Homily for Sunday, January 31, 2016 Buck Mountain Church
“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or
arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or
resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It
bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.”
Love is difficult. Love is not for the faint of heart. The
kind of Christian love Paul so beautifully describes in this famous passage
from his first letter to the Corinthians is anything but easy to fulfill. Although
we may think first of romantic love, Paul is not addressing only the kind of
love that happens between intimate partners. Paul asks us to demonstrate this
kind of love for everyone we encounter. In either case, succeeding at loving others in this way
requires a great deal of maturity—and self-control.
Maybe, sometimes, we can
manage to be patient or kind. I guess it should be fairly easy to avoid being
envious, boastful, arrogant, and rude. But our culture tells us it’s okay to
insist on having our own way; some would say it’s our right as Americans. Frank
Sinatra and Burger King have told us so. And that part about not being
irritable or resentful—avoiding those two reactions can be a daily challenge.
Even though this passage is often read at weddings, the love Paul describes is
a love that causes pain. Love this true calls for self-sacrifice. At the very
least, we put the needs of the other first and relinquish our own. If we
recognize that our exemplar of this kind of love is Jesus Christ and
contemplate that he demonstrated this love by dying on a cross, how can we not
accept that true love requires the willingness to suffer?
In the ancient world, in the
time of Jesus and Paul, all people who lived within the boundaries of the Roman
Empire would have been aware of the Greek and Roman deities, even of the lesser
goddesses known as the Three Graces-- the goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human
creativity, of the qualities Greeks and Romans believed made life worth living.
In naming faith, hope, and love as God’s abiding gifts to us, was Paul redefining
the Three Graces in Christian terms?
Christians believe grace
is God’s unfailing love and mercy for us—and for everyone. God’s grace is
freely given, but it is up to us to receive it. In the Judeo-Christian
heritage, this definition of grace is a long-standing one. Even in the Old
Testament book of Lamentations, a book mostly preoccupied, as its title
suggests, with the woes of the people of Israel, we read these beautifully
reassuring words that sum up grace: “The steadfast love of the Lord never
ceases; his mercies never come to an end.” Somehow, for Paul, the intertwining
qualities of faith, hope, and love are bound together in our ability to welcome
and receive the grace of God, so freely given. But why does Paul acknowledge love
as the greatest of these?
We have all known people who
lack faith in God, although they may place their faith in other things—wealth,
reason, nature, family. Even though they lack faith, as we understand it, God’s
unfailing love and mercy, God’s grace is still available to them. People
without faith can be blessed to
experience this kind of love through their beloved family members. Hopelessness, on the other hand, can
appear to be a more shattering state of existence. Someone who has no hope may
feel dead within, having no sense of purpose or reason to keep on going. And
yet, a hand outstretched in love may give such a person hope and restore him or
her to life. Through the BMEC food pantry, members of this parish—YOU—offer hope
to some who may feel hopeless. You extend God’s grace to them, in love. “And the greatest of these is Love” makes
sense, doesn’t it?
Why does Paul speak of
putting “an end to childish ways,” of now seeing “in a mirror, dimly”? Is it
because, when we are children, faith, hope and love all seem to be pretty easy
to obtain? As we grow older, the three graces may become more elusive. In
adulthood we endure hardships and difficulties, and when we try to comprehend,
to understand why bad things happen, we can see only our own wounded selves—as
“in a mirror, dimly.” We cannot see the larger picture, of ourselves in
relation to God or to our neighbors, who may also be suffering. We must endure—get comfortable with the
darkness--before we can truly experience the light of God’s grace.
The words of T.S. Eliot that
make reference to 1st Corinthians 13 are found in the “East Coker”
section of The Four Quartets:
“But the faith and love and
the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you
are not ready for thought.
So the darkness shall be the
light and the stillness, the dancing.”
Eliot’s words about waiting, about waiting “without thought”
illustrate letting go, surrendering, and trusting in God. Each life inevitably
holds times of hardship and pain, difficulties we surely believe we cannot
endure and do not deserve. Yet, in that very endurance, in suffering through
the darkness, in waiting for the light, we learn how to recognize God’s grace.
It comes to us as surely and gently as the touch of a loved one’s hand. How we
respond to that gracious touch, however, is completely up to us.
Henri
Nouwen, beloved theologian and author, professed that Christ was a Wounded Healer and suggested that we
Christians are called to be wounded healers ourselves. Nouwen believed that how
we respond to the wounds we inevitably receive over the course of a lifetime
determines our ability to move forward with our lives in joy and thanksgiving.
Any particular and personal response of ours, to pain and suffering, is a choice.
Here are Nouwen’s own words:
Joy
is what makes life worth living, but for many, joy seems hard to find. They
complain that their lives are sorrowful and depressing. What then brings the
joy we so much desire? Are some people just lucky, while others have run out of
luck? Strange as it may sound, we may choose joy. Two people can be part of the
same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently from the other. One
may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise.
The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it. What makes us human is
precisely this freedom of choice.
We face many opportunities to choose grace over pain. None may be
more difficult than when a loved one faces serious illness.
I
asked for 1st Corinthians 13 to be read at my mother’s funeral. In
her life and in her dying, my mother Lillian exemplified the love expressed in
this passage better than anyone I’ve ever known. She possessed in steadfast
abundance all three of the graces—faith, hope and love.
I
was with her when she died, and it was a joy to release her tormented body to
God. You see, she suffered from a rare and dreadful neurological disease—Steele
Richardson Syndrome. Mama was about the age I am now when she began to exhibit
symptoms of her illness, and she was dead within a few years of her diagnosis.
Since Steele Richardson Syndrome shuts down, over time, every organ of the body
except the brain, Mama was fully aware of what was happening to her, but she
was unable to speak. Since even her best friends could not bear to see her in
the state she was in, she had very few visitors, so her dying years were
lonely. Still, whenever I was with her, I sensed the warm, burning ember of her
faith and hope, and I knew that she knew—that God had assured her—that all
would be well.
In
her life and in her dying, Mama possessed, also in abundance, the one quality
that makes deep faith, hope, and love possible. Humility. I have heard humility defined as “perpetual quietness of
heart” and my mother embodied that definition. What does that mean? I think a
heart can only be perpetually quiet when its possessor is free of all striving.
No
striving to overcome the unfairness of things. No striving to fix or control
others. No striving for possessions or status or success or power. No striving
to be right about everything. Perpetual quietness of heart requires a simple
acceptance that all is in God’s hands—all is well, and all shall be well.
On
the day of Mama’s funeral, the true marvel for me was that the rather large
church was full to overflowing. People that I did not even realize knew my
mother came to her funeral. It was amazing to see how much my mother’s simple
kindness and unconditional love had touched so many people. My mother could
have witnessed, with the psalmist, “For you are my hope, O Lord God, my
confidence since I was young. I have been sustained by you ever since I was
born.”
Or, as Paul said, “Love bears
all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love
never ends.”
Grace
upon Grace….
AMEN.
