True Love

True Love

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 14, 2016

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Happy Valentine’s Day. You know of course that in in our culture today we associate Saint Valentine’s Day with romantic love. We give our loved one’s Valentine’s Day cards. Maybe we men give our wives or sweethearts flowers and chocolates or, like I’ve seen on one TV ad, ginormous teddy bears. We buy little candies that say “I love you” or “Be my Valentine.” I don’t know if they still do it, but when I was in grade school all the kids gave Valentine’s cards to every other kid. On TV we get inundated with ads that want us men to think that if we don’t buy our wives or girlfriends diamonds we can’t possibly love them, never mind that I can’t afford diamonds and my doesn’t even like them. It gets to be a bit much, for me at least.

It gets to be a bit much, but I think the way we treat Valentine’s Day raises an important question: Just what does the word love mean? Or to put it another way, what is true love? In the movie High Society with Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly the True Love is a sailboat, but of course I don’t want to answer my question about true love by saying it’s a sailboat. It’s a whole lot more important than that, as much as I do love boats. No, love isn’t a boat; it’s one of the central concepts of the Christian faith. The New Testament even says “God is love.” 1 John 4:8 We say not only that God is love, we say that God loves us. We say that God loves all of creation and every creature in it. We say that Jesus loved humanity so much that he went to the cross as a sign of God’s love. Now pretty obviously, if we are going to understand all of those claims about God, Jesus, and love we have to know what the word love means. Since the love of God, even the love that God is, must be the truest, most authentic kind of love. To know what true love is we need to know what God’s love is, with the understanding of course that since it’s God’s love we certainly can never understand it fully.

In our ordinary usage love means many things. Often it means nothing more than “like a lot.” “I love your new hairdo,” we say; or as I have said on occasion “I love my new car.” Sometimes love gets reduced to physical relationships. I hope it’s clear to you without my having to explain it that God’s love isn’t any of those things. No, God’s love is much deeper, more powerful, and more authentic than any of those superficial or distorted meanings of love.

Which is all very well and good, but it doesn’t tell us what God’s love really is. Fortunately the Bible tells us what true love is, what the love that is God is. St. Paul does it in the passage we just heard from 1 Corinthians. In the book we’re reading in the 9 am group Thomas Merton says that when he was in school in England a chaplain tried to convince the students that 1 Corinthians 13 means everything that the English elite mean when they call a chap a gentleman. That’s utter nonsense of course. 1 Corinthians 13 means nothing of the sort. I means a whole lot more than that, thanks be to God.

Chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians, which we just heard all of, is Paul’s great ode to love. This meditation on love of Paul’s has a couple of different parts to it, and I think they’re worth looking at rather closely. He starts by saying that anything that might otherwise be a great virtue is worthless is it does not include love. Even if I have faith that can move mountains, he says, but don’t have love, I am nothing. If I give everything I have to the poor but don’t do it out of love, Paul says, it means nothing. Even if I sacrifice my life but don’t do it from love, it’s worthless. For Paul, love is what makes anything moral. It is what makes any act virtuous. Any act done without it is neither moral nor virtuous.

OK, but while that may tell us something of the value of love, it doesn’t tell us what that love is. So Paul has some really powerful things to say about that next. Love is patient and kind. It envies nothing. It doesn’t boast, it is not proud. It is not self-seeking. Love is not easily angered and doesn’t hold a grudge. It is glad of truth not falsehood. It protects, trusts, hopes, perseveres, and never fails. Quite a list isn’t it? Pretty clearly it is, but what does it all mean? How are we to understand this love for our own lives? Is there something about it that holds all those things Paul says about it together? I think that there is, so let me take a shot at explaining what I think that thing is.

I think that the most central characteristic of true love, the kind of love Paul is talking about and the kind of love God is, is that it is about the other not the self. It bears with the other, being patient and kind, not demanding and rude. True love always seeks the good of the loved one above the good of the lover. Love sticks it out when it would be easier to quit. Love speaks the truth, always in love of course, as scripture also calls us to do. Love doesn’t insist on its own way, but always considers the other in every calculation.

Now notice one thing that Paul doesn’t say about love. He never says it’s about following rules. He never says that there are fixed boundaries around what is love and what isn’t, around what is acceptable love and what isn’t. Paul’s criteria for proper love are instead flexible and fluid. The question is love is one of intention and care, not one of conformity. The questions around the relationship between any people are not who are they, the questions are rather about patience, kindness, caring for the other more than the self, and whether the people in question are being truthful about their feelings and attitudes in the relationship. That is the kind of love that God is. God cares about creation not Godself. God cares about us not about Godself. God is patient in God’s relationship with us. God is not proud of being so infinitely superior to us but trusts us and perseveres in endless love for us. 

1 Corinthians 13 isn’t in the lectionary readings for today, the first Sunday of Lent. Luke’s version of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness is. Because I wanted you to get all of 1 Corinthians 13 I didn’t have any of that read in our service, but I see a close connection between Jesus’ relationship to miracles and his personal power on the one hand and what Paul says about love on the other. In his temptations in the wilderness Jesus could have used his divine powers for his own good. In that story Jesus is really hungry because he’s been out in the desert alone for forty days. The devil tempts him to turn stones into bread so that he would have something to eat. Jesus declines. He won’t use his divine nature to benefit himself. But later in his ministry he does all sorts of miracles. He gives sight to the blind. He makes the disabled walk. He calms a storm that is threatening his friends. He feeds thousands of hungry people with a tiny bit of food. Jesus loves other people more than he loves himself. He is God Incarnate, but he isn’t proud. He doesn’t boast. He doesn’t dictate to people. Rather, he heals, cares, lifts up, and helps the people he meets. He uses his divine powers for them, not for himself.

That’s how it is with true love. True love looks always to the welfare of the other; and it is in the welfare of the other that a true lover finds her or his own welfare. It is in the wholeness of the other that the true lover finds his or her own wholeness. That, I think, is what Paul is telling us. That, I believe, is what Jesus showed us. That, I trust, is how God loves. Not to meet any needs of God’s, for surely God has no real needs other perhaps than to love. Other perhaps than to give expression to God’s nature as love. No, God loves to meet our needs not God’s own, and that’s the love to which God call us. To care more for others than for ourselves. And it’s not that we lose anything when we do that, for Paul and Jesus both tell us that it is in furthering the wholeness of the other that we find our own wholeness. It is in truly loving that we find true love, and I don’t mean a sailboat.

So let’s celebrate love today; but as we do, let’s try to understand what true love is. It isn’t a warm, fuzzy feeling, although warm fuzzy feelings can be a wonderful part of it. It doesn’t come from any selfish desire to have our own needs met, although in true love our own needs are met. It isn’t there to build us up, although true love does lift us up. It isn’t there primarily to make us feel good about ourselves, although when we achieve true love (or as close to it as we can ever get) we do feel good about ourselves. None of us will ever love perfectly. Only God and Jesus do that. Still, Paul isn’t talking to God and Jesus in 1 Corinthians 13. He’s talking to us. He’s giving us an ideal, an ideal for our personal relationships and for our life together in community. He’s giving us a challenge. He’s calling us to our better selves. Today may we hear him and listen well. True love is what makes life worth living. Thanks be to God. Amen.