June 3, 2012 | 4:00 p.m. | Trinity Sunday

This Is Not a Wedding

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

1 Corinthians 13

Today we begin a summer sermon series during which Judy, John, and I will preach on some of the most recognizable passages in the Bible. The Twenty-Third Psalm and the Prodigal Son are a couple of passages I’ll preach on later this summer. The text I’m going to read tonight is 1 Corinthians 13, Paul’s famous words about love.

There are several reasons for a series like this. It is often the case that when a familiar passage is read, we don’t listen to it very closely. We say, “Oh, I’ve heard this before,” and we tune out right away. Other times, the text might be famous or beloved because the words are so poetic, which is fine, but in the midst of loving the poetic sound of the text, we may miss an important challenge or truth coming to us within those beautiful words. Still other times, we miss the multiple messages that might be present in a text, because long ago we decided what it meant and we close ourselves off to the possibility of a new interpretation. For all these reasons, we’ll read some familiar texts together this summer, hoping that you will hear them again as if for the first time.

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The title for this afternoon’s sermon, which I obviously mean in jest, is “This is not a wedding.” Everyone wants to hear this text read at their wedding. Some of you may know the scene from the movie The Wedding Crashers, in which two young men at a wedding place bets on whether or not this passage will be part of the service. In another example of how common the passage is, wedding couples who come to meet with me in my office routinely say, almost sheepishly, “We know everybody chooses this passage, but we still think we’d like to hear 1 Corinthians 13,” implying that it is somehow a bad choice.

So I should begin by saying that there is nothing at all wrong with wanting 1 Corinthians 13 read at your wedding; it’s a beautiful text with some of the most poetic words in all of scripture. I can’t imagine any pastor really objects to this passage. The frustration is more often that preachers don’t get to say as much about the text as they would like to. You see, preachers are well aware that no one comes to a wedding to hear a great sermon, so no preacher in his right mind will choose to preach a wedding sermon long enough to fully develop the richness of this text, and neither is the preacher likely to say much about the deep challenges presented in the text.

There is a deep and important challenge in this passage, and perhaps because the words are so familiar, many of us have missed the challenge. The challenge is that while many of us can agree to aspire to the loving ideas in this passage, the reality is that many of us do not live lives of love, but rather our lives are governed and our actions driven by fear and anxiety and anger. We love the idea of 1 Corinthians 13, but we live another way. We would rather listen to the pretty word without thinking than have a realistic conversation about the fears and anxieties and imperfections of life—and the loss is that it is exactly those ugly parts of life that make these words of love so powerful. That’s what I want to talk about this afternoon.

Human beings are experts at ignoring our problems; we love to smooth out the bumps in life and act as if everything is okay. We do this in political and social situations and in our personal lives as well. David Brooks wrote an editorial in the New York Times on Thursday in which he began with a look back at political philosophy over the last century or so. The human race lived the twentieth century with the hope that we were on our way to being a better people. We were going to figure out ways to alleviate poverty and triumph over disease. Rival nations and their boundaries would fall away as communications and technology made it possible for us to live as a more unified human family. The founding of the United Nations and the European Union are concrete examples of this unifying hope. Brooks points out that most of what actually happened was exactly to the contrary. For the most part, the peoples of the world are even less alike than we were 100 years ago; we are more politically polarized than we used to be; and our separate nations, still existing, are more difficult to govern than ever. And far from stopping the wars, over the last century we have become better at killing one another than ever before (David Brooks, “The Segmentation Century,” New York Times, 31 May 2012).

Those global issues are often difficult for us to grasp, and so I offer you examples of the chaos of our world found a little closer to home: at 5:00 p.m. tonight, in the next room, we will feed dinner to 150 people, up 50 percent from just a few years ago, not because it makes us feel good, but because there is a need for it, even though by just about every measure there is more than enough food in the world to go around. We just do a bad job of distributing it fairly because so many of us who have more than enough anxiously take more than our share. The hoarding and fear in our world do not only affect the deeply impoverished. How many among us go to work each day and deal with our coworkers out of a sense of fear and calculation, worrying about how to hold onto or increase whatever amount of power or authority we may have? How many of us feel we must act that way in our personal relationships, protecting ourselves, guarding against too much vulnerability even in our very own homes?

