Rev. Sarah
Friesen-Carper
February 3,
2013 Fourth Sunday After Epiphany PLC
Jeremiah
1:4-10 and 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
A few weeks ago we celebrated the Baptism of Our Lord with
the story of Jesus’ baptism from the Gospel of Luke. In that sermon I said that
baptism is God’s work that it is as martin Luther said, a visible sign of
invisible grace.
Later that week one of our parishioners said she wanted to
talk with me about my sermon. I have to admit that I still get a little nervous
in my belly when someone says, “Pastor, I want to talk to you about your
sermon.” I think back through the sermon trying to figure out if I misspoke or
said some kind of heresy and will need to be strung up by my thumbs.
So this woman came to my office and said, “Pastor, I want to
talk to you about your sermon.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I think you said in your sermon that baptism is God’s
work.”
“Yes, I did.” (Insert a slight questioning tone in my
voice.)
She went on to say, “So he is with God.”
You see she had lost a child too soon, before he was
baptized and her pastor at the time said, “Well…he wasn’t baptized…” He let her
believe that the child’s eternal soul was in jeopardy because he had never been
baptized. Now, at the risk of insulting one of my colleagues of the cloth, I say, this guy apparently never read the
Bible. Because if he had, he would have read God’s words to Jeremiah, “before I
formed you in the womb I knew you,” and he would have known that God’s love is
stronger even than the senseless death of a child.
In Hebrew the word for love is “Hesed." It gets translated “steadfast love," in English
which carries the notion of unshakeable loyalty, or as one translator puts it,
"the consistent, ever-faithful, relentless, constantly-pursuing, lavish,
extravagant, unrestrained, furious love of God." The idea that the God of
the Universe is loyal to _me_ and chases after me simply for the love of me
just blows me away.[i]
Greek has three words for love: philios which is brotherly love, eros which is romantic love, and agape. The one in 1 Corinthians 13 is agape which has to do with the kind of
love that God has for us and gives to us and that at our best we have and give
to one another. Some of you learned this chapter of 1 Corinthians in the
King James Version of the Bible which translated the Greek word for “love” as
“charity.” It is maybe not quite as accurate or as expansive as the word love,
but it does remind us that despite the common use of this reading at weddings,
St. Paul here is not talking about romantic love. He’s talking about the kind
of love that is active in our faithfulness, our righteousness – in the way we
treat others and God.
We have to read it in context of the rest of the book which
is to a young Christian community in Corinth. The immediate previous chapter
we’ve heard over the last two weeks. It’s the part about the gifts of the
Spirit and the body of Christ. All the gifts are special and important and all
are necessary in the body of Christ. There are many gifts, wisdom, knowledge,
faith, healing, miraculous powers, prophecy, distinguishing between spirits,
speaking in tongues, interpretation of tongues, and all are the manifestation
of the Spirit for the common good. You see the Corinthians didn’t have a lot of
respect for one another. They had drawn up a hierarchy of gifts and judged each
other based on what they could do. So, you can speak in tongues, well that’s
not as good as teaching. You can teach? Well that’s not as good as healing. You
can heal? That’s not as good as having and imparting wisdom. And unfortunately
in Corinth it went further than that too. Because we learn in the 2nd
letter to the Corinthians that they were also judging each other based on
social class, treating the wealthy better than the poor, even as far as having
communion only among the wealthy and not among the poor.
So Paul sets out in this letter to change this community. He
writes about the gifts of the Spirit and then he goes on to say that all the
gifts, all the people are vital to the body of Christ. Regardless of what your
gift is or your social rank or your race or gender or whatever other
classification may be made, you are part of this body and you are important.
Paul could have finished there. It certainly is a beautiful
message. You matter. You are vital. But he had to go on. Chapter 12 ends with,
“I will show you a still more excellent way.” He had still more to teach the
Corinthian church about life in the body of Christ. Because even if we
recognize one another’s gifts and honor them within our community, if we do not
have love for one another, if we do not act because of our love of God and for
God’s creation, then whatever we do, no matter how good, it is empty.
Now, most of us love all the time. We love our family, we
love our friends, we love our pets. Love doesn’t seem that hard. Except that
Paul used this darn “agape” word, this love-like-God’s-love. And he says that
when we do not love like God loves then we are noisy, clanging gongs. Our actions
- however important and righteous and knowledgeable - they mean nothing. And
the reason they mean nothing is because we have not truly been transformed by
the love of God.
Throughout Scripture God’s love is changing people and
transforming them. Abraham and Sarah go from being childless nomads to the
father and mother of countless generations bringing light to the nations. Moses
goes from a murderer to the leader of God’s liberation movement. Jeremiah goes
from scared little boy to prophet of the Most High. Mary goes from unwed mother,
punishable by death, to mother of God. And Paul knows the transforming love of
God better than many. He had persecuted the followers of Christ with vehemence.
And now his heart and soul and mind and strength are consumed with the love of
God.
Let me tell you about my Grandpa Carper. He has always been
a man of strong faith -strong black-and-white faith. There are right things and
there are wrong things for him. He was a member of the conservative,
evangelical groups The Navigators and the Gideons. As a doctor he dealt with a
lot of grey and no win situations but his black-and-white faith helped him to manage those difficulties.
He was well known for his bedside manner
and well respected in the community because of it.
But when his second son came out to him, told him he was
gay, well you can imagine that this was not perhaps exactly the kind of plan he
had for any of his 5 children.
And then my uncle and his partner decided to have a baby,
carried by a surrogate. And they ended up with twin baby girls. And my
grandfather quoted Jeremiah 1:5 “before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” He
said, if anyone ever questions whether these babies were meant to be, you tell
them that. His theology, however strong, could not stand up to the love of God
in Christ Jesus and his heart was transformed.
That’s the kind of love we receive from Christ, love that
takes us from a place of clanging to a place of loving, love that transforms us
into loving beings, love that converts our good gifts into loving acts and
that’s the kind of love that our Christian community, at its best, is all
about. In the Gathering Hymn today we sang, “Great God your love has called us
here, as we, by love, for love were made.” We are created by God who is love,
for love. God’s love transforms us to be love for one another and for the
world. Amen.
[i]
This is a quote from my friend Keith Fry’s facebook page. I don’t know how to
quote facebook. Certainly someone has thought of this?
[ii]
Morely, Rick http://www.rickmorley.com/archives/2284
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