Richard Lischer - "Finding a Place for Love" (January 29, 1995)
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| - | Let us pray together the prayer for illumination. | 0:07 |
| Open our hearts and minds, oh God, | 0:13 | |
| by the power of your Holy Spirit | 0:16 | |
| so that as the word is read and proclaimed, | 0:18 | |
| we may hear your word with joy this day, amen. | 0:22 | |
| The Gospel lesson is found in Luke, | 0:28 | |
| the fourth chapter, beginning with verse 21. | 0:30 | |
| Then he began to say to them, | 0:39 | |
| "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." | 0:41 | |
| All spoke well of him and were amazed | 0:45 | |
| at the gracious words that came from his mouth. | 0:47 | |
| They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?" | 0:50 | |
| And he said to them, "Doubtless you will quote | 0:54 | |
| to me this proverb, doctor, cure yourself. | 0:56 | |
| "And you will say do here also | 1:00 | |
| "in your hometown the things | 1:02 | |
| "that we have heard you did at Capernaum." | 1:04 | |
| And he said, "Truly I tell you, | 1:07 | |
| "no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown. | 1:10 | |
| "But the truth is there were many widows | 1:13 | |
| "in Israel in the time of Elijah | 1:16 | |
| "when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, | 1:18 | |
| "and there was a severe famine over all the land. | 1:21 | |
| "Yet Elijah was sent to none of them | 1:25 | |
| except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. | 1:27 | |
| "There were also many lepers in Israel | 1:31 | |
| "in the time of prophet Elijah, | 1:34 | |
| "and none of them were cleansed except Naaman the Syrian." | 1:36 | |
| And when they heard this, | 1:40 | |
| all in the synagogue were filled with rage. | 1:42 | |
| They got up, drove him out of the town, | 1:45 | |
| and led him to the brow of the hill | 1:48 | |
| on which their town was built | 1:49 | |
| so that they might hurl him off the cliff. | 1:51 | |
| But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. | 1:54 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 1:58 | |
| Thanks be to God. | 2:00 | |
| The epistle lesson is from the First Book of Corinthians, | 2:06 | |
| chapter 13, verses one through 13. | 2:10 | |
| If I speak in the tongues of mortals | 2:19 | |
| and of angels but do not have love, | 2:21 | |
| I am noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. | 2:25 | |
| And if I have prophetic powers | 2:28 | |
| and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, | 2:30 | |
| and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains | 2:33 | |
| but do not have love, I am nothing. | 2:36 | |
| If I give away all my possessions, | 2:39 | |
| and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, | 2:41 | |
| but do not have love, I gain nothing. | 2:44 | |
| Love is patient. | 2:47 | |
| Love is kind. | 2:49 | |
| Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. | 2:50 | |
| It does not insist on its own way. | 2:54 | |
| It is not irritable or resentful. | 2:57 | |
| It does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. | 2:59 | |
| It bears all things, believes all things, | 3:03 | |
| hopes all things, endures all things. | 3:05 | |
| Love never ends. | 3:09 | |
| But as for prophecies, they will come to an end. | 3:11 | |
| As for tongues, they will cease. | 3:14 | |
| As for knowledge, it will come to an end, | 3:16 | |
| for we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part. | 3:19 | |
| But when the complete comes, | 3:23 | |
| the partial will come to an end. | 3:25 | |
| When I was a child, I spoke like a child. | 3:28 | |
| I thought like a child. | 3:31 | |
| I reasoned like a child. | 3:32 | |
| When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways, | 3:34 | |
