Love Behaves

A Sermon Based Upon 1 Corinthians 6: 12-20; 13: 4-7

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Epiphany 2, Year (B),   January 18^th, 2015

“All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything. (1 Cor. 6: 12b NRS)

“All things are lawful for me…”   When you think about this, Paul’s statement is quite remarkable.   It comes from a man who was once very legalistic, who grew up on, was schooled in, and was once completely dedicated to living under the law----God’s law.   This man also believed that the moral and religious laws of God should not only be enforced, but should be forced upon other people by God’s people.   He also believed only the right religion could enforce it, which was, of course, his own religion---his very Jewish faith.   This man, with the Jewish name Saul, once believed that the way to save the world was to save God from the world, and if you are going to save God you will have to hurt people. 

Unfortunately, there are still those who believe like Saul once did.   We hear about it on the news almost every day.   As a country, we have sent thousands of military soldiers and spent billions of dollars trying to try to stop some of these people from hurting us.  Somehow life has inured and radicalized them to believe they too have to save their own version of God by hurting other people who differ or lack their faith. 

Sometimes dedicated, legalistic, religious people like Saul, still believe that God only cares about those who observe God’s own strict rules and commandments.    Sometimes, even Christians mimic that religious form and revert to insisting on and enforcing their own set of rules and laws which hurt more than help.   Most unfortunately, there are still religious zealots in our world, who, even as some Christians have done in the name of Jesus,  have beheaded or burn, or sought to destroy every so-called infidel who does not have their form of “true” religion.   We all now know how dangerous and destructive this kind of narrow-minded, unloving, bigoted, hate-filled form of religion can be.   It is still with us, and it can, and has already, hurt us.

Then, why be religious at all?  Is this lack of tolerance by religious people also part of the reason even the Christian faith is in decline among us?   Will we Christians have to revert to a faith that is enforced by law with the sword?   Or is there anything so radically and dramatically different within Christianity that can save, heal, and help?   If religion of ours or any religion becomes a religion about what we must do to save God, then why believe in a god who needs saving?   Isn’t God supposed to be saving us?   When religious truth becomes so narrow-minded, so ignorant, so unloving, and so full of hate, why believe in anything or any God at all?  

FAITH LEARNS TO BEHAVE WITH LOVE

This question of how faith should behave is more necessary now, than ever.  But it is not a new question, and it’s not just a question about how other religions should behave.  

When the famous Hindu lawyer of the last century,  Mahatma Gandhi, first began search for a religious and moral pattern for resisting the political and social oppression of his day, he greatly admired the teachings of Jesus, especially the ethical patterns found in Jesus’ sermon on the mount.   But while on a train ride in South Africa, as Gandhi first encountered people who claimed to be Christian, they treated him with as much selfishness, prejudice and snobbery as he had encountered elsewhere in the world.  He is famously remembered for saying, “I like Your Christ, but I do not like Your Christians”.  Because of so-called Christians, Gandhi became convinced that he should not, need not, and could not convert.   Gandhi’s resistance should remind us what Paul also knew, that without love, without love being put into practice in any faith, even the Christian faith, faith, no matter how true, will still mean nothing (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi).

As Paul wrote this letter to instruct Christians on how they should behave by putting love into practice, it is important to realize that he was encouraging them to put love into practice among themselves, before they would ever dare to take Jesus’ message of love into the world.   When Paul describes this priority of Christian love in chapter 13, verses 4-7, he uses 15 verbs--- action words, not nouns.   These are words that show us what we should or should not do, not words that simply tell us who we are.   There is a big difference.  Paul means that we can’t be loving, or say we are loving Christians, until we do and show love to each other.  That’s Paul’s point.   

But how do we do and behave in loving ways?   If you consider all these 15 action words, you will also note that seven of them are used to encourage positive behaviors in the faith community.   More interesting is that eight of the 15, a majority of them are verbs used to discourage negative actions or damaging behaviors.   Paul’s point seems to be that without having enough love in us to overcome the negative within us, we cannot create a Christian community who reveals and shares God’s love.   When love behaves, it is just as important to realize what we shouldn’t do, when learning to behave like Jesus.   

Behaving and being like Jesus?   That’s a tall order isn’t it?   How can we do that?   It is certainly not something we can take for granted because who knows precisely, or can do exactly as Jesus did.   Besides, what Jesus did, in his own life and death on the cross, was a once and for all sacrifice that cannot and needs not be repeated.    But how Jesus lived, how he lived and the actions he took to share and reveal God’s love as he bore his cross, and how Jesus also called his disciples to also to daily bear their own cross--- a cross which also calls us to live by a new commandment to love one another, can be, and must be repeated and revealed in us.  

LOVE THAT BEHAVES IS A “RECEIVED” LOVE

This kind of active, Christ-like, loving behavior Paul describes is not a love Paul is idealizing or theorizing about .  Paul is repeating and revealing to us what he also received and experienced as love from Jesus himself.   

