The Love Principle
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
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 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. 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.
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.
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. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 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. 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. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Paul left us with a bit of a cliffhanger last week— “And I will show you a more excellent way.” Luckily, we’re starting right where we left off. Apologies you’ve all had to wait a week, I’m sure the suspense has been killing you.
So last week, Paul explained to the people of Corinth that they were, essentially doing everything wrong—they were elevating certain people above others, creating hierarchies, emphasizing spiritual gifts that only benefited certain individuals, as opposed to the community as a whole. He used that extended metaphor about the members of the body working together as one body, not as individuals out for their own gain. This week, he’s telling the people of Corinth how to go about doing that.
That’s not to say he’s giving them a step-by-step, easy-to-follow guide, sorry to say. If only the Bible were ever so simple. The key word in the last sentence from last week’s scripture is “way.” Because in this passage that Sue just read for us, Paul isn’t just talking about the action of love being better than the action of, prophesy, for instance—he’s talking about love as a way of life.
Now, it’s understandable that verses four through seven are used in weddings all the time. It does read as an eloquent and poetic meditation on the qualities of love. But when it’s used in weddings, it’s completely out of context. This section isn’t quite as good-natured as it would appear. It’s actually a scolding that’s very specific to the people of Corinth—in prior chapters, the Corinthians were accused of being impatient, they were accused of being unkind, arrogant, and rude—all things, Paul makes it clear, that are not associated with love; but not the kind of love that we think of when we think about two people getting married, or even a platonic love between to friends, or familial love. As Maggie so perfectly put it at Bible Study last week, Paul is talking about capital L Love. He’s talking about living by way of Love. He’s talking about making sure every action you do, being done with Love in mind, with your fellow humankind in mind.
While Paul does often times seem very anti speaking in tongues, or a little flippant when it comes to prophesy, it’s not that he was against people practicing these gifts period—he was scolding them for practicing these spiritual gifts without love in mind—without the community of the whole in mind. Last week, we talked about how communities fall apart when only certain types of people are elevated above all others. As Paul saw it, the people of Corinth were claiming to have a direct line to God in terms of their gifts for speaking in tongues and prophesy—and they were using these supposed gifts to elevate themselves, rather than the whole. They were being boastful, claiming that they had powers above all others, and therefore that they should get special treatment. Not only does this go against everything Jesus and this new Jesus movement stood for, but it’s also just incorrect. No one on this earth has a direct line to God. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face,” Paul says. Fun fact that I only learned this week—this is yet another line very specifically meant for the Corinthians. Turns out, they were well-known for their mirror manufacturing. So he’s telling these folks, sure, some of you have gifts of prophesy, but only in part. This is not an earth as it is in heaven yet, there are no face-to-face interactions with God right now, and anyone claiming to have seen God or to have a direct line to God is incorrect of dishonest.
On Christmas Eve, I preached a homily inspired by the story of the early twentieth century physicist Karl Schwarzschild from the book When We Cease to Understand the World. Part of the sermon touched on the fact that scientists, artists, mathematicians, historians, philosophers, clergy—we’re just trying to make sense of the world in some way. We’re trying to find order in the world, in the universe. We’re trying to figure out how and why things happen. And the homily was also about—what happens when we realize that we can’t find any order? What happens when we can’t make sense of anything? What happens when it seems like everything is random and nothing matters?
For some people, it can send them into a tailspin, like what happened with Schwarzschild, who, when he discovered the probable existence of black holes, fell into a deep despair. Now, I will admit, I hate uncertainty. Because of my anxiety around uncertainty, I have a horrible habit of jumping to the absolute worst case scenario immediately. I think of all the many outcomes in a single situation and I do what I can to see if I can control it, or to see if I can predict it, and if I can’t (and most often, I can’t), I sometimes spiral a bit. I sometimes wonder if this is one of the reasons I felt called to ministry—that maybe I was looking for some order in the universe, some comfort that things would be okay, even when things seem very not okay.
Luckily, I’m pretty sure that’s not the only reason I was called to ministry, because if it was, I would certainly be in the wrong profession. Because so much of Christianity is accepting that we’re not God—that we don’t yet have a direct line to God, that there is so much that is out of our control. So much of Christianity is about acceptance, trust, and capital-L Love.
