First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
1 February 2004
Love, Prophecy, and Illusion
Jeremiah 1:4-10
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4: 20-30
Today we have a scripture sandwich to chew on. The bread? Two readings about God's call to Jeremiah and to Jesus to plead God's cause as prophets in an unresponsive world. The filling? What many regard as the prettiest passage St. Paul ever wrote, the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians on the subject of love, a passage that we read a lot at weddings and funerals but not enough, I think, on ordinary days when we are neither passionate nor dead.
I
Let's turn first to the filling—Paul on love. Not love with candy hearts and lace doilies, mind you. For Paul, love is not the way individuals feel about each other, or the comfort of knowing that when life ends, those feelings endure. Rather, it's about the kind of conduct that builds a true community of faith. The love Paul describes is the gift of God that makes all other divine gifts work correctly—that is, for the common good.
Exercised without love, even the best gifts won't help a congregation over the long haul, and may even harm it, as the Corinthians are learning the hard way. So this great passage on love is also just plain old Paul again, chewing out that hapless bunch in Corinth and hammering home his vision of what God really has in mind for people who call themselves a church.
Because love is a gift, you can't force it. But Paul says you can create 'conditions of possibility' for receiving it by acting as if you already have it. You can develop habits and practices of love that train your heart to be responsive to grace. These practices or habits will also serve as necessary counterweights to the strong emotions and showy gifts to which churches are prone to hitch their communal wagons, only to discover later that such things are often short-lived, vanishing as fast as they appear and leaving us—once we've rushed over the cliff's edge in hot pursuit of ephemeral glitz—spinning our wheels like the Road-Runner in mid-air with no traction.
But Christ's love was not a flash in the pan. It was a deed he did and kept on doing even after he was nailed to a cross. In order to build up Christ's Body, then, Paul knows something more is required than occasional brilliance on the part of a few, or the thrill of mere excitement that momentarily animates a congregation. You need everybody to practice—to do love, to act patiently, kindly, humbly, and in fact to rejoice over the good and stop being so rude. Not everyone can move mountains with faith; not everyone preaches like Paul, prophesies like John, dies like Stephen, or fixes heating systems like J. J. Sullivan; but everyone can take a walk on love's "more excellent way," as Paul puts it; everyone can learn to behave.
Of course, even though marriage wasn't the original context of this strong corrective message, what Paul says about community-building love applies as well to married love, be it between Adam and Eve or Adam and Steve (it matters not to me!). So it's no surprise that we hear it so often at weddings, even at weddings that are in a church only because it's traditional to have them there, or because it'll make Gramma happy, or because it's convenient to the reception hall.
It was chosen by a relative of mine for his wedding some years ago, and when he and his now former wife asked me to "say a few words" about it at the ceremony, I did. I said that if their marriage was going to last (since half of all marriages don't), they'd need to cultivate habits that would make them receptive to the gift of love. I said that they could not kid themselves that all they'd ever need for their marriage to keep working right would be the feelings they had for each other that day.
That poor dreamy couple didn't care what I said. They were lost somewhere in Lace Doily Land. The congregation didn't care either. They were fidgety because their children were fidgety, and probably also because I was saying a few words more than the few words I'd been asked to say. But afterwards, the groom's father approached me. He had been listening, and he was offended. "Jeez!" he said. Why did you have to say all that? You'll scare 'em to death!" I felt bad, of course. I had unknowingly transgressed an unwritten understanding about wedding days—namely, that when you're asked to say a few words at a wedding all they want you to do is say, "Ain't love grand?", and sit down.
Anyway, those two aren't married any more, and it's a darn shame, all the pain they caused each other. I wish that text had scared them a lot more than it did. Maybe the time to read it to them was not on their wedding day, but later, when they were having real trouble. It would have made more sense then. What Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 is not for the romantically-besotted. If engaged couples really got it, they would show up to get married in helmets and shin guards.
II
Speaking of shin guards, and of giving offense and being a little over the edge, what do you suppose Jesus was thinking in Nazareth? This episode in the 4th chapter of Luke is often called the 'rejection of Jesus by his townsfolk,' but it looks to me as if Jesus is the one doing the rejecting. His family and friends are still paying him compliments when he interrupts with provocations.
