Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned,[a] but have not love, it profits me nothing. 4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, it is not puffed up. (CEB)
“Seeking God Anew: Faith, Doubt, and
Other Lines I’ve Crossed,” Week Five
The
woman on the waitstaff of a four-star restaurant in New York City—a restaurant
where dinner currently costs $300 per person, and that’s before any alcohol—recounted
one of the most touching encounters she ever had with a patron in her job,
writing:
We remove the chair from position three
on table two to make room for the wheelchair.
A short man, who appears to be in his seventies, wheels a woman of
similar age as close as he can get her to the table. He adjusts her legs, props her up a little,
and places her napkin so that it rests over her (chest) and lap. After making her comfortable, he pulls his
own chair closer to her, away from the window and the view of the park in the
early evening light. When I approach with
menus, I look to him for direction, but she tells me exactly how she wants me
to prop the menu so that she can read it.
“Rabbit!” she exclaims when she spots
the chef’s tasting menu. “I love rabbit!”…
She orders her rabbit and he selects
from the five-course menu. They do not
order wine, but (the sommelier) remains in my station anyway. Together we watch as the husband carefully
feeds her the entire tasting menu.
“Now that is how you love someone,” (the
sommelier) says quietly.
That
is how you love someone, indeed. For, as
Paul says, love is patient. Love is
patient even when you have become the 24/7 caretaker of the love of your life. But love—and life—are about far more than
simply being patient. After all,
patience is one of those abstract, unseen things I cannot point to. I can point to a towel rack and say, “that is
a towel rack.” But when it comes to
patience, and to love, the best I can often do is to point to someone
practicing it and hope others will as well.
But if enough of us do practice it, then, in the end, it will do. It will surely do.
This
is a new(ish) sermon series revolving around a new book, by a fairly new(ish)
pastor, with a very un-new name: Jay Bakker, the son of the (in?)famous
televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, first pinged my radar when he came to
speak at my seminary’s annual Earl Lectures series in 2010. I have followed bits and pieces of his work
ever since, and after beginning the Revolution church movement in Phoenix, he
has gone on to plant Revolution churches in Atlanta and New York City, and he
is now planting a church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the meanwhile, he has also taken to
writing, and his latest book, entitled, “Faith, Doubt, and Other Lines I’ve
Crossed” spoke strongly enough for me make a sermon series! The chapter I am borrowing from this week is
called “Hoping in the Unseen.” Jay writes
in it (in part):
So many in the church are dealing with
grief. It shakes our faith, causing us
to doubt, and yet we can’t talk to anyone who responds well to our doubt. So we put it off or hide it. As Christians, we fall back on clichés to
help ourselves forget our real emotions, or we go to therapists or take time
off to deal with things expecting everything to work out in time.
But we need to be there for one
another. We need to allow doubt to be
spoken to each other on a regular basis so when we go through tragedy or grief,
we aren’t caught unaware or uncomfortable with the mourning process. We need to give people permission to embrace
death, tragedy, the meaninglessness of life.
The grieving person needs grace, and not
just the first time, but over and over again.
I’ve heard people say someone is “an emotional train wreck,” or “needy”
or “clingy.” These aren’t words that
love uses. Love doesn’t expect a
solution. Love doesn’t need someone to “get
better” to validate their patience and empathy.
Love comes back again and again.
We need to embrace others’ brokenness
because before too long, we’ll discover our own.
Now,
I’ll be honest—midway through this excerpt, I was thinking that something from
Ecclesiastes would be quite appropriate for today—after all, it’s hardly a hop,
skip, and a jump away from “the meaninglessness of life” to “vanity, vanity,
all is vanity!” And for a crank like me,
Ecclesiastes is a text to treasure, one that demonstrates you can embrace your
inner Eeyore while still loving and serving God.
