Things That Abide

1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 4:21-30

Luke 4:21-30

²¹ Then Jesus began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

²² All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” ²³ He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” ²⁴ And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. ²⁵ But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; ²⁶ yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. ²⁷ There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”

²⁸ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. ²⁹ They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. ³⁰ But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

Jeremiah 1:4-10

⁴ Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, ⁵ “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” ⁶ Then I said, “Ah, Lord God ! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” ⁷ But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you, ⁸ Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord .” ⁹ Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me, “Now I have put my words in your mouth. ¹⁰ See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

¹ If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. ⁸ Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. ⁹ For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; ¹⁰ but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. ¹² For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. ¹³ And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

The Sermon

The choir of a large Midwestern church was traveling by bus through Europe, giving a series of concerts in some of the great Eastern European cities.

Traveling with the members of the church choir were spouses who were not in the choir, and some who weren’t even part of the church.

One of those was the husband of a soprano, both early retirement age, he having worked most of his career in the upper management of one of the largest insurance corporations in the world. While not openly hostile to religion, it certainly wasn’t his thing, but he was determined to be supportive and helpful and, as usual, keep his own thoughts about religion, whatever they may have been, to himself.

The tour buses pulled up in front of a hotel in a breathtaking old town in Slovakia. There was just enough time for the choir members to scramble off the bus, unload their bags, get back on the bus, and be shuttled to the church where they would sing that evening. So the others who were not in the choir volunteered to take care of handling the suitcases while the choir went on their way.

A couple hours later, back came the choir, and soon people were finding their bags and maneuvering themselves into their rooms.

Only, someone’s suitcase had apparently been put in what she considered the wrong place, which is baffling but it was her interpretation. Apparently this constituted a major offence, and she became enraged, and finding one of the guys who had volunteered to unload the suitcases, she unloaded with both barrels, venting her rage on the retired executive.

Here was a guy who was accustomed a. to being in charge, and b. to being civil, as might be expected in the upper echelons of the corporate world. In his whole life, he had never been spoken to that way before.

It might be an exaggeration to say that he was shaken, but if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of even a momentary torrent of verbal abuse, you know how it feels. It doesn’t feel very good.

And I said to him at dinner that evening, “I’ll bet you really wish you were part of the Church now! Don’t you wish you were part of this wonderful, loving Christian family?”

It was funny—the choir was moving through the great cathedrals of Eastern Europe, delivering the beauty of the finest of the American and English choral traditions into some of the most spectacularly beautiful, breathtaking houses of worship. Such truth spoken with such beauty.

But when it came down to a face-to-face encounter, one of our ambassadors was apparently having a bad day, and ended up sending a very mixed signal.

Which concerns me, because, I’m no stranger to having bad days myself. And I wonder how unfaithful I have been, in terms of sending the right message about who we are, and who God is.

But If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

If there is one message we are to be entrusted with—we, the body of Christ—then it must be the same message, carried on, that was brought by Jesus, the Christ. And if that is boiled down to one message, what would that be?

Before Jesus was born, we already had the law of God. We already had those who could speak prophetically. We had already had generations of prophets, ages of wisdom teachers, centuries of telling the story of how God called Abraham and set aside a covenant people.

The message Jesus brought was: God is love.

He taught us to love one another, to love God, to love our brothers and sisters, to love the world, even to love our enemies.

That was the challenging, radical word that Jesus brought. Love one another, just as I have loved you—completely, fully, totally, self-sacrificially. Because love comes from God, not as a trickle of rusty water, but gushing up from eternal wells that never run dry because they can never run dry because God has made it so. God’s love for us is extravagant; it’s beyond our ability to comprehend or control.

This is the message we are commissioned and charged with bringing to the world.

“Well, I can’t do that; I’m not some great apostle.”

Are you kidding?

When God told Jeremiah that he was appointed by God as a prophet to the nations. Jeremiah I said, “Ah, Lord God ! There must be some mistake—I don’t know how to speak, I’m only a boy.”

And God said to Jeremiah, “Don’t say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.”

Then the Lord put out his hand and touched Jeremiah’s mouth, and said, “Now I have put my words in your mouth.”

And the word we are to speak is love.

That word is misunderstood and misrepresented. Love is not blind submission to abuse. Love is not sexual license. Love is not an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and shouldn’t look like one.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.

One thing to consider is that probably all of us who have had any significant experience in the Church have had at least one encounter, in the church, where we experienced exactly the opposite of what Paul just said.

But if love is real, there is still reason for hope, because:

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

We live and work and minister in a world that has become quite comfortable getting leverage out of polarizing words, hateful words, deceitful words, oversimplifying words that seek to belittle people we disagree with. We are geniuses at creating divisions between ourselves, and we are morons for the way we fall for our own contraptions.

Meanwhile, as the Church is distracted by these false divisions, the hungering need for brave, strong, well nourished ministry goes far too largely unmet.

We may be dismayed or we may take comfort in recognizing that you could use almost exactly the same words to describe the situation in Corinth when Paul wrote to the young church there that was already fracturing:

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.

For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

We represent something much greater than ourselves, that even we who are disciples cannot yet fully appreciate.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

“Abide” is a great word. Beyond existing for the time being, to abide is related to the word abode, as in dwelling, the place where you live. To abide is to be there to stay. Paul was writing to a young church that was already starting to fall apart because some people thought they were better than others, and the “others” were starting to believe it. And everybody was starting to resent everybody else, particularly the people who were not like them.

And Paul said, here’s something you may not realize about the Church of Jesus Christ: faith, hope, and love abide there.

Today we minister in a context where many people, in this country and around the world, have found in their church experiences judgment and intolerance and lack of acceptance; and frustratingly, when they leave the church, and decide that God is an illusion, and Jesus is not real, they report that as a liberating experience—which can only mean one thing: somewhere along the line, the message has been horribly garbled; the transmission has been faulty and full of static. There is no way that turning away from God should feel more liberating to someone than accepting God’s embrace.

We are the body of Christ, and so we are the arms of that embrace.

We must win them back. They are not our enemies. We are a kingdom of priests, ambassadors of the God who is the source of love. We, clergy and laypeople, are the professionals of mature, responsible, all-embracing, Godly love.

But even the ambassadors know what it’s like to have a bad day. And when our faith is tested and faltering; and when circumstances conspire to make situations feel hopeless; and when we have forgotten how to love because we have been too preoccupied to notice that we ourselves are soaking in it, the Apostle Paul reaches out through the ages, with a crystal clear transmission that cuts through all the static and noise:

Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

And we long for the day when our Savior will say, in our church, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”