Sermon "Chosen To Love and Be Loved"
Rev. Lonnie Richardson
Sunday, February 1, 1998
I Corinthians 13:1-13
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Bible Study
Chosen To Love and Be Loved
I Corinthians 13:1-13
Recently I read of a love letter that one young lady wrote to her former fiancee: Dear Jimmy--No words could ever express the great unhappiness I've felt since breaking our engagement. Please say you'll take me back. No one could ever take your place in my heart, so please forgive me. I love you, I love you, I love you! Yours forever, Marie. P.S. And congratulations on winning the state lottery.
We are looking at one of the most beautiful chapters in the New Testament, First Corinthians 13. This chapter is justly famous, not only for its majestic language, but for the lofty idealism of its subject matter and the very practical behavior it describes.
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all that I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. {1 Cor 13:1-3 RSV}
Beautiful words, and their truth is undeniable. Indeed who has not recognized the power of love... Love is superior to knowledge, it is more fruitful than understanding all mysteries, it is above all prophecy and more powerful than the faith that can move mountains. Love makes all the difference.
I would like you to think about your telephone. For some, the ringing of the telephone can be a major annoyance like when a telemarketer calls to solicit a home improvement at meal time. I have a friend who looks forward when he gets a day or two off in a row. However, even when he is home he is on call. During those days whenever the phone rings his first instinct is to leave the house in case it is a call for him to come in for an emergency.
To him, on these days that are supposed to be days of rest, the sound of the phone is best described by Paul's words, it is a like a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. But to his daughter and to his teenage son, the sound of the phone is the sweetest sound on earth. Both of them can't wait for the phone to ring. They can't wait because it might be that special someone who is calling, that special person whom they spend at least three hours a day talking to on the phone. For my friend's children the sound of the phone is not something horrible that threatens their peace of mind. For them it is an angelic sound with an angelic message, a message of love.
The love of God is like that kind of call. It is a love that transforms. We sing about it. We write stories about it. We talk about it. We think about it. And we pray about it. The most common prayers in churches and synagogues and mosques and temples around the world are prayers about love. We ask God to help us to love each other, We ask God to show us love, We thank God for the love that we have found, and we urge God to bring about love between nations and peoples.
That is our prayer, no matter what our faith, yet - when love actually does descend upon us, or upon our neighbors, we are often astonished by it, and often we try to turn that love aside, to reject it and all its possibilities. It is in today's gospel reading, when the people of Nazareth become angry with Jesus, when he tells them how God loved the widow of Zarephath and cured the leper Naaman - people who were outsiders and strangers to the worship of the Lord.
Then again - perhaps you have lived through another kind of experience concerning love. one that has frustrated you and made you feel sad for someone else. I am thinking of the experience of encountering a person whom you recognize as good and beautiful and kind, and yet who is alone and afraid and sad.
You see in him or her a person who needs love. A person who indeed wants more than anything to be loved, and yet that person refuses to accept your love, or the love of anyone else. For some reason he or she doesn't think that he is lovable, or that she deserves love. and so she turns away all your gestures of care, shutting out the very thing needed most.
Perhaps, that person is you. You want love. You need love. But you cannot accept it because you don't think you deserve it.
It's like the story of Jeremiah from today's reading. We see a young man being addressed by God. God tells Jeremiah that he loves him, and that he has known him since the time before he was formed in his mother's womb. We learn that God not only has loved Jeremiah all this time, but that he wants, and has always wanted, Jeremiah to be his prophet. To be a man who speaks to the nations in his name, a man who by speaking the words God gives him, will build and plant that which is good.
God offers to Jeremiah the chance to do important work, the chance to be one of his chosen instruments, to bring good things to pass. What happens? Jeremiah tells God that he is not ready for this favor, that he is young, and that he doesn't know how to speak well enough.
In other words, Jeremiah tells the Lord that He is wrong to chose him, wrong to call him, wrong to show him his favor in this way. Jeremiah, a man whom the scriptures show deeply yearned for God's healing presence in his life, tried to reject the single most important thing God was going to do with him, and for him, and through him.
Maybe Jeremiah sought to avoid the call of God for other reasons than those he gave - perhaps Jeremiah didn't want to respond to God because he was simply too busy to do so, or perhaps it was because Jeremiah thought that the job he was being called to was too dangerous and unlikely to make a difference to anyone.
Whatever the reasons Jeremiah had for trying to turn down the job that God had specially chosen him for, his resistance to that choice of God is similar to the resistance that many of us have to being loved whether it be by God, or by the people around us.
The message of the Bible is that God sees who we really are; he sees us as he saw Jeremiah in his mother's womb; and he finds us to be precious and important and able.
And where we are not able God will make us able. It begins by accepting his love, and that love will do the rest. Think about the phone - its noise transformed by love in the ears of those who listen that way. Think of how you have changed and grown because you have felt the love of someone. God loves us and transforms us and makes us ever more beautiful than we already are.
The noise in your life, the thoughts and feelings that distract you and make you feel so alone and afraid, can be transformed by the power of the love of God into songs of joy and praise to God. But you have to let that love in, you have to accept the fact that for some reason you are lovable, that for some reason God, has chosen you as he chose Jeremiah and Sarah, and Moses to be his child, his fellow worker, his brother or sister. When that happens you will become even more lovable than you already are.
We have a choice - to love and be loved, without condition or qualification, knowing it is right to do so, or to be loveless - loveless all because we feel that we, and that others do not deserve it and have not earned it.
It's like the wise physician who once said, "I have been practicing medicine for thirty years, and I have prescribed many things. But in the long run, I have learned that for most of what ails the human creature, the best medicine is patient understanding of anther's problems." When someone asked him, "What if it doesn't work?" he replied, "Double the dose."
God wants us to be something - to love and be loved. May God help us to hold this clearly in our minds and remember, ... the greatest of these is love.
Prayer
Lord, we feel so incapable of manifesting this quality of life, and yet the sacred Scriptures assures us that is what was intended. We have it supplied to us in unending quantity as we choose to use it. Help us to make that our goal. Beginning the rest of today, and all of next week, and for the rest of our lives, we will "owe no one anything, but to love one another." In His name, Amen.
