Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

Love is Eternal Rev. Chandler Stokes I Corinthians 13 The First Sunday in Lent February 14, 2016 Scripture Introduction: THE BAPTISMAL CORD is a metaphor that we will keep before us throughout Lent. This is the image:

In baptism it is as if a slender cord, so slender as to not even be seen—has been tied around our waists. And the risen Christ is at the other end of that slender cord, ever so gently, but insistently and continually pulling us forward, guiding us to who and where we were created to be, pulling us through the tumultuous waters toward our Easter destination.1

That is THE BAPTISMAL CORD that we will continue to explore throughout Lent.

Our text for today is one we know well, although we don’t usually hear it on Sunday morning. We hear it most often at weddings. Nevertheless, it wasn’t written to a couple about to get married. 1 Corinthians was written to a congregation, a community struggling through its conflicts and challenges. Listen.

Scripture Reading: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 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 have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; 5 it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; 10 but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. 13 So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

* * *

When I told Dave about the image of THE BAPTISMAL CORD he reminded me that in many places in the world, when you need to cross a river and there’s no boat, no bridge, and no ferry, they draw you across by a rope. On Ash Wednesday the bulletin cover photo was of a single soul being pulled across the river by a rope; this morning we have more of team approach to getting a soul to safety by that cord, of a community living out the sacrament of baptism. But the picture is essentially the same: when there’s no boat, no bridge, no ferry, and you are in the turbulent stream, you are drawn across by a cord.

1 Doug King, unpublished paper for the Moveable Feast—Austin, Texas: 2016, edited for context.

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As we explore this image more deeply, what’s on the other side of the turbulent waters? What’s over there? What about that far shore?

In today’s text when Paul refers to it, he says, “…when the perfect comes….; now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully….” Then … It’s Paul’s “then” that describes the far shore.

The seventy-five cent word for what I’m talking about is “eschatology”—literally, study of last things, not to be confused with “scatology”—the study of feces.

Eschatology: You probably know that clergy sometimes, when people know we are clergy, feel trapped on an airplane. They just don’t want to hear the four thousandth version of “I used to go to church, but…” Or, “My sister isn’t a Christian anymore. She’s a Presbyterian. How can I convert her?” So, rather than confessing that we are clergy, when asked what we do, sometimes we make things up. My favorite is: “I’m an eschatologist.” End of conversation. And it’s not lying: ends some things.

Eschatology: Eschatology is language about that far shore. And on Ash Wednesday we talked about that shore, that end of the journey, as our Easter destination. There are many Biblical metaphors for it. Some of them are spatial: they refer to the promised land or heaven. Some are more temporal, as Paul’s is here, with his “then.” But it is invariably a place or a time of the ultimate fulfillment of God’s purposes and hopes. Paul calls it when the perfect has come, when we will see face to face and understand fully. Later in this letter, he says it will be when God is all in all.2 It is completeness, fulfillment.

If the tumultuous river through which we are drawn, is all about the ravages of time, then there is something about that far shore that is eternal. Just as we imagine the risen Christ at the other end of that cord, the life we are drawn to is resurrection life, eternal life. That’s the far shore.

But, if anything is clear about now, about this time, while we are still in this life, it is that we are not there. We are still in the big muddy. Paul is sometimes translated as saying, we see “through a glass darkly” or sometimes “in a mirror dimly”—either way, that describes our current state. Things are not complete or finished or whole or utterly fulfilled. They are murky, muddy, tangled up in the filth. That’s our now: we are still in the filthy waters: of hateful speech and people without homes, of violence and conflict—even in places very close to home; struggles at work, in relationships, with our fears and addictions. We are in it.

We are baptized into a course that goes across such currents. It’s not a course downstream with all the flotsam. It is across the current. There is a direction, a destination across the river. The shore is over yonder, across the currents of inhumanity. And we are in the river. We are in it.

Wait a second, Chandler: it’s Valentine’s Day, we’re reading 1 Corinthians 13, and you’re talking about this? Dude, you have no sense of occasion whatsoever.

But… there is this cord. There is this gift of baptism. While still in the river, still in … it, still in the struggle for holy and beautiful life, this cord ties us to another reality. While still in the river, we also share in something of that “over yonder.” We can be graced to live a life now that tastes of then, that tastes of life on

2 1 Corinthians 15:28.

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the beautiful shore. Our lives may echo or reflect that resurrection destination, that eschatological reality, which we call eternal life, while still in… it.

Tom Long once told a story about a man he saw carrying his wife across the threshold. Tom was just driving by when he glimpsed this homecoming, maybe from the wedding, maybe on the greatest day of their lives. At first glance it looked like they were taking the final step into their promised land—and it didn’t seem like any arduous journey through the tumultuous waters. It was just happy love, his carrying her across the threshold. But the traffic stopped, and he had a second look. They were both quite gray, much older than first seemed. And then he saw the wheelchair, from which he had clearly just lifted her. This wasn’t a first happy step across the threshold. It was perhaps the thousandth, arduous step.

