Sermon for the Fourth Sunday After Epiphany
Sermon Text: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 (NRSV)
Grace, peace, and mercy are yours through the triune God. Amen.
Whenever we read this passage from 1st Corinthians 13, it’s not uncommon for us to feel an overwhelming sense of pure happiness. After all, this is a passage that has come to be identified with some of the most joy filled moments of our lives and rightfully so. It’s no secret that this text is one of the most popular passages of Scripture to be read at wedding ceremonies. Newly married couples look to these words as a kind of inspiration or standard for what they hope to experience in their relationship together. Expecting parents will also lift this passage as an affirmation of the feelings they are having while awaiting the arrival of their child. These words of the Apostle Paul have even been plagiarized by many sentimental songs about love and relationships. That this passage has become so common in our culture, a culture that’s obsessed with the emotion of love or the individual feeling of love, is not surprising. Still, it’s important for us to recognize that there is more going on in this text than we might think.
We live in a culture that talks about love merely as a feeling or an emotional experience. We say things like “I love ____” or “I love you” to express deep and intimate feelings that we have towards something. We might feel love for another person, for a peaceful place like a park, or even for something as simple as a beautiful flower. When we say that we love something, we tend to mean that we have deep feelings towards that person or thing that are difficult to express. They can be romantic feelings, but they most certainly don’t have to be. This way of talking about love, however, can be quite limiting because it only focuses on the individual experience. It’s all about my feelings and my inner emotions, which is indeed a part of love. But this is not the full picture of love that is expressed by Paul in 1st Corinthians. Love, in this text, is not just the presence of inner feelings, but it’s also demonstrated through outward actions towards the other, towards our neighbor, and towards the community. Love is doing things in this passage, and we often miss that.
In the translation of this text that we just read, love seems to be described by a set of adjectives like patient, kind, and not envious. Biblical scholar Melanie Howard points out, however, that in the original Greek, these words are not acting as adjectives but as verbs.[1] These words aren’t describing what love feels like, but what love does. Therefore, Howard notes that it’s better to read this not as “love is patient” but as “love waits patiently” and not as “love is kind” but as “love acts kindly.”[2] In other words, love is doing something here. It’s not just a passive inward feeling. The inward experience is the spark that drives a set of tangible outward actions.
It’s also important to note that, in writing this passage, Paul didn’t have a wedding ceremony or romantic relationship in mind. That’s not to say that this passage can’t be meaningful for our joyful celebrations, but that was not its first intent. Instead, if we look back to chapter 12 of this letter from Paul, we realize that this passage was Paul’s response to a time of discord in the church in Corinth. Instead of a celebration of a joy filled event, this text was written to people in conflict. We see in chapter 12 that the people in Corinth seemed to have been embroiled in a controversy over the importance of spiritual gifts. The community seems to have been trying to figure out what gifts were better than others and how to develop those more important gifts. They seem to be competing with each other by ranking their gifts and trying to create a hierarchy. To this Paul first replies by affirming that all people are indeed blessed with unique gifts that are each equally needed for God’s work in the world. Our text last week from 1st Corinthians talked about this through the language of unity in the Body of Christ, but Paul didn’t stop there.
Paul understood that merely affirming the importance of everyone’s diverse gifts and calling for unity isn’t enough to create a sustainable community. There must be something that brings all people together, that motivates us to use our gifts in the service of others, and that gives us a common purpose. Otherwise, we’re all just out there doing our own thing with no real connection to each other in the body of Christ. We need something to enliven the community of diverse gifts and for Paul, love is that very thing. That’s why Paul says we can have all knowledge, all understanding, or even enough faith to remove mountains, but if love is not in the mix, those very things are useless.
Rather than being only an inward emotion or some romantic feeling, love is the very thing that turns our vision from ourselves to others. It’s the thing that drives us to action in community with others. It’s the thing that gives meaning to the varied gifts that each of us bring to the body of Christ. It’s the thing that leads us not to compare our gifts with those gifts of others, but to value the importance of each of our gifts. Love is the thing that sustains the community in times of conflict and in times of strife. Love is what holds us together. Love is both feeling and action.
