Plugged In and Turned On!

A story is told of a pastor who went to visit a man in his congregation who had not attended worship or fellowship events at the church in recent weeks.  It was a cold night and his parishioner had a wonderful fire burning in his fireplace. The wood snapped and popped as it burned… and the coals deep within the flames burned with a warm, red glow.  The parishioner offered his pastor something to drink and invited him to sit by the fire.  The pastor made several attempts to engage his parishioner in a conversation, but most of those ended a litany of responsibilities that had kept this parishioner busy at home or running errands when he might otherwise have been at church.  “I know why you are here,” the parishioner said, “but my heart is right with God.  Isn’t that all that is needed?  Why do I need come to church?”  Instead of responding, the pastor remained silent… sipping his drink… as they sat together before the fire.  After a time, the pastor stood… picked up the tongs by the fireplace… and, reaching into the heart of the fire, pulled a large flaming coal from the fire… set it apart on the brick of the fireplace and returned to his seat.  The flame on the coal quickly died and, in a very short time, its warm red glow dimmed and turned dark.  Without saying a word, the pastor stood again… and, using the tongs from the fireplace, picked up the large dark coal… put it back into the middle of the fire… and then resumed his seat.  The heat from the fire caused the large coal to burst into flame again, quickly regaining its warm, red glow.  After several more minutes of silence during which both men stared at the fire, the pastor rose to take his leave.  At the door, his parishioner shook his hand and said, “Thank you for coming, Pastor. I’ll be there this Sunday.”

This chapter from Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth is one of the most beautiful chapters in the Bible.  It is lyrical… expressive… succinct… and a fairly easy to understand treatise on the topic of Christian love.  In fact, it is so beautiful and so well-written that it is often included in marriage ceremonies as a lesson on the topic for both the bride and groom.  But Paul was not writing to a bride and groom… he was writing to a church. He was writing to a Christian church… a church torn by dissention in which various members believed that they were right and all others were wrong… a church in which love was noticeably absent.  This chapter on Christian love follows Paul’s insightful discussion of gifts… the gifts that are given to all by God to be used for the common good.  It also follows Paul’s discussion of the body of Christ… in other words, the church… the various parts of that body… and how all parts of the body are critical to its function.  In this discussion, Paul told the Christians at Corinth that they were all members of one body… and that they should function as one… one in Christ.  And now, he speaks of the glue that holds that body together and gives it meaning… Christian love.  Paul is not speaking to a bride and groom… but to you and to me… as members of the body of Christ.

 Bluntly, the greatest gift that you and I can give to each other is the gift of love.  Learning to love each other… to bear with each other… to build up each other… to stay with each other through all adversity… in all the ways that love is described in exquisite detail in this chapter of Paul’s letter… this is what forms the basis of our life in Christ.  In taking up this particular topic, the Apostle Paul is picking up a key thread in the tapestry of Jesus’ preaching.  Love was the topic that Jesus chose to address more often than any other while he lived on this earth.  “Love your neighbor as yourself”… and we know from the parable of the Good Samaritan who our neighbor is.  “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” … another great teaching from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He taught his disciples to, “Love one another, just as I have loved you.”  And he told them, “By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” And, in his final discussion with his followers, Jesus said, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.  You are my friends.”  Jesus knew that while our faith would bind us to God… it was our love that would bind us to each other.  That is why he spent so much time teaching his followers about love… and using his relationship with God the Father as the example of the intimate and self-giving nature of the kind of love that would sustain his church through all adversity.

I know that the title of the sermon today may sound like a reject from the flower children of 1960’s, but the kind of Christian love that Christ spoke of is not born of an individual, but lives and thrives within a community of faith… a community that is plugged into Jesus Christ… a community through whom the love of Christ can flow and be expressed.   This weekend, as I… finally… put away the little Christmas trees that decorate each room of my house during the holidays, I realized… once again… the importance of electricity in bringing light and life to each tree.  Each tiny tree is decorated with strings of lights… colored glass balls… small ornaments… and tinsel… but when the lights are unplugged, those trees remain but dark shadows of their potential.  Each tree has its unique contribution to make to our celebration of Christ’s birth… but, if it is not plugged in and turned on, it does not have the life-giving flow of electrical current that can change it from ordinary to extraordinary.  Without that vital energy, it cannot share its light.

