Feb. 3 Notes I Cor 13.

We are a bit ahead of the calendar for Valentine’s Day. This morning we heard a passage that has been used in wedding after wedding, this great hymn to love. It is a hymn of more than pretty sentiments though, as it looks squarely at obstacles to love as well as its manifestation. It sees arrogance in attitude and rudeness in action as real impediments to its life, and perhaps poison that threaten its very life. It is a testament to the sense of community in church that we so easily switched this passage to the intensity of newly married love and can barely conceive it as a message to a church community.

Love often moves toward an exclusive special quality.That’s why Jesus  almost gets lynched after his sermon started so well in Luke.(I must admit that Jesus’s sermon getting a bad reaction has given me some hope at times). Recall that he is doing this sermon for the home folks. Instead of being told how special they are, they hear about the love of God that spreads out beyond the constricted borders of an unsure heart.With their hearts and minds constricted, they are fearful that God will be as stingy as they are; there will not be enough blessings to go around.They cannot bear to hear that others will get blessings as well as them.

Even though we use this chapter for weddings, it is addressed to the church in an aspirational vein for the fractious Corinthian community.This morning let’s just pick two to emphasize in our community here. We don’t emphasize the virtues for living in Christian community or family life, for that matter, nearly enough.After all, the couple is not hearing the words of their wedding sermon, so Sunday may be a better place to dig into the chapter a bit more fully. Let’s start with the very first set of virtues patience and kindness.Paul is about building up the bonds of community. Look at most of what he says as that which supports loving relationships or threatens to undermine them. Both these virtues help produce an environment for love to grow and deepen over time. Here patience is makrothumia, being forebearing, putting up wiht the foibles of another.It has a sense of constancy, of longsuffering( in older translation), of being slow to take offense or seeking revenge. As my mother declined in her oind, my patience was sorely tested. the biggest thing that helped my patience was to stop expecting her to be the woman I knew but to see her as becoming more childlike.

In Greek, kindness is chrestotes, and a number of people must have heard a similar sound to Christ. It had the sense of someone looking out for you, of someone being a good person of integrity, so by extension to do good things for you, perhaps where the walk matches the talk. Kindness is a word that has lost a lot of its punch over the years. I keep coming back to its linkage to the word for kin, or maybe child. How should we treat family and by extension, others, would be kindly.A recent piece in Christian Century took some real care with the notion of kindness.We speak of a kindly disposition and of acts of kindness. People continue to hold on to the idea of random acts of kindness being an antidote to random acts of violence. I enjoyed a recent collection by Pete Hamill and he recalled a bus driver letting him ride on the NJ turnpike for free. Every time he sees a bus, he remembers that act of kindness.Love is the chain that connects and maintains constant acts of patience and kindness.