Fourth Sunday After Epiphany

Hello Friends, 

This week I really had trouble finding where the Spirit was leading me. Eventually I realized that I needed to talk about the reading from 1 Corinthians 13. It took a while to come around to it. With preaching sometimes it is immediately obvious where the sermon is, and other times it seems to be far more unclear. Here are the readings.

Now I don't have a manuscript for Early Church but I do want to tell you about it. In my efforts to be creative I wanted to put the love poem in ch. 13 in the context. So we all got in a time machine and were 1st century Corinthians. I handed out reasons why each of the members in our congregation is the best (examples include: I am the best because I got my whole family to church, and I am the best because I am a great singer). So we all shouted our I am the best statements over and over, and then I handed out bells and gongs to the kids adding to the noise. Once it was unbelievably loud I asked everyone to sit down and I read them Paul's love poem. I am hopeful that I did not scare off too many of our new comers. That would be bad. But it was fun to yell in church. And I hope the contrast between the conflict of greatness, and the calmness of the love poem expressed something of God's presence to the congregation. 

With out further ado then, here is the sermon to the 11:00 am congregation:

Sometimes as a preacher I am more comfortable talking about a difficult text or an obscure text. It’s easier for me to try and find where the Spirit is leading us and showing us when it’s sort of hard to figure out. I think part of that has to do with my personality- I like to struggle with the text. But this week, our Epistle reading is the opposite of obscure and difficult.  It’s perhaps one of the most recognizable passages of scripture. Even non religious folks who never ever ever go to church seem drawn to this passage and want to have it in their wedding ceremonies. Billy and I used it in our wedding. I remember his Aunt Betty Anne intoning the words to it, clearly and slowly. And since we are at the age where all our friends are getting married, we have heard it quite a few times this last year at quite a few different weddings. I realized as I read this passage over and over again this week—that at a certain point I wasn’t hearing it. I don’t know if you have ever had that experience, that when you hear words over and over that they can sometime be difficult to hear. That familiarity sort of makes it so that you hear them with out being able to examine what they mean. 

            So because I was having so much trouble considering the words- I decided began to focus on the context of this passage with in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. If you were here in church the last two weeks, you heard the bits in the letter about gifts of the spirit. And you also get a gold star for attending so much church—but if you missed it, or need a refresher: the Corinthians are arguing among themselves about which of them is the most important, based on which spiritual gifts they have been allotted. Some are able to speak in tongues, others can heal, and others are teachers. Paul insists that they not try to make a hierarchy and instead realize that it is the same Spirit that has given them all these gifts. Paul uses the image of a body—and helps us to see that though the foot and the hand are different parts they rely on each other, just so the tongue speaker relies on the teacher.

            My method as a preacher is to consider the context in the letter of this love passage. The love comes as a response to all of this community fighting among the Corinthians. This passage about love comes right after all of those body images from last week. I think because I was connecting this love passage to those conflict passages I was thinking about love as a solution. And I was trying to read Paul’s writing as prescriptive. When there is a community struggle then you should love.  So I kept reading and re-reading it thinking: where does the love come from? How do we do this kind of love? How do we get the love that is patient, kind, rejoicing in truth, hopes all things? How do we get to the love that never ends? 

            Paul’s letter doesn’t answer that question. And maybe those are not the most helpful series of questions to be asking. As I was reading the letter hoping for solutions and answers I was missing something key. I was reading it trying to obtain very certain information related to a community but I wasn’t prepared to read it as poetry. It’s not totally my fault. I want to blame some one or something for making me a little too stressed out to think about poetry this week. And I also blame those who set our lectionary. The lectionary leaves out a critical verse between last week’s reading and this weeks that sets up how Paul wants us to attune our ears.

