Preacher: Jenn Hosler

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

Love – and Almost Getting Thrown off a Cliff (1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30)
Jennifer Hosler

The love passage – 1 Corinthians 13. Perhaps this feels like a difficult passage to dig into right now. Using my powers of deduction, many of us are stressed, terrified, angry, appalled, baffled, enraged, and maybe even on a short fuse. We might be amped up, ready to fight, or we might be shutting down, barely able to function. Scared, fearful, angry, sad: the news and the present state of our country are probably bringing forth these emotions.

Moreover, our own city faced tragedy this week, with the plane and helicopter collision into the Potomac. Many of us fly from DCA regularly – it is our home airport. Nate flew home on an American Airlines flight this past Monday. Some of us probably traverse the river regularly. For my family, the Potomac River has been a source of deep comfort and strength over the past decade – and especially since early 2020, when we began our weekly hikes on the Potomac Heritage Trail. Something beloved to us is now also the site of tragedy.

Culturally and as a city, there is a lot of grief and conflict. We have anxiety and are experiencing overt threats against many of our values and many jobs and even attacks on our government and on important tools for societal well-being and care. We have macro-level chaos and all of the terrible emotions that come with seeing trans lives and migrant lives and global life-saving development aid all put at risk.

We also have some chaos at the congregational level. We have not talked about it much, but there is grief. There has been conflict. Some of it has centered on differing priorities. Some of it due to ineffective communication and poor conflict resolution skills. There has been gossip. There has been talking about the person to someone else instead of talking to the person. Grudges. And even sometimes just mean-spirited stuff. For some of you, this might not be on your radar. For others, you might know a little. For still others, you might be involved or wounded or angry or something else. This is not the spot to tackle those issues, but I think it is important to name when things have not been healthy. There has been a lot of beauty and community building over the past year. There has also been some fracturing, pain, and loss.

Back to this love passage. You may have heard it quoted at a wedding. This is one of the most famous passages of scripture – people love reciting it. It’s beautiful and poetic. Yet one commentary notes, “Such reverence for the passage creates problems for the preacher. The text is regularly lifted out of its context, and love becomes an abstraction, an ideal… The beauty of the language obscures the practice, exhortative force of the words. The setting of a conflicted congregation, caught up in a distorted spirituality, engaged in intense power struggles, is overlooked in the admiration of the poetry” (Cousar et al., 1994, p. 127). While these words about love can certainly apply to individual level and interpersonal relationships, their intended audience was to a church that was a hot mess: “these are words of exhortation for a confused congregation” (Cousar et al., 1994, p. 128).

Some of the conflict in the Corinthian focused on spiritual gifts. Chapters 12 and 14 deal with spiritual gifts in the faith community. In chapter 13, Paul says quite clearly, that any religious action occurring in the congregation is meaningless without love.

Paul says, speaks in the first person – perhaps to show the Corinthians that this applies to both them and him.

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. If I eloquently talk of God but do not have love, I am just a gong or a cymbal. I might get people’s attention, but it is just noise.

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. Prophesy, knowledge, and unimaginable faith that leads beyond belief—to moving mountains. Even when I can accomplish miraculous deeds, without love, I am nothing.

If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Even if I make great sacrifices for God, choosing God over money or material things, or even sacrificing my own life, if I do not have love, it is all meaningless. I gain nothing.

I am noise. I am nothing. I gain nothing. That is, if I do not have love. We are noise. We are nothing. We gain nothing – for all of our religious or spiritual efforts, if we do not have love. For churches in discernment processes or, really, at any other time, these words are essential.

All we do as a church is meaningless, if we don’t have love. Love as a group, together, as a church. Love as individuals, following Jesus in our own lives and environments. Love for our community, for our neighbors and our enemies. All we do as a church is meaningless, if we don’t have love.

Brother Paul continues and shares what love is—and, importantly, what it is not.

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.

Patient. Kind. Paul starts with two words to show what love is. One commentator points out, quite helpfully, that here, love is a verb. Many English translations miss the mark. Commentator Melanie Howard (2022) writes, “what most English translations fail to capture is that all these descriptors are verbs, not the adjectives with which they are often translated. So, these descriptions might be better translated along the lines of, ‘Love waits patiently; love acts kindly’ and so forth. What might seem like a pedantic grammatical point is actually quite important. That is, the love that Paul is describing takes action; it is not a passive feeling toward another.”

