The love a thousand schlocky weddings can't kill

a prison sermon

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; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love. - 1Cor 13

My friend Sara once reminded me that the really amazing thing about the whole 1^st Corinthians 13 love is patient, love is kind passage is that even thousands of schlocky wedding and bad Christian coffee mugs can’t kill it.  Paul’s hymn to Love that we just heard is perhaps one of the most recognizable texts in the New Testament.  And it is really beautiful… but of course it has just about nothing to do with romance, for which I am grateful.

I cringe at the notion that it is romantic love that can right all wrongs and make us more beautiful and heal our every wound and help us finally discover our true value - I mean, that might sell commercials on the Hallmark channel, but life isn’t a made for TV movie with a tidy ending. 

I’m not sure why we can be so idealistic about human love when human love is profoundly imperfect and so often unreliable.

The reality of human love is that human love is a show-off. Human love can get its feelings hurt. Human love sulks and broods and whisper mean things. Love can be messy, and desperate, and often go cold. Love eats the perfectly ripe banana you were saving for breakfast and keeps getting those totally avoidable parking tickets. Love morphs and changes and is hard to hold.

All the romantic comedies in the world can’t change the fact that the issue of love is complicated for us because we so often are loved poorly, loved incompletely, loved conditionally.  The subject of human love is a tricky one because we ourselves so often love poorly, incompletely and conditionally.  And, forgive the pop psychology, but my theory is that when we are loved poorly we begin, on some level, to assume that we are maybe undeserving of being loved well.

This is what we do with that pain.

I was thinking recently about the things I’ve done in my life to try and make myself more lovable.  I lost weight, I tried to not use big words, I tried laughing even when a joke wasn’t funny.  And once when I was dating my ex-husband…and those of you who know me will get this, once I even went camping.  What I mean is that I tried showing the other person only the parts of myself which I thought were lovable and if there weren’t enough of those parts then I just made some up.  Because I was sure that to know me… is actually not to Love me.  This is what the pain of not being loved well does to us.

But what do we do with that pain?

My friend Richard claims we can know a lot about our spiritual maturity by what we do with pain : Do we transmit our pain or do we transform our pain? Do we spread it or do we revolutionize it?

Because the mirror in which we might see ourselves as God see us gets dimmer and dimmer when the pain of being human is transmitted to us and not transformed.  As our own sin and brokenness begins to be the lens through which we view ourselves and others, the mirror in which we see ourselves as God sees us grows dimmer. And then the pain of not knowing who we really are is transmitted through all the things Paul describes: arrogance, impatience, unkindness, envy, selfishness.  It can be a desperate cycle based on something as simple as the truth my mother once spoke “honey, bullies bully out of their own hurt inside as though they just have to spread it”.   But this is true of so many things when we think about it.  I know that my own hurt is almost always the origin of my poor treatment of others. Because, as we all know, hurt people hurt people.

And I think what Paul was saying to the church in Corinth was: Stop transmitting your pain. 

This transmission of our own hurt onto others happens in families and relationships, and at work and on-line and on the freeway and in church and for sure in here. What I am trying to get at is that this letter to the church in Corinth wasn’t providing a sentimental reading for their weddings, it was a smack down.  They were bickering and dysfunctional and competitive.  They were being petty and prideful and ridiculous.

They, perhaps not so unlike us, didn’t know who they were. So Paul was trying to remind them.  And so he told them who they were - not by telling them about history or biology or sociology - but by telling them about love.

Not the emotion of Love. Not the sentiment of Love. Not the romance of Love. Because honestly I have yet to see a Hallmark card with I love you so much that I will endure you.  Or, My love for you bears all your things.

 No.  Paul writes of Love as their origin.  Love as their source.  Love as God, and God as Love.  And this kind of Love really has nothing to do with feeling nice.  It’s actually not about feelings at all, it’s about truth.  It’s about the truth of who we are through the eyes of a God who knows us fully. The truth of who we are in a mirror undimmed by pain.

This love described by Paul isn’t mushy and sentimental.  It’s  tough and unwilling to yield. This love which is patient and kind and isn’t rude or boastful and is self-giving and all that….  here’s what is scary about this kind of love: there is no making yourself worthy of it. you can’t manipulate the kind of love Paul writes about.  There is no amount of weight loss, piety, personality management, big smiles or strained pretense that can affect this love.  And in the absence of manipulation we can stand bare before the eyes of God, naked and unashamed. Because this type of love is characterized by the giver not the receiver.  Gone are the strivings and manipulations and efforts to make ourselves more lovable.  Nobody has to pretend to enjoy camping. 

In the face to face gaze of the beloved, you aren’t loved because you are known.  You are known by God because you are loved by God.  Think about that.  The truth of who you were before any pain and hurt was transmitted to you by those who are also hurt and in pain…before you forgot your song you were loved. 

Maya Angelou writes beautifully about love in her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She said that to really love someone is to know the song their heart sings and to hum it back to them on the days they forget how it goes.

I think the world tries to steal this song.  It’s understandable really, with so much pain out there.  So as we grow up the melody to our heart’s song can be interrupted by the humming of others - of friends and enemies and terrible foster parents.

But perhaps when we know that we are loved by God in the fullness of God’s knowledge of us we are free to live in this love.  Free to transmit the love of Christ in a hurting world.  Free to see ourselves and others as God sees us. Because loved people love people. How radical, to move through this place and see each person, resident and CO alike, as God sees them.

Not because they are good, but because they are loved.  

The world tries to dim our eyes, and quiet our song, but the truth of who you are is found in the eyes of God, not the eyes of the world.  The truth of who you are is found in the love of your God  - the God who created this world and called it Good…. who brought the Israelites out of slavery, who fed Ruth and Naomi, who walked among us as Jesus of Nazareth, it is the love of the God who knit you together in your mother’s womb that gets to tell you who you are.  Nothing else. Not a family who wishes you were different, not the Colorado Department of Corrections, and not even yourself.   Only the God who knows and loves you fully can tell you who you are. And who you are is loved and worthy to be loved.

Amen.

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My deepest thanks to everyone who supports my work. Because of you, no matter where I am: cathedral, prison, church - I do not need to get paid to preach. All the honorarium for all my preaching goes directly to New Beginnings, the only inclusive Christian community inside the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. THANK YOU!