Sermon: The Love that Binds
It is the love of God that binds us together. You may have heard the classic phrase, “the ties that bind”. That implies there is a common idea that binds certain people together. Sometimes these ties are family, experience, enduring something, or friendship. Yet none of these truly bind us. Family and friendship probably the strongest of these, can all too easily be broken. These are not truly the things that bind us. Common experience, often means that someone understands you better, but again this does not bind us. It is only the love of God that underlies this that binds us. It is the love of God that leads us to knowing and being known by the other. It is the love of God that pushes us to trust the other. It is the love of God that leads us to sacrificially act for the other in family and friendship. The love of God is like gravity, even without our effort is pulling us together, urging us to ever-growing closeness. Then it is the love of God that binds us when we find ourselves in his embrace.
With Valentine's day coming up, you might be thinking that love is primarily a feeling or a romantic thing, but love is so much bigger than that. Eros, or romantic sexual love, is meant for one other person in a committed marriage. Love, the love that society longs for, that our hearts want to live in is different. Many of you have probably heard our reading from 1 Corinthians 13 a few times in weddings. Mary Anne and I also had this reading. Even still, I think this confuses the point of this passage. Yes, this kind of godly love needs to be present in any and every marriage, but this beautiful and poetic language is written to a Christian community. Paul is trying to tell these people how they should live together and live in the world. This is a love for every relationship. This is a love we are meant to live in and live out all the time.
The Christian community of Corinth is also going through some internal turmoil. People are looking down on others in the community. The rich are taking the best. They are making other Christians separate and less through words and actions. We can relate as we look at the world and it would seem that there is nothing new in sin. The Corinthian church needed healing and Paul was using godly love in order to help them find a way to come together.
Paul starts out by saying what love is good for:
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.
No matter how eloquent and beautiful our words are they mean nothing without love. Without love, our words like a noisy gong destroy peace and affect more than those that they are directed towards (even when we think our words are neutral or just stating the facts). No matter how powerful or capable, or knowledgable, or faithful, we are nothing without love. Without love our actions, ideas even our whole being is worth nothing. No matter how much we give or sacrifice, without love, we gain nothing. Without love, we can be generous and kind, but we will never be truly rich. Love gives purpose and meaning to our words. Love gives us our worth and being. Love is what gives anything its richness. No wonder we all want more love.
Yet this doesn’t tell us what love is. It can feel hard to define sometimes. So Paul starts by telling us what it is and what it isn’t.
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, endures all things.
Love is patient. This is important. Love waits. It watches. It endures. It holds. And it keeps being love while doing all of these things. True Love like God, does not shift with every shadow. Godly love is faithful and lasts. This is what we hear two verses later. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Love is an immense kind of patience that holds firm and yet open through everything.
One quick clarification: when Paul says that love hopes “all things”, believes “all things”, etc. We know that he can’t mean all things in the way we often think about it. I believe Paul is speaking to an important idea presented in Genesis. God created all things and again and again he saw that they were good - even the snake and the monsters of the sea were first seen as good. What then happens is that evil is a result of the distortion, corruption or destruction of that good. The snake says, “if you eat this fruit you will be like God”, yet he failed to point out that they were already like God, made in his image, he failed to show them that God had already been showing them right and wrong, he failed to say, “why don’t you turn to God and ask for clarification”, he failed to say all the ways disobeying God would make them less like God and I could go on. Evil, even if it feels very real, is not a thing, it is a distortion of a good thing - which is why evil and wrong can be so sneaky and even seemingly small at times.
So when Paul says that love believes all things, he is saying that love holds onto all of the lasting and true things that come from God. Love hopes all things, love sees the good of what is true and sees where it is leading and so keeps pointing towards God’s good work that is leading us somewhere. Love bears all things. Love doesn’t just hold onto, it actually lifts up everything that is good, true, and right. Love endures all things. Love recognizes that it is good to bear the painful, the struggles, the trials and temptations, because we know that when sent from God, these are actually good things leading us to what is truly right and good.
One of the hard parts is to sort out the distortions of good, so that we can actually hold onto the good. For that we need a standard, someone to help us so that we can actually know. I will come back to this.
Love is kind. This is so much more than holding a door open or buying someone a coffee. This is about giving sacrificially to lift up the other. True love like God, does not put themselves first, but seeks the good of the other too.
Paul contrasts this kindness and love with opposite ideas as he says,
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.
We have already talked about these through talking about patience and kindness, but Paul wants to be clear, so that we understand. Love is a grand and beautiful godly patience and kindness that rejoices in the truth.
Love described in this way, is something that we get tastes of in life, something we long for, but something that can sometimes feel far too distant, both in our experience and our ability to practice it. That is because there is a fundamental reality to love that we too often ignore.
As Paul talks about the eternal reality of love and how so many other things, as good as they are will come to an end, he is trying to help us mature and hold onto the lasting thing that it takes a mature heart to see. Take a moment to think about it. What are the lasting things? The things that will stand the test of time? Let me help you out. The only thing that will last is God and the things connected to God. Evil, that will end. Now that death has been repurposed and redeemed, sin is like a snake with its head cut off. Sin is in its death throws making every last ditch effort to grab onto and strangle any it can - I can feel that I don’t know if you can.
As Paul is talking about love, he says right now we see in a mirror dimly. Right now, it can be hard even to see ourselves, or what is truly around us, but soon we will see face to face. We will fully know just as we are fully known. Paul is pointing us to a fundamental reality about love. Love is not a feeling or emotion. Love is not an action, even the most beautiful and profound ones. Love is a person. Love is someone we soon will see face to face. Love is someone who we are getting to know and who fully knows us. As John says, God is love.
All of this longing for love is truly a longing for a more intimate relationship with God the Father - love itself. All of this weakness in our love, is because we aren’t being fed or living out the image of love, who we have met in Jesus. All that difficulty in sorting out what is truly good and lasting, is because we don’t turn to the ever-present love: the Holy Spirit. It is God who binds us in the gravitational pull of love. If we want to know and live in this love, what we need is to know and live in God, just as he longs to live in us. AMEN
