SERMON FOR JANUARY 30, 2022  I CORINTHIANS 13
     I found an article on today’s second lesson by a former student, who is herself now a New Testament scholar and seminary professor. I was interested to hear what she had to say about this familiar text from Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth. Here is her opening: “1 Corinthians 13. Ah, the ‘Wedding Text.’ How many of us have preached on this text in the context of a wedding, and probably most often for weddings at which we would have rather not presided?” She must have some real horror stories to share. I admit my first wedding was traumatic. The bride was a divorced Roman Catholic, so the couple could not be married in her church, and she was furious about that. Since she couldn’t unload on the refusenik priest, she took it out on me. Even though I was saying “yes,” she kept hearing the church’s “no” in any request I made. The couple blew off appointments with no excuse and no apology. When I finally managed to reach them by phone, Bridezilla didn’t even bother to cover the receiver when she summoned her fiancé to come “get this [word rhyming with ‘witch’] off my back.” My boyfriend at the time was an experienced pastor, who counseled me to wear my clerical collar whenever I met with this couple. “See if that doesn’t make them back off and quit with the snarky remarks about women pastors,” he said. It worked well enough for us to get through the ceremony, which did indeed include “the Wedding Text.”       
     “The irony,” as the New Testament scholar points out, “is that this text has little to do with the love that is associated with marriage.” Paul himself was celibate, an estate he commended, although he recognized that it was a gift, a grace from God, not a lifestyle option for just anyone. In an earlier chapter in this same letter to the Corinthians Paul has the following to say about marriage: “It is well for a man not to touch a woman. But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. . . . I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (1 Corinthians 7:1-2, 8-9). This sounds a very different note from what we read in Genesis 2, where God declares that it is not good that the man should be alone and determines to make him a partner. “So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman for out of Man this one was taken.’ Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (2:21-24). I think of this story as “the Wedding Text,” but rarely in my experience has it won out over I Corinthians 13. What Paul does say directly about marriage would make for a disconcerting if memorable choice — can you imagine a wedding homily on I Corinthians 7:9: “For it is better to marry than to burn”? 
     There are now two questions to consider: Why does Paul feel this way about marriage? And if marriage is not the setting for the love he celebrates in I Corinthians 13, what is?
     In this same letter to the Corinthians, when discussing the resurrection of the dead, Paul confidently asserts, “Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52). The apostle expected to hear that trumpet very soon. He believed that among his contemporaries were some who would live to experience the Lord’s return; their mortal bodies would put on immortality without having to pass through the grave. Much of Paul’s writing is concerned with ordering the lives of the churches he served, but these are not arrangements for the long haul. They are designed to hold people in readiness and advance them in holiness so that they are prepared for the imminent return of Christ. They may still be living in the earthly “now,” but the present form of this world is passing away (1 Corinthians 7:31). They are reaching beyond it, already experiencing the “soon-to-be” of the kingdom of God. And Paul urges them to act accordingly.  “. . . you know what time it is now, the moment for you to wake from sleep,” he writes in his letter to the Romans. “For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provisions for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Romans 13:11-14). If marriage keeps debauchery and licentiousness in check, well and good. It can protect, but it does not save. Indeed, for Paul, marriage, even when advisable, has its drawbacks. Husbands and wives are by necessity anxious about worldly matters, in particular, how to please their spouses. Their interests are divided, while the unmarried need only concern themselves with the affairs of the Lord, so that they may please him by being holy in body and spirit. “He who marries his fiancée does well,” concludes Paul, “and he who refrains from marriage will do better” (1 Corinthians 7:38).
     Paul was a person who had the gift of celibacy. The desire and delight felt by Adam when he beholds the partner God made for him are not part of Paul’s experience. Even an apostle can only speak from what he knows, and Paul knows marriage as an observer, not a participant. My father died two months shy of my parents’ 64th wedding anniversary. In the first week of her widowhood my mother said to me, “I can’t remember a time when your father was not in my life.” She felt desolate and diminished, not freed up for holier pursuits. Her marriage shaped her as a child of God and opened her life to God’s grace in singular ways. This is only to say that Paul offers an important perspective on this matter but not the final word.
     In chapters 12 and 14 of 1 Corinthians, the one immediately preceding and the other following the hymn to love, Paul discusses the variety of gifts the Holy Spirit bestows on the church. He cautions the Corinthians against the competitive attitude that is causing division among them. For anyone to claim preeminence in the community on the basis of the superiority of their gifts is to make those gifts worthless. “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.” The love Paul requires is not a feeling or a state of mind. It shows itself in concrete actions, some deliberately embraced and others just as deliberately rejected. The rather static English translation doesn’t capture the energy conveyed by Paul’s original Greek. Love isn’t just patient and kind; love shows patience and acts with kindness. Love does not take offense or hold a grudge. And this love does not fail or falter or end, because it comes from God. It knits together the various parts of the body, each of us individually and all of us together, as we become Christ’s church. The measure of this love is its capacity to bear tension, anger and disagreement without yielding to division and contempt. God calls us to put it to the test, to follow what Paul describes as the “still more excellent way.” Here again the English translation is not the best. “More excellent than what?” one might ask, when in truth the way of love in the body of Christ is beyond measure. It is beyond comparison. The mean-spirited posturing of the Corinthians, pitting their gifts against those of others and claiming superiority, is part of the present form of this world, which is passing away. We see in a mirror, dimly, says Paul. He did not have a mirror of polished glass; he would have seen himself reflected imperfectly in a shiny surface, perhaps a pool of water or a metal utensil. Clear as our looking glass may be, still we can be caught off guard by our reflection, what it reveals and what it hides. We see through a glass, darkly; still we see. We know in part, and that part is enough to hold us together through conflict and uncertainty. It is enough even now to transform our lives and our world in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, as we we travel together God’s incomparable way of love. Amen.