race and peace to you from God our Father, and from the heavenly bridegroom, Jesus Christ our Lord, Renata, Eric, family and friends, brothers and sisters in Christ.
e hear 1 Corinthians 13 read at nearly every Christian wedding. But St. Paul did not write this chapter for weddings. He didn’t write it for two twenty-somethings who were head-over-heels for each other. He wrote it for the Christian congregation in Corinth—a group of people who couldn’t stand each other. They were divided in many ways. They were divided because they were playing favorites with their preachers. Some said “We like Paul.” Others said “We like Peter.” Others said “We like Apollos” (who was a co-worker of Paul). It was more than just likes and dislikes. It was more like, “Our guy is great, and your guy is stupid, and you’re stupid if you like him.” And they were divided even more. Some of the people thought they had special spiritual gifts, prophecy, knowledge—there were even some who thought they had the gift of Pentecost, the ability to speak languages they hadn’t learned. And the refrain here was much like the first one. “Our gifts are the best. Our gifts are the greatest. If you can’t do what we can do, then you’re stupid and unimportant.” So Paul begins, “Now I will show you the most excellent way.” You want to know what’s best? Here it is!
aul could have talked about every issue that divided them. He touches on most of them. But his chief concern is on the one thing that divided them. Their lack of love. Here’s a less-poetic paraphrase: “I can speak in the tongues of human languages, even the language of the angels, but without love it is nothing but irritating noise. It’s fun to be the smartest person in the room, but that means nothing if you’re the smartest in the room because everyone else has left. I can do the most amazing acts of self-sacrifice, but that means nothing without love.”
hen Paul defines love. He defines it differently than anyone in his time defined it, and much differently than anyone in our time defines it. Now we think of love as an intense feeling. The year I graduated from high school (1984) there was a song, “I can’t fight this feeling any morrrrrrrrre….” Something that excites us. We like something very much—we’re even obsessed by it. That’s how people define love. Paul defines love as an action. “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” We don’t want to add anything to Scripture because Scripture is all-sufficient, but we could add “other people” in parentheses after each of those phrases. “Love is patient (with other people), love is kind (to other people). It does not envy (other people),” and so on. You can’t sit in your own little chair in your own little room and say, “I am patient” because there, there’s no one to tax your patience. You can’t sit alone and say “I am kind” because there’s no one to put the kindness to the test. Here Paul is defining love as giving yourself to other people. Paul does not mention Jesus at all in this chapter, but he is certainly describing a Christ-like love, patience and kindness that is always directed to others. In a marriage, patience and kindness will be tested. One of you will do something and the other will think, “Oh, he never did this when we were dating.” “Why is she starting to do all these things all of a sudden.”
he disciple John does mention Jesus by name in his first letter. “This is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ gave his life for us.” And also in his first letter, John says, “We love because he first loved us.” There John is holding up Jesus as a great example of love—and he is also doing much more. He is pointing us to Jesus as our motivation for love and our power to love. Love the way Jesus loved—certainly. But our broken human nature gets in the way, doesn’t it? There may be times we don’t feel like loving. There may be people we think are difficult to love. Then our feelings aren’t driving our love, they are destroying it. “We love because he first loved us.” As Christian people, we have been given so many gifts, and we’ve been made aware of so many gifts. There’s first gift of all: life. And then all the other gifts follow: The life of faith, being connected to your God because he reached out to you with his Word, revealed himself as your Savior, he took your sins on himself and declared you to be his child. He gives you each day your daily bread, all you need for body and life. He continues to forgive you day by day, leads you through temptation and delivers you from evil every day. How do you respond to that? …to that love that God has poured out into your lives? “We love because he first loved us.” The love of Christ is your example for love, your motivation for love, and your power to love in good times and bad, when it is easy to love and when it seems difficult to love.
aul surprises us. He was an apostle of Jesus Christ, so he certainly would be concerned about things like prophecy, knowledge, but what does he say in the next paragraph? “Where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.” I think he’s focusing back on the problem the Corinthians had— “We’re great and you’re stupid. We’re gifted and you’re rotten.” Here he’s saying, all the things you think make you special will have their time. You think you have gifts of prophecy, tongues and knowledge? A time is coming when you won’t be able to do those things anymore. Then what will make you special? Besides, here on earth, nothing is complete or perfect. “We know in part, we prophesy in part. But in heaven, there everything will be complete. Now we see things like we’re looking in a foggy mirror. Then we will see and know just as God sees and knows us.”
aul displays love himself by his gentleness. That’s what this part is about: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” Now when my children were small, they used to say all kinds of cute things. I remember Renata going around when she was 1 ½ to 2 saying “Tib, tib, tib, tib, tib.” We tried teaching her “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know,” and it came out “Yah, bee bee bee bee.” But that’s not the kind of speaking like a child Paul is thinking of. I think he’s thinking about the terrible twos, when a child’s favorite word is “mine!” One child sees another with a toy, and the first child shouts “mine!” and grabs the toy and shoves the other child away, because this toy is mine! In the gentlest way, Paul is telling the Corinthians, “Grow up. You’re like a bunch of two-year-old children shouting mine. Put childish ways behind you. Think about others. Give yourselves to each other in love.
nd then Paul surprises us again. Paul’s greatest book, perhaps the greatest book in the New Testament outside the gospels is his letter to the Romans. Romans is a book about faith. “The righteous shall live by faith” (1:17). “Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:1). “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (10:17). So at the end, he says, “These three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” Why doesn’t he say “the greatest of these is faith”? Because love is faith and hope put into practice. Love is how you show a living faith. Think again of all the gifts you have been given as children of your heavenly Father. Grace, mercy, peace, love, forgiveness and everything else. If this is what you know, if this is what you accept as true, if this is what you trust, then how do you live? “Be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:1-2).
lory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning is now and will be forever. Amen.
Pastor Paul Stratman's Blog 