Loving Differently
1 Corinthians 13
A
Sermon Preached by
University
Congregational United
“On a bright Sunday morning
in February, shivering in a T-shirt and running shorts, I stepped into the
vaulted stone vestibule of the Church of the Heavenly Rest in
The woman who stumbled into church that day was the historian, Elaine Pagels.
But it was not an academic question about death she brought with her to church that day. Two days before, Elaine and her husband and learned that their two-and-a-half-year-old son had been diagnosed with a rare lung disease. He had only a few months, perhaps a few years to live.
While in some ways, we might look a bit different from the Church of the Heavenly Rest, in many ways I don’t think we look any different at all.
Some of you have stumbled in here this morning – not quite sure why you are here. Maybe just to stop and catch your breath before running out to all that lies before you.
Others of us knowing all too well what it is that we bear in us, bring with us today.
Some of us come bearing the terminal illness of a loved one that weighs heavy on our hearts.
Others of us knowing somehow in a deeper way than we have known before that we are mortal, that we all are dying and some day shall.
Some of us have come like Elaine, from anguished nights of fear and worry.
With holes in us of loss and hurt.
And others with something harder to name, to grab hold of, but that we know as a presence in us all too well.
Seeking a community that can face and help us face whatever it is we are facing.
The apostle Paul knew much about all that life calls us to face and bear.
He knew deeply, touched deeply, how transitory, fleeting, quickly passing life is.
He knew as a poet, that longing desire to connect with others through words - and yet sometimes the sheer inability, sheer lack in us to do so. To connect, reach another. To commune with another.
He knew as someone who invested much, gave much over to learning, study, and trying to live the life of faith that sometimes it all feels just so empty. We don’t know why we are doing it all – we lose the larger purpose and meaning we have been seeking.
He knew, as all of us know, about sacrifice. Sometimes he, like us, wondered what the sacrificing was all for – whether it was all worth it.
It is such realities that he sings of in the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians.
And he offered, he knew, but one small word that can meet all that ache and need – love.
* * * * * * * * * * *
I, like all of you, first learned about love from the people I grew up with, lived with.
I am very fortunate that I grew up in a home that immersed me in love, surrounded me with love. I know that some of you grew up in such homes. Others of you live in such homes today.
We learned a lot about love in my family by gathering around the kitchen table.
We had to get ourselves out of bed – all too early for me often! – to come together and sit around the kitchen table to have breakfast with my Dad before he went off to work.
And we had to end each day, again, by putting down whatever it was we were so busy doing to come together and eat supper together.
I learned around the table what love is. I learned love isn’t necessarily something that you always want to do – but something that requires daily tending to and practice. To learn about love you have to be within hearing distance of love.
Around the kitchen table I learned that love is home and family. Love is close.
I learned the rules that love lives by. Rules about how to be-together.
Loving means learning how to say, “please pass the peas”.
Loving means not kicking your feet under the table.
Loving means not annoying my sister at the table.
I learned a lot about love from my family around the kitchen table.
I know that some of you hear that this morning and are jealous, resentful, or sad.
For you didn’t grow up in a home that taught you much about love.
Instead, your family taught you a lot about the distortion of love – love that holds through violence, pain, fear or hurt.
You learned about the absence of love.
You learned that love was but a guest, who occasionally dropped by for dinner.
But whatever we learned about love and didn’t learn about love from our families – what we all learned was this: The love we learned around those tables wasn’t enough. Wasn’t enough to bear and be all love needs to bear and be.
For example, I learned a lot about love being “kind” – about love speaking kind words to others. But I didn’t learn a lot about a kind of love that speaks the truth – that dares to even though that might bring pain or grief.
I learned about a love that is “patient” – but not about love that knows when and how to say, “stop”. Later in my life I was drawn into some relationships where I kept being hurt again and again and again – but I kept showing up for isn’t that what love does? I didn’t learn about a love that can say, “no”. A love that says, “I am not being loving to me by putting myself in this situation again and again. And finally, I am not being loving to you by letting you hurt me again and again.”
Finally, it was a larger love, a different kind of love, that we needed to help us bear and face when someone around that table died or when one of us grew ill or faced a deep sorrow or loss. It was a larger love, a bigger kind of love that we needed then.
I don’t know if my parents would ever have said this, but what I know is that we went to church again and again. There was some kind of larger love that we needed – maybe some kind of larger love that they knew we needed that they just couldn’t provide, much though they wanted to.
And so, we were brought back again and again, to hear about this love of God.
To learn the stories about that love.
To sing about that love.
To learn to wrestle with and press and question that love.
To seek to understand that love.
To seek to live that love.
We came together to do what we do today – what we do once a month here, or once a week if you come to our Taize service on Wednesday nights.
We came to gather around this table.
To learn here about a different kind of love. A love that we participate in as part of this family in Christ that gathers around this table. A family where there are no outsiders, no strangers. A family where all are welcome and there is room and place and food for all.
A table, where whether we want to or not, we have to hear, remember the story that has been entrusted to us to remember.
We have to face the story, hear the story of Jesus’
desertion,
capture,
betrayal,
trial,
pain,
and death.
Words that we all know – words we shall all know.
But not only those words, but another word as well, Love.
A love that none of those words could take away. A love that could not die, does not die.
A kind of love we are called to take part in.
A love that has been given to us.
Not a word to “understand” – for who can understand such love?
But a love that we are called to participate in, to make our own.
Elaine Pagels reminds us that how Christians have understood, approached this table over the centuries has varied widely. What we need from this table is as diverse as the community we are.
For some, it may be to come, to repent of some violence that this table knows all too well- to repent, be freed from it – so that we may be met with the forgiveness this table offers.
For some, knowing pain, desertion, trial, we come seeking comfort from a God who knows our pain, bears our pain with us.
For others, we come seeking communion – that communion, presence of God that we know in and through the sharing together, this communion with God, this being-with God and one another that we are invited to participate in here.
Many ways we come to this table.
I come to this table today as one who has walked deeply into places of fear, betrayal and death with you and you with one another.
I come to participate in the sacred power of this table – a love that “bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things” A love that never ends.
A power that we are invited to participate in.
Christ’s resurrecting power and life. A love that will not let us go.
Let us come to the table. To remember. To participate in the story of this love that will not let us go. Amen.
* * * * * * * * *
We learn about love in dialogue with others. I have been assisted in this sermon by talking about love these past weeks with Lloyd Averill; Dave Shull and our housemates, Paul Chiocco and Doug McCrary at our weekly Tuesday night dinner; and with many of you in this community of faith. I have learned much, am learning much about what love means from all of you.
I was also assisted by re-reading, Lloyd Averill’s book, Reconsider Love. I recommend it highly. I have just started to read Elaine Pagel’s latest book, Beyond Faith from which the story that began the sermon this morning was taken. Her first chapter inspired and spoke to me.
* * * * * * * * *
(with thanks to Conference Minister, Stephanie Haines)
We have partaken in the story.
Let us go forth as a sign of Jesus Christ:
A sign of community to the lonely;
A sign of hope to the discouraged;
A sign of compassion to the downhearted;
A sign of challenge to the apathetic;
A sign of love to the rejected.
Go in love.
Go in peace.
Christ goes in you.
Amen.