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Confirmation 2007

I Corinthians 13
Confirmation Sermon
May 20, 2007

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy
gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all
mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do
not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my
body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
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. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they
will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we
prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child;
when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror,
dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully,
even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and
the greatest of these is love.

One the difficult things about doing a shortened Confirmation program is that you miss
some important things, I think, and one of the most important is something I like to
share with the confirmation classes I’ve taught over the years, usually at the very end
of the process. Usually, I’ve had time to explore the passage we just heard with the
class well before we arrive at this moment, the day of confirmation—we have a chance
to spend some time working with this passage, exploring its meaning, putting it into
some context, trying to get it beyond the usual hearing that it is has been given in the
past, remembering that love is the ultimate ethical and spiritual test of any truth we will
struggle with on this side of eternity. The way we usually hear this passage in the
church is to put it in our marriage rituals—I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this
Scripture at weddings, and I suspect many of you have heard it dozens of more times in
those types of contexts. Yet, I like to remind people of the context of this passage,
which is within an early Christian community in the throes of fighting with each other
about who was smarter or more spiritual, who was right about this or that issue within
that early Christian community. We Christians have a long history of fighting dirty, of
not being good to each other when we disagreed with each other—we have often failed
our own words, our own calls to be kind, and our own calling to love each other,
something which Paul, in one of his better moments, reminds that we are called to do in
this passage we just heard read aloud.

And yet, the thing that they are arguing over with such viciousness in Corinth, in Asia
Minor, was the importance of a gift given to the early church by the Spirit, the God
within, that we will be celebrating next Sunday, on Pentecost Sunday. The final gift of
Christ, which is that gift of himself within us, the gift of God within, is what we celebrate
on Pentecost Sunday—the promise that the presence of the risen Christ would be so
close to us it would be as if God was in the very air we breathe. The Spirit of God, the
breath of God, is now forever within us, so passionate was God’s love for us, so
passionate was God to know and be known by us. And yet, these different gifts given
to us by this God within us, the Holy Spirit, these gifts were the very things tearing the
church at Corinth apart. Paul, in his attempts to respond to a letter the church at
Corinth had written him, Paul sends them this response, this letter in our Bible,
counseling them to bless all of God’s gifts, and to remind them the most important
spiritual gifts were the ones the whole community could benefit from, not the particular
gift that seemed only to be for a few, and for the benefit of the very few in that early
church. And then Paul, in his effort to try to get them to understand the point of
Christian community, he simply reminds them of a better way, a phrase uses at the end
of the chapter right before the famous chapter we just re-heard for the millionth time.
He simply wants them to know that the point of it all, of church, of life together, is to
learn how to love each other when we’re not sure we even like each other.

And, if we had had time in the last few weeks, I would have reminded our confirmands
that love in this passage is not necessarily something we feel, but something we do—
the warm fuzzies, the emotions that sometimes come with love, in life, in romance, in the
first burst of hope when joining a new community of faith—they are gifts, these feelings,
but they aren’t love. Love is when you are asked to be patient when you have every
right to be impatient; it is the choice to be kind when our instincts are to return
unkindness for a hurt done, a slight endured. Love gives way when we’re quite sure
the opposite direction is the best direction, and love believes in people, in community,
and hopes that we can be together despite our best efforts to sabotage the delicate
balance and work of being together. Love, in the face of all of the shadows within us,
and within every place and space that God has created, love sees into the heart of us,
into the very heart of it all, and still despite it all, it says yes to the work of being
together, to work of learning how to love each other. You know, there are some things
that you can learn by yourself, that you must learn by yourself, but there other things
that you can only learn with others—and the work of learning how to love others is
something you learn by choosing to be with others. It is a hard work, and it is not for
the timid, nor for those who are not ready to have their hearts broken by the people of
the church, but it is a work worth doing, this task of learning how to love each other.

Alexa, Mikalya Aaron, Jaime, David, and Maegan, I know what I’ve missed in not sharing
this passage and the ethic of love with you, but I want to make sure that I don’t miss
sharing this truth with you: in the midst of your decision to confirm your baptism and join
this particular church, I just want to remind you of what I think Paul was trying to say
some two thousands years ago. In the end, the reason why God has given God’s self
to us in the Holy Spirit, why God has placed God’s own being in us, and in each of you,
is, first, to learn how to love our selves the way God loves us, but secondly, and
perhaps more importantly, is to learn how to give away that love to others. I mean, love
really is the measure of our lives, and when you get on with your lives, through school
and grades, and sports, and all of it, the question that God will ask each of us, in the
end, is not how much money we made, or whether we finished first in our class, but I
think God will ask each of us the question of how we loved in this world. Love does
what must be done, even when the emotions and the good feelings fail us—it is, as we
talked about a few weeks, it is something we do with each other, more than what we feel
for each other. Love is about learning how to treat each other, and learning how to
teach others how to treat us—with respect, with kindness and gentleness, even in the
midst of gulfs of disagreement and hurt feelings that always arise among human
beings.

So, I wish this for you: I hope that you love well, and I hope that you know that your life
will be measured on how deeply you cared for others, and how you were willing to give
away what God has first given you, which is love. I think, in the end, that is all God
really wants from what God has created, us human beings— to love well, and to love
deeply. And I hope this as well—I hope that in your effort to love well that you will think
of this place, this church or even another fragile, heart-breaking, and beautiful
community of faith, that you will think of the church as a way to learn how to love others
and to love well. There will be more opportunities, in work, in life, in romance, in family,
in which the lessons of love will be learned, and they are all wonderful means by which
God teaches us what must be learned together—but the church is one of the few
places where the work of learning how to love is as intentional, as purposeful, as it is—
most of the other ways we learn how to love are accidental, are places we have
stumbled into or been thrown or born into—family, work, even romance. But to be
here, in the church, is not to accidentally learn how to love—it is to choose to learn how
to live and love with people that are just like you and yet who are very different, people
who are as full of light and shadow as you are, people who are working our their
salvation with fear and trembling, as Paul reminds us in another place in the
Scriptures. You have chosen the church to do this work of learning which the Spirit has
asked all of us to do, which is to love one another. I hope you will spend your life in the
church, this or even another church, and I hope that you will be as patient with the
people next to you in the pew as God has been with you, with me, with all of us in this
place, in our efforts to learn how to love one another. I think the people of this church
will say to you that it has been worth it—that it has been well worth the gamble, this
choice to live and to learn how to love each other with each other in this place. Amen.