November 10, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Hymn to Love

The Fourth and Final Sermon in the “Texts for Life” Series

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 23
1 Corinthians 13:1–13

“The greatest of these is love.”
1 Corinthians 13:13 (NRSV)

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything.

George Herbert
“Love (III)” from The Temple

To begin this morning, a postscript to my sermon of last week, when we reflected on Jesus’ act of radical inclusion in encountering the Samaritan woman at the well. I spoke in my sermon about my hopes that the day will come when the church will welcome and celebrate the love that same-gendered people have for each other. And so it was a joy this week to be here in Illinois with the passing of the act that will make Illinois the fifteenth state in the union to recognize same-gendered marriage. It is a great victory for human rights, for GLBT people, and it is my prayer that the church will not be long in catching up with these actions of the state.

This Sunday concludes my short sermon series, which I have called “Texts for Life,” reflecting on scripture texts that have been important in my own journey of faith and particularly in my time here in ministry at Fourth Presbyterian Church. We walked on the road to Emmaus together, reflecting on the constancy of Jesus’ presence even when we do not recognize that. We sat at the temple with Jeremiah as he called the people to live in ways of justice and mercy and love. We were with Jesus last week as he lived into that act of inclusion of the Samaritan woman at the well. And now on this fourth Sunday I struggled a bit as to what I would choose to preach on to cap this series. This is not me suggesting, as I’ve said before, a canon within a canon, but rather choosing somewhat randomly texts that have spoken to me and my relationship with this congregation. I could have preached this morning on the sixth chapter of Micah, that injunction that we do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with our God. That text is on the Unweaving parament as we leave the church, reminding us to live in that way as we go back out into the world. I could have chosen what I often think of as a central text for this church, the parable in Matthew 25 where Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats, those who will be welcomed into the kingdom by the king. The reason for that, we are told, was that when he was hungry we fed, when he was thirsty we gave something to drink, when naked we clothed them, when in prison we visited—a text that speaks to the centrality of outreach and mission in the life of this congregation.

But rather than those or many other ones that we could have looked at, I chose this morning to reflect on 1 Corinthians 13, Paul’s soaring crescendo in this important New Testament letter, which we know today as the Hymn to Love. Now there’s always a danger in approaching a text like 1 Corinthians 13, one that can seem to be overly familiar to us. Those of us in the wedding profession know that it’s very often the text chosen by couples coming to be married. But there is a danger of us seeing 1 Corinthians 13 as what one commentator called “an embroidered framing on the wall.” One of my colleagues on staff, when they learned that I was preaching on 1 Corinthians 13, said, “Are you just going to preach a wedding sermon?” Of course, while it’s suitable in many ways for this text to be read at weddings, it’s not at its heart about marriage or about physical love between two people. One commentator, Mark Ryan, speaks about the need for us to be getting Paul’s hymn on love back from the greeting card to the struggling church, which is its setting.

First Corinthians is Paul’s letter to a church which has in many ways fallen away from living into what Paul taught the church should be. First Corinthians is a letter that is written to a community that has divided into quarreling factions, a community that is undertaking questionable practices when it comes to its worship life and the celebration of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. We learn from the text of the letter that the people of the church are engaging with each other with what we might euphemistically call dodgy morals. Clearly disagreement is happening on a number of levels in this church, which if Paul didn’t actually found, then he became a very important teacher to the church. This way that the church in Corinth is living is what makes Paul write the letter in which he calls the people of the church to recognize that they are all members of one body through their baptism.

Paul uses the extended metaphor of the body and its members, how a body needs different members, hands and eyes and ears, and how through baptism all of these different members are called into one. But then Paul reaches the height of this letter when he describes at the end of chapter 12 the “more excellent” way to live. Then he launches into this poem, this hymn to love. And I think one of the things about 1 Corinthians as a whole and particularly this portion of it is its relevance to the church, not only the early church, but the church throughout its history. We learn from 1 Corinthians that division and disagreement in the church are not a product that grew up just in the Reformation or in our disagreements today, but rather have been a part of the church’s history. When we think about the church, its history, and where we are today, we realize that part of the way that the church has lived its life and sought to define itself is by understanding the church as over and against something else. Over and against the world, or society, or factions within the church. Or over and against the pagans or heretics.

We find in that history that the tools that are used are exclusion, excommunication, working towards a purity of doctrine and practice, and undergirding all of this is the exercise of power. I’m reminded of George MacLeod’s famous dictum about how the world chose a love of power when what it needs is the power of love. And that’s true not only in the obvious places like in the medieval church in Europe; it’s true for the history of the church in North America. Northwestern history professor Gary Wills has a fine book called Head and Heart: American Christianities, and it begins the reflection on the religious history of North America by exploding one of the myths of the founding Puritans in the colonies in New England—namely that they came to these shores in order to provide for freedom of religion. That’s not the case, says Wills. He writes, “The founders of the New England colonies did not come to America to protect any variety in religious practice or to assert the primacy of the individual’s conscience. Far from it. They came to set up the one true faith where corrupt versions of it could not intrude.” That’s another example of providing a place to define church over and against the other, and that’s what the early colonists did. Wills goes on to talk about how in the early days in the colonies that view resulted in violence against groups like the Quakers, some of whom were executed for not abiding by the Puritan understanding or church and doctrine.

Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is a letter in which he is seeking to discipline and build up the church through its commitment to the virtue of love. There’s a famous passage in a sermon by St. Augustine of Hippo, the great early church father. In a sermon on the fourth chapter of the first letter of John, in which the writer says that God is love, St. Augustine in his sermon says this, “A short precept is given you: love and do what you will. Of this root can nothing spring but what is good.”

Love and do what you will. One of my hopes for this congregation, this church which I love dearly, is that it would be a church defined by love, just as we have promised to guide and nurture these little ones who have been baptized, to love them into the faith. That the church would be, in the words of the hymn writer William Rutherford, “a school of love.” Being a school of love does not mean to wear rose-colored glasses or to think that living lives out of love is somehow simplistic or is a shield from the realities of life. That is not what I mean. In a sermon that was preached at the funeral of a twenty-one-year-old girl who died in a car accident, Stephen Davis, a philosopher of religion, reflected in this way: “Love at its deepest level is God’s love for us, not ours for God or for each other. To be a Christian is to believe that love conquers all and that the God of love is by your side.”

Even at the hardest times in life. My friend, John Bell, of the Iona community is a contemporary hymn writer. He tells a story of a couple who were friends of his who lost their child at birth. They came to John and asked him to preside at the funeral and to choose some hymns. He went through the usual hymnals to look for a hymn that could be sung at such a time, and he couldn’t find one, so he wrote one. The first verse goes like this:

We cannot care for you the way we wanted
or cradle you or listen to your cry,
but separated as we are by silence
love will not die.

Love will not die. So friends, I invite you this day to commit yourself anew to the church, to the people of God. Commit yourself to the school of love, to teaching love and learning love and living love in this place, in this city, in this world, trusting in Christ’s loving presence when we gather, the same Jesus Christ whom to know is life abundant and whom to serve is perfect freedom. Amen.