A sermon on 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times of late that I’ve been attending a few weddings recently, some as a celebrant and some just as a guest, and that I’ve got several more coming up this year. I’m even looking at facilitating a relationship enrichment course for couples, which perhaps some of you might be interested in. Stay tuned.

But I raise this, not because I want to talk about marriage tonight, but because I very definitely don’t want to talk about marriage, but unless I spell that out really clearly, you might all find your brains unconsciously veering off in that direction. You probably know why already. A few minutes ago we heard a reading of the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, a reading that is number one on the hit parade of Bible readings for weddings.

If Paul’s publisher were to put out a volume of “Paul’s Greatest Hits”, 1 Corinthians 13 would choose itself. It is a wonderful piece of poetry with a profound and incredibly important message, but unfortunately, when we most often hear it in the context of weddings, its real message is obscured. In the context of a wedding, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love,” comes to mean “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have a special someone who is the love of my life.” Paul’s hymn to love gets morphed into just another ode to the joys of having that special someone to hold. And that is very definitely NOT what it is about. It is not opposing that; it’s just got stuff-all to do with it.

If we want to understand what it is saying, we need to start by doing two things. Firstly, we need to recognise its original, very-un-wedding-like context, and secondly, we need to recognise how it relates to the previous chapter that we heard read here last Sunday.

So, firstly, let’s try to put this famous Bible passage back to its original context. Paul’s lovely poetry is not aimed at starry-eyed lovers. He isn’t writing to people who cherish and desire each other and who want to spend the rest of their lives together. He’s writing to people who can’t stand the sight of each other. He is a frustrated and perplexed spiritual leader, calling an fractious and self-destructive church to wake up to itself before it tears itself apart. If you read the twelve chapters that lead up to this one, you get a fairly clear picture of the dysfunctional mess that Paul is responding to. The church has split into factions. People are playing their favourite religious teachers off against each other. Everyone’s vying for power and status.  Congregation members are taking each other to court. It’s a total shit show.

As I said to Margie last week when she was talking about how dysfunctional churches can sometimes be, whenever you feel too despondent about the state of the Christian churches, just go read 1^st Corinthians all the way through to remind yourself that things have ever been thus.

So instead of thinking of weddings, imagine your worst nightmare of a church tearing itself apart and everyone at each other’s throats – I hope it is not this church you’re thinking of! – and that’s your best context for trying to understand what Paul is saying in this chapter. 

Now, the second thing we need to pay attention to if we want to understand what Paul is saying is the direct connection to the previous chapter – to all the previous twelve chapters actually, but especially to chapter 12. There is an easily overlooked sentence that ties the two together, but let me recap last week’s reading before we get to that.

Right the way through the letter, Paul talks a lot about spiritual leadership and spiritual gifts, because they seem to have been things that the Corinthians were fighting over a lot. Last Sunday we heard most of chapter 12 which began with Paul saying, “Now concerning spiritual gifts, friends, I do not want you to be uninformed.” Then there was all the stuff about how everyone is given a different gifts from the same Spirit for the benefit of the whole body, and the stuff about how every member and their gifts are important. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you,’” and all that. 

And then, despite his emphasis on the importance of all the gifts, he ended that discussion with a kind of hierarchy of the significance of various gifts, and encourages us to strive for the “greater” gifts. 

Just after that comes this little sentence that is frequently overlooked but is actually very very important. We most often hear these two chapters separately, and so we don’t notice the sentence whose only significance is in tying them together.

So straight after the list of important gifts, and the encouragement to strive for them, Paul says: “And I will show you a still more excellent way.” 

“And I will show you a still more excellent way.” Doesn’t sound like much on its own, but listen to how it ties the two parts together: “Strive for the greater gifts, by all means, but I will show you a still more excellent way. 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. … Love is patient; love is kind; … Love bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends”, unlike all those gifts which will all come to an end. 

A still more excellent way. Can you hear what he is saying? We mostly tend to think about what gifts we and others have. We note that this person is gifted in this, and another person is gifted in that. We often get trapped into comparing gifts, often at our own expense. That person is so much more gifted in this area than I am. If only I had the sort of gifts that person has; then I might be of some use to God and the church. 

In thinking about who might be the right sort of person to serve as a pastor or to serve on our Host Group or as an Assembly delegate or something, we can easily start weighing up their gifts. “This person runs a successful business, they’d be good. That person is a confident public speaker, we should choose them.” 

But, says Paul, I will show you a still more excellent way. And to a large extent, what he is saying is that gifts don’t matter very much when it comes to assessing your spiritual maturity. Everybody has gifts, they all matter, and they don’t really tell you anything important about the person. It’s the same as saying you can’t tell anything about the merits of a person by tallying up the value of the Christmas presents they received. Gifts are gifts, and they don’t make you who you are. 

But love is different. To be a person who loves is not a gift that can be given you. It is something that is cultivated and grown in you. Love comes from the core of your being, and the extent of your love reveals who you really are. 