| for now we see in a mirror dimly, | 3:38 | |
| but then we will see face to face. | 3:40 | |
| Now I know only in part. | 3:43 | |
| Then I will know fully even as I have been fully known. | 3:45 | |
| And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, | 3:50 | |
| and the greatest of these is love. | 3:54 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 3:57 | |
| Thanks be to God. | 3:58 | |
| - | In the musical, "Fiddler on the Roof," | 4:14 |
| the husband Tevye surprises his wife when he asks, | 4:18 | |
| "Do you love me?" | 4:23 | |
| She replies, "Do I what?" | 4:27 | |
| "Do you love me?" | 4:33 | |
| "For 25 years, I've washed your clothes, | 4:37 | |
| "cooked your meals, cleaned your house, | 4:39 | |
| "given you children, milked the cow. | 4:41 | |
| "After 25 years, | 4:44 | |
| "why talk of love right now?" | 4:49 | |
| Love is something you do she seems to be saying, | 4:53 | |
| not talk about or preach about. | 4:57 | |
| Ask the parents of a severely handicapped child | 5:04 | |
| why they have devoted their lives to caring for their child, | 5:07 | |
| and chances are they will say something like | 5:13 | |
| our child has special needs, | 5:15 | |
| or that is just what we do. | 5:19 | |
| But probably not, because we love her. | 5:23 | |
| Even preachers know that to talk about 1 Corinthians 13 | 5:30 | |
| can be dangerous to speak of this great love chapter. | 5:36 | |
| And the danger is sounding superficial. | 5:41 | |
| With all the work we have to do, | 5:45 | |
| why talk of love right now? | 5:50 | |
| What's more, it's not even controversial | 5:55 | |
| to come out in favor of love. | 5:57 | |
| I can see the headline in the Chronicle, | 5:59 | |
| divinity prof, love good. | 6:01 | |
| (congregation laughs) | ||
| That's not going to rock your world. | 6:07 | |
| The jury is no longer out on love. | 6:11 | |
| We know that it's indispensable to the Christian message | 6:14 | |
| and indispensable to our identity as Christians. | 6:17 | |
| In the Gospel, Jesus summarizes everything | 6:23 | |
| that had come before him with two simple sentences, | 6:25 | |
| you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart | 6:30 | |
| and all your soul and all your mind, | 6:32 | |
| and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. | 6:36 | |
| And this is a preface to a little story He tells about love, | 6:40 | |
| which has come to be known | 6:45 | |
| as the parable of the good Samaritan. | 6:47 | |
| But it's the Biblical writer John | 6:51 | |
| who makes the ultimate equation in one of his letters, | 6:53 | |
| for he says not only love is of God, | 6:57 | |
| but he says God is love. | 7:00 | |
| More than that, the message not only of our culture | 7:07 | |
| but of all cultures since time began | 7:09 | |
| seems to support our high view of love. | 7:12 | |
| Although in culture, the equation is reversed, isn't it? | 7:17 | |
| Not God is love, but love is God. | 7:21 | |
| But nevermind, from Sappho to Shakespeare to Barry Manilow, | 7:26 | |
| that's to let you know I'm hip, | 7:33 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 7:35 | |
| our culture says love is great. | 7:39 | |
| But there are some serious problems that remain | 7:44 | |
| with the way Paul talks about love. | 7:48 | |
| Years ago, we took our children | 7:53 | |
| to the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. | 7:54 | |
| I still remember standing in front of that Apollo capsule, | 7:58 | |
| somewhat awed, without a group of people | 8:02 | |
| and overhearing a little boy ask his dad | 8:04 | |
| the quintessential American questions. | 8:07 | |
| Is it real? | 8:10 | |
| Will it work? | 8:14 | |
| Not bad questions to put to this text, | 8:18 | |
| which was originally intended to serve a limited purpose, | 8:20 | |
