February 2, 2025
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30
Love: Our Beginning and End
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
We’ve heard today that remarkable passage from First Corinthians 13: Paul’s hymn to love. This passage is frequently used at weddings. And it’s very appropriate for weddings, as love is in the air.
It’s a feel-good passage, one we tend to sentimentalize. But the original context of these words and Paul’s intent are far from warm and fuzzy. Corinth was a faith community divided. Some individuals were puffed up by their gifts and abilities. Other people were left feeling inferior.
In the passage just prior to this, Paul addressed the need for unity within the faith community. Together they’re like a body with many parts. The body is an integrated whole, and each member does what it was made to do.
Paul is stating that all gifts of the Holy Spirit come wrapped in the essence of the Holy Spirit, which is love. The Holy Spirit is God, and God is love. So, therefore, all gifts of the Spirit are derived from this divine love.
Greek has many different words for love. There’s eros, which is physical love; there’s philia, which is brotherly love. But the word Paul uses throughout this passage is agape. This is selfless love, the kind of love that places the welfare of the beloved before your own. This is the essence of God’s love. God’s love is directed outward. It’s fierce and unshaking in nature towards the focus of its love. And we are the fortunate objects of that love!
The faith community of Corinth had been richly blessed with gifts of the Holy Spirit. But these gifts became corrupted by human frailty. They may have the talents, but they’ve become severed from the base of agape love.
What was left, then, was something far removed from the original gift. Paul begins with the gift of language. “If I speak in the tongues of angels, but don’t have love, all I am is a noisy gong.” Noise at best! At worst, words can become a knife that gouges and destroys. Elsewhere, Paul directs us to speak the truth in love. Love builds up. It doesn’t destroy.
Sometimes the message of truth is a hard pill to swallow. Jesus came to his hometown in Nazareth. As he preached in their synagogue, he sensed that their focus was inward. They wanted him to do for them all the wonderful things he’d been doing elsewhere. He reminded them just how big God’s love is. It can’t be contained.
I had a professor at seminary who likened God’s love to atomic energy. He said, “We want to contain and control that power for our own benefit. We treat God’s love like a nuclear generator. We stick rods into it to contain and cool it. But what we need to do,” he said, “is to pull all the rods and let the thing blow!”
We like control. We don’t like powers that are greater than we are. And God’s love certainly fits the bill for that! Just let us turn on the tap a little bit, God! We’ll just pour on enough for our little community here and keep the rest in a big old reservoir for future use!
We have a hard time understanding the immensity and limitless magnitude of God’s love. We’d prefer to contain and micromanage it. The church has long done this. We want to be the dispensers of this message of salvation and grace. We want to declare who’s in and who’s out. We dole out forgiveness only when people have adequately demonstrated their contrition. We sprinkle a few drops of grace on our brows because we fear being drowned in the tidal wave of God’s goodness and mercy.
But Jesus wanted his neighbors from Nazareth to know. He wanted them to know the depth and breadth and height of God’s steadfast love. And so he told them how that love encompassed foreigners like the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian.
But they didn’t want to hear it. They wanted a smaller kind of love, one that was meant only for them.
Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”
There’s something deeply offensive about God’s kind of lavish love. We prefer to operate from our base reactions. We prefer to treat others on the basis of merit or lack thereof.
The crowd at Nazareth have rejected a message of divine love. They’ve rejected love and opted for violence. They grab Jesus and haul him to a nearby cliff to hurl him over the brow.
Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a similar propensity to violence and hatred that permeates into us:
“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
This is why Paul states that love endures. Only agape love has the power to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things.
This love comes from God alone. And it’s this very love that became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus is the embodiment and the fulness of divine love. And he came, not to give us what we deserve; no, he came in spite of what we deserve! He came and dwelt among us to bestow the fulness of God’s healing love and redemption and life upon us. In his dying, he revealed that his love bears all the sins of the world. And in his rising to new life, we see clearly that his love truly endures all things.
The Holy Spirit lives and moves within and among us. It comes bearing its gifts, and they are wrapped in the love of the divine. As God’s people, we are growing into this love. We yearn to be shaped into the vessels to bear this love through our words and actions.
Martin Luther wrote about the sanctifying process of love’s power on us:
“This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.”
We are growing in the love of God through Christ Jesus our Lord. As a child doesn’t stay a child, but grows into maturity, so we pray that our capacity to understand and convey God’s love will grow over the course of our lifetime.
The city of Corinth was famous for their fine bronze mirrors. But mirrors then were a far cry from what we know today. They took a disc of metal, such as bronze. And they polished and polished and polished it, making it as shiny as possible. It was an imperfect science. A reflected image was there, for sure, but nothing like seeing face to face.
In this life, friends, we can see and appreciate God’s love like that fuzzy mirror image. We get the gist of it, but we will never see the fullness of that love perfectly in our lifetime. And so the nature of the love we are able to give out will also remain limited. But when we take our final breath and step from this world, then we shall see the fulness of divine love face to face. And we will say, “My God, how great thou art!”