In that same book that I used for my Christmas Eve homily, there’s a different story towards the end about another German physicist, Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg is another physicist, like Schwarzschild, who turned the universe upside down with a shocking equation. Before Heisenberg’s discovery of what is known as the uncertainty principle (truly my worst nightmare come true), there was an accepted school of philosophical thought called determinism, which was also a school of thought that was promoted by traditional physicists like Einstein. Determinism simply assumes that all events, that everything that happens in the world, are determined by something that happened before it. So it’s this really attractive, neat and tidy idea that we can just keep looking back in time and say this happened because this other thing happened before it—and the lovely thing about this is that it assumes that we can at least somewhat predict what could happen in the future by looking at what events spurred what events from the past.
Unfortunately for determinists and anxiety-ridden people like myself, Heisenberg came up with the uncertainty principle and pretty much proved determinism is wrong. The uncertainty principle, by way of equations most us wouldn’t possibly come to close to being able to understand, implies that there is a fundamental limit to which events can be predicted from initial conditions. Essentially, we’re physically incapable of ever getting to the point where we can accurately predict the future events. Labatut writes of the consequence of the discovery of the uncertainty principle: “However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.” How strange that something with such a scientific basis sounds so Biblical.
In addition to the fact that Corinthians were falling into old habits of creating hierarchies that mirrored those of their day, I wonder if they were also just looking for some order in the world. I wonder if they wanted so badly to know the language of God, to see the future clearly, that they actually believed they did, and they could. And I can’t blame them. It must feel absolutely amazing to feel like you have it all figured out! No wonder they were being arrogant and boastful!
So how do we cope with this uncertainty? How do we cope with not ever being able to really know God? How do we deal with the fact that no matter how hard we try in this world, before the complete comes, we’ll never truly be able to make sense of anything? How daunting… how daunting it is to come to terms with the fact that the only thing we can be certain of is that nothing is certain. Well, almost nothing—one thing we can absolutely be certain of is that if we perform our actions with love in mind, we’ll never be in the wrong. That’s not to say everything will be just great and fall into place and we’ll never suffer. But we can always be sure that if we act in the service of love, if we act in service to others, to the community and world as a whole, we can be sure we’re always doing the right thing.
Acting with capital-L Love in mind is acting with humility. It’s accepting that we don’t know everything, that we can never know everything. Instead of being arrogant and claiming to know everything, claiming to know the future, claiming that we can speak in tongues to God, we accept that most of what happens in this world is out of our control. But what is in our control is how we act in the world, how we act towards others. And that means as long as we are acting in capital-L Love, we’re doing okay.
When Heisenberg discovered the uncertainty principle, everything the world knew about physics, about philosophy, about life was turned upside-down. In making scientific, philosophical, or spiritual discoveries, we’re trying to make sense of the world—but sometimes our discoveries do the opposite. In When We Cease to Understand the World, Labatut writes, “In the deepest substrate of all things, physics had not found the solid, unassailable reality…ruled over by a rational God pulling the threads of the world, but a domain of wonders and rarities, borne of the whims of a many-armed goddess toying with chance.” While I take some issue with Labatut’s presumption that an irrational world of chance must be the work of an imagined female-bodied God, the point remains—as Paul says, “…we know only in part.”
We are still in our infancy. We are still children thinking like children. We can’t know God face-to-face, we can only feel the presence of the Holy Spirit as best we can. We can only act as Jesus would have us act the best we can—and that is with capital-L Love.
We can choose to despair and become overwhelmed with the fact that we may never know the future, that we, in our lifetimes at least, may never know the full truth. Or we can choose to live fully in this “domain of wonders and rarities” until the time comes when we will all see one another face-to-face. There is hope. Paul says, “When the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.” This may not be in our lifetimes or our children’s lifetimes, but it’s what we work towards. And living by this Love principle that Paul speaks of—that helps to usher us towards the complete. That is how we slowly but surely bring about an earth as it is in heaven—by accepting what we can’t know, what we don’t control, and by always acting with capital-L love. Amen.
