A sermon preached by The Reverend Sarah Grondin, at St. Jude’s Church, Oakville, Wednesday, September 18, 2024
I speak to you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“Dear friends in Christ, we’ve come together today in the presence of God to witness the marriage of…” wait, sorry, … wrong service! Though it’s in the context of a wedding that we most often hear our passage today from 1 Corinthians.
The words are probably quite familiar to most of us, “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.”
And while that’s a beautiful proclamation of love, that’s not what I want to focus on today. I’d like to draw your attention to the last two verses: “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.”
I have a short poem that I’d like to read you about Faith, Hope and Love.
“Faith walked along down a winding road,
in search of her comrades two.
She happened upon Hope,
Who was looking mighty blue.
Hope said, “I need your help! I seem to have lost Love.”
Faith smiled, and said, “Love comes from God above.
So, Faith and Hope found God’s Love,
and together they went on their way.
Linked arm in arm with Love between them,
today and every day.”
Faith, hope, and love. This passage has always held a special importance for me, because I think it’s easy to forget sometimes that the manifestation of faith, and the lived expression of hope, is love. It’s so important to me, that I actually have Fides, Spes et Caritas tattooed around my right ankle, which is Faith, Hope, and Love in Latin.
Speaking of languages, English can be incredibly frustrating sometimes, because we use one word to mean so many different things, and lack the nuance that many other languages allow their speakers. That is very much the case in our passage from 1 Corinthians today.
The New Testament was originally written in Koine Greek, and since I was partial to the Romans over the Greeks in my classical studies, I’m no Greek scholar. But I can tell you that the Greek word that’s used throughout this passage for love is “agape.”
In fact, in Koine Greek there are 8 different words for love! And each of those words refers to a specific kind of love. So, it’s important to know that we’re talking about “agape” love here. And I’m going to come back to “agape” in a moment.
Since we only have one word for love in English, we tend to use it very sparingly. We keep it locked up for special occasions. Particularly in Western countries, its a word we tend to use only with our immediate families or very close relatives…and even then, some families don't use the word love with each other at all.
Now, maybe it's partly because I’m very rarely willing to allow the status quo to dictate how I choose to relate to others, but I think it's probably more so because of passages like the one today from 1st Corinthians, that I refuse to keep the word love locked up.
I probably tell my kids that I love them multiple times every day. In Greek that would be “storge”, familiar, or family love.
I tell my close friends and other people that are important to me that I love them too. That would be “philia” in Greek, affectionate platonic love. And sometimes that results in questioningly raised eyebrows, because we’re just not used to people outside a very small few telling us they love us.
And quite frankly, I think that's rather sad.
And I think Paul and Jesus would be sad by that state of affairs as well.
But the kind of love that I really strive to exemplify is “agape.” Agape is the kind of love that Jesus talks about over and over again in his ministry. Agape is a universal, unconditional, selfless love for others. It involves being altruistic and caring more for others than for your yourself. Jesus dying on the cross for us is the ultimate example of agape love.
Agape is the covenant love of God for God’s people, as well as the reciprocal love we have for God; and since we love God by loving our neighbour, the term necessarily extends to the love of our fellow human beings as well.
In our passage today Paul is reminding the church at Corinth what agape is really all about. They had forgotten how to love each other well. They had fallen into quarrelling and dissention, they were divided, and they had forgotten that every single one of them was a beloved child of God. They were all recipients of God’s agape, and Paul reinforces that faith and hope must be carried out in love… Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is love.
I’d like to turn now to verse 12, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.” Have you ever been to a Fun House where they have a mirror room? And all the mirrors do crazy things like make you super tall, or super short?
Or maybe you’ve had an extra hot shower before and fogged up the bathroom mirror and then tried to wipe it clean only for it to immediately fog back up again?
In those cases, it’s very obvious that the image we’re seeing reflected back to us is not an accurate representation. Paul is of course not talking about our bathroom mirrors though, he’s talking about the way we see things this side of eternity.
When we look around us everything that we see is distorted. We see the world around us through a series of filters… we see through the eyes of jealousy and envy, we see through the eyes of hatred and fear, we see through the eyes of superiority and entitlement. We don’t see things clearly, as they really are…. As God sees them.
God looks at the world through the eyes of agape. That’s what happens when you take away all those filters that we pile on top of each other, all those distorted ways of seeing.
When God created the world, God looked at everything in it and said it was very good. The shining sun, the flowing rivers, the blossoming trees, the crawlers, the swimmers, the two legged, the four legged, and the flyers. All of it was very good in God’s eyes.
God didn’t look around when Creation was complete and say, “Hmmm… that tree over there looks a little lopsided, or that flower doesn’t smell right, or that person over there looks or sounds too different from the others…” God didn’t even say, “that platypus should really make up it’s mind whether it’s a mammal or not.” God saw that all of it was good. God sees with agape.
So how do we move from seeing dimly to seeing face-to-face? How do we strip away those filters that distort our vision so that we can see things as they really are?
I mentioned earlier that Jesus dying on the cross is the ultimate example of agape love. Jesus freely gave up his life so that we could place our faith and our hope in eternal life. The way that we move from seeing dimly to seeing face-to-face is to put our love there too.
Faith and hope on their own aren’t enough, because without love they’re hollow. Love is what gives them strength, and love is what binds all of Creation together. In a world that is so afraid of showing and expressing love, striving to embody agape love is one of the most counter-cultural things you can do.
Jesus demonstrates not only the ultimate example of agape, but is also God’s agape incarnate. If we want to take off the filters, if we want to try and see clearly, and we want to see face-to-face, we need to look with cross shaped vision.
We need to see our neighbour the way Jesus sees our neighbour. We need to love like Jesus loves…We need to look around at all of Creation and echo God’s affirmation that it is indeed very good.
Love widely and wildly, and refuse to lock up the word love. I love you, your church loves you, and God loves you… each and every one of you. You are all beloved children of God, and I pray that you would feel God’s unconditional love for you deeply, and reflect that agape love outward to all you meet, so you can see face-to-face.
So go raise some eyebrows this week, love your neighbour, love the trees, love the platypus… love all of Creation. “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
Amen.