But
then the pivot happens, as it so often does with writers who know how to make a
point: grieving people don’t need clichés, they need grace. And that word gets turned, sort of, over the
course of what Jay is saying here, from grace into love. Now, to be sure, there is great overlap
between the two, but one really cannot offer.
Grace comes from God, and God alone.
But
love? That we can offer. And Paul tells us how in one of his most
famous passages.
Now,
I know all of the baggage and preconceptions that a Bible passage can come with
by dint of its own fame and renown: we normally associate this passage with
weddings, where some pastor dresses up in a suit that he otherwise rarely ever
wears (that’s me) reads this passage to two nervously smiling—but simply
glowing—people gazing at each other with Bambi-esque big-eyed expressions of
pure, unadulterated love.
I
mean, that’s the one thing we all associate with this passage, right? Love is patient, love is kind…well, someone must
be getting married!
There
are two things, though, about our preconceptions about this passage, and both
of them we can chalk up to this, like all the books of the Bible, being a text
in translation.
First,
the Greek word Paul uses for “love” is, in fact, caritas, from which we get our English word—you guessed it—“charity.” So really, Paul isn’t even talking about
romantic love here—for one, he would have used the Greek eros (guess which English word we get from it…see, isn’t this fun?),
and secondly, Paul is so down on marriage I doubt he would have commended it to
anyone. Heck, six chapters earlier in 1
Corinthians, when addressing married couples specifically, he says that it is
preferable for people to remain unattached like he is. So yeah.
But
the second thing about this passage comes from the word “patient.” Except that too probably isn’t the most
accurate English translation of the word.
As the great Disciples preacher Granville Walker pointed out, the Greek
Paul is using is a series of verbs, not adjectives, and so rather than saying “Love
is patient,” Paul is really saying something along the lines of, “Love
practices patience.” Or, as the KJV and
CEB versions both translate it, “Love suffers long.”
(I
can already imagine some of you thinking, “See, pastor! Paul WAS talking about marriage!”)
But
no. Love practices patience. Love practices patience no matter how much
suffering it experiences. Love suffers
long precisely because love is willing to practice patience despite it.
Love
is willing to suffer alongside a disabled spouse, to care for them, to treat
them reverently.
Love
is willing to suffer alongside a fallen friend struggling in the throes of
addiction or abuse.
Love
is willing to suffer alongside a desperate family member who has nobody else to
turn to.
Ultimately,
love is willing to suffer, no matter the circumstances, no matter the cost.
Love,
then, is the opposite of our favorite clichés—and believe me, Christianity is
full of them. “He’s in a better place.” “It’s part of God’s plan.” “God wanted them in heaven.” Cliches are short, ineffective, and designed
to shut down any attempt at a meaningful conversation. They’re basically Hallmark cards minus the
envelope. They aren’t meant to convey
any great meaning or depth of feeling, they’re meant as a token, so that
someone knows you are at least nominally still invested in their wellbeing.
But
they’re not what patience would do. They’re
not how patience would practice.
Paul—nor
Jesus, for that matter—refused to teach in clichés. He threw himself headlong into his work and
his ministry, so emotionally attaching himself to his communities that you can
see it so vividly in his letters today: he exhibits such depths of emotion, of
joy and happiness and of sadness and disappointment that you would think he
were saying those words in their presence, not writing those words from afar or
even from prison.
And
so Paul, for all of his human faults—and he’ll be the first to admit he has
them—is willing to act with patience for the church. He is willing to suffer long, even if no
solution is imminent.
And
Jesus, at every turn in His ministry, showed that he willing to—and did—suffer long
for us, even when there was—and is—no possible way that we can completely validate
ourselves, or the love that is shown to us by Him. Jesus loves us precisely because through His
love, He was willing to show patience.
He was willing to suffer long. He
was willing to hope in the unseen, abstract thing that we cannot always point to, cannot always register with our senses, but that we register with our hearts and our minds and our souls instead...this thing we call love, that it
would be enough to save us. And it
is. It really, truly is.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
October
6, 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment