Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, January 30, 2022, at 8:00 & 10 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher
The Greatest of These
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
(Jeremiah 1:4)
“I have been sustained by you ever since I was born; from my mother’s womb you have been my strength.” (Psalm 71:6)
“Love never dies.” (I Corinthians 1:13)
The readings appointed to be read in our churches are on a three-year cycle, so here we are this morning with one of the supreme passages in all of the New Testament, in fact, in all of world literature—a hymn, a theological statement on the subject of love, one that resonates down the ages and touches us closely in our everyday lives. It is often read at weddings, but it should be posted on our refrigerators and, indeed, embedded in our hearts—not just read in church once every three years!
For love is a tough subject, isn’t it? You know, love plays a role in all of the major world religions—from the sutras of Hinduism, to the summary of the law in Judaism to the love lyrics of the Islamic poet Rumi. Rumi typically writes, “All the universe is born of love—but where did this love come from? Love your soul in God’s love, I swear there is no other way.” But nowhere is love as central as it is in Christianity.
God says to Jeremiah as he calls him to be his prophet, that he knew him as he was being formed in the womb. He was rendered holy even before he was born. And the same is so with us, according to the psalmist: ““I have been sustained by you ever since I was born; from my mother’s womb you have been my strength.” If love stretches even to the placenta of our births, surely this confirms and strengthens the message that God is love, loves us, from the first and until the last.
But I said, as you remember, that love is a tough subject. Why? Because not only can it be a challenge to believe that God is love, but the commandment to love as God loves seems far beyond our feeble means.
To call God love can be quite shocking, since many of us have inherited an idea of God as a judge or potentate or stern Father or indifferent unmoved mover or cause of Fate. It is a radical paradigm shift to transform these forbidding and abstract images into a God of gentleness, compassion, understanding and intimate love.
Even more challenging is the belief that we are worthy of such unconditional love. Because we think that what we really, really know about ourselves discounts us, rules us out of the party of love-making that God invites us to. I was thinking of the terrible culture wars that seem to be infecting (yes, infecting, like Coronavirus itself) our public life. We read about people creating havoc on airplanes from refusing to wear masks, of plots to overthrow our presidential election, of corruption so pervasive that our heads spin. And of talk of war, of this juvenile obsession with territorial aggression. Can you believe that we are actually making possible the destruction of the earth over squabbling over Ukraine? I wonder what Andrei thinks of such insanity? Bad enough that we have this tin-pot dictator Vladimir Putin, who can’t resist bearing his bare chest to photographers, pining for a return to the boundaries of the Soviet Union; perhaps as bad, if not worse, that the United States wants to threaten this aggression with deadly weapons that will make all parties lose and lose fatally. When is the world, and that includes us, going to stand up and demand an end to war? It can be done. We just have to do it.
I consider myself a millimeter from being a full-blown pacifist. But I know that there is aggression and animal nature within me. The mob that stormed this Capitol last January were ravenous traitors, all right; but I, too, could be lured into joining a lynch mob. Under certain circumstances, my rage could be aroused to the point where I, too, could do something heinous and illegal and deadly.
Everyone wants to be loved and loves to be loved; but few of us are willing to do the loving. Being loved results in returning it. It is not only a natural consequence of being loved, it is our obligation, our happy obligation to love others as we have been loved.
One way to turn around our pinched attitudes, our reluctance to love under the numerous circumstances when we withhold it, is to consider all those times and places, and all those people who have loved us. I think we will be amazed, in fact, to consider just how much love has come our way. We are children of grace, every single one of us. And this love is not just confined to us human beings.
I recently read the story of a wounded dog, a Doberman named Khan, who after just four days into a new and adopted family with a 17-month-old baby saved that baby’s life by suddenly picking it up by its diaper and tossing it across the yard. At first the bystanders thought the dog was attacking the baby—until they realized the dog took sick very suddenly. Rushing it to the veterinarian they learned he had been bitten by one of the most venomous snakes in the world—the Mulga snake of Australia—and Khan was near death for days as the vets struggled to save its life. Instead of killing the baby, the dog had saved its life, had intervened when he saw the snake approaching the tiny child, and put its own life on the line. As it turned out, the dog lived. And the child too. Love among the animals. This too is love; this too is God present.
I close with a reading of our Epistle, this time the Message Bible translation:
The Way of Love
13 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.
2 If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.
3-7 If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
8-10 Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
11 When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.
12 We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
13 But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.