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Sunday, May 10, 2009
THE GREATEST OF THESE IS LOVE
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13 New Revised Standard Version
1 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. 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 or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and 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 in a mirror, dimly, 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 abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
We are beginning this morning with some quotes from second grade Sunday school children and public school children about mothers. Here are some questions and answers:
WHY GOD MADE MOTHERS · She is the only one who knows where the scotch tape is! · Mostly to clean the house. · To help get us out of there when we were being born.
HOW DID GOD MAKE MOTHERS? · He used dirt just like for the rest of us. · Magic plus super powers and a lot of stirring. · God made my mom just like he made me. God just used bigger parts.
WHAT INGREDIENTS ARE MOTHERS MADE OF? · God makes mothers out of clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world-and one dab of mean! · They had to get their start from men’s bones. Then they mostly use string, I think.
WHY DID GOD GIVE YOU YOUR MOTHER AND NOT SOME OTHER MOM? · Because we are related. · God knew she likes me a lot, more than other people’s moms like me.
WHAT KIND OF LITTLE GIRL WAS YOUR MOM? · My mom has always been my mom and none of that other stuff. · I don’t know because I wasn’t there, but my guess would be pretty bossy. · They say she used to be nice.
WHY DID YOUR MOM MARRY YOUR DAD? · My dad makes the best spaghetti in the world and my mom eats a lot. · She got too old to do anything else with him.
WHO’S THE BOSS AT YOUR HOUSE? · My mom…You can tell by room inspection. She sees the stuff under the bed.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MOMS AND DADS? · Moms work at work and work at home and dads just go to work at work. · Moms know how to talk to teachers without scaring them. · Moms have magic; they make you feel better without medicine.
WHAT DOES YOUR MOTHER DO IN HER SPARE TIME? · Mothers don’t do spare time · To hear her tell it, she pays bills all day long.
WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO MAKE YOUR MOM PERFECT? · On the inside she is already perfect. On the outside, some kind of plastic surgery.
IF YOU COULD CHANGE ONE THING ABOUT YOUR MOM WHAT WOULD IT BE? · I would like for her to get rid of those invisible eyes in the back of her head. · I’d make my mom smarter then she would know it was my sister who did it and not me.
Here are some statements from children about grandmothers. A six year old was asked where his grandmother lived. He said: “Oh she just lives at the airport and when we want her we just go get her. Then when we are done with her, we just take her back to the airport.”
Grandparents don’t have anything to do except be there when we come to see them. They are so old they shouldn’t play hard or run. It is good if they drive us to the shops and give us money.
When grandmothers take us for walks, they slow down past things like pretty leaves or caterpillars.
Grandmothers have to answer questions like: Why isn’t God married? And, how come dogs chase cats?
When grandmothers read to us, they don’t skip parts. And, they don’t mind if we ask for the same story over and over again.
Everybody should have a grandmother, especially if you don’t have television because they are the only grownups who like to spend time with us.
Grandmothers know we should have snack time before bed time and they say prayers with us and kiss us even when we have acted badly.
Let me tell you about the influence of two other mothers on this day when we honor and remember the influence of mothers. This week I was reading about the newest vehicle that the Ford Motor company will debut this year, the reengineered Taurus. Ford’s Vehicle Dynamics Development Engineer is 36 year old, Crissy Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican woman who has been with Ford for 12 years. She was born to Cuban parents who fled to Puerto Rico to escape Castro’s communist regime. Here is what this very influential engineer says about her mother’s influence: “I learned to be a methodical thinker from my dad who was a chemical engineer, but it was my mother who was the mechanical one. When I was growing up, she encouraged me, to figure out how things worked, and she never got too mad at me when I put things back together and had a few parts left over.” “She encouraged me when I was growing up…” There is one of the key roles we have as parents and grandparents. That encouragement and support usually doesn’t stop at a certain age. I heard an NPR interview with advice columnist Amy Dickinson whom I read regularly. She was talking about her book in which she tells of the influence, not only of her mother, but other women in her family, at a time when she was going through a painful divorce, and had moved back to her hometown of Freeville, New York with her young daughter to regain emotional strength.
The book is called The Mighty Queens of Freeville. Dickinson says it was the women in her family who exhibited the patience, kindness, forgiveness, and compassion that Paul reminds us about in his eloquent and moving description of love in I Corinthians 13. It was the women in her family who helped her pick up the pieces of her life as a single parent and helped her put life back together. It was their love that made the difference, the love Paul describes for us in the verses of 1 Cor. 13.