I remind you of these things not to depress you or to suggest that things are getting worse all the time, which is not what I believe. I remind you of these things because of my sense that what Paul is about in 1 Corinthians is not a distant, theoretical love poem. It is a deeply relevant word to people who are struggling with the difficulties of life.

Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13 gain their power out of the deep inadequacies in our human condition. The call to love is not without reason: love is a protest against the many things in life where we so clearly see an absence of love.

Paul wrote these words to a group of people he knew. He wrote them to a church in Corinth he had founded. When Paul says “that one may have the gift of eloquence, all the communication skills in the world, but without love these are only an empty din, he has actual and specific individuals in mind” (J. Barrie Shepherd, Aspects of Love, p. 47). Paul can see in his mind’s eye the very faces of the people in that congregation; he remembers the gifts that they have, and he asks if they are using those gifts to God’s glory or if they are ignoring God’s call and living in fear and division. In the same way, I can look into your faces right now and ask what are the gifts that God has given you? What opportunities do you have in your life that you can use to spread God’s love? Are you using those gifts in love or are you allowing fear and anger and anxiety to rule in your life? This is really the core of the message in the first part of the passage: What gifts and abilities and opportunities do you have? And are you making use of them in acts of compassion and love, or are you hiding them in fear?

A pastor named Barrie Shepherd wrote a book about 1 Corinthians 13, for many of the same reasons I’ve chosen to preach about it tonight. The book ends with two stories, both of which happen on a hilltop.

The first one comes from the classic novel Doctor Zhivago. As I said, the scene is a hilltop somewhere in Russia, leading towards the edge of a cliff, and a group of convicted conspirators are being led up the hill to be executed by comrades who were once partisans of the same cause. One young man, barely more than a boy, suddenly drops to his knees and cries, “Forgive me, comrades, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again; please let me off. Don’t kill me. I haven’t lived yet. I want to live a little longer. I want to see my mother just once more. Please let me off, comrades; please forgive me. I’ll do anything for you. I’ll kiss the ground under your feet.”

The silence that follows this plea is broken by a volley of gunshots as every one of the condemned is shot, including the boy. It’s a scene of violent, random, meaningless death. It is the exact opposite of the love to which God calls us.

The second story was told right here in this room about thirty years ago by a man named Elam Davies, who was once the pastor of this church. It’s a beautiful story not only because of the love and compassion that is present within it, but also because that love and compassion is shown in the presence of deep human tragedy.

Elam and his wife, Grace, were at home in Wales. It was a beautiful evening, and they went up to a hilltop to get a view of the sunset. As they sat there, a beautiful kaleidoscope of colors spreading itself across the sky, they noticed a small, beat-up car pull up at the side of the hill. The passengers were an elderly man and his wife and their son, a grown man himself, yet so severely disabled that he was unable to sit up on the seat by himself. With a mixture of great effort and great gentleness, the couple labored to help their son sit up and to turn his legs so that his body faced toward the sunset, but he was still unable to lift his head. As Elam tells the story,

Just as the sun in all its magnificence was to give its final burst of glory, as if God were dazzling us by the pyrotechnics of the universe, they put their finger—the father did and then the mother a little later—under this young man’s chin and just pointed him out there. And I knew, at that very moment, I knew God can dazzle us with all the magnificence of God’s universe, but that the secret of the universe, the heart of the universe, was revealing its glory . . . not in the sunset . . . but in the compassion, grace, and love that comes to us when we need it most.” (J. Barrie Shepherd, Aspects of Love, pp. 117–123).

Two stories from a hilltop, one showing the fear and violence and retribution to which we have all become far too accustomed, the other showing love. And not an easy love, not love that is automatic, but love that makes a choice. Love that senses what really matters in the world and takes responsibility for it, in full awareness of the troubling alternatives to love that too often rule in our lives.

It is the beginning of summer, and so there is a good chance that a few of you here this afternoon will soon find yourselves worshiping at a wedding and listening to the poetic words of 1 Corinthians 13. Listen carefully; listen deeply. Hear the words of God that speak throughout the ages. The world in which we live is one full of alternatives to love. Remember that each day we are able to make a choice to live our lives as a protest against fear and violence, anger and despair, and live in love, as God has called us to do.

Amen.