Lenten Lessons in Love - February 14, 2016

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I Corinthians 12:31-13:13

Today we celebrate the 40+ Club – couples who have been married for a long time. 72 years for B&CB. What an example they and all our others provide for us. Included in your worship guide today are tips they've given for how to have a long lasting marriage. Together they offer us all wisdom for love for a lifetime.
Happy Valentine's Day. My thanks to the Romeo's for singing for us today.
Valentine's Day is a time for romance. Our 40+ club knows that it is important to make time for romance. They also know that long lasting marriages are about more than hearts and flowers. Next to parenting, (which I have not done), I think marriage is the most challenging thing most of us do, and I've only been married for 24 years
It's no coincidence that the marriage vows say, "for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health." Health crises, either of one's own or of other family members, economic challenges, and just plain hard times make marriage difficult.

Living with another person isn't easy. Anybody who has been married for very long knows there are moments when you may love the other person but you don't like them very much. Last summer Doug and I attended worship at Central United Protestant Church in Richland and the theme for the day was marriage. The pastor told how just before going to sleep, he and his wife always hold hands in bed and pray. One time they had been particularly unhappy with each other. As they went to bed and the ritual time came he thought to himself, "Well this is awkward." Indeed. Personality conflicts, disagreements about how to handle a situation, and differences in tolerance for clutter or the temperature in the house, raise up multiple opportunities for strife.
Our reading this morning from the 13th chapter of I Corinthians is a favorite at weddings. The Apostle Paul waxes eloquent about love. To really understand this passage, however, we need to move beyond weddings and romance to consider the original context.
The church in Corinth faced its share of problems. I love Corinthians because it is clear these folks were just like us. Some of the Christians in Corinth abused the freedoms they found in Christ, they scorned other people's spiritual gifts while boasting of their own, they sought recognition for themselves and jockeyed for position, among other things. Sound familiar? This church was no more ideal than marriage is – or any church.
Paul's ode to love was actually a challenge to the Corinthians. As they heard these words they likely either squirmed in discomfort or tightened up in self-defense. I doubt they smiled at the loveliness of his words or dreamed of hearts and flowers.
Paul's words about love follow his teaching about spiritual gifts. He had told the Corinthians that as the church they were the body of Christ. He had surprised them by saying that the less honorable parts of the body are just as important as the more honored parts, a switch from the way the body image was used in Roman society. To those people who argued about whose gift was more important Paul urged. "But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show a still more excellent way." Then he sings of love.
Love is not so much a spiritual gift as it is the way God intends for all of us to use our gifts. The Corinthians had argued about gifts like speaking in tongues, prophecy, and knowledge. Paul said, "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. And If I have prophetic powers and I understand all mysteries and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing."
The Greek word Paul uses for love is agape – likely you've heard it before. Agape does not mean romantic love where your heart pounds a little faster and you can hardly wait to embrace your beloved. Agape is not sentimental or even sweet. In fact, agape is not really a feeling at all. Agape is far more about action than it is emotion. It is a choice made to act for the wellbeing of the other, even when doing so is not in our own self-interest.
Certainly those in a long lasting marriage know about agape. They have chosen to seek good for their spouses, from eating at the other person's favorite restaurant even if you don't care for it, to moving across the country for the other partner's job and leaving behind your own. They have learned over the decades that love is more important than being right, powerful, or honored.
Today is also the first Sunday in the season of Lent, a time when we seek to deepen our devotion to God. Especially toward the end of Lent we focus on Jesus' passion, which has nothing to do with physical love and everything to do with physical suffering. There were no hearts and flowers at the cross.
As I studied I Corinthians 13 it occurred to me that it is a great Lenten text, and long lasting marriages have a lot of wisdom in them which we can apply to our faith. Just as Paul's words call two people in a marriage to act on behalf of the other, over and over again, for forty, fifty, sixty, seventy years, so too our faith in Jesus Christ calls us to act on behalf of others. In marriage, couples use their gifts to benefit each other or they have nothing at all. In faith, Christians use their gifts to benefit others or they have nothing at all.
Throughout the history of our faith various leaders have devised what we've come to call examens – guides to use in examining one's life and then confessing to God the ways we've failed to live up to God's standards. The Ten Commandments are one sort of examen: have I put something else before God? Have I used God's name in vain? Have I honored my parents?
Paul's definition of love in vv. 4-7 make for a great examen. I invite you to take out a pew Bible and turn to p. 164. Let's read it together and as we do consider how you have lived out this definition of love today. Ok, found it? Let's read together: "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. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."
Lent lasts for six weeks. Perhaps you have other Lenten disciplines you follow: giving up candy or Facebook, memorizing Scriptures or reading from a devotional book each day; donating to a charity or helping out a friend. Those are great ways to deepen and express our faith. Another way might be to use I Corinthians 13 as an examen, perhaps once a week. Read not just the few verses we just read together but the whole chapter – it's only 13 verses, As you read, prayerfully consider how it is that these words call you to prayer. Confess those moments when you have not been patient or kind, when you have insisted on your own way, or felt resentful about something or someone.
Carpenters use a plumb line – a string with a weight on it – to measure how level a wall is. I Corinthians 13 is a plumb line for faith. It helps us to consider how straight and true our faith is, and when we realize how we have gotten out of alignment what we need to do to straighten out.
Our 40+ Club model for us of commitment, mutual respect, forgiveness, and devotion. I didn't ask them to tell me about the hard times they've weathered, and I think I'm safe in guessing that over 40+ years they've each had some moments that have not been easy. As RC said, "Don't kill them in the first ten years." There are some basics. RS named it when she said, "No abuse is a given." Be it physical, verbal, or emotional, there is no excuse for trying to control or wound the other. No one deserves to be treated that way. That is not love.
Love is the decision to act for the good of the other. God's love for us is the ultimate model for the joys of human love, be that within marriage or in other relationships. Today we celebrate that the love within these long lasting marriages also reveals to us something of God's love. Happy Valentine's Day, congratulations to our 40+ Club, and a blessed Lent to us all.