Political scientist, Anne-Marie Slaughter, saw something of the same in an older couple she once knew. She said:

Every time I visit 91-year-old Jack, he mentions Frances as soon I sit down. “We were a match made in heaven,” he tells me. She's been gone more than three years now, but his eyes light up when he mentions her name. Jack and Frances happened to sit next to each other at their fiftieth high school reunion. They were both widowed, and unexpectedly found new love later in life. They were married seventeen years. I remember Frances as our curmudgeonly church organist, who volunteered for more than fifty years. She did not like to play new hymns and her first response to any change in the church was “No.” But Jack knew a different side of her, and he adored her. When Frances developed Alzheimer's, he cared for her at home with steadfast devotion. He would drive her around all afternoon because it seemed to soothe her. “I want to go home,” she would say, over and over again, and when they pulled into the driveway of the home she had lived in for decades, she would protest, “No, I want to go home.” So he would back out and drive around a bit more.3

Writer, Lara Dotson-Renta, describes how her neighbor cares for his wife of more than fifty years as she slowly slips toward death in the ravages of time:

I see the sparkle in his eye when he looks at her still, and it is both heartbreaking and inspiring. There is no measuring, no holding back, no keeping score or negotiating there. There is no use for pretense at this place in the journey, and he is all here, all in, with her ... Getting married is easy. Loving anyone this way, for this long, is hard and messy, miraculous and graceful.4

My colleague, Leanne Reed, who told me these stories, adds to this image. “Parenting offers its own teaching on the practice of love,” she says. Then she paints one last clarifying picture of life attached to that cord, while we are still in … it.

She quotes Omid Safi, the Director of the Islamic Studies Center at Duke University, who wryly describes the lesson he learned from his infant daughter’s diaper. He says, “I call it the spirituality of [poop].” [I’ve 3 Lillian Cunningham, “Nurses, fathers, teachers, mothers. Why do we devalue someone the minute they care for others?” The Washington Post, October 21, 2015.

4 Lara Dotson-Renta, “Living Through Death: Love at the End of Marriage,” November 1, 2015, www.onbeing.org/blog/living-through-death-love-at-the-end-of-marriage/7989.

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edited this for the pulpit. But this is where eschatology meets scatology.] He recalled the runny, stinky, smelly poop that was constantly leaking out of his daughter's diaper, riding up her back, requiring marathon diaper changing sessions involving multiple, multiple baby wipes.

Yet I noticed something amazing, [he said]. There was no resentment towards my child, not even disgust. The poop was still nasty ... but to put it simply, I loved my daughter more than I hated the poop. I had found ... a love stronger than [poop].

It was the lesson of a lifetime: Love is stronger than hate. Love overcomes disgust. Love is stronger than [poop]. It's because love is of God, love is from God, love leads to God, and love carries God's fragrance. To put it in the words of both the Bible and Muslim mystics, love is God.

In the old days, when a person wanted to join Rumi's community of mystics, they would be sent to clean the toilets. Literally, they had to clean up other people's feces. There is great wisdom in this: unless we are willing to love one another, and ourselves, with a love stronger than [poop], we are not ready to be transformed.

Real spiritual transformation has to involve a willingness to serve. It is not simply about accumulating spiritual experiences, getting high on the spirit. Real life of the spirit is not about a personal, consumerist experiential gratification. It's about the willingness to love and serve—to clean up other people's [filth], to clean up our own. Clean and polish, clean and polish, till we find a love stronger than [poop].

One of the strands of the cord, perhaps the greatest of these, is love. Love that trims toenails. Love that changes diapers. Love that reaches its hand, you know how parents do this automatically—love that reaches out to catch the throw-up.

And the thing is: it’s eternal. That very fleshly, human love is the stuff of deepest fulfillment. There’s no boat, no bridge, no ferry. We just go through the ravages of time. We are drawn through them. In 1 Corinthians, Paul is describing a love that is real, present, and performed. Yet people who offer this kind of love are not heroic; they are simply participants in the life of Christ, held by that cord. That’s the reality of the love we humans offer. The human element is caught in this larger, divine element: it’s not just God behind love, commanding it; it’s God in it. In the love.5

It’s miraculously living connected to the other side, tied to that beautiful shore, while yet in the midst of the muddy, mucky, filthy river.

Take just one of Paul’s small threads in the strand of the cord: Love is patient, and so we are called to be patient. But patience is an eschatological practice: life on that far shore. Patience, in my experience, is demanding of everything in the moment. So, maybe to love in that way is somehow heroic. It’s not small. That’s for certain. Patience is not small; it’s soaring. It matters, deeply. And this tangible, real love—like patience—is the stuff of the divine, of the eternal.

5 This was part of the conversation at the Moveable Feast 2016: Austin, Texas. I’m not sure who said this. It could have been our scholar in residence, Ted Smith, of Candler School of Theology.

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As love is patient and kind, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things—as love is these things, the moment when we choose patience is eternal—and God is glimpsed in such patience.6

“Be good when you can…” It doesn’t sound as weighty as “take up your cross,” but it is just as eternal, just as full of divine grace.7

May we all feel the hold and the pull of that cord across the current and find the grace to be patient and kind, to bear, believe, hope, and endure. It is the stuff of eternal life, even in the midst of the dirty river.

Let the people say, Amen.

6 Rev. Tom Are, comment at the Moveable Feast 2016: Austin, Texas.

7 Ibid.