Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

First Corinthians 13:1-13

January 28, 2007

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. 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. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

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Let me begin with a story I found on the internet. In 1977 David Kuzminski was walking down a path in the Georgia woods when looking ahead he saw a puddle of water. He did what most of us would do. He started to walk around it, but as he did he was suddenly attacked. Stunned by surprise he was unable to do anything. The attacker struck three, four, five times. Yet David was unhurt. He backed up, the attack stopped, and then David burst out laughing. His attacker was a butterfly!

When he stopped laughing, he took a step forward. The butterfly rushed him again. It rammed David in the chest with his head and body, striking him over and over again with all his might. For a second time, David retreated a step and for a second time the attack stopped. Again, David tried moving forward and again the attacker charged. He wasn't sure what to do, other than to step back a third time. After all, he thought, it's just not everyday that one is attacked by a butterfly.

This time, though, David stepped back several paces to look the situation over. His attacker flew back as well and landed on the ground next to the puddle, right beside another butterfly. Suddenly David understood. His attacker had a mate and she was dying. She was beside the puddle right where David had been planning to walk. Now David knew what the butterfly was fighting for, and even though there were only a few inches of path on the other side of the puddle, David carefully made his way around, leaving the two butterflies undisturbed, and continued on to his car.

Isn't that a great story? I know from all my college Psych training that we're not supposed to assume that animals have feelings the way people do, but how do you not read love and devotion into that story? Maybe it's all just genetic programming. There's no way we're ever going to get inside a butterfly's head, but even if they don't have the capacity to feel love, clearly they are able to behave in what appears to be a loving manner. And isn't that what's important anyway, for butterflies maybe, but certainly for people.

When Paul wrote his great passage on love, it was clearly behavior that he was concerned about. The entire letter to the Corinthians, leading up to the thirteenth chapter, is filled with Paul's concerns and warnings. It had come to his attention that there were arguments and divisions in the church, some were abusing the Lord's Supper, there was sexual immorality, lawsuits among believers. All in all, there seems to have been a pretty wild party going on. Paul was at great pains to make it clear that some of the ways they were behaving were not in keeping with the Spirit of Christ. In chapter twelve he talks about the various spiritual gifts, saying that though not everyone has the same gifts they all have a contribution to make to the health of the whole body. Then, having reached the high point of his argument, he says, in effect, that one gift is above all the others and that is what everyone should strive for. "I will show you a still more excellent way," he says. And that is when he begins talking about love.

Love is patient and kind, not jealous or boastful or rude. It lives in hope and endurance. It is everlasting. It rejoices in the truth. Without love the best of what we have to say is only crashing noise. Without love all our wisdom is worthless. Without love, nothing we ever have or ever will accomplish amounts to a hill of beans. What an incredibly beautiful vision. Love truly is, "the greatest of these." I'd invite you to notice though, that in all of Paul's celebration of love, just as in the rest of his letter, the focus is on behavior, not feelings.

We seem to constantly get our notions of love all tangled up in our feelings. Pam and I were watching a movie the other night called "The Last Kiss." The film follows the lives of several couples who are all struggling with relationship issues. Hardly anyone seems to be getting on very well except one young man and woman, who have been living together for three years. At first they seem to have the most successful relationship going. But, the woman has just gotten pregnant and the man has just started getting cold feet. He imagines his whole life passing before his eyes. He sees himself settling in to all the traditional roles of marriage, family and career and it seems to him that the door of a great cage is closing. So he takes advantage of an opportunity that presents itself. He has an affair, which causes his whole life to begin unraveling. Eventually, he realizes that by not being willing to commit his whole heart to his true love, he has risked losing her forever.

At one point, this young man is shown confessing his infidelity to his would be father-in-law, the man whose daughter he has so recently stepped out on. He keeps insisting that the affair is over, that it will never happen again and that he is truly in love with this man's daughter. "I realize now I love her more than I will ever love anyone else," he says. The response he gets is absolutely perfect. The father shoots back at him, "Stop talking about love. Every [jerk] in the world says he loves somebody. It means nothing. What you feel only matters to you. It's what you do to the people you say you love. That's what matters. It's the only thing that counts"

Wow. What you feel only matters to you. You know, at first blush we might want to take issue with that. We've all been taught that the feelings of others ought to be of some concern to us. And doesn't that mean that our feelings ought to be of concern to others? I don't think we want to go around telling people that their feelings aren't important. But I don't think that's the point here. The truth is, what we feel inside ourselves is mostly invisible to everyone but ourselves. We might communicate that we are happy or sad or angry, but we can't make anyone else feel the feeling we're having. When it comes to love, we can say I love you until the cows come home, but unless those words are backed up by actions, the love inside us will never be more than a feeling. And feelings are about as changeable as the weather.

There's a song by Sting that Pam and I get to laughing about sometimes. It's his take on the old saw that it's a woman's right to change her mind. I just love these lyrics:

With her smile as sweet as a warm wind in summer

She's got me flyin' like a bird in a bright June sky.

And then just when she thinks that I've got her number

Brings me down to the ground with her wintry eye.

That's my baby. She can be all four seasons in one day.

I'll probably catch it for using that in a sermon, especially with Pam sitting right here. My point though, is not to throw a stereotype at anyone, but just to say that it is in the nature of feelings to be changeable, for men and women both. And because feelings are so changeable, it just isn't really a good idea for us to build the most important commitments of our lives on their insecure foundation. I don't care who you are or how much you might think you've found the one great love of your life, your feelings are going to change, because that is the nature of feelings.

And what is true of our romantic relationships is no less true of every other connection we have. Paul and Jesus both call upon us to make love the center of our lives and the foundation of all our relationships. How could we possibly miss that the love they were talking about was exactly that same love that they both demonstrated in their own lives, a love that moved both of them into compassionate ministry and ended in their own self-sacrifice for the sake of others. I'm sure they both had feelings along the way, and some of those feelings may have inspired them to do some of the things they did. But if their feelings weren't backed up by a commitment to act in loving ways, whether or not they felt like it, we surely wouldn't be here today in a church that lives to honor their memory and continue their ministry.

We all know that Jesus said we should love our neighbors as ourselves. In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis talked about that. He said, "Do not waste your time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor. Act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we [discover] one of [life's] great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less." That's the way it works. As often as not, the feelings of love actually follow the actions, rather than the other way around.

As much as our culture may beg to differ, and it does frequently beg to differ, the truth is that love is not primarily about feelings. It is about what we do to the people we say we love, it is about a commitment to doing the right thing regardless of how we may feel. It's about taking our feelings and turning them into action. Like the little boy whose father was trying to read the paper. The boy kept interrupting him. He would lean against his knees and say, "Daddy, I love you." The father would give him a pat and say rather absently, "Yes, Son, I love you too," and he would kind of give him a little push away so he could keep on reading. But this didn't satisfy the boy, and finally he ran to his father, jumped up on his lap, threw his arms around him and said, "I love you, Daddy, and I've just got to DO something about it!"

Exactly right, we've got to do something about it. That is the meaning of the old UCC bumper sticker, "To believe is to care. To care is to do." The same sentiment was expressed by a man named Gene Barron, who said, "The world will not care what we know until they know that we care." Paul really hit the nail on the head. Faith, hope and love he said. Make sure that you do all in your power to abide in these three things. But never forget that love is the greatest of these.

Amen.