As I pondered the lectionary passages (you can find them all here: Vanderbilt Divinity RCL) for this coming Sunday, I found myself moved by the irrefutable claim present throughout all of them that God has set forth for each of us a calling. From the calling of Jeremiah, to the assertion of Psalm 71 that God has walked with us from birth, to Jesus proclamation that God’s call is often to go outside our box to proclaim the Gospel. But the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Corinthians lays out the true unmistakable mark of what it means to be called by God, love.
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
13:1 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.
13:2 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.
13:3 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.
13:4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant
13:5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
13:6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
13:7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
13:8 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.
13:9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part;
13:10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.
13:11 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.
13:12 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.
13:13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
(NRSV)
The love described in 1 Corinthians 13 is a love we experience as we submit our lives to God’s grasp. There is no love, be it of a parent, significant other, or a child that is as all consuming as God’s love. It is the source of our life itself and is the means by which we are actually able to be patient and kind, to bear all the things that life throws at us, and to not give into our never ending selfish ways and desires.
In our world today, there is much questioning about life, its purpose, and how one should live it. In our nation, much of our political rhetoric is centered around the rights of the individual and we tend to support policies that will best suit us. Paul is dealing with this same issue in the church in Corinth, as those of us who proclaim to follow Christ must do in our own world today. We live in a world where individual liberty has become idolized to the point that it is wreaking havoc among our nation not to mention the world.
I believe very much in the principle of freedom and individual liberty. I am thankful to live in a nation founded upon such freedom giving documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But what we have forgotten it seems, in light of debate on how we best live within those freedoms, is the freedom we are given in God, the freedom to love. As Christians, not only are we given the freedom to love, it is our very calling. But yet somehow we have allowed our public discourse to become nothing more than a world full of clanging cymbals and noisy gongs.
Paul's words remind us then that some things more important than being right, powerful, or on the winning side. In public discourse, Christians are often portrayed as merely desiring to be right. Many Christians when it comes to their point of view on their pet issues will often rail so hard in support of them that they forget that whatever we say or do that is not in a spirit of love is simply noise. So then all of our talk, knowledge, religious acts, and sacrifices wind up equating to zero, zilch, nothing! When we believe that we gained everything by standing on our own principles, bullying others, or by being on the “right” side of things, we have truly lost everything, most importantly our faith.
The love that Paul speaks of, the love that defines our purpose and calling as Christians is a love that seeks not its own good, but the good of the ones we are called to love. And in short, if we affirm Christ, then we are called to love everybody. No if’s, ands, or buts. That includes people who think differently, live differently, believe differently, look differently, speak differently, and so on and so forth differently than us.
So in the future, as you wrestle with what it means to live your life in freedom, remember that if in your pursuit of your desires you have not love, then you have nothing at all.