On the Damascus road, Paul was arrested by love, yes I said arrested, he was not arrested by the law, but arrested by the spirit of Jesus, who confronted him for his wrongdoing (murdering Christians).  But it was how he was confronted and how he was challenged by Jesus’ love that is most remarkable.   If you read Acts 9 closely, you will see that Paul was not struck down by lightning or given death sentence for those murders.   Rather, Paul was struck by the light of God’s grace and was given a new life sentence.  You might not see the difference, but I’ve preached to prisoners in prison and they see it.   It was only through the firm, but loving resurrected Jesus and the acts of his followers, that Paul was changed and challenged by God’s patience and kindness.  Through the power of forgiveness and love he was rehabilitated and re-commissioned to serve a life sentence of sharing God’s love with the world, rather than trying to save it with a religion of hate. 

Don’t miss what is being changed and challenged in Paul.   It is exactly his own hate and judgment of other people based on his own religious, legalistic, and self-pious viewpoint that was confronted by Jesus Christ on the Damascus road.   It was not Judaism or anyone’s religion or lack of it that was being judged, but Paul’s own view of Judaism and his view of unbelievers.   Paul was not a hardened criminal being let off the hook, or being released without taking responsibility for his actions, but Paul is a sinner, a sinner like everyone else, and he is being shown the kindness of forgiveness, while he was also being patiently challenged and changed by God’s love and grace to live a new life, to behave a new way, and to answer a new calling for going on a mission of love, not hate.  

These details in Paul’s conversion story are essential to understanding what writes.   How Paul describes love in this well-known text is nothing less than the loving and forgiving response Paul himself received from Jesus on the road he took to hate and kill.   When Paul says love is patient and love is kind, this is how God was with him.  Even though Paul was a religious, legalistic, sinner, who was primarily against any other viewpoint; even though he was intent on murdering those who preached love; even while Paul a sinner like this: hostile, hating, snobby, stuck up, and stuck on himself, Jesus died for him and did for Paul, what Paul was not doing for anyone else, not even allowing for himself.  

When you encounter love like this, and you are suddenly struck by the light of this kind of unconditional, redeeming, reconciling love, you will also be changed from having a religion that carries out laws to trusting in a faith that gives people grace.   The experience of such extravagant love will cause you to seriously reflect upon and realize the kinds of behaviors that a Christ-follower should have, and should not have.   When the fullness of God’s love shines into your life,  you will want to be patient and kind with others, even if it kills you.    And this is exactly what a Christian discipline and ethic calls for, doesn’t it?   We are to lose ourselves, even sacrificing our feelings and our own opinions, for the sake of showing a love that is a new kind of patience and kindness given to others---even when they are in the wrong. 

LOVE REVEALED BY WHAT WE DON’T DO

Paul makes this point very clear when he says love does not rejoice in wrong doing, but rejoices in the truth  (13.6).   Love behaves patiently and kindly, even when it saddened by wrong.  But it will respond to wrong, but it will respond to wrong in a loving way,    

To understand how love should respond, especially when others are wrong, or when we believe we are in the right, is not always easy to answer.   That’s why we always need love.  This became classically expressed in a disagreement between two brothers in 1932, not long before America entered the war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.   These two brothers, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr were German-America citizens and also well-known teachers of religion, who disagreed over how America should respond to the evil of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.   Reinhold argued for a desirable military response, believing that the most loving response was to take up arms and attempt to aid China in fighting the Japanese threat.   H. Richard Niebuhr, on the other hand, called for restraint, and for, at least a temporary, prayerful and patient ‘grace of doing nothing’.   When theologians and historians now look back on this historic debate, they don’t see a clear winner or loser, but take good points from both sides.   They also see that whatever response we have to wrong, it needs to be accompanied by patience, kindness and hope (See James Wm. McClendon, Jr., in Ethics,  Abingdon Press,  1986, p. 319).

In this description of how love should behave, Paul also gives two sides to love.  Paul says that love can be found in ‘the grace of doing nothing’.   This means  that sometimes love is  best expressed in what we don’t do or refuse to do.   In Paul’s own description of love, he spells out 8 very negative behaviors that we must resist, negate, and overcome, if we want to behave like Jesus and become a more loving church community.   Most interestingly, is  that Paul is probably listing his own negative behaviors he had before Jesus.  Paul says:  Love is not jealous, like he was once jealous over Christians.   Love is not boastful, as Paul was once boasting about how many Christ-followers he had killed.  Love is not arrogant, rude, insistent, irritable or resentful, as when Paul claimed that only he was in the right and spent all his energy proving how everyone else was wrong.   

These are very bad human behaviors, which Paul had to wrestle within himself, because they are behaviors we all have to wrestle with.  These are feelings and actions Paul had to negate or overcome to be a part of a loving community.   Understanding that Paul was once a ‘chief of sinners’, as he called it, meant he was an unfortunate authority on religious hate, which is a pertinent description for us to consider in this time of rising religious hatred in the world.

