January 28, 2007

The Fourth Sunday of Epiphany

All 168 Hours

Jeremiah 1:4-10; 1 Corinthians 13

The Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.

  

As one of his church’s involved members, possibly serving in its leadership, the young man dutifully listened last Sunday to my presentation about Natural Church Development.  Then he sat and filled out a survey about his experience of that church and its ministry.  The results of the survey of these 30 members will be reported in a profile of the church’s eight “quality characteristics,” identifying one of these characteristics for special attention in the coming year.  When he had completed his own questionnaire, he approached me, as “coach” for the church, with his concern.

 

“I don’t want our church to change,” he began.  “This church is just the way I like it.  I enjoy it when I come here, but I’ve not been asked to take my faith with me for the rest of the week.  I come here for an hour or two a week, then I go back to the rest of my life and I don’t mention the church to anyone.  I am comfortable that my church and my work occupy different compartments.  They don’t mix, and I want it to stay that way.”

 

I listened to his concern without argument, but his words have haunted me ever since. His fear of change is understandable; he correctly understands that behind this process begun by his church is an assumption that will indeed challenge his own assumption of the church’s life and purpose.  He believes that there is a separation, not merely of church and state, but between faith and the rest of life.  His understanding may be better framed as a question:  “Should what we do in church for an hour or so in Sunday worship make any difference in what we do with the other one hundred sixty-seven hours of our week?”  Or, more pointedly, “Is there a connection between our weekly worship and the rest of our lives?  Do faith and life mix?”

 

Even as a child, I remember pondering that question, though at the time I couldn’t have thought of it in just those terms.  Rather, there were the circumstances of our life together.  I lived in a small town – the census said that the population was 300 – and, for better or worse everyone knew each another well.  All knew, for example, that seated only two rows apart in our church on Sunday were the patriarchs of the town’s two wealthiest and most powerful families.  One family owned the cotton gin on the north side of the railroad tracks, the other owned the gin on the south side.  Neither the town’s small size nor their experience of shared worship tempered their competitive hostilities Monday through Saturday.  Occasionally their power struggles played out in church politics that were obvious even to children.

 

 Such struggles are not new in the church.  The conflicts of ownership and leadership are common to church life regardless of size or geography, and ecclesiastical disputes run through its history.  In fact, had my own little church paid more attention to the scriptures in those days, we might have applied Paul’s advice to the church in Corinth to our own church’s situation, not to mention the changes in our nation’s understanding of how Christian values should inform questions of racial justice in the 1950’s and ‘60’s. Just to mention those times gives renewed urgency to the question haunting me this week:  “Do faith and life mix?”

 

So let us, today, listen again as St. Paul gives advice to the church at Corinth.  Behind these two Corinthian letters, one can glimpse struggles in the early church not unlike our own.  The situation in Corinth was complex, but as background, suffice it to say that disagreements, jealousies, criticism, hurt feelings, and general mistrust marked the life of that community. 

 

When they gathered for their common meal, those who had food and wine in abundance sat across the room from those who had little, and they didn’t share.  Several factions claimed to be the true followers of Christ, spiritual leaders because of their superior gift of speaking in tongues, or their gift of prophecy, of knowledge, of generosity, even the gift of faith itself.  Any advantage was leveraged against every opposing faction.  Their church life and their resultant relationships were, in a word, a shambles.

 

In response, Paul took no faction’s side, but reminded them all of the love of Christ for all.  Then he called them to love one another, as Christ had loved each.  After affirming each faction’s spiritual gifts, as you heard about last week, and affirming that ALL gifts were needed equally, Paul said, “I will show you a more excellent way,” thus introducing the famous ode to Christian love in what is one of our lessons for today.

 

We’re familiar with this passage because it is so commonly read, and commonly misunderstood, at weddings.  Misunderstood, I contend, because these verses were not first meant for marriage relationships, but the relationships – even the conflictual relationships – in the church.  Though useful advice at weddings, Paul here reminds the church of how to BE the church:  “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:1-2)  No gifts are important, Paul says, not even the gift of faith itself, without the gift of love.