Paul is writing to the people he knew and taught and loved in the Greek city of Corinth. Corinth was the largest city in Greece with a population of 600,000 at that time. Corinth was like Las Vegas with its loose morals and its multitude of temptations. The temple of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, had 1000 temple prostitutes available, female and male. In this bustling center of hedonism and commerce, Paul lived and worked for 18 months and established a small and mostly faithful congregation of followers of the way of Christ. In his two Corinthian letters in the Bible, he is writing to them, three years after he has left, and is addressing some of the practical problems they are facing since his leaving and since other leaders followed him there to mislead the people.
In chapters 12-14, Paul is dealing with the arrogant and self-righteous spirit that some church people have shown. They have said that they are more holy than some others and one of the ways they know that is they are able to speak in strange tongues. Paul talks about the various spiritual gifts in chapter 12 and lists “tongues” at the bottom of the list and then he says, let me tell you about an even more excellent way, the way of love. What he gives us next is a description of what love, at its best, is like. Let’s stop for a moment and catch our breath. We have so cheapened that wonderful word and we mean so many different things. We say: I just love macaroni and cheese. I just love Charlton Heston movies. I love Stevie Wonder music. I love my work. I love my new Schnauzer puppy. I just love my new shoes.
Paul’s words are some of the most important in the Bible and they ground us in the posture of love at its best. It is the kind of unconditional love we heard described by grandchildren of their grandmothers early on today. This love is not a romantic or sentimental feeling. It is an attitude that wants and wills and acts for the wellbeing of another person. Feelings are not usually involved in this higher love. It is the kind of compassionate love that Jesus tells us about in the story of the Good Samaritan whose feelings about the wounded man he helps are not as important as his sacrificial acts to help the wounded man, the man he no longer sees as an enemy but as someone who needs what he can offer.
Paul tells us that unconditional love acts with patience, it practices kindness and compassion, it does not remember people’s faults or mistakes and it is not arrogant or boastful or rude. This kind of love is sacrificial and represents what is best for the other person even when it requires something difficult from us.
This is the love that we see at our best when we are doing our job as mothers or fathers or grandmothers and grandfathers or as friends or as responsible citizens of the world. When we are at our best as human beings, we are relating to each other in this mature and compassionate love. The Greek word for this kind of love is Agape. Let me close with one more real life story about this kind of love in action. This kind of love is always seen in action, not in a feeling or sentiment.
Judy and I saw a film last week about this kind of caring and sacrificial love. The film was The Soloist with Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. It is based on the true story and the book written by Los Angeles Times columnist, Steve Lopez, about a highly unusual homeless musician named Nathaniel Ayers. Mr. Ayers is an extremely talented musician who primarily plays the violin and bass. He was a student at the Juilliard School in New York City for two years until schizophrenia came to control his life. He dropped out of school, became homeless and alienated from his family and wound up sleeping on the streets in Los Angles, playing his two string violin during the day in one of the busy city tunnels.
That tunnel is where reporter Steve Lopez first saw him. He stopped his car to talk with him thinking that surely there would be a newspaper column or two he could write about this man. That meeting began a four year friendship between Lopez and Mr. Ayers that is chronicled in the book and the movie. It is a troubling and revealing story of homelessness in America and of mental illness. The book tells mostly about the first two years of this relationship. It is a very rocky and troubling story as Lopez finds himself drawn to helping and supporting Mr. Ayers whom he comes to see is an extremely talented musician. Mr. Ayers gets to meet and then take lessons from members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra. He gets to go back stage and visit with fellow Juilliard student Yo Yo Ma after a concert. Yo Yo Ma has read about him and is moved by his journey.
It is a tough, tough journey during which Lopez moves from being just a reporter, to becoming a friend and advocate. There are a couple of times when he feels his safety is at risk because Mr. Ayers is not in control of his behavior and emotions because of his serious and persistent mental illness.
But Steve Lopez shows us courage, compassion, incredible patience, friendship, and yes Love. This is the kind of love that Paul talks about, the kind of love that God offers to us and inspires in us. It is that love that motivates and slowly moves Mr. Ayers to move from sleeping on the streets at night to moving into his own small apartment and to taking lessons from members of the LA Philharmonic orchestra. He, also, attends concerts with other lovers of classical music at the Disney concert hall even though Mr. Ayers still dresses with much eccentricity and panache. It is that advocacy and love that lets Nathaniel Ayers meet the mayor of Los Angeles. He takes the mayor on a tour of Skid Row which results in additional resources devoted to helping the least and the last and the lost in a city with 90,000 homeless people. The journey is very difficult. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of time and a lot of sacrifice. It is a journey of love.
Love is patient. Love is kind and envies no one. Love is never jealous or conceited or rude, never selfish or quick to take offense. Love keeps no score of wrongs. It does not gloat over someone else’s faults or mistakes, but it takes delight in the best.
All these other things, we think are important, will pass away. But three things will last: faith, hope and love. And, the greatest of these is love.