Summer Of Love: Love Is Not Jealous Series

Fifty years ago this summer I was a 7 year old living in Germany. So I didn’t make it to the summer of love. But others were there.

George Harrison was there, as were The Who, Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia.

They had joined the so called hippies and flower children who had descended on San Francisco to celebrate, demonstrate and as Timothy Leary so famously said to “Turn on, Tune In and Drop Out.”

And this year there will be celebrations recognizing what happened that summer.

But that wasn’t all that happened in the United States 50 years ago. As the City of San Francisco was trying to deal with the logistics of feeding and sheltering 100,000 teens and young adults the rest of the country was dealing with something of a much darker nature.

There will be no celebrations to remember was has been called the “Long Hot Summer of 1967.

In the summer of 67, 159 Race riots broke out in Detroit and Tampa and all places in between. Before the summer was over 76 people would have died more than 2,100 were injured and over 11,000 arrests were made.

The images of that event were very different than what was happening on the West Coast and there will be no celebrations to recognize the “Long Hot Summer of 1967”

This Summer at Cornerstone we are celebrating a different “Summer of love” as we spend ten weeks focused on 1 Corinthians 13.

This is week 3 of our series and as we’ve done the past two weeks, this week we are going to read the Passage together.

1 Corinthians 13:1-13 If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless. When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

Last week we looked at the first two positive attributes of Love, Patience and Kindness. And we talked about how we need to be patient with Ourselves, with Others and With God. And then we looked at how we needed to be kind to others, that one was kind of a no-brainer.

This week we are going to take the next step in verse four where we are told that Love is not Jealous.

So let’s begin with The Definition of Jealous.

When we think of the word “Jealous” we think of being jealous of someone or something.

That is, we are afraid they are sharing their affections, or sharing more than just their affections, with another person or thing. We can be jealous of people, of things, I’ve heard wives say, “I’m sure he loves that motorcycle, car, boat, fill in the blank more than he loves me”. And people can be jealous of activities. Like work or hobbies, and sometimes with good reasons.

Which lines up with what Robert A. Heinlein wrote “Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.”

And when we think of love in the sense of romantic love that makes sense, Love is not Jealous.

However. . . How many folks here have ever seen the movie “The Princess Bride”? How many have seen it more than once? Yeah, it’s that type of movie.