A nuclear explosion is the result of a high-speed collision between atomic particles. The resulting blast can erase the landscape. But these technologically orchestrated smash-ups are a pale imitation of what happens when God brings together the most powerful entities that exist and allows them to explode within our lives. This sermon arranges and argues for a collision between your people and the greatest forces in the universe: faith, hope and love.
At his retirement, a college professor was asked what he considered the most important contribution of his career. The professor said, "I have spent my career being a traffic officer. Most people who direct traffic are trying to avoid collisions. But I have been trying to arrange them. I have considered it my calling to arrange collisions between the minds of young people and the great truths of our human existence."
Paul was trying to impose that kind of traffic pattern on the anxious, fractious members of the Corinthian church. Their concern over proper beliefs and the distribution of spiritual gifts had left them weary. In chapter 12 Paul used the analogy of a human body to try and get the Corinthians to view charismatic gifts within the proper perspective. But now Paul hastens to add the single most important component necessary for that spiritually-gifted body: the lifeblood of love. Just as the individual organs of the body cannot function without the blood coursing through them, we humans are nothing without love flowing through us.
The organs are all present to aid the blood - the heart to pump it, the kidneys and liver to cleanse it, the lungs to oxygenate it - and the blood in turn nourishes the organs of the body. We are able to survive without some organs. Recent medical science is filled with people surviving with only one kidney, no spleen or gall bladder at all, or without entire lobes of the liver. Even a severely damaged heart valve or muscle can be coped with by the body. But when something goes wrong with our blood, we are in big trouble. Leukemia, sickle-cell disease and the frightening new specter of AIDS are all fought and lost on the battlefield of the blood.
So it is for Paul and love. Emil Brunner's classic discussion of the intersection between the love that Paul so ardently underscores, and the two other "abiding" virtues, faith and hope, still remains an outstanding guide to our understanding. (See Emil Brunner, Faith, Hope, and Love [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956].) Brunner insists that the relationship between faith and love is quite simple for, "...faith is the hand by which we receive love, the way in which we receive God's revelation." In other words "...faith is nothing in itself but the openness of our heart to God's love" (75). For Christians, love is made manifest in our human hearts by Christ's living presence there. Our faith, therefore, becomes our response to the vital, present reality of Christ living in us.
The experience of this indwelling Christ - our faith made possible by God's love - reveals something more to us as well. The very presence of Christ's love and our ability to respond to it makes the partial, piecemeal nature of our experience more evident. Paul does not despair over this condition, however; in fact, it is our ability to recognize this "not yet" quality of our faith which enables the quality of hope to spring forth. Brunner ties faith and hope together by asserting that " . . .faith believes what hope expects. Hope expects what faith believes" (77). Hope holds on because it has faith in the strength and persistence of God's love for us.
Faith and hope thus never stand alone. Paul is calling the Corinthian church to recognize this interrelatedness and learn to live on the reality of a Lovehope Faith. What could the Corinthians expect from cultivating a Lovehope Faith? What should we look for in our own lives to see whether we carry a true Lovehope Faith in our hearts? Lovehope Faith gives us all the necessary tools to deal with the sufferings and the success we meet with in life. It gives us perspective - on how to view those triumphs and tragedies (vv. 9-10); patience - to endure the bad and accept the good graciously (v. 4); purpose - providing us with a reason to want to surmount the setbacks and look for celebrations (v. 7); and passion - for living life through all its blessings and hardships (v. 12).
The universality of Paul's language in 1 Corinthians 13 has not been lost on the present age. Over a year ago Life asked 173 people the question "What is the meaning of life?" The editors of Life have just published the full roster of responses ("from the Dalai Lama to Rosa Parks, from Richard Nixon to George Lucas, from John Updike to Desmond Tutu, from Timothy Leary to Maya Angelou, from poets to scientists to religious leaders to everyday sages on the street") in a book entitled The Meaning of Life (New York: Little, Brown, 1991).
We suggest going to your public library or local bookstore and getting a copy of this in preparation for this sermon. Indeed, your sermon could be nothing more (nor less) than citing how many of these people talk of love as the fount and foundation of meaning in life, and quoting from them.
Among these thoughtful, thought provoking, sometimes amusing answers we find the meaning of life embodied beautifully in Martin E. Marty's response:
What is the meaning of life? Love. To love. To be loved. No surprise there. Philosopher Max Scheler reminds us, and our experience confirms, that before she is the thinking being or the willing being, the human is ens amans - the loving being.
As for God, faith impels people to reserve that name for the first and initial source of meaning. In the Hebrew Scriptures, faith finds God showing "steadfast love." In the New Testament, while love is not God, God is love.
I have no good idea and have never met or read anyone who did, as to why evil in the form of hatred exists to counter love. In the drama between love and hatred, however, I find some unfolding of meaning. In communion with nearly two billion fellow humans identified with his name, I find this dramatic unfolding decisively connected with Jesus Christ. I hope to learn, in his context, that love is stronger than death.
Thus, three italicized words from 1 Corinthians 13 line up in this game of life: "So faith, hope, love abide, these three: but the greatest of these is love." Hence, the meaning of life. Or at least the first hint of a whisper of a clue of finding it.
On the same page, by the way, Father Theodore Hesburgh also quotes 1 Corinthians 13 in his response.
A Lovehope Faith is one of tremendous strength and comfort. Trusting in the abiding nature of a Lovehope Faith may sometimes be our only source of sanity in an insane world.
The 1990 spring thaw in the Sierra National Forest revealed a profound tragedy. On March 1, 1990, Jean and Ken Chaney, while attempting to negotiate a little-used road in those parklands, skidded off into a huge snowbank. With a blizzard swirling around them, the 68 year-old woman and 75 year-old man decided to sit tight. As they waited for help to arrive, the couple began to keep a diary of their actions. Writing by the fading glimmer of their glove compartment light, the Chaneys slowly began to see the fatal truth of their situation - "We began to realize that we were on a road that isn't maintained during the winter. Truly a miracle if anyone comes by...We have no idea what lies ahead...so here we are completely and utterly in God's hand!! What better place to be!!"
During the next week the Chaneys ate Rolaids, a stick of gum, and two of those restaurant packets of jelly. They scraped frost off their car windows for drinking water. But the Chaneys endured those days by singing hymns together, quoting all the Bible verses they could recall, and praying. Still no one came. On March 18 Jean Chaney made the following entry in their diary: "Dad went to the Lord at 7:30 this evening...It was so peaceful I didn't even know he left. The last thing I heard him say was 'Thank the Lord.' I think I'll be with him soon...I can't see. Bye. I love you."
The Chaneys' bodies were not found until May 1, when the spring thaw had finally progressed enough that a forest ranger could make it down the road they had been trapped on for so long. But although the loss of their lives was a human tragedy, the Chaneys did not die alone or in despair. Huddling together in their car, they celebrated their Lovehope Faith with every fiber of their beings, every shred of their strength. They were not complacent about death, but were confident in their faith, hopeful for God's presence, and secure in the knowledge that they were surrounded by God's love. That is the power of a Lovehope Faith.