If we want to be Christian, and if we want to be like Jesus; if we want to show that only a God who is love can save us all, we too will have to learn to change and challenge our own negative behavior too.   Paul could not participate in God’s call for his life, in his calling for the world, nor could he find a loving community in the world, until he realized that faith us to love.   We cannot discover God’s call or blessing (for ministry or life) until we learn from Jesus want it means to behave with patience, kindness and love toward each other. 

LOVE REVEALED IN WHAT WE DO

Not being negative can be very positive, especially when it comes to living with and loving those not like us.   When we don’t hold on to our negative behaviors, there is something greatly positive that love can and must do.    We not only learn how to not to rejoice with wrongdoing, he says, but we can also learn to rejoice with the truth.   

How does love learn to rejoice in the truth?  Can we do that too?  Can we behave lovely in our rejoicing in the moral truth God reveals to us?   “It is time for judgment”  Peter once said, but judgment, is  to begin with the household of God?”  (1 Peter 4.17).  Peter and Paul agreed that if moral judgment is done by the church, or by any church, it is only to be done in the church and for the church, and it is only to be for those who also bear the name brother or sister to each other (5.11).   When it comes to moral questions, moral pronouncements, or even making difficult moral judgments, Christian morality can only be answered or declared in a context of people who care about each other and care about showing and sharing Christ’s love.

Most of the time, when it comes to any kind of immorality taking place within the church, a separation or dissociation happens naturally, as darkness cannot bear being into the light.   Rarely, in an open and free society,  where the pulpit is free and church attendance is voluntary,  must we physically separate from each other, even if we disagree with each other.   Paul only recommended separation at Corinth, because the immorality in the church community was clearly open, clearly public and such an indecent kind of immorality even pagans did not normally put up with it (5.1).  Instead of dealing with, or being ashamed of it, some in the church at Corinth had become arrogant and strangely proud, instead of grieving over or being offended enough to oppose openly immoral behavior.   Because it was like a moral cancer to the whole body, which Paul saw as a leaven threatening to ruin the whole batch, it needed to be decisively dealt with.    

There is a time when a church must respond positively to immorality within its own spiritual family so that it can protect its witness to the world.   Sometimes the church body must act, but when it acts, it must still acts with love and overwhelming agreement, so that our unity, our mission and our morality of love is not damaged.    We can only do this as a family and we can never do this to condemn, but to release, as Paul says, to hand over a person, so that eventually, “their spirit may be saved.”   Such a painful surgical procedure can only be done when a spirit of love permeates the body, and there is a unifying trust in God’s irresistible and undefeatable reconciling purpose.

What I find even more fascinating about showing love, is how Paul tells the Corinthians that they, nor he, have any kind of calling to deal with the immorality of the world or among unbelievers.   When Paul told the Corinthians “not to associate with sexually immoral persons” (5.9), he clarifies that he does not at all mean removing themselves from the immoral of the world.   With tongue in cheek, he says that if they ever really tried to disassociate from this immoral world, it would mean they would have to go out of the world (5.10).   How could they ever answer Jesus’ Great Commission to go into the world, if being church means we have absolutely no association with immoral, worldly, persons?   “What have I to do with judgment outside?”   Paul asks. “Is it not those who are inside that you are to judge  (5.12).  

But who is outside and who is inside?  Do we have to always answer this?   Paul said it only has to be answered when the immorality becomes a threat to the integrity of the body.   This seems to be the point Paul makes when he says,  “All things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial… to the body, he means.   All things are lawful for me, but I will not let (my body) nor (Christ’s body) be dominated by anything.  It doesn’t matter whether the issue is food or fornication, immoral sex or an immoral spirituality, or any other sin or any other shortcoming, there is to be only one Lord over the church.   When something else, or someone else tries to dominate the church, then it is up to the church leadership to lead the church back under the only lordship worth having,  the lordship of Jesus Christ, who only dominates us with his love.  

Recently, CBS Morning News covered a story of one of the fastest growing global Christian faith movements, especially among youth, that was now in New York as it is in the world.  It interviewed two of the main preachers of Hillsong Church and they spoke about how they preached the gospel truth at their church meetings, which also included the twin biblical messages that life is sacred and that marriage is only to be between a male and female.   I found it very interesting how one knee-holed jean, leather wearing, tattoo stamped preacher answered: “In our church we call it like the Bible says it.  But we don’t force the truth on anyone and we respect everybody’s right to their own decisions and viewpoints.  While we call it like we see it, we let the chips fall where they may.” 

Can we understand today what Paul means when he says, love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth?  We can only understand this when we also understand this kind of love when our love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and enduring all things.   Only when trust in the power the truth of love,  will we behave with love, both for the sake our body, and for the sake of His body—the church.    When you realize your life is not your own anymore, that you are bought and paid so that you don’t have to be a slave to sin or the world, you can live to glorify God and behave as Christ’s body of love in the world.  Amen.