A Still More Excellent Way

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
July 20, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Hosea 11:1-9
I Corinthians 13

“Love never quits.”

On July 9th at the age of 95, Sir John Templeton died. Templeton spent the first part of his life making money—lots of money—and the last part of his life giving it away. In 1973 he established the Templeton Prize for progress in religion (whatever that means) and awarded the prize first to Mother Teresa. Then in 1987 he formed the Templeton Foundation to promote research on what Sir John called the “Big Questions,” questions dealing with the intersection of science, faith, God and the purpose of humanity.

Templeton came of age during the Scopes trial that was held near his home in Winchester, Tennessee. A Presbyterian by up-bringing, he did not believe in the literal interpretation of Scripture and so was determined to do what he could to find common ground between science and religion. If science could study religious experience, perhaps such study might foster understanding of what he called “spiritual realities.” Foremost among these realities for Sir John was love: unlimited love.

I know this first hand because about a decade ago the Templeton Foundation offered to give millions of dollars to the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton if CTI would establish an Institute for Research on Unlimited Love. In the spirit of not taking money from lobbyists [acceptance of Templeton funding presupposed the promotion of religion, it seemed] and so standing on the ground of intellectual integrity and freedom, my colleague declined the offer. Soon thereafter, Case Western Reserve managed to grab the brass ring, receiving over $8 million to host research on unlimited love in the summer prior to 9/11. “Through scientific research, education and publication the Institute’s aim,” reads the website, “is to significantly increase humanity’s understanding and knowledge of what is commonly called unconditional love.” I wonder what Paul would say to this!

Paul’s chapter on love, like the chapter we considered last Sunday, is wedged in the middle of a longer discourse written in response to a particular division within the community. You will remember that Chapters 8 through 10 concern eating meat offered to idols. There Paul admonishes the Corinthians to identify with the weak and vulnerable in the community rather than flaunt their freedom from the law. Chapters 12 through 14 concern the presumed hierarchy of spiritual gifts within the community: gifts that lent status to some and second class citizenship to others, thereby causing divisions. Topping the list of better gifts, according to the beginning of the 13th chapter, were speaking in tongues followed by prophetic knowledge of God and ostentatious stewardship.

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love,” Paul begins “I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” To be given the gift of speaking in tongues is to be set apart to say the unsayable in the community, to express the ineffable through the aid of God’s Spirit. What comes to mind in a congregation without that gift is music. “No art points beyond itself more decidedly,” wrote Gerhard van der Leeuw, “than does music.” In the midst of the choir’s anthem or when Mark offers the voluntary to begin and end the service of worship or as we join in the singing of a hymn, music is made in an act of going out of the self even as music received resounds in the bones and sinews of the soul, turning us Godward.

But music in the community of faith, to paraphrase Paul, can be no more than noise when it is offered as self-referential performance. “A bell or a gong is not music,” writes Karl Barth as he pauses at this verse. “It is simply a noise…no matter how significant and arresting it may sound, or how seriously it may have God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in intention….What sounds in it is only the exalted self-enjoyment and the forceful self-expression of the one who [makes music], and it is something monotonous, tedious, uninspiring and finally irksome and annoying. No Kyrie or Gloria can help a performance of this nature.” We all have attended churches where the music, marvelous as it is, is performance and so worship is experienced as monotonous, tedious, uninspiring, annoying and irksome!

Paul says the same of human knowledge about God whether written by the theologian, proclaimed by the prophet or acted out by the healer. “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.” We know how proud the Corinthians were of their higher knowledge of God, a pride Paul challenged at the outset of this letter. A person can have the outward appearance of knowing God theologically, receiving God’s word prophetically, working God’s works miraculously, but if that one is puffed up with knowledge or self-important about one’s faith, then there can be no witness to the One who in love emptied himself. “It is love alone that counts,” says our towering theologian in sum, “and not this brilliance [or belief], however great it may be….”

Then in the third place, Paul takes on an aspect of discipleship that is unassailable in most Christian communities: sacrificial giving and social action. “If I give away all that I have and if deliver my body to be burned, I gain nothing.” This action comes as close as any can to the more excellent way Paul is commending. But even in an act of sacrifice on behalf of the neighbor, the love that is love can be missing. If you go to Mississippi to build houses or Haiti to plant trees and, all the while, do not get out of yourself, divest yourself of yourself, remove yourself from the center of your concern so that there is room to be with and for the other, then you might as well have stayed home.

