By The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
October 21, 2012
Text: 1 Corinthians 13:8-13
It is hard sometimes for those of us who are members of the clergy to adequately describe the sense of pathos we often feel at a funeral and burial. There is not one of us who has had the occasion of performing such a ceremony, where the pathos is overwhelming at times, and leaves a deep feeling within our hearts and our minds. I don't know whether it was an obituary that I read this week that sounded very much like the man that I was thinking of, but when I read it, it seemed that he was a very similar character with a very similar life to a man that I buried some 15 or 16 years ago.
The man in question was in his late 90s. We buried him in the famous Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa, similar in many ways to Mount Pleasant here in Toronto. This man had lived a long life, but it had started out very roughly. As a young man, he fought in the First World War, and during this war he was the victim of gassing. The gassing scarred his lungs, and even though he managed to live a long life, remarkable in the light of what had happened to him, there was this pain and the memory of the war and the scars in his body.
He was a man who unfortunately had a very sad existence. I had buried his son, who had died of an overdose, having been an alcoholic since his teens. This man had outlived his two wives: his first, who had died at a relatively young age at the height of what should have been matrimonial bliss; the second one ended up in a wheelchair, and for years he had to take care of her. He had a hard life. In his declining years, he himself ended up in a wheelchair. I'll never forget going to visit him in his small room, so small that you could hardly turn the wheelchair around in it, in a home in New Edinburgh, Ottawa.
Yet this man was remarkable. He went out of his way to visit young soldiers who had been injured or maimed. He went regularly to visit a young man who had lost both his limbs in Kosovo and lived on the other side of Ottawa. At great expense and great personal discomfort, he would visit this young man and care for him. He was a remarkable man! I asked him once, “How is it that after all you have seen and endured that you are so positive and still so caring of others?”
He said, “It is because I believe that love never ends.”
He asked me to read a poem by Annie Johnson Flint at the graveside. I had never read it before but I have many times since, and when I do, I think of him and his faith. When it came time for his burial, on a cold and grey day, weeks after the ice storm of the winter of 1998, when a lot of the tree limbs were down, and the ice was still on the driveways and walkways, I read:
God has not promised skies always blue
Flower strewn pathways all our lives through
God has not promised sun without rain
Joy without sorrow, peace without pain
But God has promised strength for the day
Rest for the labour, light for the way
Grace for the trials, help from above
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.
When we put him into the ground that is all I could think of: that the love of God would always be with him.
This of course finds its beginning, its genesis, in the very words of Paul in Corinthians 1:13: “Love never fails; love never ends.” For the Apostle Paul, all of this arises from what I suggested last week was his definition of love, namely that it is the agape, love, the love of God in Jesus Christ. It is because of the love that is being poured out by Jesus Christ, we know what love is. For those who were in Corinth when Paul first wrote this letter, there was some confusion about what love is.
You see, in Corinth, the people understood the word “love” but the problem was they understood it amiss! Around them, on the hills, 1800 feet high, was a statue in Corinth to Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love! Around this temple to Aphrodite there would be a thousand priestesses, and those priestesses would be prostitutes. The idea was that if you joined yourself to one of the prostitutes, you would be in communion with Aphrodite herself. So when you used the word “love” it was the Goddess of Love that was the image that so many of the Corinthians had: a love of pleasure, a love of self-seeking, and a love that bonds you with the gods. That was the “love” of Corinth in the time of Paul.
You can see why he had to redefine love. He had to start all over again. He had to define what love was. If this new, fledgling Christian community was going to have any faith and survive at all, it had to understand what love is. So Paul, in this incredible poetry, defines it for them. But, I think when Paul is defining it he is not just defining it with words: he is defining it by describing the love of Jesus as the manifestation of this definition.
The definition arises from Christ; not Christ from the definition. For example, look at some of the words he uses to define Christian love. He says, “Love is patient.” If anyone was patient, it was Christ. Just look at the disciples he had around him: look at what a rabble they were; how they got things wrong, how they misunderstood what he was saying; how they didn't do what he asked. Yet, if anyone exhibited patience, it was Christ.
Paul says, “Love is kind.” Where does he get this sense of kindness from? He gets his sense of kindness from a man who reached out to the leper even though he could be unclean. He reaches out to the blind man, and gives him sight. He reaches out to Zacchaeus, the outcast, and he brings him home. He reaches out to the Samaritan, who has been pushed to the side of society. Kindness is not just a word, but a person.
Paul says, “Love does not envy.” If there was anyone who didn't envy, it was Jesus. Even when he met the rich young ruler, you would assume that he would be envious of all his wealth and all his power, but no, he wasn't! Even though he says “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” he was not envious. He reached out to even the most wealthy and most powerful. When I think of it, one of the most pernicious things in life is ending. It is one of the things that drive so much evil in our society. When we see the prosperous, when we see things that we don't have, we want them. We envy people for them, and we will drag them down to get it, or we will do anything to lift ourselves up to attain it. Envy is a terrible thing. Love does not envy.
“Love does not boast” says Paul. Jesus didn't boast. Even when he performed great healings, one of the things he said was, “Don't tell anyone. Keep quiet. I don't want anyone to know what I am doing” because he didn't want to be a superstar. He was the Son of God. Do not boast, for love does not boast.
Love does not envy, love does not boast. Love is not rude. Look at Jesus. Even before Pilate, even when he was being accused, what was Jesus' response to Pilate? Was it rude? Did he use foul and disgusting language to let him know just how wrong he was? No! He opted for silence, not rudeness and vulgarity. I think people who espouse love today need to understand that the vulgarity of our age, and we are in a vulgar age, is not love.
