January 31, 2016 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Love in Action

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 71:1–6
1 Corinthians 13:1–13

Love is God’s river, flowing on into the future, across the border into the country where there is no pride, no jostling for position, no contention among God’s people. We are invited to step into that river here and now and let it take us where it’s going.

Tom Wright

I have started to notice a pattern emerging in the last couple of years of ministry. Frequently these days, when I sit down with a couple to plan their wedding and I ask them if they have any particular scriptures they want to include, I hear something like this: “We are open to just about anything. Well, anything except that scripture about love. We have heard it too many times at too many other weddings.” I am sure they have. This 1 Corinthians 13 passage is as wed to a service of marriage as Psalm 23 is tied to a memorial service. It might be difficult for us not to think solely of the marriage covenant whenever we hear these words about love.

And yet if we restrict Paul’s words to the relationship celebrated in a wedding, we miss the most radical and challenging pieces of Paul’s argument in this letter. We fail to see how provocatively Paul was writing. Do you remember to whom Paul wrote these poetic words about love? It was not to a young couple on its wedding day. Instead, Paul wrote these words about love to a young church embroiled in conflict. Some of you remember part of their story from last week. Strife and division were welling up within this small church. The richer members were eating the communion meal before the poorer members could arrive, mirroring the practices of their urban culture.

But in addition to the clash between the socioeconomic classes, some of the members of the church were also bragging about who had been baptized by whom, creating even more factions. And immediately before this passage, in a part of the scripture from last week on which we did not focus, we learn some people in the church were playing the “I am a better believer than you are” game, flaunting their spiritual gifts as a way of increasing their reputation rather than using them to build up the body.

Even though he was no longer physically present, Paul heard about all of that conflict and trouble. That is why he wrote to them. I remind us of this letter’s historical context because if we ignore it or don’t know it, then it becomes much easier for us to shrink down Paul’s statements about love into a romanticized, warm, and fuzzy platitude—merely poetic words that some folks do not want read at their wedding because the passage has been overused and grown stale.

As we remember the incredible mess the church in Corinth had quickly made of itself, we see how Paul’s treatise on love explodes radically into its midst. As a colleague has written, The Corinthians “were doing real and potentially destructive battle with each other. . . . Paul inserts this passage in his letter . . . to call the Corinthians to account for their behavior. Everything he says love is not, they are; everything he says love is, they are not. . . . Those who heard these words more likely responded with gasps of shock and anger than ahs of affirmation and delight” (Jeffery Jones, Feasting on the Word, Year C, vol. 1, p. 303). There is nothing romantic, warm, or fuzzy about what Paul was doing when he wrote this thirteenth chapter. His words are challenging, provocative, and pointed.

Furthermore, the love about which Paul writes in this section of his letter is not the kind of love we might normally do in our lives or practice with each other in our churches. In one of the last books he wrote, C.S. Lewis contrasted the kind of love we typically practice with the kind of love Paul described to the Corinthians.

Here is how Lewis summed it up: Lewis claimed when we think about love, we tend to think in terms of what Lewis called “need love.” Lewis called it “need love” because it goes out from us to the other person in order to bring back into ourselves something we need or value. It could be pleasure, beauty, a self-esteem boost, a knowledge we are loved, etc. It is a kind of give-and-take love. It’s an acquiring kind of love. If he were to draw it, Lewis would have drawn it as a circle. It is a love that goes out from us and then returns to us.

Lewis claimed that kind of need love was not the kind of love to which Paul referred when he wrote these words in chapter 13. Rather, Paul was describing the nature of agape love, God’s kind of love, the kind of love that we, as people created in God’s image and made the body of Christ, are called to practice. And God’s kind of love, Lewis asserted, is not drawn as a circle, but rather as an arc (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves). Think about that for a moment.

God’s arc kind of love goes out to the other and then stops. God’s arc kind of love is a gift meant simply to enhance the other, without any thought of a return. God’s kind of love, the kind of love we are invited to practice, goes out to the other not to bring something back to itself but simply to give. It is not about anything owed or required as a response. This kind of God love, this kind of arc love, agape love, is only interested in empowering and strengthening the other for his or her own good, joy, and freedom. And it is this arc kind of love, what Lewis termed gift love, about which Paul writes in this thirteenth chapter of Corinthians.

So put Paul’s words back in context again. He was writing to a group of people fed up with each other, disappointed in each other, and being wounded by each other. He was writing to a church in major turmoil and conflict, for whom a split was not out of the question. They were actively trying to throw each other out of the body. Paul’s response to their conflict, to their pain and struggle, was to hold up a mirror for them. He wanted them to see the difference between the way they were acting with each other and the way God called them to act as the body of Christ. Paul called them to account in hopes they might repent of their destructive behavior and move back into being Christ’s body. He wanted them to employ Christian love, arc love, with each other, so that they could then practice that kind of love with the larger world.

Perhaps you have noticed that throughout the sermon I have spoken about love not as a feeling but rather as an action. My decision to speak of love as action emerges from Paul’s words in this chapter. In these words, we find verb after verb after verb. We cannot see it in the English, but in the Greek, verses four through seven contain sixteen different verbs about love. That tells us love is a busy, active thing that never ceases to work (Brian Peterson, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 13:1–13,” www.workingpreacher.com). This call for action is concealed in our English translations that state “love is patient, love is kind,” etc. A closer translation to Paul’s meaning might be “Love bears patiently. Love shows kindness.” Paul’s words about arc love, gift love, are not meant to tell us what love is, but rather what love does.

