As a priest I have always been curious about how clergy are portrayed in television and in movies, especially at weddings and the sermons that are preached which tend to be silly at best, or vacuous or at worst hate-filled.
My favorite is the Bishop with the speech impediment in The Princes Bride and his marriage sermon that starts with “Mawwiage, the bwessed awangment, the dweem within a dweem” and ends with “Wuv, twoo wuv will last forever.” And then at the urging of the wicked Prince he skips ahead to “Have you the wing?”
It is actually a pretty clever movie a rollicking great adventure about giving and risking everything for true love.
Love. True love. Interesting.
We usually hear Chapter 13 of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians at weddings.
We also usually lose the cutting challenge of the chapter in all the sentiment of the occasion. The great chapter about love, about what it is and is not and the great mystery of love being what makes everything else work, without which nothing means anything.
It is about much more than marriage.Paul is writing to a congregation that has many impressive gifts and skills and expertise and much boasting and elitism and exclusion, a congregation that has lost love.
Paul is writing to a congregation that has many impressive gifts and skills and expertise and much boasting and elitism and exclusion, a congregation that has lost love.
And love isn’t just one ingredient among many ingredients that makes for a faithful church, it is what makes all the ingredients work, without which nothing works. Grace Church soup tastes so good, literally because it is made with love.
It doesn’t matter what we know, what we do, without love it means nothing, the recipe doesn’t work.
This is about every aspect of our lives.
Are we living and acting out of love, the love that builds up others? If not then our lives mean less than nothing. There is nothing sweet or sentimental about this chapter. It is a harsh judgment on a church that has lost the whole point.
Here is the big picture for Paul: the final judgment, resurrection day, the consummation, renewal and restoration of creation, all that will be left of us on that great day will be what was done in love.
All our achievements, successes, failures, worrying, striving, envying, anger, resentments, fears all mean nothing, only what we do in love sticks around and lasts and rises again. Nothing else lasts, nothing else has any substance without it.
I have wasted so much of my life and my vocation on things that are not love.
That is the reaction we are meant to carry away from Chapter 13.
We are convicted to begin to learn the ways, habits and character of the love that is patient and kind, not envious, not boastful, not arrogant, not rude,
not insisting on its own way, is not irritable or resentful, doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing, that endures and puts up with everything, that always trusts God, that rejoices in truth and never gives up hope.
We are students in the school of love. That is the Church.
Only this love makes everything else work, this is the greatest gift of the Spirit and the only evidence of God’s blessing.
The centrality of the love ethic is the definingcharacter of Christianity, no other religion has this command as central and defining.
Jesus says the writings of the Law and the Prophets hang from love of God and neighbor, scripture can only be used for those two things, if used for something else then scripture is abused.
And love looks like Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, it looks like Jesus hanging from the cross for the sake of those who betrayed, abandoned and executed him.
It is a difficult faith to practice because we usually want a clear check list of does and don’ts. But what we are given is the task of learning love and following where true is love found, because God is there.
We are prospectors looking for the gold of God’s love, because everything else fails and fades.
We can’t be legislators of whatever check list happens to be in vogue, that isn’t the faith of Jesus Christ.
Are we taking on love and following it at all costs?
That is the only great adventure.
Everything else means nothing.