The Paradox of Love
A sermon given by the Rev. Christine Gowdy-Jaehnig on February 2nd, 2025, the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany.
Jeremiah 1:1-4 * Psalm 71:1-6 * 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 * Luke 4:21-30
Sara Miles wrote: “I was a middle-aged lady, set in my ways, when I decided to be baptized. And when that water poured over my head, I realized the big problem with my new religion. God actually [dwells] in other people. I couldn’t be a Christian by myself and I couldn’t choose who ... was my [sibling in Christ].” Sara may have been thinking of today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians and other passages in the New Testament such as Jesus’ command that we love each other as he has loved us. Perhaps this text should make us deeply uneasy because it tells us that the most important thing about being a Christian is often the most difficult and the most demanding.
Today’s verses come after Paul’s discussion about the gifts given by the Spirit to members of the body of Christ. The gifts of teaching, preaching, healing, guiding, prophesying, speaking-in-tongues and interpreting –are all given to enhance the church’s common life and mission. Paul says that the Corinthians should earnestly desire these gifts but they seem to have become a source of conflict. Speaking in tongues and prophesying are mentioned more often than the others; perhaps they are the primary source of tension. The remedy that Paul proposes is that each exercise their gift with love. As I mentioned in my Thanksgiving Day sermon, the three sisters (corn, squash and beans) provide us with a lesson on living in community: respect one another, support one another, bring or offer your gift to the world (in this case it would be the church) and receive the gifts of others. The gifts of each are more fully expressed when they are nurtured together for none can stand alone; the church needs them all. However, if the sharing of the Spirit’s gifts is not motivated by and grounded in love, they loose their value and their power to build up the community. Paul goes even further, saying that charity, martyrdom and even faith and hope are mere busyness without love.
The word Paul used that has been translated as love, is agape [ἀγάπη], one of four loves found in the Greek language. It was not a word used very often back then, and I wonder if Paul didn’t appropriate it. My lexicon tells me it means: charity, fellowship, good will and friendship. I think that this love that Paul urges the Corinthians --and us!-- to desire and seek, is a spiritual bond that forms us into the Body of Christ. This is a love that draws people out of loneliness and self-centeredness into unity with God and each other. Dorothy Day wrote: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.”
Sara Miles recognized an unfortunate problem that many people inside the church know about –and have experienced. The church (local, denominational and universal) is made up of people who are made in the image of God and profess to believe in and follow Christ, and some of them we find irritating, tiresome, controlling and maddening. Additionally, there are probably some Christians who profess a theology at odds with our own in significant ways. There are people who are pushing for changes that other people think will ruin the church, and people who want to return to a golden age that in other people’s view was never very golden to begin with. There are so many reasons not to love those in (and out of) the church. And yet, we are commanded to love.
And we have failed to love. Church fights are awful and some people leave the church with severe wounds. Despite the fact that there is no religion (and I hope no Christian denomination) whose central tenet is hate, as Jonathon Swift noted, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” William Blake wrote this cautionary triplet:
I sought my soul, but my soul I could not see;
I sought my God, but my God eluded me;
I sought my neighbor, and I found all three.
Reluctance to seek and love one’s neighbor is why one pastor believes every congregation ought to have an 11-foot pole, a pole that would help the church deal with all the neighbors it wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Sometimes our prayer should be: “Take away my heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh.”
Loving is hard. And Jesus doesn’t give us a list of dos and don’ts for every conceivable situation. Instead of telling us what to do in exhaustive detail, he tells us how to do everything we do: with love. But Paul reminds us that we have only partial knowledge; the “other” (whether child, spouse, co-worker, fellow delegate to the convention –and even God) is always a mystery. If we are sure we know the other and know what is good for them we are verging on objectifying, manipulating or patronizing them. It is a challenge to know how best to love in all the messy places in our lives. God’s gift of the Holy Spirit is supremely helpful, if we would only learn to listen.
Richard Rohr wrote: “Love is a paradox … at its heart it is not a matter of mind [or feeling] or willpower but a flow of energy willingly allowed and exchanged, without requiring payment in return.” This love does not love because someone is funny or beautiful, clever or successful, generous or good at problem solving. I hope we all have (or will have at some time in our lives) a taste of this love, and have experienced its freedom and felt its healing power. Love, experienced and expressed, has the power to transform. Christian Picrolini was a neo-Nazi. Eventually Christian left the white-supremacy group. He founded a very different kind of group he called Life After Hate. He was able to leave the hate group because he had experienced compassionate love from someone who had no rational reason to love him: a black security guard at his school.
When we open ourselves to this love and strive to create a home for it in our hearts, it changes us, too. Love becomes who we are, not just what we do. Love at first is like a pair of glasses that we have to remember to put on to see as Jesus sees: with kindness, patience, commitment, self-giving and forgiveness. Eventually our love changes; it is like Lasik surgery, although of course it takes much longer, for it gives us this Christ-like vision permanently. The Lasik surgery can be scary and it has a cost that glasses wearers might be reluctant to pay.
Will love conquer all, in the end? Christian hope says yes, but we are playing the long game here. The lack of love we see in the church and world can be discouraging. Dorothy Day wrote, “Young people say, ‘What good can one person do? What is the good of our small effort?’ They can not see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. … But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions and know that God will take them and multiply them, just as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.” Even small actions done with love matter.
Paul presents agape as the supreme eschatological [end times] reality. It is unconquerable and it never ends. In the Song of Solomon we find these words: “Many waters can not quench love, neither can floods drown it.” Love is the eternal light shining in the here and now. It therefore undergoes no change of form. It is that which continues. Insofar as we participate in love here and now, that part of us which loves passes from time into eternity without change. Love is unconquerable; it is perfect and complete. It is a permanent part of the Kingdom of God, now and to come.
Love is risky. You know all those qualities of love that Paul wrote about? They are the very qualities of God’s love towards us, and which Jesus demonstrated and which lead to his crucifixion. Herbert McCabe, a Dominican Friar wrote: “If you do not love, you are not alive; if you love effectively, you will be killed.” He believed that love required taking a stand against oppressive and unjust institutions and systems, just like Jesus. We have to trust that the risk of loving is always worth taking. After all, God thought so.
Let us pray:
Loving God, you have given your people tongues to speak your name, prophecy to see your works and faith to see your power;
Open our minds and hearts to receive your love which never ends,
teach us to see and love your face in the face of friend and stranger
and give us the courage to risk loving effectively.
This we pray through Jesus Christ, who fulfills your promises. Amen.