Agape Love - Sermon for 4th Sunday after Pentecost

Sermon:

Text: 1 Corinthians 13

Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ who loves us to the point of death.

We’ve spent the last two weeks looking at our God given gifts and how we use them, both out in the world, and for the benefit of all in the Body of Christ. God energizes us to care for the world, and calls us to care for the least in the body, teaching us that everyone has an important place, and plays an important role, and we need each person for the body to function.

And this week it’s time for a wedding!! At least that’s what it seems like considering that’s the text we’re reading today. This text is possibly the most recognized text of the whole bible, and certainly the most recognized passage of Paul’s writings. “4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends. … And now Faith, Hope and Love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is Love.”

I’m guessing that we have all heard this text at a wedding at some point, and probably many of you used it for your own weddings. It’s sort of strange to me to look at it in the context it was written though, Paul hasn’t been talking about marriage at all, in fact, only 9 words separate this text from what we were reading last week. 

And those words link that text more fully with our text today. “And I will show you a still more excellent way.” Paul isn’t just randomly starting to talk about love so that we can have a good wedding text. We remember that he is writing to a people who are trying to figure out what it means to be church, and not only that, but they have been saying, well some people don’t have the gifts needed, or that if they do have gifts, their gifts aren’t as important as ours, so we can throw those other people out. That’s why Paul wrote the last chapter to them, hey, stop! You all have gifts, and you are all part of the same body, you are family and you need everyone, do not try to cut people off, but help them when they fear and care for them when they are sick or grieving. Then he ends that passage with those words we just spoke, “And I will show you a still more excellent way.”  

The way of competition and deriding will not work. What is necessary is Love. Even if you have all those gifts we talked about but don’t have Love, what’s the point? You’re a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal. You’re just a distraction and annoying. If you have faith like crazy, enough to move mountains, but you don’t have love, you’re nothing.

If you don’t take to heart that Jesus calls us to reach out to the other through Love, are you Christian?

Sounds like an interesting wedding text then doesn’t it? That’s part of the problem we have when we look at this text, we see love and we think about what our word love means. Romantic caring and desire for another. But, that’s not what this word means. Greek Lesson time. Repeat after me. Agape.    Very good! You know a word of Greek. It’s the word that is most commonly translated as Love in the Bible. But, there are actually 2 other words that the bible uses for Love. And the Greek word for Love as we think of it, Eros, isn’t actually used in the bible at all. I’m not going to go much more in depth on them here, but if you look at your newsletter for this month I wrote a little piece on them there.

But, the word we have in our passage today is not Eros, but Agape, and this word Agape is indeed aptly translated as love, but it’s just not the exact way that we usually think of love. While Eros is a thought word, having lovey dovey thoughts and feelings for someone, Agape is an action word, it means to love and care for someone that you are willing to do anything for them. We are accustomed to thinking of love as a feeling, but that is not necessarily the case with agape love. Agape is love because of what it does, not because of how it feels. God so “loved” (agape) the world that He gave His Son. It did not feel good to God to do that, but it was the loving thing to do. In fact, Paul in this passage tells us what agape means.

 “Love is patient;” when you agape someone you walk with them no matter how long it takes. You don’t abandon them because it takes too long. Agape means loving people who test your patience.

“Love is kind;” Agape means that you respond nicely, when the other may hit you, you respond with more love, you turn the other cheek, to use Jesus’ words. And it means that you may have to love people who are not kind to you.

“Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;” Agape means that you are doing this not to get something in return, you are not doing this because it will add to your prestige or power, you don’t do it so that you can therefore brag or boast about what a great thing you are doing. You love not to get what you want out of someone, but to help them find who they are and see the love of God in their own life.

“6 (love) does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.” Agape means that we seek not to insult or diminish the other by pointing out and using their faults and sins against them, but shows that when forgiveness is asked for and people change their ways we rejoice with them that they have truly seen the love of Christ.

“7 (Love) bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Agape means that we do everything, that we endure everything, believe that anything can happen, all because we love. That enduring, that bearing, that hoping, that believing, that’s the love. It’s not just having warm fuzzies about someone, or saying I love you, but actually putting your actions behind your words and thoughts. If you say you love someone, but don’t do anything to show it, do you love them?

The last element in this parade of love’s activities is the claim that love never ends. Paul names 3 things which are of central value to the church: faith, hope, and love (verse 13). These three form a brief summary of the life of the church. Faith will one day become sight, in the end we will stand together with Christ before God, and hope will end in fulfillment and Christ will show us his hands and his side, and we will know that Christ’s Agape, his love for us, has saved us. But, through all that Love will still remain, because God’s love will not fall, fail, or falter. We are drawn into that love of God, and we are remade by that love so that we become lovers.

That is what Paul calls us to be. As the Body of Christ, using our God given and an energized gifts, called to be Lovers of God, and lovers of each other and the world around us. Giving of ourselves to show that love to the world. Showing the world that Christ’s agape to us found through the cross, leads to our agape of the world and all in it.

Let us pray,

Lord God, your love for us, your agape, of giving your Son to us to die, is more than we can ever reach. Your love for us so completely overshadows our love for you. Help us to respond to your love with our own love, help us to put our actions behind our words of love. Help us to love the world, and have the world see that we do.