Head west from downtown Palo Alto on University Avenue – when you arrive on the Stanford campus you see ahead of you at the end of the road a great big old church: Stanford Memorial Church. Up its grand entrance and into the building you proceed – into a large open circular space with balconies and a large stage, and a sound engineer.
When the bride and groom come to you hand in hand, you face them, and speak the words of the apostle Paul’s discourse on love – “If I spoke with the tongues of mortals and of angels…” (1 Corinthians 13) After the service, everybody shakes your hand. Good sermon.
Great sermon, Paul – but how did the Corinthians like it? The first people to hear your words were not at a wedding. They were gathered as a church to listen to a letter read aloud – a letter from their founding pastor.
All too fond as they were of certain distinctive spiritual gifts – ones that made them feel special, that showed off their piety – they were so proud of what they had got hold of that they forgot why they had been given those gifts in the first place: for the common good.
Gifts are given to us for the purpose of building up each other; they are given us for love. They are given to us to empower us to love, as God loves.
What use is a gift without love? Eloquent speech, tongues, knowledge, prophecy – without the one vital element of love they are worse than useless – they are a new form of idolatry. They furnish a false identity – an identity not as God’s beloved children but as somehow finding security in yourself – in living by your own rules, by your own powers.
People who had turned from polytheism – those first Corinthians, first to hear this letter – now sought a new identity: would they look for it in a source of power for themselves, or would they set it all at the feet of the living God – would they worship God alone?
For people who follow the rules hoping that obedience will save them – or people with no rules at all (Corinthians again) – both fall away from trust in God.
The Corinthians were people who didn’t have much use for any rules at all. Freedom – in Christ, so they said – was what they were after. But it is so easy to fall into a false sense of identity. It was easy; it is easy – then and now – to attempt to gain status (in one’s own eyes) from the gift not the giver.
Paul brings them back – your true identity, your true self, is found only in the heart of God: God is love, and where love is there you will find God – so lay all your gifts at his feet.
The desire for status, or a sure thing, for success or power however fleeting – for something other than God to rule your life or allow you to rule your own – these are false gods for false people.
We hear the call: Become the true people of God – the people who love one another as God has first loved us.
And what does that love look like? First and last, it looks like Jesus of Nazareth – a plain carpenter’s son, a peasant from a small village in Galilee – whose life is the best picture we know of love incarnate. And he is patient; he is kind…
And these characteristics, the same we find in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, are the work of the Spirit – the fruit of the Spirit – borne in us; borne in us when we too embody love and show to the world the presence of God.
Let us love another and the world – in spirit and in truth.
JRL+
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