With an arc kind of love, there is no such thing as loving in the abstract. Love is what love does. This love only exists when it is acted and embodied. One cannot simply feel this kind of gift love. One must practice this kind of gift love, arc love, and that is a challenge for us as individual disciples, like it was for those Corinthians. But it is even more of a challenge to think of how a whole faith community, a congregation, does that. How do we, as a collective, actively practice gift love, God’s arc love, not only with each other, but also with the world? That is a question Paul prods us to ask.

But did you know we’ve done it? This kind of gift love, arc love, is a love we have actively practiced at crucial moments in our past here at Fourth Presbyterian Church. Let me tell you just one story as an example. Some of you know it. But because of what is going on in our larger national and international culture, I believe it is vital for us to hear it again within this context of gift love, arc love. As you have heard me say before, we are living in an ethos that seems to be leaning more into fearing others rather than into offering welcome or trust; into stoking anger rather than expressing kindness; into promoting divisiveness rather than working for unity. So this story has resonance for us in this day and time.

The story (which is reported in a Discernment Team Report written by the congregation of Church of Christ, Presbyterian, the church that started as the Japanese American congregation in this story) involves a young student pastor named Pastor Tsai. One Sunday, after baptizing a father and son in a vibrant worship service at a small Japanese Christian church here in Chicago, Pastor Tsai was approached by two men from the FBI. They told him his church had to stop meeting at once. Not only was it dangerous for the members due to the growing animosity in the neighborhood, but their meetings were now illegal. It was, of course, December 7, 1941. Pastor Tsai and the church officers closed the church that day.

At first the members attended other Christian churches in the neighborhood. But the language barrier was so difficult that no one was being spiritually nourished. Under great stress, the church members went to their pastor and begged him to find help so they could gather together again. The pastor was told about a downtown congregation who might welcome them.

So Pastor Tsai went to Dr. Harrison Ray Anderson, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church. Pastor Tsai asked if our church would be willing to open its doors for this Japanese American congregation to gather in worship and prayer. If Paul were writing a letter about that moment, he might have said that the pastor asked if Fourth Presbyterian Church was willing to practice arc love, gift love, even though it might easily put them in danger or throw them into internal conflict. In its own written history, the Japanese American church recalls Dr. Anderson’s words verbatim: “Mr. Tsai, if I could make decisions by myself I would be glad to have you use the church starting tomorrow. But our church has almost 100 members in the Session, and they have to make the decision. It will take some time.” It was March, 1942.

It did take some time. When Dr. Anderson presented this call to actively practice arc love, gift love, and to offer this risky hospitality, many people on Session had major doubts. Few of the elders actually knew any Japanese Americans. Some were worried that spy activity could be conducted and our church would be discredited. After talking about it for three monthly Session meetings, they still had not made a decision. Finally Dr. Anderson said, “Even though we are now engaged in a war with their homeland, church is God’s church.” Session voted and it was a unanimous yes.

We would practice arc love, gift love, for that particular part of Christ’s body that was suffering. And we would extend that love without any thought of what we might get back. We would practice that love simply so our brothers and sisters in Christ might be strengthened, nurtured, and fed. It is reported Dr. Anderson himself would often stand outside the chapel and keep guard as the Japanese Americans arrived for worship.

I tell this story again because it is important for us to remember we know how to do this. Even though we are a large congregation, with members and visitors constantly in and out, we have had times and occasions when we’ve purposefully decided to actively practice arc love, gift love, no matter what the cost to our reputation or the internal difficulties that could arise from hard conversations. Actually, I imagine those decisions to do arc love out there forced us to really practice arc love, gift love, with each other, as well.

One more quick example: our church archivist recently gave me a paper that our own Session wrote, also in the time of Dr. Anderson’s ministry, in which our Session called for the reform of the Chicago Police Department because the congregation saw elements of corruption and unjust behavior. This was in the 1950s.

Friends, we will be called on to do this kind of hard work, to practice this arc love, this gift love, again, and our knowledge of this is why we are currently diving into some of the complex and messy issues of our time—issues like mass incarceration and criminal justice reform, racism and white privilege, police and community relations. We are having classes, book studies, forums, dinner groups, etc. so we might have our minds and assumptions stretched and challenged.

But it will be equally important to act on such things when called upon, to choose a path of arc love, gift love, and then to actively practice it even when it is frightening or makes life together more challenging. I don’t know yet when that call to practice risky arc love will come next. I just know it will, because this is who we are.

We are a people who are called to actively engage in arc love, gift love, love that reaches out from us to the other without any expectation of return, because we are a people who follow Jesus. And Jesus the Christ is God’s living, breathing, flesh-and-blood definition of arc love. Jesus did not do what he did in order to receive affirmation, accolades, or even love back. Jesus did his kind of love simply as an unconditional, free, utterly astounding gift from God. Period. And that is who holds our life and who calls us to follow. So we will and we do. Amen.