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Epiphany C February 3, 2013
Jer.
1:4-10 Ps.71:1-6
1
Cor. 13:1-13 Luke 4:21-32
Super Bowl Sunday and we actually have some
people in church or perhaps you are here to pray for the home team and not “jinx”
them? There is more superstition in
sports than has probably ever been religion.
I have been trying to build some hype for the
church service today by doing some Tweeting on Twitter; kind of like the Old
Burma Shave Signs. (And I know some of
you are old enough to remember them on the road side).
Tweets: The Love Chapter will be in your
local parish on Sunday. The Love
Chapter: Is it a Rock Band? The Love Chapter: Is it a new online dating service? The Love Chapter: Is it a club for lonely hearts?
And what is the Love Chapter? The 13th Chapter of 1
Corinthians. How many of you had this
read at your marriage? Can you believe
that this was written by a man who was not married, so he decided to write an
impossible standard because he knew that he’d never have anyone to ask him to
take out the trash or fix the faucet?
All kidding aside, I really do think it is
St. Paul’s very best writing. If love is
a cliché then sometimes it is the truest cliché that needs to be used. Do you ever use the word love? The Greek language has at least four words
for love and in English we have to supplement the word love with lots of
qualifying nuances. It is easy to decry
love as a trivial cliché especially if you are not the one who is fortunate
enough to be “in love.” We get a life
time education in love because what we mean by love at 16 may be completely
different when we are 82.
So how do we use the word love? Let us count the ways? Well, today is anyone saying, “I love
football?” I love the 49’ers? And what kind of love is this? Do you love your spouse, your partner or your
friend? Do you love pizza or haggis or quiche? Do you love to ski? To play golf?
To jog? Do you love a particular
hobby? Do you love your enemy? Or is that an oxymoron? Do you love a particular television
show? Do you love music? Do you love your country? Do you love your job? Do you love money? Do you love your political affiliations?
Do we over use the word love such that it
becomes trivialized and loses precision of meaning? Should we decry love and speak against its trivial use? Is love only about the
passion and desire known as one's preference? Is
being in love actually a pathological state because it makes us “lose”
control? Is the passion of love not to
be trusted? Have people done things
because of love that they've come to regret?
Should we always choose the calm, restrained, and passionless voice of
reason over the whims of love?
What is the way of love? How does it work? In a general sense is it a kind of magnetic
force that exists between everything that in rather fickle fashion draws
together beings with desire in a more or less predictable but often serendipitous
ways?
The writer of the Song of Solomon called love
strong as death. Emily Dickenson wrote, “That
love is all there is, is all we know of love.”
Love rides on the border of always being a
trivialized cliché and being the most profoundly definitive word of how we
truly feel at any time.
Love is a word like God, a single word for a
highly awesome and complex inclusive conception. We have to use the word even though we always
feel a bit hypocritical and a bit unworthy to use the word love, because it is
always strangely more wonderful and more awesome than we can say.
St. Paul was writing to a congregation of
people who had ministerial gifts and the great qualities of and for religious devotion. Some had the faith to become martyrs; some had
the ecstatic states and utterances of the angelic sort with incredible experiential
highs that made them feel very touched by God. Some had faith to do great works, and in the
face of all of this St. Paul writes about Love.
The way in which he writes about love is awesome and even terrifying
because his view of love is a view of God.
It is a vision of what is possible.
And what is possible overwhelms what is actual. What is possible inspires hope because the
possible is the future that inspire our actual efforts now.
The awesome and terrifying nuances of the
Love that Paul writes about are revealed in these phrases: Love endures all things. Love believes all things. Love hopes all things.
Well do you believe in UFO’s and unicorns and
gnomes and fairies? In my own
understanding, I’ve come to believe in everything that can come to language,
since not to believe in what comes to language is to deny the way in which a
person characterizes their own experience.
Yes, I would always qualify about how I believe many things that have
occurred in the imaginations of people.
But this hymn of Paul to Love is a confession of the all-inclusiveness
of love. That is terrifying because
there is much included in the total body of human experience that I would like
to censor and remove because it is not to my liking. But love believes all things and hopes all
things. This is a witness to the expansive
nature of the freedom that exists with the full play of possibility. The awesome and creative can arise in this
Plenitude of love but also some very dark and evil things can occur as
well. But love is not in the business of
exclusion it is all about inclusion because with inclusion comes maximum
aesthetic clarity.
What would I mean by aesthetic clarity? It is like the young boy who was hit
repeatedly by the bully at school. His
mom ask him if he were hurt. And the boy
stumbled upon a sort Yoga Berra explanation: “Mom, after he stopped hitting me,
not being hit felt much better.” The boy
had aesthetic clarity about what health was in a different way. The Plenitude of the Love about which St.
Paul wrote is the very condition for meaning that occurs because of the
tolerance and belief in vast differences.
Love has the inclusive plenitude of
contradiction, as in love your enemies.
Jesus also said that even after one has the paper of divorce love still
maintains that the two are still preserved in the reality of Love. Love preserves in that it means that what has
happened can never be that it did not happen.
Love preserves to make the past absolute. That is awesome and terrifying at the same
time.
Love can also be unrecognized and
incognito. Jesus the prophet did not
have the honor of love in his own hometown.
Familiarity can make it seem as though love is not there and love
sometimes does not become apparent again until a person has died or is gone
from the scene. And suddenly love is
known as having been “taken for granted.”
Love can be known in the experience of “wow,
this is what I was put in the world to do.”
The prophet in his call felt like he had been called from the womb. This is the poetry of love being known as the
proverbial “déjà vu.” Wow, this just
seems so awesomely right.
The final thing that I want to say about Paul’s
hymn to love is this: “To know love is to know that humility is not a choice,
it is the true condition of being overwhelmed in the plenitude of love.”
In most philosophy, the supreme insult is to
call someone a “relativist.” St. Paul
makes it clear that in the face of love we have no choice but to know ourselves
as relativists. Why? St. Paul, wrote, “Now, I know in part.” That is the most any of us can say, “I know
in part.” My knowledge is very limited
and partial, even while I hope that my knowledge is growing. What do we do in having only partial
knowledge in the face of such plenitude?
We have all of the real conditions of humility that enables us to
worship the one who has much more than our partial knowledge. Where our
knowledge ends we submit in our hearts to the loving relationship with the God
of Love. And we say, “Take me Oh God of
love!” Since I cannot comprehend the
divine plenitude, I take comfort that the ocean of God knows me and loves
through me, even in ways I cannot see.
In the end, St. Paul is telling us that God is calling to be lovers and
that we can receive in moment by moment doses the inclusive love of God. It is our calling to let God’s love be
transmitted through us in the words and deeds of our life. This is the mystical experience of Love to
which all of us are ever invited. Amen,
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