 

Of course, love is first a gift from God to us.  Our faith is in Christ, whose manifest presence in our lives is God’s expression of love for a rebellious, rejecting world.  Our faith in Christ is a journey begun in baptism, a sacrament of God’s love for each of us as special children of a love that will not let us go, a sacrament in which God says to each of us, “You are my child, my beloved.”  Our faith is fed by our common meal, a remembrance of Christ’s love for us, even to his death on the cross.  A death for us, for all of us, that marks the length to which God goes to love us into life.  Loved thus, we are called to love each other, and because nothing, including neither our accomplishments nor our sin, separates us from God’s love, we are to love one another as with similar forbearance and forgiveness.

 

We assemble here as a community, week after week, to recall that love in Christ, and to be reconnected by that love:  reconnected to God, and reconnected to each other.  The middle verses of Paul’s great hymn call us to the specifics of love for one another: 

 “Love is patient; love is kind;

            love is not envious

                        or boastful

                                    or arrogant or rude. 

It does not insist on its own way;

            it is not irritable or resentful;

                        it does not rejoice in wrongdoing,

                                    but rejoices in the truth. 

It bears all things,

            believes all things,

                        hopes all things,

                                    endures all things.”  (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)

 Friends, this calling to love one another is neither simple nor easy, but it is profoundly important.  As I’ve gone through this week I’ve pondered Paul’s reminder to the church – his church and our church – that loving each other is the greatest of the Christian gifts.  I’ve also remembered the question from last Sunday’s conversation with my brother in Christ who doubts that his church life and his other life are entwined.  With him I’ve pondered:  Are faith and life connected?  I believe that they are.  Our faith connects to the rest of life in the love of Christ for us, and in our Christ-like calling to love each other. 

 

After all, love is the purpose of the church.  So said no less a theologian than Yale Divinity School’s H. Richard Niebuhr, who said essentially, “The purpose of the church and its ministry is to bring about an increase in love for God and for neighbor.”  Or, as our own church’s mission proclaims:  “Our mission is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.”  To love both God and neighbors requires all 168 hours in a week, not just one hour on a Sunday morning.  

 

 We are here “in church” each week to remember how much God loves us, and to recall at what costs God expresses that love for us.  My own favorite scripture verse also comes from Paul, from his letter to the Romans:  “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”  (Romans 5:8)  That verse implicitly calls us to love as well.  In midlife, poet and preacher Kathleen Norris found her faith in the little church in her grandmother’s hometown in rural South Dakota.  Church, says Norris, has, at its heart, the reminder that the Christian life centers in love:  “Even when I find church boring, I try to hold this in mind as a possibility:  like all other fools who have dragged themselves to church on Sunday morning, including the pastor, I am there because I need to be reminded that love can be at the center of all things, if we will only keep it there.” (The Cloister Walk, 346)

 

That kind of love makes for a vitally growing church.  Perhaps you won’t be surprised that “Loving relationships” is the name given to one of the eight quality characteristics at the center of Natural Church Development.  And “loving,” not “relationships,” is the key word. In a church, we’re bound to have relationships; our task is to keep these relationships “loving.”  Working toward genuinely loving relationships means that we open ourselves to a natural vitality.  In the words of Christian Schwarz a German pastor, and the creator of this process:  “Unfeigned, practical love endows a church with a much greater magnetic power than all the marketing efforts of this world.  At best, marketing the church can be compared to artificial flowers.  They may look deceptively real, but they have no fragrance.  Real love, however, spreads that mysterious scent that few can resist.”  (Christian A. Schwarz, The ABC’s of Natural Church Development, page 17.)

 

At the end of worship, I sometimes offer the benediction, “Go, serve God and your neighbor in all that you do.”  Perhaps that’s just another way of saying, “Go, LOVE God and your neighbor in all that you do.”

 

After all, God loves us.  Loving one another is the least we can do in response.

 

Amen.