The Most Excellent Way: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 - Sixth Sunday after Easter

One of the most painful decisions my family ever had to make was to move my late grandmother into a memory care home shortly after her 90^th birthday.

Grandma was a fiercely independent woman, and her greatest spiritual gift was caring for others. So, we knew that this move was going to be agonizing for her.

My mom and my uncle did everything humanly possible to care for her at home. There are no words for how hard they tried. But it got to a point where it was no longer safe for her to be at home.

I’ll never forget how painful it was seeing her in that home, and in the condition which made it necessary for her to be there. But I found solace in the people who worked there, whose love for my grandmother was genuine.

It would be inaccurate for me to say that we saw this love in everyone. But there were many who made the conscious decision to love the people in their care. For many of them, the difference they made was not reflected in their paycheck.

I remember during one visit, a small, thinly built man with short, dark hair walked into Grandma’s room. It was his job to help her with her most personal needs. He greeted her by name with a smile on his face, and her face lit up. “Here comes my guardian angel,” she said.

I am so thankful, that for all my grandmother lost, she hadn’t lost the ability to love and be loved in return.

Image by HeungSoon from Pixabay

Today, in our first reading, we learn what love is all about in be one of the most beautiful passages of Scripture. Perhaps you heard it read at a wedding ceremony, and appropriately so, because it takes more than just feelings to hold a marriage, or any human relationship, together.

At the church in Corinth, the ties that bound them to each other were being stretched to their limit. There church was rife with conflict, competition, and controversies, all in an environment of rampant paganism and increasing persecutions of Christians and Jews. These were the kinds of troubles you’d expect to spell doom for the church. But if the church died, people’s hope of resurrection was going to die with it.

But the church didn’t have to die. There was a way forward, through the conflicts, through the power struggles, through the dangers in the world, and that was the way of love.

The love Paul describes is not mere feelings, affection, or even friendship.

You can have the perfect marriage, the ideal family, or the strongest friendship. You can be a warm, welcoming, growing church. You can be a top-rated, five-star nursing home. But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be problems. People are sinners. Relationships without conflict don’t exist. Human nature overwhelms our better judgment. And even if everyone is doing exactly as they should, life still happens. The world and its ways are not friendly to God’s purposes.

But love is how God makes a way when there is no way. Love is what keeps us together when trouble pulls us apart. Love is what keeps us going when the future is bleak. It is love that carries you through the unthinkable.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; ⁶ it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

If we, as people of God, believe in what God’s Word is teaching us and commit ourselves to living in accordance with what we are taught, there is no need to fear the future. To have hope is to trust that love is waiting for you on the other side of the unthinkable.

Love as Paul describes it is what drew people to faith in Christ and kept them together through persecutions. People were so overwhelmed by God’s love in Christ that they risked their lives to tell others rather than remaining silent.

Love as Paul described it is what kept our churches going through the months of the pandemic when we couldn’t be together, and there was doubt that we would ever be together again.

Though many in our world have given up on love and embrace greed, power, and violence as the means of winning the future, we stay the course. Love is the power of the Holy Spirit which raised Jesus from the dead. I can assure you that as long as we are willing to walk together in love, people will want to walk with us, because we’re walking with Jesus.

If you are going through fiery trials and facing the unthinkable, I pray that God will overwhelm you with love so that you rise with Christ as a new creation, and find the joy of the Lord so that you can share it with others in their afflictions.

If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² 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. ³ 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.

⁴ Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; ⁶ it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

⁸ 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. ⁹ For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, ¹⁰ but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹ 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. ¹² 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. ¹³ And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love. (NRSVue)