“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.””
This Epiphany season (technically, the “Sundays after Epiphany”) I’m doing a sermon series called “What is Love”? It’s based mostly on First Corinthians 13, the famous “love is patient, love is kind” passage. The last two will be about the Beatitudes and loving your enemies. The impetus was partly the lectionary: first Corinthians is often the Epistle readings for the season, and lots of my own concern to take back the word from the culture.
The whole section on love is squished into the middle of a section on spiritual gifts and living in Christian community. The church in Corinth is in conflict, as people are jockeying for status and position, arguing that their spiritual gifts make them higher or closer to God in some way. It was what people did in the Roman Empire all the time; it was how their world worked. Powerful people gave status to lower status people who kissed their ring and did them favors. It was a whole culture that ran much like prison gangs or high school cafeterias. Now that they are Christian, where do they stand? Who’s on top? Who do I kiss up to? Who do I push down? How do I assert my position?
As a camp counselor you would see this with some cabins: the first day and a half was social jockeying, establishing in and out groups, using secrets to form boundaries between insiders and outsiders. Then I would take my cabin to morning worship, and see another one in a circle on the lawn having a “talk”. It was the counselor calling them out on the politicking, and forcing them to name it in the open. Rarely did it last once it was named. The popular always seem to want to look like they’re ordinary. Rip off the veil, and they look like ordinary people who are just mean. At Bible camp, of all places, there should be no hierarchy. It should be a safe place for all, where nobody is the loser or the outcast like in school.
Paul encountered exactly this. The first letter to the church in Corinth is essentially a cabin “talk”, where they’re being called out for using this wonderful outpouring of spiritual gifts for social positioning. I have tongues, so I’m better than the one with hospitality etc. They could be forgiven for doing this, because it was second nature. But it isn’t the Gospel.
So Paul gives a lecture first on the different spiritual gifts, chapter 12. They get named, and then he gives this one verse in there that never gets enough traction:
On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.
1 Corinthians 12:22-26
The weaker are indispensable. The inferior are honored more. If one is honored we all rejoice.
That sounds so collectivist. Doesn’t it?
You go through the community and deliberately give more to those who have less, and less to those who have more.
Now you can see why it gets glossed. Shouldn’t those with more be honored more, because, obviously, they are more hard working and deserving? Shouldn’t the inferior be told to clean up their lifestyle habits and quit being so profligate with spending? Doesn’t the presence of superior gifts prove that God is blessing them, that God’s favor proves their superior worth?
So I look around today and see an interesting contrast.
I ride my bike down The Loop, and homeless camps are all over. I’ve had to stop on underpasses to avoid riding over people passed out. I’ve almost hit people stumbling out on the path – who then saw my “live generously” shirt and laughed at it. There was some sort of irony there.
Research shows that the ranks of the homeless are disproportionately veterans dealing with untreated PTSD, people with childhood trauma and abuse, people fleeing domestic violence, people born in poverty. Many opioid addicts started with work injuries and the Vicodin for the back pain turned into an addiction. Yes, there are some who had it good and blew it through drinking too much or recreational drinking or drugs; I’ve met them. But the data doesn’t lie: the hard circumstances of birth and chance have put most where they are. It wasn’t too much Door Dash and video games.
Then I turn to the news and see who is getting elected to congress and getting nominated for positions in the cabinet, and I see behavior that is the worst of every moral vice and personal sin. Serial adulterers, accused rapists, men who blow the family savings on strip clubs and bankrupt businesses, cocaine-fueled parties. Decadence and profligate spending everywhere. and instead of getting the same judgment heaped on them that goes to the homeless, they get lionized for being “real men” who are just “so manly they can’t help themselves”. What was a scandal is now proof of virility and strength. Double standard.
Is it that hard to believe that they are no better or deserving, they just have a huge financial and political cushion to fall back on when their bad choices catch up with them. People dealing with a childhood of abuse and poverty don’t get to just say, “well, I wasn’t a perfect person, but that’s in the past”.
Which brings me back to First Corinthians. Paul’s church had people very wealthy, and very poor. Traders and owners came to the same church as slaves and prostitutes. Then the Holy Spirit comes and the Word of God pours fourth in prophecy and tongues and visions. And the Spirit doesn’t seem to honor wealth and class. Of course those on the world’s bottom of the ladder would be excited to finally have their shot at status. But that’s still not the Gospel.
Not entirely.
The point is that the Spirit is not trying to replace one social hierarchy in Greece with a new hierarchy in the church. It’s that the Spirit is spreading out the wealth and evening the scales by giving more to those who the world deems as less. It’s distributing to the have nots where the haves already have.
This is what the late theologian Gustavo Gutierrez called the “preferential option for the poor”. It’s that God chooses to take a side in the struggles of the poor, and advocates for them. God does not hate the wealthy and powerful. They just don’t particularly need God’s help with money and social problems. And, of course, God is challenging us to ask about the structures of our economy that leave some poor for doing the same things that make others rich and powerful.
The Spirit gives honor to the less honorable, and raises up the inferior. And when the least are raised, we all benefit. It’s one of those paradoxes of Christian faith, that the path forward for the church does not lie in finding the most beautiful, wealthy, and popular and using their status to attract more people (a strategy that many churches employ). It’s to seek out those that the world clothes in less honor, and clothing them with more honor (and sometimes better clothes). It’s to raise up the lowly, and in doing so, the Spirit pours out and the Word of God is shown to the world. The way to more is through those who have less.
It's all rather counter-intuitive to us, but very Biblical.
So this will be our walk this Epiphany – to see what love means in a context of competition, rank, class, and conflict. To see what love means in Christian community and social interaction. And to see again the beauty of a God who is so full of love that the most suffering and clothed with the most from our creator.
Peace,
Pastor Lars