“There is in fact a love which is without love, a self-giving which is no self-giving, a [fit] of self-love which has the form of a genuine and extreme love for God and one’s [neighbor],” says Barth, “and yet in which it is not really a question of God or [of the other] at all, but only of the delight which can be found in oneself, in the unlimited nature of one’s heroism, when all things, even life itself, are offered.” How many good deeds have we ruined by the inner self-congratulations that placed us, once again, in the moral spotlight? Be assured, as well, that the one who is the object of a loveless loving act sees right through to the pretense!

What, then, is this love without which our speech and knowledge and actions are in vain? “The essence of love,” according to the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, “is to affectively affirm as well as to unselfishly delight in the well-being of others, and to engage in acts of care and service on their behalf; unlimited love extends this love to all others without exception, in an enduring and constant way….”

With this definition in hand, the Institute funds studies of human behavior that sect out to trace, scientifically (!), how persons come to delight unselfishly in the well being of the other. The assumption is that if a researcher can identify and even measure what makes a person love unconditionally, then it may be possible to reproduce the conditions—in the family, community of faith, nation and world—that will make unconditional lovers out of otherwise selfish human beings. Ironically much of the funded research has to do with the benefits that accrue to a person who loves unconditionally—health, for instance, and long life or the salutary effects of prayer on healing—thereby compromising the unconditional aspect of the affective affirmation of the well-being of another!

Paul knows you just cannot say what love is without saying Jesus! He knows only Christ can make unconditional lovers out of otherwise selfish human beings. He knows this because Christ has done this for him. Hence he offers no definition but instead turns the Corinthians to the one who alone is love. Substitute Christ for every mention made of love in this chapter and you begin to see through a mirror darkly the love for which you were made. “What is here called love,” writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Ethics, “is not this general principle but the utterly unique event of the laying down of the life of Jesus Christ for us….The New Testament answers the question ‘What is love?’ quite unambiguously by pointing solely and entirely to Jesus Christ.”

However when Paul considers the love revealed in Christ, he looks not to the teachings of Jesus or to the deeds of Jesus during his lifetime. He looks to the cross where “[Love] is “shorthand for a narrative: death and resurrection…,” says theologian Robert Jenson, “because, seen from faith’s viewpoint, death and resurrection is what love concretely means….The usual promises we make each other stop short because we except the condition of death, because we reserve self-preservation; but to promise myself is to try to give up this reservation. Therefore to love is to accept death: it is to give up my cautious claims to hang onto myself….”

At the heart of the division in the Corinthian community was this cautious claim to hang on to the self: the wise self, the moral self, the righteous self, the “I am right and everyone else is wrong” self. Therefore, with the exception of Paul’s first two positive words (love is patient—has the longer wind; and kind--a better translation would be “fit”), we are given a negative litany that nails the various ways in which we hang on to ourselves: by our jealousy, boastfulness, arrogance, our rude behavior; by insisting on our own way, being irritable and resentful, rejoicing in the wrong rather than in the truth. We are full of ourselves such that we come to believe love of the other must be at the expense of ourselves. Indeed it must!

So given the presupposition of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love--that if we can know what makes a person love unconditionally, we can reproduce the conditions that will make unconditional lovers out of otherwise selfish human beings—Paul would say death is the only condition; say that our jealous, boastful, arrogant and rude selves must die as Saul died on the road to Damascus. Our selves so sure we are right in our knowledge of God must give way to the God that takes us by surprise on our way to stone one called of God to service. Our selves that exist because of our cautious claim to hang onto ourselves must be released in light of the hold God in Christ has on us. Our selves full of ourselves must be emptied even as Christ emptied himself and took the form of a servant. This is not a condition we can reproduce, my dear friends. Rather if we love at all, we love because--when we were jealous and boastful, arrogant and rude, irritable and resentful and insisting upon our own way--the patient and kind God first loved us, is still loving our sorry selves to the end that, with Sir John and all the saints, we may one day see love face to face! Thanks be to God for the love that never quits!

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