LOVE NEVER ENDS

by Bev Latif Duncan/Pilgrim Church/January 28, 2007

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Jeremiah 1:4-10; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Krister Stendahl, retired Lutheran Bishop of Stockholm, New Testament scholar, and chaplain at Harvard Divinity School when I was there, told us as student preachers never to use the word “love” in a sermon. I think he meant that the word too easily became a facile catchall for “being nice.” I assume he also wanted to stress that the word “love” can be used so often that it passes into a diaphanous vapor devoid of substance or any real meaning at all.

Well, I’m taking a chance today, though it would be difficult to preach on 1 Corinthians 13 without using the word “love.” My prayer might want to be, “May the words of my mouth be acceptable to you, Krister Stendahl.”

The famous “love hymn,” 1 Corinthians 13, is Paul’s message to parties in a nasty church fight. The Corinthian church was divided into several groups, all at one another’s throats. Paul’s intent in writing this part of this letter is to say that no matter how charitable, faithful, spiritual, or knowledgeable your behaviors are, if there is no love among you, all those other, outer displays amount to nothing. We can relate to that…. But you need to know that my telling you this has nothing to do with my feelings about this congregation or with my charge to you as I leave your employ. I KNOW there is love breathing all through this place, for I have been one of its beneficiaries!

My charge to you, the legacy I want to leave with you, has to do with your expressed appreciation for how I have introduced Scripture readings to you each Sunday. Well, as I have studied Scripture in school, worked in church agencies and churches, led Bible studies and been led by them, and been exposed to some amazing theologians, both lay and ordained and in many places, I have experienced a dizzying number of “Aha’s!” and moments of epiphany from and in the stories in the Bible. It is because I have discovered that the Word of God is not dead but is alive and vibrant and has very tangible meaning for our lives, that I want for others to be able to share the same excitement and meaning that I have found in Scripture. You have been an enviable audience of hearers.

When we know that what we are hearing or reading is based on something having taken place in a particular location under specific circumstances in history, and that involved real live human beings seeking to do God’s will as they understood it or were trying to understand it, we are halfway toward our own understanding. When we suddenly realize these people could be us and that situation is like the one we are experiencing, Scripture takes on a human face that looks just like ours.

What I want to leave with you, then, are stories of the human faces that have had everything to do with my ministry and have brought Scripture into high relief in my life. These people are those who heard God speaking directly to them when Paul wrote, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (verse 1).

The first face of 1 Corinthians 13 is the Rev. Martin Luther King, who embraced what he called the “Beloved Community.” It was the ultimate goal for which he worked and the underpinning for every sermon, march, and speech. He said, “As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy even if I just got a good checkup at the Mayo Clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be…. We are interdependent.” For Martin King the Beloved Community was the “Kingdom of God come to earth,” much as we pray it in the Lord’s Prayer and as the apostle Paul meant it to be when he wrote, “…If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” I leave with you the passion and, yes, the love that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. embodied. Perhaps you will see his face before you when you hear these verses.

The second face of 1 Corinthians 13, for me, is the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, who recently died. He was Chaplain of Yale University and Williams College, then senior minister of Riverside Church in New York City. He was a Freedom Rider, Vietnam War protestor, advocate for nuclear disarmament, and a fair pianist. I heard him play, but it didn’t hold a candle to the way he could speak and move people.

The Rev. Coffin not only put his life on the line for justice, but he felt that the scriptural mandate to love--even though written two thousand years ago--took direct aim at him and each of us. He heard verses 11 and 12: “When I became a man I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Then he wrote, “All saving ideas are born small. God comes to earth as a child so that we can finally grow up, which means we can stop blaming God for being absent when we ourselves were not present; stop blaming God for the ills of the world as if we had been laboring to cure them; and stop making God responsible for all the thinking and doing we should be undertaking on our own. I’ve said it before and will probably say it many times again: God provides minimum protection, maximum support—support to help us grow up, to stretch our minds and hearts until they are as wide as God’s universe. God doesn’t want us narrow-minded, priggish, and subservient, but joyful and loving, as free for one another as God’s love was freely poured out for us at Christmas in the babe in the manger.” My legacy to you this day is to be encouraged to see some meaning for your life in the example of the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, whenever you hear these verses.

Finally, I leave you the face of God’s word that belonged to none other than your founding father, shipbuilder and state legislator, Mr. Seth Sprague. An upright and wealthy citizen of this town, a mover and a shaker, he left First Parish Church during the Unitarian Controversy and built the church behind us as a Methodist Episcopal church, because the Methodist Episcopalians opposed slavery. Then he left that church because they wouldn’t support the abolitionist movement, and he built another church—this one. His letter of resignation from the church behind us read in part: “I thought the church (would be) ant-slavery…. When an attempt was made by a few of its members to expel this enormous sin, all the official influence of the Church was arrayed against (those few members) and for eight years past it has been persecuting abolitionists and defending slavery. I consider the Methodist Episcopal Church as one great prop in the support of slavery and feel that as long as I remain a member of it, I am giving my support to that. I am sensible that my influence in society is very small; but small as it is, it ought to be exerted in favor of humanity.” So I leave with you the face of your founder, Seth Sprague, who knew that the apostle Paul was speaking not in pretty, poetic words, but directly to him, when Paul said, “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (verse 13).

Would that there were time to describe to you how God’s word came powerfully alive to me when I saw so much Salvadoran art in the 80s and 90s that depicted ordinary people crucified on crosses, with ordinary wives and mothers mourning beneath them. Their Christ and his experience became their own experience, and their consolation, as their loved ones were “disappeared” and murdered because they dared to stand up to a brutal dictatorship.

And would that there were time to say more about our Mass. Conference UCC partners in the Pentecostal Church of Chile, most of them the poorest of the poor. At harvest time they all bring armloads and crate loads of the fruits of their gardens and farmyards and place all of it on the chancel on Harvest Sunday. For the next week anyone may come and take as they have need. The chickens people have brought are penned in the pastor’s backyard, and are given to any who ask. This Pentecostal community takes Acts 4 seriously: “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common…. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.” (verses 32, 35).

These stories and images I leave with you; they are more than you wanted to know about why I have poured myself into reading Scripture to you on Sunday mornings. I have wanted you to be touched by God, through God’s living word that breathes life into us for the times we are living in, which are not so different from the times God’s people have always lived in, the calls God’s people have always been answering, and the needs we have that Christ has always understood. As this church writes its story for the days ahead, remember the unfathomable, tangible treasure and living resource for you in the pages of Holy Scripture. The story of salvation is yours as well; Christ means for you to live it.

With love, I wish you Godspeed, as you soar into your future. May there be nowhere you cannot go; no God-given task you cannot accomplish; nothing that Scripture cannot breathe new life into. Amen.

Quotations are from The Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Alex Ayers. 1993: Meridian; Credo: William Sloane Coffin. 2004: Westminster John Knox Press; and Pilgrim Church 1844-1994: The First 150 Years. Eds. William H. Houghton and Celia Y. Houghton.