| to solve a specific problem in a troubled congregation, | 8:24 | |
| but which is not exhibited as the universal ideal | 8:29 | |
| against which all definitions of love must be measured. | 8:33 | |
| This text has been painted on plates. | 8:39 | |
| This text has been embroidered | 8:42 | |
| and framed and hung in parlors. | 8:44 | |
| But what happens when you take the ideal out of the frame | 8:48 | |
| and put it into a context that might not be receptive to it? | 8:53 | |
| Will it work? | 9:00 | |
| Oh, it's fine when it's hanging in the parlor. | 9:03 | |
| But read it, say, at a faculty meeting, | 9:07 | |
| and it begins to fade. | 9:12 | |
| Or try reading it in the dorm to your roommate, | 9:15 | |
| love does not insist on its own way, | 9:19 | |
| and it begins to sound a little unreal. | 9:24 | |
| Read it at a city council meeting | 9:26 | |
| or in the United States House of Representatives, | 9:27 | |
| love is kind, | 9:30 | |
| and it begins to sound positively unreal, | 9:34 | |
| which is why theologians from Luther | 9:39 | |
| to Calvin to Reinhold Neibuhr | 9:41 | |
| have barred considerations of love | 9:44 | |
| from professional, social, and political contexts | 9:47 | |
| and relegate it to the realm of interpersonal relationships. | 9:51 | |
| They seem to be saying this is fine. | 9:57 | |
| This is a very good definition of love, | 9:59 | |
| but there are certain messy contexts in which it won't work. | 10:02 | |
| And from a practical point of view, I agree with that. | 10:09 | |
| From a theological and religious point of view, | 10:12 | |
| I have some questions. | 10:14 | |
| When we have so thoroughly identified love with God, | 10:17 | |
| God is love, and then turn around and say, | 10:20 | |
| but there are an awful lot of situations | 10:23 | |
| in which this has no place, | 10:25 | |
| it would be inappropriate. | 10:30 | |
| Well, those of you have read 1 Corinthians | 10:35 | |
| know that this thing comes with its own messy context. | 10:37 | |
| If chapter 13 is Paul's cathedral of love, | 10:41 | |
| the rest of the book is a weed patch. | 10:45 | |
| Paul was the pastor of what we might call | 10:48 | |
| a Pentecostal congregation that had gone haywire. | 10:50 | |
| His members believed that because they had the spirit, | 10:54 | |
| they could treat one another as they pleased. | 10:56 | |
| They believed that because they had the spirit, | 11:00 | |
| that they could use their bodies | 11:02 | |
| and other people's bodies as they pleased. | 11:03 | |
| Thus, 1 Corinthians reads like "Days of Our Lives." | 11:06 | |
| There are divisions over an attractive minister | 11:11 | |
| in chapter one, a case of incest in chapter five, | 11:13 | |
| lawsuits between members of the church in chapter six, | 11:17 | |
| and more, divorce, idolatry, | 11:21 | |
| false doctrine, denials of the resurrection, | 11:23 | |
| drunkenness at the Lord's Table in chapter 11, | 11:26 | |
| and worship services that often got out of hand. | 11:30 | |
| Everyone had the spirit in Corinth in this little church. | 11:36 | |
| And apparently many were speaking in ecstatic tongues, | 11:40 | |
| which means that their worship services | 11:44 | |
| were probably more interesting than ours | 11:46 | |
| but also more chaotic. | 11:50 | |
| Now it's important for me to say | 11:54 | |
| that the problem in Corinth was not the spirit. | 11:56 | |
| Paul was a man of the spirit. | 12:02 | |
| Paul lived in the spirit. | 12:04 | |
| Paul himself had visions. | 12:06 | |
| In another letter to this church, | 12:09 | |
| and it seemed that they required many letters, | 12:10 | |
| Paul wrote I knew a man who was caught | 12:14 | |
| into the third heaven in the spirit. | 12:16 | |
| And most scholars think he was talking about himself. | 12:19 | |
