Thursday, January 30, 2025

Today's Scripture
1 Corinthians 13:1–13

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.

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

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. 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. (NRSV)

Reflection

Behind the soaring language of these words of scripture, frequently read at weddings, hides a deep disappointment. If you read the Apostle Paul’s correspondence with the Corinthian church beyond these thirteen verses, you can’t miss it. He is disappointed, namely, in the divisions that exist in that church.

A specific division the author singles out has to do with divisions of wealth, as experienced in the way the community celebrates communion (of all things!) “One person goes hungry,” he complains, “while another is drunk.”

Yes, one of the most well-known scriptures about love would not have been composed if not for disappointment.

Church disappoints us. If you have never been disappointed by a church, just wait. We are a fallible communion, a broken vessel, an imperfect body. We let one another down.

The letter of another apostle, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., spoke painfully and personally about this disappointment from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, when he upbraided the “moderate” leaders of white congregations who had criticized his direct-action campaign of nonviolence. “I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership,” he wrote. “I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.”

Yet Dr. King was quick to clarify to his clergyman readers (they were all men) that his disappointment was not that of a critic but as “a minister of the gospel, who loves the church.” Though he acknowledges that he has wept over the “laxity” of the church, his tears have been born of love.

“There can be no disappointment where there is not deep love.”

When church disappoints us, may our disappointment be of the loving variety, which strives to correct and to build and to perfect.

As Dr. King knew well, we have a long way to go.

Prayer
“O God, make us willing to do your will, come what may. Increase the number of persons of good will and moral sensitivity. Give us renewed confidence in nonviolence and the way of love as taught by Christ.” Amen.

—Prayer by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Reflection written by Rocky Supinger, Senior Associate Pastor