Jesus says to them, "You will doubtless say, 'Doctor, cure yourself...'" Well, in fact up to this point, it hasn't occurred to them to say anything of the sort. But that doesn't stop him from taunting them with two biblical stories in which God extends to outsiders the mercy usually reserved for the chosen people. It's as if Jesus is saying, "I am about to do the same thing. I will extend God's acceptance to people you've been taught that it is righteous to despise. You love me now, but when I start acting like the agent of a welcoming God, you will turn all parochial and nationalistic and xenophobic and ethnocentric. You will lump me in with the people you fear. You will try to domesticate me, and failing that, you will try to kill me. So why should I do the miracles and mercies here among you that I have done elsewhere? I am not going to play the cute small town boy made good and dignify your narrow little world-view with acts of power and grace!"
Jesus picks the fight that eventually erupts. What's going on? It's hard to say for sure, but in this episode at the start of his prophetic career, he reminds me a little of people who suffer what hasn't happened yet, who succumb to what psychologists call anticipatory grief.
Now, far be it from me to play shrink to Jesus, but maybe his baiting of his kinsfolk is part of the same dynamic that made young Jeremiah cast about desperately for a reason to say no to God's call to be a prophet, to build up and to tear down, to plant and destroy. It is that business about tearing down and destroying that made it unlikely that most really good prophets would die peacefully in their beds.
There's no such thing as a happy, successful career based on repeatedly transgressing people's sensibilities, offending the authorities and violating convention. Everybody knew that; and so when God tapped Jeremiah for the job, and he finally ran out of excuses and accepted, that young man knew he was also accepting, if not a death sentence, at least a relentlessly hard and thankless row to hoe.
Jesus knew this too, and there's something in this scene at the synagogue in Nazareth that feels as if he is fast-forwarding to the worst case scenario; rehearsing at the start of his mission for the violence sure to come; trying on the shroud in which he will be buried three short years hence; forcing his home town friends to put it on him, or at least to try, so that he can get a feel for its texture and dimensions, a feel for the role, the pattern of the prophet's often short and terrible life.
III
The way I read them today, I find among these three readings a theme that has something to do with God not letting us have our illusions, and with the violent storms that get kicked up when the stripping of those illusions gets underway. Jeremiah is wrenched from his illusion that you have to be eloquent and mature and brave to be a prophet, to act, to speak and to suffer for God's cause. The Corinthians are chastised for their illusion that being gifted in everything but love is a sufficient basis for a community called 'the Body of Christ.'
Jesus, however, is under no illusions—not about God, not about himself, and not about the self-protective violence human beings are capable of. Perhaps he left all such illusions behind in the wilderness struggle with temptation he underwent before going home to Nazareth. Whatever the case, once at home, he carries out a pre-emptive strike on the locals' hidden illusion. By provoking them, he uncovers (and denounces) their tacit assumption that God is theirs to handle and control, that God is small and local and confined to past deeds and promises, and that there can be nothing new under the sun.
All three readings make it plain that breaking through these illusions to find a life truth, freedom and grace is no picnic. Like it or not, a certain kind of violence seems routinely to attend the process, whether one chooses it voluntarily in the form of communal self-discipline and the construction of new habits, or undergoes it at the hands of others in the form of outright persecution. Whatever the case, the call to discipleship is a difficult, disturbing, unsettling thing.
Doug Theurner is a tall, rangy, boisterous now-retired Episcopal bishop into whose big shoes Gene Robinson notoriously stepped not long ago in the Diocese of New Hampshire. After the ecclesiastical furor about Gene's being openly gay, Doug probably can't say this as much as he used to, but pre-Gene he often remarked how curious it seemed to him that everywhere Jesus and Paul went there'd be a violent revolution, and that everywhere he goes they serve tea.
Believe me, I am not very comfortable talking about a need for upheaval and violence in the Christian life, especially in connection with the gift of God's love. The exploitative yoking of violence and love has a nasty, nasty history. But if we mean business as a community of faith and witness, we have to ponder seriously the connection between the practice of love and its consequences, among them a kind of unavoidable suffering and dislocation—even if all we do about it for now is ask ourselves whether it is simply too quiet around here, and what, in light of these and other scriptures, our smooth tranquility might mean.
At the beginning, I called our texts for today a scripture sandwich. If it is, let's not serve tea with it. Let's pray instead that as we chew on it together, it in turn will chew on us, chews us up, and chew us out if need be, for the gospel's sake and the world's.
© 2004, Mary Luti