The love that we have received from God the Father through his son is the life-giving flow that gives meaning to life and life to Christ’s church.  If you still have your Bibles open to our reading for today, let me show you what we have missed by beginning our reading at the first verse of chapter thirteen.  Most of you know that the chapters and verses in our Bible were assigned by those who compiled the Bible several centuries after these books and letters were written.  The Apostle Paul did not determine where chapter thirteen began in his letter to the church at Corinth and, if we back up into chapter twelve, we can catch an important gem we might otherwise miss.  After exhorting the Corinthians to strive for the greater gifts, Paul says these words: “And I will show you a still more excellent way,” and then, he launches into his treatise on love.  The gifts that you and I possess are wonderful… gifts from God that we are to share with the community faith as we work together as a single, unified body to do God’s will.  But all those gifts are nothing… mean nothing… if we cannot… if we do not… live together in love.

And now, you will hear me do something that I rarely do… and that is to slam the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (USA). When it comes to differences between people, the Book of Order says… and I quote… “there are truths and forms with respect to which men of good characters and principles may differ. And in all these we think it the duty both of private Christians and societies to exercise mutual forbearance toward each other.”  “Mutual forbearance” is a sublime objective for a sinful society filled with self-centered human beings… but it is a lukewarm… tepid… or perhaps even a cold shadow of the love that Jesus taught… the love that Jesus expected his followers to show to each other… and to others.  In searching six different translations of the Bible for the word forbearance, I could only find it used a maximum of three times… in all of scripture… all the in book of Romans… and all referring to God’s forbearance of all our shortcomings… not… as you might think… as instruction for the way in which we are to deal with each other.  Forbearance is a dark coal sitting on the hearth apart from the fire.  Forbearance is a Christmas tree… unplugged and dark.  It is there, but it is not contributing much to the community of faith… and it certainly does not reflect the love that God has shown to us in his son.   

Love is the oil that allows the engine of the heart to run… the glue that links people and hearts together… the sun that allows our lives to shine. It is the crop that is most easy to cultivate… and the most valuable to any society.  It is the subject most worthy of our attention… and the most excellent goal toward which to direct ourselves.  Does that mean that the people that God places in our path are the most lovable… the most easy to love?  No. But here is what it does mean: Through the power given to us by the Holy Spirit, we can show the love of God to every human being and… as the love of Christ transforms our lives, we can learn to love even the most unlovable of God’s creatures.  In this, we are unlike those dark little Christmas trees, for we are actually transformed by the love that flows through us.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
for the ends of Being and ideal Grace. I love thee to the level of everyday's most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.”  Her words are very moving… and ones we love to quote, particularly when we are in the first throes of a new romance.  But this warm, gooey feeling is not what we are talking about when we speak of Christian love.  As any long-time married couple can tell you, love is not a feeling… it is a decision.  And the actions that flow from that decision create the stability of a relationship… of a community… of a society… for better or worse, for richer or for poorer.  I find Shakespeare’s words a far more accurate representation of the Christian love that Jesus taught.  “Love,” Shakespeare wrote, ”is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. O no! It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

It is easy to speak these words… and to live these words… when the one we are speaking of is our own child… our spouse… our friend.  It is much more difficult to live these words when the one we are to love is a thoughtless… irresponsible… arrogant… uncaring… and yes, perhaps even unlovable… human being.  How can we deal with the diversity of personalities… and opinions… and attitudes exhibited by those around us… even those who form this community of faith… and do it with all the humility… and grace… and self-giving love of which the Apostle Paul speaks?  Many times, I know, we retreat to “mutual forbearance” as our escape.  Other times, we sit on the sidelines like that solitary lump of coal… swearing that we will not return to Christian fellowship until the church becomes the reflection of love that Christ intended it to be… not realizing that… in doing so… we do not exhibit the love of God toward our fellow man.  We fail to see that we have lost the flame of that love ourselves… and have become a cold shadow of our potential.  You and I are conduits of the love of Christ.  The determination to share that love is not a feeling… it is a decision… a decision that is empowered by the Holy Spirit.  If we wait until we feel like loving someone, we will sit outside the fire for a long time.  But if we make the decision to love someone… to be a conduit of Christ’s love… despite our feelings for or about that person, we will find ourselves in the midst of the fire.  For our love grows in direct proportion to the love that we share with others… and, as we share that love together in the community of faith that is the church, that fire grows hotter and burns brighter… attracting those who live in the cold reality of this world to its warmth.

God proved his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.  Can we not prove our love for God by sharing that love with others?   Like the Corinthians, we find ourselves surrounded by the human failings of turf wars… social climbing… gossip… obsession with control… and other realities of life among other human beings.  But in the midst of all that, there is a community of faith which… bound together in Christian love… can overcome all these things and give warmth and light to the world.  My challenge to you… and to me… this week is to read the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians each morning… thinking not of our children… our spouses… or our friends… but of that unlovable one to whom we have been showing “mutual forbearance.”  Can we show that one the love of Christ… the love that the Apostle Paul describes so eloquently?   I believe, with God’s help, we can.  Amen.

1 Corinthians 13:1-13