Epiphany 4

The Fourth Sunday of the New Year

“Growing Up Christian”

I Corinthians 13:1-13

Listen To This Sermon!

First Corinthians 13 - the love chapter - one of the most famous and popular passages in all the Bible…

I have often had the experience of working with a couple preparing for a wedding when I asked the couple if there were any scriptures that are significant to them that could be read during the ceremony.

Blank stares.

But sometimes, after a moment or two of awkward silence, a dim and distant light will flicker behind the eyes of one or the other – usually the bride-to-be – and she will pull up something from her memory and say, “What about that thingy about love?”

Now, after you’ve done a few weddings, you learn how to interpret such phrases as “that thingy about love.” She is talking about First Corinthians 13 - the love chapter - one of the most famous and popular passages in all the Bible. Many of us know it, at least in part. Can you help me recite the beginning and the end?

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of (angels), but have not (love), I am a noisy gong or a clanging (cymbal).

See? You know the beginning. How about the end?

“So faith, hope and love abide, these three, but the (greatest of these is love).”

Awesome! Just about everybody knows that thingy about love.

Trouble is, we really don’t know it as well as we think we do.

Far from being a glowing essay about the beauty, power and preeminence of love, the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the little Christian church in Corinth has another more important purpose. If you grew up thinking this passage is just a description of love, you need to come deeper and see something much more profound. The true message of this chapter, in fact, can be summed up in two words. They are two words that need to be spoken to every church, to every Christian and to every person who professes to be a man or woman of faith – two words that are well-described in a little story involving Carlyle Marney, the brilliant Southern Baptist preacher and church historian of a generation ago.

Marney, the story goes, was strutting across the campus of a certain Baptist seminary, puffing away on his ever-present pipe and trailing a stream of blue smoke behind him. A young man, one of Marney’s students, approached him and, with great righteous indignation said, “Dr. Marney, I want you to know that your smoking offends me!”

Marney stopped walking, removed the pipe from his mouth, exhaled one last stream of blue smoke and said, “Son….GROW UP!”

St. Paul could not have said it better himself! Here’s how the apostle put it in verse 11 of the 13^th chapter of First Corinthians:

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”

That’s the simple message of 1^st Corinthians 13. Paul is saying to the Corinthians the very same thing Carlyle Marney said to the young student. Two simple but very profound words:

“Grow up!”

Why do you suppose Paul would say that?

Well, the Corinthians had become a church much like the Christian Church is today – divided, fractured, disjointed. Scholars tell us that, contrary to popular opinion, the church in Corinth was a little house-church of no more than 50 or 60 people. And yet there were at least seven fights going on in that little church. It was a badly divided church. And they were the same kind of schisms that divide churches today – personality cults, different ideas about how to interpret scripture, diverse opinions about what constitutes morality, strong ideas about worship, organizational power plays, theological differences, whether to serve regular or decaf, what the color of the carpet should be – you know, important things.

Or so they seemed…until the person who had brought them to faith and planted their church wrote this amazing letter in which he tells them in no uncertain terms…to GROW UP!

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”

Some of us say about ourselves that we grew up Christian. What that usually means is that we were raised in Christian families, nurtured in Christian churches, perhaps even made a personal commitment to Christ when we were still very young. Many of us grew up Christian.

But that does not necessarily mean that we have GROWN UP!

And that’s where 1^st Corinthians 13 becomes for us not just an abstract essay about love, but rather a test to see if we are growing up.

The test begins with the question, “Has loving others become the highest priority of your life as a Christian?

Let me ask that again: “Has loving others become the highest priority of your life as a Christian?

When my best boyhood friend Dennis Astrella and I ran as fast as we could down the aisle at the evangelistic rally where we gave our lives to Christ, we did so to save ourselves from burning for all eternity in the fires of hell. And we knew there was a better than even chance of that happening if we didn’t get down there quick. So there we were – 12-year old hoodlums saved by the blood of Jesus – wiping the sweat from our foreheads and tightly gripping the little Gospel of John handouts we were given. And up there by the altar, we were told many, many things about what it would mean to be and live as a Christian.

