Sermon Tone Analysis

Year C

February 1, 1998

 

4th Sunday after Epiphany

RC~/Pres: 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Common Lectionary Readings

Jeremiah 1:4-10

Psalm 71:1-6

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Luke 4:21-30

 

*Love Is Not All You Need*

 

Selected Reading

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

 

Theme

The Christian faith, in its teaching about men and women in marriage, has stressed fidelity and commitment more than it has stressed love.

For Christians, love is the result of commitment rather than its cause.

We would not be able to remain committed in our love were it not for God's grace in enabling us to keep our commitments -  particularly the commitment of marriage.

Introduction to the Readings

Jeremiah 1:4-10

Jeremiah receives his call to be a prophet.

 

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Here is Paul's famous hymn to love.

Luke 4:14-21

            14 And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, and a report concerning him went out through all the surrounding country.

15 And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all.

16 And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the synagogue, as his custom was, on the sabbath day.

And he stood up to read; 17 and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah.

He opened the book and found the place where it was written,

            18 "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

            because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

            and recovering of sight to the blind,

            to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

 

            19 to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."

20 And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.

21 And he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

(RSV)

Luke 4:21-30

Jesus is rejected at his hometown synagogue in Nazareth.

Prayer

Lord, bless us in our families and in our marriages.

Help us to be faithful, committed, and willing to endure even times of unhappiness in order to remain faithful.

In a world in which our affections change quickly, and everything is measured in the short term, give us the gifts we need to be faithful in all our commitments to one another over time.

Amen.

Encountering the Text

While today's beloved epistle, 1 Corinthians 13, is concerned with love in a most unloving congregation, most contemporary Christians probably think of this passage in connection with love and marriage.

It is a great favorite at weddings.

We shall utilize this text in a meditation upon Christian marriage.

While Paul here claims that "the greatest of these is love," we shall argue that love, specifically Christian love, is a gift of God, a disposition that is dependent upon fidelity more than feelings.

While love is great, commitment is even greater, particularly in the context of marriage.

A couple of weeks before the celebration of St. Valentine's Day, we shall think about love and marriage from a peculiarly Christian point of view.

Proclaiming the Text

Paul speaks to us today about love.

You know today's epistle well.

Without love, you are nothing.

With love, you have everything.

Love is even greater than faith or hope.

The greatest of all is love.

Today I'd like to speak about love - love in a Christian context.

I've also got my mind on marriage.

"Why is it," a young person asked me the other day, "that whenever the church says something about love, they always get on the subject of marriage?"

Good question.

His question suggested to me that Christians really don't believe in love outside the context of long-term, public commitment.

In fact, it could be said that we're not as much into love as into commitment.

Recently, I shared in the leadership of a wedding.

My fellow pastor said to the couple during the course of the ritual, "The only thing you need to remember in your marriage is to love one another.

Love overcomes everything.

Only love matters."

Do you believe that is true?

Do you believe, to quote the old Beatles song, "Love is all you need"?

At first glance, that appears to be what  Paul is saying in this beloved song to love in 1 Corinthians 13.

Only love endures.

Love overcomes all things.

Faith, hope, love - these are all wonderful virtues - but the greatest of all is love.

Perhaps because our culture has so twisted and perverted that word love, I think we need to take care in our thoughts about love.

In a couple of weeks, some of us will celebrate St. Valentine's Day, a day surely dreamed up by florists and greeting card manufacturers, in which it appears that romantic love is the cure for everything that ails us.

But any of you who have been in love, in a romantic way, know how notoriously short-lived are our feelings of romantic love.

Part of the joy of romantic love is that it is fragile, coming upon us quickly like a fever, usually burning out with time.

In the wedding in which I recently participated, after the minister had told the couple that all they needed was love, we had an original poem read by the young poet, which told us that all the whole world needed to solve all of its problems was love.

Then we had two songs sung, current hits, which also celebrated the joys of love.

Love, love, love.

Yet, I thought something was missing.

What I think was missing, in this thoroughly contemporary wedding, was God.

Marriage was spoken of exclusively as a purely human achievement, something based upon our efforts to love.

One might get that impression from a text like 1 Corinthians 13.

Paul, who has been begging the feuding Christians at Corinth to get along, now begs them to love one another.

Yet Paul does so in a context of their commitment to Christ.

Love, Christian love, is a sign of our relationship to Christ, not the cause of it.

We love, commitedly, faithfully, because God in Christ has loved us in those ways.

I've sometimes noted how, when one considers how much we talk about love, it is curious that in the traditional wedding services so little is mentioned about love.

There is much talk of commitment, fidelity, being true to promises, but not all that much talk of love.

The minister never asks, "John, do you love Susan?"

In the service the minister asks, "John will you love Susan?" Love is spoken of in the future tense.

Most of the couples we marry probably think they are getting married because they love each other.

Yet, the service suggests that love is the result of our commitment in marriage rather than its cause.

Love is the fruit of marriage.

So in marriage, in the church, in any of our human relationships, we do not believe that love is all we need.

Our love tends to be short-term, fickle, changeable.

What we need is something that keeps us close to people, even when they are difficult, even when we are difficult.

We need something to keep our marriage even when we don't feel like it.

So, we Christians tend to stress things like fidelity and commitment more than we stress love.