God is love. That is the most significant one word summary of the nature of God in the Bible; God is love. And so the more like God any person becomes, the more that love will be their obvious defining characteristic. 

Receiving the gift of tongues or the gift of reckless faith does not make you more like God. It is love that reveals whether you are becoming anything like God. And so after all his concern that we not be uninformed about spiritual gifts, the Apostle Paul now relegates the spiritual gifts to a very much secondary significance. 

In the context of the Corinthian church and its dangerously self-destructive infighting, he is saying, “All these impressive gifts and attributes you have are all very well, but you are claiming them as proof of your spiritual superiority over one another and using them to put others down. It’s tearing you apart. So if you want to know how to measure anyone’s real spiritual strength and maturity, let me show you a better way. Love. Love. That’s all. Love.”

If I am a wonderfully gifted preacher, or writer or poet, whose words move and inspire people and are quoted and perhaps even awarded, but I am not someone who loves, I am a noisy gong or a blast of static. All my words will count for nothing, and even if the church makes the mistake of putting me up on a pedestal, or in a pulpit, God will weep over my failure to do the one thing that really matters: to love. To love God and to love others; to love even those who set themselves up as my enemies.

And if I have prophetic powers and knowledge; if I can see to the heart of things and offer a devastating critique of the way the values of our society and the actions of government and industry are marginalising the needy and destroying the social and ecological fabric of the planet; and even if my prophetic critique inspires a grassroots movement of change and really turns things around, if I do not love, really love, love not just those who I find attractive and fun but those who are hard to love, then all my accomplishments amount to nothing. And even if the church hails me as the greatest prophet of my generation and puts me on its A-list speaking circuit, God will be weeping over my failure to become the one thing that really mattered: a person of love.

And if I cultivate the most impressive range of socially and politically conscious virtues; if I have a composting toilet and wear a ‘Make Poverty History’ band on each wrist; if I voluntarily live on the equivalent of the dole and give the rest of my income to worthy causes; if I sponsor twenty African children and serve meals at the homeless shelter every week; if I only eat organically grown food and regularly ring my local MP to lobby on behalf of asylum seekers and I’ve been arrested several times for symbolic action protests at military facilities; if I do all these things consistently for years, but do not simultaneously grow in my ability to generously love even those who do none of these things and even those who think I’m wrong and that such things shouldn’t be done; if I become more and more pure but not more and more extravagantly loving, then I have remained part of the problem and contributed almost nothing to the solution.

And if I am faithfully at church every week, even when it means missing the tennis final, and I serve on the Host Group, and attend the midweek gathering and a study group, and I contribute to the singing recordings, and host the daily prayers, and volunteer for absolutely everything; if I become resentful of those who don’t pull their weight, instead of growing in my capacity to love them and delight in serving them even when they take advantage of me, then all my diligence is wasted and I have missed the point. I have missed the still more excellent way. I have invested in that which will pass away and not in that which is forever.

Love is the only name of the game. Love is not in a hurry. Love wants what is best for the other person. Love does not begrudge them their successes, or glory in being better than them. Love is not pushy or demanding or belittling. Love is willing to step aside and let others do it their way. Love is not always getting its nose out of joint or getting bitter over the attention shown to others. Love hangs in there through thick and thin. Love is always ready to give people the benefit of the doubt and take a chance on them. Love keeps believing that the best is yet to come. Love cannot be snuffed out, no matter what you hit it with.

Sure, all of that stuff is true of the love that makes a marriage work for the long haul too, but that’s not its biggest test, and those who can live it out in their marriages but can’t show real love to anyone else are not getting the thumbs up from Paul here. As Jesus said, loving those who love us is not exactly taking love to any kind of new and unexpected level. It is love that can hang in there and begin to break through the conflicts and jealousies of a dysfunctional church and a dysfunctional world that really has the fingerprints of God all over it.

Perhaps the test for us, given the context of Paul’s words, is not the love shown to our friends, to the people we like, perhaps it is how the people we can’t stand experience our love. Love is not how you feel about them, it is how you treat them. We could perhaps even ask how we love the people we hate! Do they feel disliked or barely tolerated by us? Or do they feel respected, honoured, cared about by us? Do they feel like we really want the best for them?

God is love, and in the end, only love matters. Now we know very little, but when we come to know ourselves as fully known, as known by God, known in the depths of our being, then we will know ourselves known by love, we will know ourselves loved, we will know love. Then we will love in all its fullness, and love never ends. 

All these other things will pass away. But love is what we have come to know in Christ Jesus; love is what we have been shown of God. God is love, and those who belong to God are transformed in the image of that love. And nothing else matters. Everything else will fall away, and love alone remains. No matter how wonderfully gifted you are and how great your accomplishments may be, and good on you for that, says, Paul, “but I will show you a still more excellent way. I will show you the thing that trumps all that, the one thing that really matters.” Love is the be all and end all, for God is love.