduces Scripture to being nothing more than a manual of moral truths for do-gooder’s and presumes that God just speaks generically and not to us personally.  That would be crazy.  Yet, one thing the Bible clearly and adamantly indicates is that God is directly involved in his Creation and in each of our lives.  We are each part of God’s purposes for his Creation.  I remember reading somewhere, maybe in Proverbs, something that said God created us with two holes in our heads, meaning two ears, so that we can hear him when he speaks.  Please do not underestimate the importance the Bible places on our hearing God personally.  God created us for that.  

But anyway, I guess the question we really need to ask is how does God speak?  How does God speak so that we may hear?  I will confess my insanity here.  I wouldn’t have come to Canada to be a minister had God not spoken an audible word to me to that effect.  Then, there’s the countless number of times when in my daily Bible readings, a verse or verses have stuck out to me that addressed me and the situations of my life in a very specific manner and in time what was said proved true . There have also been times when I’ve actually had the opportunity to sit in church like you folks and God has spoken to me through the sermon or a hymn.  There have also been times when something as weird as a hawk showing up at a moment that was more than coincidental and seemed to me to be God speaking to me.  God speaks.  

And, let’s set the record straight here.  Because I am a minister, does not deal differently with me than he does with each of you.  Since each of us is indwelt with the Holy Spirit who opens our ears to hear, God will speak and it does us well to give him opportunity.  I think, heck I know, that for the most part our problem with hearing God speak is in our not giving ourselves opportunity to hear.  Speaking from the testimony of the Scriptures themselves and my own personal experience, God does and will speak specifically and personally to us particularly when we are at a low point or in the midst of crisis, when we are in need of being turned around, when we need guidance.  God has not hung us out to walk through life on our own hoping we get it right.  Our God loves us.  Our God is faithful.  Therefore, he speaks and he speaks lovingly to us that which is best for us.  Therefore, his word is nothing to fear, but rather the thing upon which we should place our hope.  Jesus told Peter, “Do not be afraid.”  So let us not be afraid that God speaks.  If God doesn’t speak then life really is just our staring over the side of a boat into a greenish, black void not knowing what lurks there.  I find that scary.  Lie down on Jesus, repose on Jesus, press in on Jesus and listen for God to speak.  Amen.

Be Something

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1 Corinthians 13

Have you ever sat around and talked about nothing?  Actually, it’s a pretty hot topic these days.   You know nothing, what is it?  It’s a big one in the world of theoretical physics as there is a pretty strong movement among physicists who will say that this big, big, big, enormously big universe we live in came into existence out of nothing.  Before the Big bang there was nothing and then “Bang!”, there was everything.  Before knowledge of the Big Bang, most physicists would have said everything has always been.  Original theories about the Big Bang said there have been many Big Bangs.  The stuff of the universe has always been here.  Gravity causes it to collapse in on itself until it can’t collapse anymore then it explodes again and then collapses again.  That theory worked until they discovered that everything in the universe is accelerating away from each other.  That force of acceleration is stronger than the force of gravity and that means this universe will never collapse.   And thus and such, they do the math and the only way things add up is to say that there was a time before time when this universe didn’t exist.

Well, that seems to be a lot of talk about nothing and definitely a chicken-or the-egg kind of debate.  But if we look at this conversation about nothing out of the world of physics and look at it from a philosophical/religious perspective, it seems that neither side is saying anything new.  One side sounds a lot like Western/Christian ideas of Creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, and the other like Eastern ideas of the eternal all in which everything is connected and has always existed.  On the Christian side, the more Christiany you get with your ideas of how things came into being the more things seem to have a purpose that needs to be developed.  God has a purpose for this Creation.  The more Eastern you get; the more things lack a purpose and just are.  You know, the goal or non-goal of Buddhism is to empty one’s self of self and become nothing and if you progress far enough along this route you will reach the center of the perfect state of nothingness, known as Nirvana.  Practising meditation and compassion will help you along this route.  

One crucial difference between Christian faith and Buddhism is that we Christians say we are not “nothing” and should not seek to be nothing.  We are something.  God created us with a purpose in mind and we should therefore strive to be what God created us to be.  God created us, humanity, in his image and with a purpose that the Westminster Catechism so wonderfully states as glorifying God and fully enjoying him forever.  Each of us is uniquely and wonderfully made and beloved by God and gifted towards that endeavour.  We are not nothing nor should we strive to be nothing.  Our problem and one that we must strive to rid ourselves of is not self but rather a self that is bent in on itself, self that seeks only itself.  The self that is sick with the disease of mind called Sin.