| Paul himself spoke ecstatically. | 12:23 | |
| He said it's like the language of the angels, | 12:27 | |
| and he bragged about it. | 12:29 | |
| In his important new book entitled "Fire From Heaven," | 12:34 | |
| theologian Harvey Cox reminds us | 12:39 | |
| that in the 21st century there will be more spirit-baptized, | 12:41 | |
| fire-breathing Pentecostalists | 12:47 | |
| than all the Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, | 12:50 | |
| Baptists, and Methodists put together. | 12:53 | |
| Now some of us receive this as troubling news | 12:57 | |
| as though the church were just about to veer off course | 13:01 | |
| from its original, cool, rationalistic style. | 13:04 | |
| You couldn't prove that from 1 Corinthians. | 13:09 | |
| Once again, the problem in Corinth was not the spirit. | 13:13 | |
| Without the Holy Spirit moving through people, | 13:18 | |
| you have a dead religion. | 13:20 | |
| The problem was that everybody had gifts, | 13:23 | |
| intellectual gifts, spiritual gifts. | 13:27 | |
| But they had forgotten how to love. | 13:32 | |
| That context remains. | 13:37 | |
| That's the original context, | 13:39 | |
| and in a strange way, it is our context as well. | 13:41 | |
| It's an interesting time to be a Christian in America today. | 13:50 | |
| There are contradictory spirits blowing through the land. | 13:55 | |
| If you believe what you read, | 13:58 | |
| America is once again in a religious revival, | 14:00 | |
| and we're all seeking a higher spiritual meaning | 14:03 | |
| for our lives. | 14:06 | |
| In the last fading glow of the second millennium, | 14:09 | |
| standing on the brink of an unimagined age of information, | 14:12 | |
| it turns out what we're hungry for is knowledge | 14:18 | |
| of the spirit. | 14:21 | |
| Newsweek magazine reports | 14:25 | |
| that 20% of Americans say that they've had a revelation | 14:26 | |
| from God in the past year. | 14:30 | |
| 13% have sensed the presence of an angel in the past year. | 14:33 | |
| If Paul could come back to earth | 14:40 | |
| and read all these dozens of books about angels, | 14:42 | |
| which are everywhere, | 14:45 | |
| not only in bookstores but boutiques, | 14:46 | |
| or could pop in on one of our prayer breakfasts | 14:50 | |
| or listen and really hear the deep | 14:53 | |
| and genuine dissatisfaction | 14:55 | |
| with the materialist bent of our lives, | 14:59 | |
| I think he'd say to us what he said to the Athenians | 15:03 | |
| who had erected a statue of an unknown god. | 15:07 | |
| He'd say you are very religious people. | 15:11 | |
| But it's also, | 15:19 | |
| it's also a mean time in America, isn't it? | 15:20 | |
| Americans may be searching for some higher spirituality, | 15:26 | |
| but we're also hunkering down behind the old barricades | 15:30 | |
| of privilege, race, | 15:34 | |
| place, hate, guns. | 15:37 | |
| Now it seems like it's never enough | 15:43 | |
| just to disagree with an opponent. | 15:45 | |
| We have to smear them with hate and humiliate them. | 15:47 | |
| And a fantastic networks of communications | 15:51 | |
| has made it possible for us to do this very efficiently. | 15:53 | |
| Just a few weeks ago, | 15:59 | |
| one of these radio talk show hosts suggested | 16:00 | |
| on his program that the gun control advocate Sarah Brady | 16:02 | |
| really oughta be quote put down | 16:06 | |
| the way you put an animal out of its misery. | 16:11 | |
| And there was a kind of primal yeah | 16:17 | |
| that one could hear across the land. | 16:22 | |
| After 2,000 years | 16:26 | |
| of talking, talking, and talking about love, | 16:29 | |
| where does all this hate come from? | 16:36 | |
| What is it that's festering behind the masks | 16:40 | |
| of our higher selves? | 16:42 | |
| What are all these angels covering for? | 16:46 | |