Paul says, “Love does not get angry.” Only once did Jesus get angry. This was when he turned the moneychangers out of the temple. He wanted to remind people that the house of God is not a money-making machine; it is for the worship of God; it is for the sake of the glory of God. It is not for usury. It is not for the accumulation of wealth. It is not for the coins. It is for worship! But even Jesus' anger at that time was not for himself, but for what was happening to the exploited, who wanted to come into the house to worship the living God. Jesus didn't get angry when he was accused.
“Love does not keep a record of wrongs,” said Paul. If there was anyone who did not keep a record of wrongs, it was Jesus! Even when he was on a cross between two thieves crucified, did he keep a record of wrongs? No! He says, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Jesus didn't get angry. Jesus did not approve of evil. Love does not approve of evil. Evil drags people down. Evil causes others to stumble and to fall. Evil delights in people stumbling and falling. Jesus said, “Do not cause even one of these children to stumble and fall for love does not rejoice in evil, but rejoices in the good.”
You see the picture that has emerged? Love is the love of Christ. Love is defined by what is seen in the person of Christ. Love is the way of Christ. It is in a person. That is why love never ends! It is based on the life and the death and the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet, if you are like me, you look around the world and say, “But is this love really all it should be? Is it manifested in the way that I hope it should be?” When I see inhumanity, when I see evil, boasting, anger, vulgarity, rudeness and envy, where is this love?
Paul knew that in the current moment, in the now, what we see is partial. Paul understood that neither in himself, nor in the world, is the fullness of love to be witnessed. Paul said, “When I was a child, I thought like a child, I spoke like a child, but now I have put away childish things.” I have grown. I have moved on. Then, he says this incredible phrase, “We see now through a glass dimly.”
In the 1960s, Ingmar Bergman made the movie Through a Glass Darkly. In it, there is a protagonist who waits for God to appear to her every night in the wallpaper in her bedroom. She prays for this thing: that this love will be revealed to her. She waits for it to happen through the wallpaper. But, she sees through a glass darkly, for it never fully comes.
Sometimes there is a virtue to having a cloudy mirror. In the mornings, I am actually quite relieved that the mirror in my bathroom is cloudy, and I am in no hurry to wipe away the mist! I am quite happy just to let it give a distorted view of how I look. At least until the mist disappears and the truth is revealed for what it is!
Sometimes, it is nice to look through a glass darkly: not to be able to see everything completely. When it comes to God, we see through a glass darkly. We do not in this light get the full image. We do not see everything. Our lives must continue in many ways to grow and to develop. We are not the same as we were 10 years ago. I always love it when people try to find a way to trip a person up by saying “You are not the same as you used to be. You are not consistent. You don't actually believe today everything that you believed yesterday.” As if somehow changing your mind and becoming better is a bad thing!
Surely, it seems to me, that a person who can say “I have changed my mind, I have grown, I have a fuller understanding, and am richer, not poorer.” So it is with love! Love is something we have to live with; something that we have to let live with us; something that should grow within us. Let us not be static like a child, and say “I have the same love as when I was an infant to what I have now.” Love should grow, even through a dim mirror.
As I mentioned last week, I have been reading a biography of Benjamin Disraeli, the great British Prime Minister in the 19th century. He was a great orator, and one day in the House of Commons at a particularly testy time, he gave an extemporaneous speech, and it was magnificent. Afterwards, a lady who had been sitting in the gallery came down and said to him, “You know, that extemporaneous speech was so great, I have been thinking about it for hours!”
He looked at her and said, “Thank you, but that extemporaneous speech I have been thinking about for twenty years!”
It had lived with him, and finally, it came through. It had been in him, but finally, it was spoken. It had been in the recesses of him, but now it was revealed.
Paul says that is what love is like, that is what the love of Christ is like: you let this love live within you, and work within you, and grow within you. You will mature in that love. But, there will be an even greater day, when you will see the fullness of that love. Paul concludes with these incredible words: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
Paul knew that faith someday would not be needed. Faith believes in what is unseen. Faith anticipates something that is going to happen. Faith is something that we have, even if evidence does not always confirm it. Faith is our belief. Hope is its product. Hope is what we anticipate. Hope is what we expect. Hope is what we look forward to. But for Paul, faith and hope someday won't be needed again, because we will see God “face-to-face.” The object of our faith and hope will be met in person. There will come a day when we will see the love of God face-to-face.
I know that in our daily lives, when we get up and have our breakfast and we make it for the children and we go to work and we have lunch with friends and we golf in the afternoon and we have dinner in the evening and we watch television and we go to bed, we are often not thinking about some day seeing God face-to-face. But, can you imagine what hope it would give us, what faith it would confirm within us, if we actually lived knowing that love awaits us? I think there will be a day, and Paul did too, when we will see those who we love and are gone face-to-face. There will be time when we will see God face-to-face, and when we know we will have been in his presence face-to-face.
A number of years ago, I saw an incredible icon. The icon was of two great saints of the church, two saints, who in many ways are patron saints of the Slavic people, Cyril and Methodius. These two saints were ninth century Christians who brought the good news to Eastern Europe. These great men introduced the alphabet that is still used in Eastern Europe. They were believers. In this incredible icon, of these two great saints, and they looked like a couple of serious dudes, let me tell you! They have the long beards and the long gowns, and they have the big hats and they have the poles and the mitres, and they look like incredibly strong men. One with the words of the scriptures; one with the alphabet: two great Christians!
Yet, hovering between them, with outstretched arms in the background, is Christ, looking upon them, watching them. I thought, “What an icon for every Christian!” Here we are in this life, living to the best of our ability to love, failing and stumbling and seeing through a glass darkly, but still believing there is a love that endures, a love that never ends, a love that embraces us. It is a love that never ends, not in the past, not right now, not in the future, not even into eternity, for it is the love of God, and it is the greatest of all things! Amen.