Looking here at 1 Corinthians, I don’t know how philosophical Paul was trying to be, but he was certainly being poetic when he said if he had all those spiritual gifts for ministry but not love, he is nothing.  Love is how we express the something that God has created us to be, it is how we glorify and enjoy God.  Love requires we set aside the self that is bent back in on itself and humbly serve on another.

Paul said what he said because in Corinth they had a little problem, a leadership dispute that was affecting their unity in Christ.  A little background, Paul spent about a year and a half in Corinth planting what developed into several house churches.  When he left, he left no one in charge.  I suspect he was hoping that they would through prayer discern by the working and leading of the Holy Spirit who Jesus was calling to be their leaders.  Instead, several groups and personalities began to compete for control.  There were the rich patrons who owned the houses in which they met.  There were the philosophical types who thought the churches should be run more like philosopher clubs.  There were the name-droppers who said “I follow Paul” or “I follow Cephas” or “I follow Jesus” and since they were the “most sincere disciples” of the “great teachers” they should be the leaders. There was also what appears to be a group consisting primarily of women who spoke in tongues and prophesied a lot and who gave words of knowledge.  They likely thought that since they were so “spiritual” they should be in charge of the churches.  Unfortunately, these women looked just like the priestesses in the pagan temples.  

This leadership conflict in the congregations severely affected their unity in Christ.  They were failing to love one another, to be a community where the love of Christ showed through as the distinctive character of their relationships as congregations.  Instead, there was infighting in which congregants took each other to court before pagan judges. There was sexual immorality.  One man had taken his stepmother to be his wife.  When they celebrated the Lord’s Supper, it turned into a party for the rich while the poor had to stand back and watch.  And those spiritual women looking like pagan priestesses simply had these Christian churches looking like just another organization, trade guild, or religion like any other instead of a community which embodied the Kingdom of God/New Creation community that reflects the character of the One True God, and existed as a foretaste of what things will be like when Jesus returns and sets the world to right.  They were becoming nothing.

Here in chapter 13, the Love Chapter, the most read passage of any kind at weddings, Paul isn’t giving marriage advice.  He’s telling these churches what the heart of being the church is – love.  The Greeks had four words we translate as love.  One is the love of family.  Another is the love between friends and another is romantic love.  The word for love Paul uses here is for sacrificially and unconditionally looking to the needs of others as if they were your own.  In the church’s Paul planted this love was evident in a kind of fellowship that was not known in any other social grouping in the ancient world.  Women were leaders. Slaves worshipped with the families who owned them.  Rich and poor regarded one another as equals.  They suffered together, celebrated together, prayed together, worshipped together.  Christian community was something new.

As this community in Christ was new and had vastly different values than other kinds of communities back then, Christians often found themselves in conflict with their surrounding communities.  The result was that fellowship in this new Gathering in Christ filled with the living presence of the Holy Spirit became the primary relationship network for those who came and believed.  Each one of them all got a new identity as a beloved child of God in a new family-like fellowship that was known by its love.  In this Christian fellowship every one of them no matter who they were could say, “I used to be nothing but now I am something. The Spirit of God is in me.  I am a child of God the Father, a sister or brother to Jesus Christ the Son of God who is Lord of all Creation.  And we are all family, a new humanity that loves.  Without this love, I am nothing.” 

This love embodied in Christian community is the heart of the gathering.  This love by which we are something rather than nothing is not a matter of private religion where good people just come to hear good talks on how to be a good person and then go on trying to live a good life.  Being something requires that we gather together and listen to each other as we share our lives, our struggles, joys and pains.  It requires that we learn hospitality and respect for everyone and not build boundaries to people whom we think are not like us.  It requires that we do together that most crucial of all activities – prayer – even if it means we must pray out loud for one another.  It requires that we make our Christian fellowship the primary fellowship of our lives.  It requires that we study the Bible together and struggle with it together and do our best to live by it.  

Being a community that embodies love in the image of God is why this congregation is here.  This love is what makes us each “something”.  We can have every kind of ministry under the sun that we think churches ought to do but if we have not love, we have nothing…we gain nothing…we are nothing.  Love one another.  Be something.  Amen.