| I will show you a more excellent way Paul says. | 16:53 | |
| Love is not God. | 17:00 | |
| Love is not God. | 17:01 | |
| God is God, | 17:04 | |
| and Jesus Christ is the revelation of God's love. | 17:06 | |
| Christian love or any kind of love is not just a matter | 17:11 | |
| of doing what comes naturally. | 17:15 | |
| No natural instinct ever indicated the kind of love | 17:19 | |
| that Jesus demonstrated on the cross. | 17:23 | |
| No natural instinct ever dictated this sentence, | 17:25 | |
| I will always do what is best for you. | 17:30 | |
| For that more excellent love, | 17:38 | |
| we have to turn to the more excellent One, | 17:40 | |
| who although He understood all mysteries | 17:44 | |
| and possessed all prophetic powers, | 17:46 | |
| was often found touching the dead skin of lepers' faces | 17:49 | |
| or mending withered limbs | 17:54 | |
| or comforting the poor and the afflicted. | 17:57 | |
| He did not insist on His own way | 18:01 | |
| but chose the way of the cross as a more excellent way. | 18:04 | |
| There He bore all things because He believed all things. | 18:08 | |
| Hoping in His Father above all things, | 18:12 | |
| He endured all things on our behalf. | 18:15 | |
| We can talk about His love for a long time, | 18:21 | |
| but to be formed by it and to be changed by it, | 18:25 | |
| we have to follow Him. | 18:31 | |
| The love of Jesus Christ can't be boxed up in the heart. | 18:35 | |
| The godless symbol of love is the heart. | 18:39 | |
| The Christian symbol of love is the cross. | 18:42 | |
| The heart is private with its secrets. | 18:45 | |
| The cross is as public as the cry of a dying man. | 18:48 | |
| He bore all things, endured all things | 18:55 | |
| that we might love. | 19:01 | |
| Is such love real? | 19:07 | |
| Will it work? | 19:11 | |
| May I add another question? | 19:14 | |
| What will it cost? | 19:15 | |
| It will work. | 19:19 | |
| It will work just about as well for each | 19:22 | |
| and every one of us as it worked for Him, | 19:25 | |
| as it worked for all those | 19:31 | |
| who have followed His more excellent way. | 19:33 | |
| 30 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. | 19:39 | |
| introduced a strange phrase into our theological | 19:43 | |
| and national vocabulary. | 19:45 | |
| He spoke of the weapon of love. | 19:47 | |
| And for those of us who thought love was a feeling | 19:51 | |
| or an instinct, or an intention, | 19:55 | |
| this phrase came as a shock, the weapon of love? | 19:58 | |
| Like Paul, King defined love as an action. | 20:02 | |
| It rejoices. | 20:05 | |
| It bears. | 20:05 | |
| It endures. | 20:06 | |
| Such a love we may say was never intended | 20:09 | |
| to work, really work, in our kind of world, | 20:11 | |
| and King was roundly criticized for his teaching on love, | 20:14 | |
| not only by militants | 20:18 | |
| but by theologians. | 20:21 | |
| The theologians were willing to admit | 20:25 | |
| that love can be an impulse of good will | 20:27 | |
| from one person of one race toward another of another race. | 20:30 | |
| But the very idea that love could take | 20:34 | |
| to the streets en masse as it were | 20:36 | |
| and saunter into a restaurant and order a hamburger | 20:38 | |
| or that love could march into a courthouse and cast a vote, | 20:43 | |
| well now, that seemed like a context mistake. | 20:47 | |
| King was always giving speeches | 20:55 | |
| about love in all the wrong places, | 20:57 | |
| on highways, in tenements, | 21:01 | |
| sometimes in the smoldering ruins of firebombed churches, | 21:04 | |
| places where he should have been talking about revenge, | 21:10 | |
| where the H word, hate, would not have been inappropriate. | 21:14 | |
| But instead he spoke of love and forgiveness. | 21:21 | |