Love looks like treating someone with patience. Love looks like kind words and kind actions, even in response to unkindness. So, these are two positive ways that love looks like. Paul then goes on to list eight different actions that are not what love looks like. Love does not act with envy. Love does not boast. Love does not act haughty or arrogant; it does not think it knows best. Love is not self-important. Love does not respond rudely or act in ways that demean or belittle or shame others. Love does not insist on its own way. Love is not irritable. Love doesn’t lash out, get easily annoyed or angry. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing. Love does not relish bending the rules or lining one’s pockets. Paul closes these 8 negative attributes with a positive attribute here, saying that love acts with integrity and seeks truth and transparency.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love can hold up against a lot. Love looks like forbearance, hope, perseverance. As a community, love means sticking with it, finding a way forward, hoping that we can get through a rough patch, learning how to trust, and learning how to forgive and transform relationships. As the Bible tells us again and again, love is hard work. Love is something we don’t do on our own, but with the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Gospel writer Luke describes Jesus’ ministry as powered by the Holy Spirit. In Luke 4, we see Jesus start preaching and teaching. He then calls out the ethnic fervor and nationalism, or “nativist impulses” of people in his hometown. Jesus then almost gets run off a cliff.

Our gospel text in Luke starts off right after what Dana Cassell preached on last week, at the start of Jesus’ ministry. To recap, Luke 4 starts out with a freshly baptized Jesus being led by the Holy Spirit and entering the wilderness. For 40 days, Jesus fasts and faces temptation. He resists the temptation of glory and greed and power. At the end of the 40 days, Jesus returns “in the power of the Spirit to Galilee.” He starts teaching in synagogues, much to the acclaim of everyone.

Jesus comes to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth and stands up to read. He is handed the Isaiah scroll and opens it up to the spot he has chosen: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recover of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Jesus sits down and says, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled as you heard it.”

First, the crowds go wild. The CEB says, “everyone was raving about Jesus, so impressed were they by the gracious words flowing from his lips.” Jesus keeps teaching, starts talking about how prophets are not usually accepted in their hometowns. Then he says, “It’s interesting – there were so many widows in Israel during the prophet Elijah’s time. Israel was struggling with a drought – no rain for 2 and a half years. There was a famine. And yet – Elijah wasn’t sent to any of those Jewish widows. He was sent to a widow in the city of Zarephath in Sidon (modern day Lebanon). A Gentile. You know, same thing – there were lots of people with skin disease in Israel during the prophet Elisha’s time, but Elisha didn’t cleanse any of them. He cleansed Naaman the Syrian.”

The crowd in the synagogue is enraged. They whip into a lynch mob and run Jesus out of town. The mob pushes Jesus to the top of the town’s hill so that they can throw Jesus off the cliff! But – Jesus passes through the crowd and goes on his way. The Message says Jesus “gave them the slip.”

Everyone was happy with Jesus – but then he showed them that God loved foreign widows and cared for a widow who was the Israelites’ enemy, even though there were hungry Israelite widows. Jesus said that God used Elisha to cleanse a Syrian – and points out that there weren’t any Israelites cleansed from skin diseases at that time. Jesus challenges his people’s perceptions of who God cares about – and they are enraged and what to kill him. To think that people might be upset when a preacher says God values mercy and care – especially for people we think are outsiders and unworthy of mercy and care.

I note here that Jesus expected resistance and yet still declared God’s liberating justice and expansive love. He was fortified by the Holy Spirit and filled with a deep knowledge of the scriptures and who God has been revealed to be throughout history. Strengthened by the Spirit, nourished by a long period of fasting and prayer. I think this allowed him to be steadfast in declaring God’s expansive and liberating love.

In everything that we do as Jesus followers, we seek the power of the Holy Spirit and prayer to fill us, to guide us and to empower us. The Holy Spirit is with us when we pray. The Holy Spirit is with us when we work to learn healthier patterns of communication or when we seek to unlearn unhealthy conflict avoidance. The Holy Spirit is also with us when we seek to care for the poor, the imprisoned, the hungry, the foreigner, the vulnerable, and the outcast. All of this is Holy Spirit work. Prayer is spiritual and bible study is spiritual and caring for migrants is spiritual, working for peace is spiritual, addressing hunger is spiritual—there is no dichotomy in scripture, of spiritual vs social. All of it is Spirit-led. And all of it, whether prayer or bible study or caring for people in need, all of it is meaningless without love.

The question isn’t, what is spiritual and what isn’t – the question for each of us is this, are we willing to walk in the way of Jesus together, strengthened by the Spirit, steadfast in declaring God’s expansive and liberating love, despite the risks we might face? Are we willing to make love the verb that defines our community, practicing the ways that love should look like and doing the hard work of actually sorting it out with each other when what we’re doing doesn’t look like love?

May we have the courage to walk in the way of Jesus together, strengthened by the Holy Spirit, clothed in love, as we pray, as we sing, as we study scripture, as we advocate, as we fold clothes for migrants or play with kids, or host a queer potluck, or so much more. AMEN.

References
(Cousar, Gaventa, McCann, & Newsome, 1994, p. 127).

Howard, M.A. (2022, January 30). Commentary on 1 Corinthians 13:1-13. Retrieved from
https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-after-epiphany-3/commentary-on-1-corinthians-131-13-7