            Last weeks reading ends with Paul telling the Corinthians to strive for greater gifts. But there is one more line after that. Paul says ”And I will show you a more excellent way” what follows in chapter 13 is our reading for today. Paul’s more excellent way. It is a vision for what love is. It’s much more poetry than prescription. That one line And I will show you a more excellent way suggests that Paul is describing something that doesn’t yet exist. He is imagining something that he wants to share with us. Paul is imagining. Paul is making. The Greek word that we get poetry from is a word that means making. So I bring up the word poetry because I think that is what Paul is doing in our passage. He is using language to make something new. But before I get too carried away with what is being made, What do I mean by poetry? And what does reading it as poetry do for us? If it isn’t providing us with a solution for how to live in community, than what exactly is it doing?

            These are very good questions. I think let’s start with what I mean by poetry. As someone who hasn’t written a poem since I was in high school and it was writing one as a homework assignment for an English class-I don’t know how qualified I am to talk to you about it—but I will do my best. Poetry is a literary form where the words and language evoke meaning or feeling beyond what they literally might. That feeling or meaning might be more in the juxtaposition of words, or in the cadence or rhythm, or maybe it emerges in the totality of the poem. A poem uses language to evoke things beyond what might seem present on the page.

            While I was reading this passage for a solution I wasn’t listening to the cadence of the words. I wasn’t listening for the repetition. For the slowing down and speeding up. I wasn’t thinking about the fast beating heart we associate with being in love.  I wasn’t listening for the way that Paul is describing love. Or as my poetic husband said to me, Paul is tracing the outsides of love. Carving out space for us to feel it. Paul is painting a picture with language. He doesn’t define it, but tells us some of its attributes, and tells us some things that it is not. Somewhere beyond the words themselves, beyond the page, we get the picture of what love is. Paul uses things we are all familiar with, we all know the feeling of having been a child, and we all have grown up enough to see that we thought differently when we were children than we do now. He uses that great image of a mirror—the one we see though dimly. Mirrors in Paul’s age were all considerably dimmer than the ones we have now. And mirrors of course are always reversed, never really letting us see reality, but just an image of it. But in the end, in the complete as Paul puts, he will see face to face. When we hear this as poetry we are familiar with the image of love it presents. We know and recognize love in hearing it.

            So Paul is writing poetry here. Poetry that uses language to suggest more than the individual words might mean. Poetry that makes us both know more about love and actually feel love when we hear this. Now that I have defined what poetry is, and made a case for reading this passage as poetry I think I am now ready to answer my question posed before: what does reading Paul’s letter as poetry do for us?

            Reading this passage as poetry pulls it further away from the context of the letter, we don’t have to think so much about the fighting Corinthians we can also think of things beyond Corinth, and even beyond Paul. Next we are invited to feel that love that this passage makes us feel. We are invited to remember past loves, and dream of future ones. We are reminded of God’s persistent love for humanity. Not only do with think of loves that we feel, but reading it Paul is also sharing his love for the Corinthians as they read it and is sharing love with us too. Reading this as poetry is a way of to communicate the importance of love, and a way to feel God’s love.

            Thinking about this passage in scripture as poetry helps us to understand something bigger about our relationship with God. Poetry itself is a good metaphor for our relationship with God. Thinking of our relationship with God as poetry we can see that it evokes feeling and makes meaning out of different parts of our life. If it is poetry it suggests that there is something beyond the words of our experience. There is another level on which all things have a different meaning. It also suggests that we need to use our interpretative tools to try to piece together the meaning. And maybe a good image for God is that of a poet. A poet making meaning beyond what is on the surface. Perhaps the act of creation could be thought of as poetry. 

          After all when we think back on the word poetry as connected to the Greek word making. God is making something new. Of course the prologue of Johns gospel makes a good case for god as a poet. The emphasis on words and language at least suggests a writer as a good way of understanding god. Jesus might be the language of the poetry that god was using to do a new thing.

          About a month ago, while the bishop was here for his visitation he preached about going a home by a new way and emphasized the importance of trying and doing new things to continue to be a vital part of our community and world. This morning as we think about poetry and love and creation I find that I want to share gods poems with the world, I want to share gods love with our neighborhood and I want us all to remain attuned to the poetry god is wring in each of our lives and to the poetry we make as the body of Christ.