Ending this portion of the letter to the Corinthians, Paul affirms one final thing. That is, we desperately need love to be the glue that holds together our diverse community. We need love to enliven our common life together, because we do live in a world where conflicts exist and will exist. We do live in a world where people are envious of others. We live in a world that is extremely impatient, unkind, and boastful. I know you all are “Minnesota nice,” but Paul affirms that we live in a world where people can be arrogant and rude. We live in a world where even Christians can and often do become beset by these very things. Paul describes this experience in verse 12 as something like looking into a dim mirror.
Paul says, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.”[3] I was intrigued by this little phrase and decided to do some investigating to see if I could get a better sense of what Paul was talking about here. Little did I know that there are whole websites out there dedicated solely to telling the history of ancient mirrors. What you find in researching mirrors in the ancient world is that this text isn’t describing the mirrors that we are familiar with but something different. As it turns out, mirrors in the time of 1st Corinthians were not made out of glass like the ones that hang in our homes. Rather, they were made by flattening pieces of metal. They’d make the metal so smooth that it would shine just enough that a reflection could be seen when looking into it. Luckily for us, Biblical Scholar Melanie Howard pointed out that, while our mirrors are far more advanced today, we can get a taste of looking into these ancient mirrors simply by looking at our reflection in a metal spoon.”[4] So, if you can imagine, I did a little experiment to try this out and here are the results.
We see in a mirror dimly! As I look at my own reflection in the spoon, it strikes me that you can tell that it’s a person. You might be able to recognize some of my facial features and tell that it’s me. For the most part, however, my reflection in the spoon isn’t perfect. It doesn’t give a full and true representation of who I am. The image is distorted. It’s actually a little disorienting. It looks more like an artistic piece, than an accurate picture. If you had never met me before and had only seen this picture, you’d be surprised to meet the real me in-person.
With this imagery, Paul seems to be saying that the Corinthians don’t have the full picture of the world or of faith right now. They’re not yet living in the fully reconciled Kingdom of God that one day would come in perfect love, the love that never ends. The competition, boasting, and striving in the church in Corinth for the best spiritual gifts missed the point of what the Body of Christ was all about, and it threatened to tear the community apart. Paul was giving the community a promise that they one day would see fully, when the long-awaited justice of God would be made real. Until then, however, the community should strive to let love be the thing that binds them together and the thing that leads them to actions that are always rooted in the need of those around us. They should do this because love endures. The challenges that the community is facing and their need for these spiritual gifts will one day come to an end, but not love. That is what it means to be the body of Christ.
I love this imagery because I think it speaks to how many of us feel in our current situation. We too are experiencing a time of conflict. Our world in this moment is embroiled in division, a continuing pandemic, and rising tension among our families. This experience can lead us to wonder just where all of this is heading. Even the future of the church and what it will look like in the years ahead is unclear. Like my own warped reflection in the spoon, our challenges can sometimes be just as disorienting. They can threaten to tear our own community apart.
At the same time, however, there is a promise in this text for the Corinthians and for us. It’s the promise that our community, the body of Christ, can be strengthened and held together only when we choose to let our feelings of love turn into outward actions. Only then, is true love found. Only then, is true love expressed. Only then can we experience that unity of the body of Christ because love is that enduring glue in our community. Love is always what places us in relationship to the needs of others. This is the love that comes from God, the love that energizes and moves us. The love that will never end. The love that’s active and doing things. Let’s let that kind of love be the thing that we strive for amid our present circumstances. Let’s allow that kind of love to be our guide through these next few years that are unknown to us. Let’s allow that kind of love be our guide as this church ponders how it will be active in the ministry of Christ. Amen.
[1] Melanie Howard, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 13:1-13,” Working Preacher (Luther Seminary, n.d.), https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-after-epiphany-3/commentary-on-1-corinthians-131-13-7.
[2] Ibid.
[3] 1 Corinthians 13:12, (NRSV).
[4] Howard, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 13:1-13.”