But not a word was said about the most important thing of all – love.

I wonder if one of the reasons there are so many unloving Christians in the world is because no one ever told us that love is more important than reading your little Gospel of John handout, more important than believing the right doctrines, more important even than going to church on Sunday.

No one ever told us that the most important thing about being a Christian is becoming a person of love. Of the three cornerstones of Christian living - faith, hope and love – Paul tells us the greatest of these – the most important of these – is love.

Religious faith, uncoupled from love, is one of the most destructive forces in the world. You may have read about that church full of folks from out in Kansas who are convinced that the war in Iraq and all the deaths of our young service people is God’s judgment upon the nation for being too tolerant of homosexual persons. So they show up at the funeral services of these young soldiers and their grieving families and they chant their slogans and wave their banners. Can you imagine doing something like that to a mother and father who have just lost a child?

Religion, uncoupled from love, is destructive.

I wept once at a wedding, and not for the reason people usually weep at weddings. It should have been the most beautiful wedding in the world. She was a wonderful young woman and he was a terrific young man. Although they were very young at the time, they worked very hard to prepare themselves for marriage. I had been reluctant to marry them at first because of their age, but as time went on I found in them a maturity beyond their years. So the week of the wedding came. I got a call from the bride’s mother. She and the father would not attend the wedding.

Why? Because they are too young?

No, because he is Catholic.

Many of us here today grew up in that time when kids were sometimes emotionally abandoned by their families because of religious differences. I wept that day as she walked down the aisle and gave herself away to the young man who is still her husband today.

How can parents do such things to their children?

Religion, uncoupled from love, is destructive.

It sends people into public market places to blow up themselves and innocent civilians in the name of God. It ostracizes and marginalizes people who are different and even justifies denying them basic human rights. It causes families and communities and even churches to split apart over simple disagreements. Religion, uncoupled from love, becomes self-righteousness.

And it is destructive.

So Paul tells us to grow up, and that growing up into a faith whose primary characteristic is love is the most important thing of all.

Love is patient and kind. It is not jealous or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way, it is not irritable or resentful. Loves does not keep score of other peoples’ sins, but rejoices in the good. Love bears the burdens of others, believes in others, holds out hope for others, and sticks by them to the end. Love never stops loving.

Nobody ever told me those things that night up by the altar where Dennis and I gave our lives to Christ. We thought it was mostly about getting saved from hell. No one ever told us that to be saved means to be made whole by Jesus and so to be set free to do the highest and most powerful thing a human being can do: to love as Jesus loved.

You see, that’s what draws us to Jesus in the first place. If we are seeking a Messiah who destroys all the infidels, we don’t find it in Jesus. If we are listening for a Prophet who rails against all that’s wrong with the world and with people, we don’t hear it from Jesus. If we are looking for a Savior who treats people like sinners and divides people into camps of saved and unsaved, we don’t see it in Jesus.

The Jesus God gives us is a Jesus who perfectly practices the ministry of love toward friend and foe – saint and sinner – Jew and Gentile – believer and unbeliever.

Jesus is the embodiment of 1^st Corinthians 13.

And so St. Paul points to the love of Jesus, and says:

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”

In other words, “Grow up!”

If you would dare to do it, why not take 1^st Corinthians 13 as your personal guide for living? Study it line-by-line and meditate on how it would apply to your life. Memorize the words. And then take one description of Christian love each day – like “love is patient” – and ask Jesus to help you develop patient love toward someone who just drives you absolutely nuts!!!!

And when people ask you why you are doing such a crazy thing - being patient, and kind, and not envious, etc. - just say to them, I’m practicing that love thingy!

Or, better yet, just say you are growing up Christian!