| When you listen to those old tapes, | 21:27 | |
| all crackly now with the years, | 21:29 | |
| his words about love always sound a little out of place. | 21:34 | |
| But that's the challenge, | 21:40 | |
| to find a place for love, | 21:43 | |
| a place where love does not belong, | 21:47 | |
| to help love find a new context, | 21:50 | |
| perhaps one that you long ago relegated to realism, | 21:53 | |
| as in let's be realistic. | 21:57 | |
| That won't work. | 21:59 | |
| Think of where the love of Jesus Christ does not belong | 22:02 | |
| and help it set up shop there. | 22:08 | |
| A few months ago, a young teacher | 22:14 | |
| in the Durham County Youth Home | 22:17 | |
| and a recent Duke graduate, I think perhaps '92 or '93, | 22:20 | |
| was named Teacher of the Year for 1994, | 22:25 | |
| a huge honor for the university and for this man. | 22:29 | |
| Maybe you saw the story in the Herald Sun. | 22:33 | |
| In the article, a detention counselor | 22:37 | |
| recalls what happened one day | 22:39 | |
| when one of the youths in the home erupted in frustration | 22:43 | |
| and began throwing furniture and cursing everybody in sight. | 22:47 | |
| When the young teacher approached him, he cursed him too. | 22:53 | |
| The teacher responded, "You can curse me all you want, | 23:00 | |
| "but I still love you." | 23:07 | |
| At that, the youth broke down in tears and embraced him, | 23:11 | |
| and said, "Nobody's ever said that to me. | 23:18 | |
| "Nobody." | 23:22 | |
| So I leave it to you. | 23:26 | |
| Was this just another context mistake made | 23:28 | |
| by your typical idealistic recent grad? | 23:31 | |
| Or had our man found a creative place for love? | 23:36 | |
| It's not enough to be creative though. | 23:44 | |
| It's not enough to be inventive | 23:45 | |
| in finding new contexts for love. | 23:47 | |
| You don't say to somebody coming at you | 23:49 | |
| with a chair, I love you | 23:50 | |
| unless you've been grasped, thoroughly washed, | 23:56 | |
| and made whole by the love of God in Jesus Christ. | 23:59 | |
| Paul says it's the love that will make us whole. | 24:06 | |
| That's all. | 24:08 | |
| Everything else is fragmentary. | 24:10 | |
| This is nowhere truer than in a university | 24:14 | |
| where it seems that each of us has a little piece | 24:16 | |
| of knowledge, but nobody has the whole. | 24:18 | |
| And it's true of all of us. | 24:23 | |
| We know our lives in part. | 24:25 | |
| We know what's real about life in part. | 24:27 | |
| We know the future in part. | 24:29 | |
| And when we want to know more, | 24:32 | |
| it's as if we've set up a mirror in front of us, | 24:34 | |
| and we say now I'll find out the truth. | 24:36 | |
| And we look in it, and we see partialness, | 24:38 | |
| projections of our own fears, | 24:42 | |
| our best guesses about the future. | 24:44 | |
| Paul would say oh, | 24:48 | |
| if you only knew who stands through the looking glass, | 24:49 | |
| as it were, on the other side beholding you and loving you, | 24:54 | |
| then you would know the perfect, | 25:01 | |
| and that should be translated the totality | 25:04 | |
| that will make you whole. | 25:09 | |
| This passage, 1 Corinthians 13, | 25:14 | |
| is the greatest definition of love ever given. | 25:18 | |
| But if God is love, | 25:23 | |
| it's also a statement about the God who beholds us. | 25:26 | |
| Just listen. | 25:31 | |
| God is patient and kind. | 25:34 | |
| God is not irritable or resentful. | 25:37 | |
| God does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. | 25:41 | |
| God bears all things, believes all things, | 25:46 | |
| hopes all things, endures all things. | 25:49 | |
| God never ends. | 25:54 | |
| So faith, love, hope abide, these three, | 25:58 | |
| but the greatest of all is God. | 26:04 | |
| Amen. | 26:10 |