“Measure in Love”

I Corinthians 12-13

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

June 30, 2002

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

            The musical RENT is a contemporary version of La Boehme played out on the streets of New York with a group of artists affected by Aids, violence, addiction, and the inability to do their work and still pay the rent.  One of the songs asks, how do you measure a year in a life:  By 525,600 minutes?  By laughter, by strife, by daylights, by sunsets, by midnights, by cups of coffee? All of these come up short says the song.  In the end, all that matters is love.  That’s the only real measure. 

How much love do you have to share?  How much love have you received?  How much love do you need?  How do you find the love you need? 

A love—measure is the only measure that God uses.

            On this pride Sunday, I can’t think of a better scripture to focus on than the beautiful love poem in the 13^th chapter of First Corinthians.  Pride Sunday is all about respecting the right to love one another.  And of course the church needs to be there saying, we respect love and we need to say loudly and clearly that God is interested in respecting love in all its forms and expressions. 

But we haven’t only looked at the 13^th chapter today, have we?  I firmly believe that the Thirteenth Chapter of I Corinthians cannot be understood apart from the twelfth.  Likewise, the twelfth cannot be understood apart from the thirteenth.  We need to have our love grounded in experience.  Even if that experience is clouded by conflict.  That’s what makes love mature.  It’s the ability to make it through the rough places.  So let’s look at Chapters 12 and 13 and see if they shed any light on our experiments with love today.

It upsets Paul that power struggles start happening in the church.  Paul rails against the tendency of church folk to feel that their gift is more important than another’s.  Scholars posit that the issue is speaking in tongues.  We can substitute any gift in there. 

We can substitute marching in a parade, preaching, giving, visiting the sick, intelligence, musicianship, introspection, prayer, faithfulness, prophecy, poverty in spirit, organizing, a liberal out look on the world, a conservative outlook on the world or on faith, and so one and so forth.  Paul is saying that the body of Christ is all of those gifts, all of us using our gifts in this wonderful stew that is the church. 

But it’s hard to do that sometimes.  Sometimes we do get into those power plays.  Sometimes feelings do get hurt.  Sometimes one may feel his or her perspective is not deemed worthy enough.  I am so thankful to my glbt sisters and brothers who have opened my eyes to the places where heterosexism rears its ugly head and makes some of them feel like second class citizens.  Paul says that all gifts have equal weight, which means that all people have equal weight.  If we let one or more of our isms blind us to a brother or sister’s needs, then the whole body is off-balance. And if we are unbalanced as a church, then we are unbalanced as a society.  If one part of our body hurts, then the whole body is compromised. 

We need to lovingly recognize the gifts which we share.  Paul recognizes that, just like us, each person has a different gift.  Each person has a different portion of his or her personality and life, which is necessary for this body of Christ to function.  That means that it is not okay for a hurting person to be outvoted and ignored. 

UBC trades newsletters with a number of like-minded churches.  Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina recently voted to elevate an openly lesbian staff member to co-pastor.  It took a number of months of meetings and soul-searching for the church.  Jack McKinney, the other pastor (a straight white male who took a voluntary cut in pay to facilitate his colleague’s promotion) wrote a newsletter article to the 57 people who voted against the proposal.  He told them how much he appreciated them and told them that it is absolutely essential that Baptists retain the right to dissent from policies and decisions with which they did not agree.  Baptists have long been greatly suspicious of the tyranny of the majority.  He told the 57 that they were very important to the church and that he hoped there could be ministry which they could continue to do despite their disagreements. 

In a community of faith it is vital everyone is heard so that a person’s pain might  be laid on the line so the church family to heal.  Because when one person hurts, we all hurt, because we are members of one another. 

Sadly, many churches have dealt with the problem of a trouble-maker by amputation.  Forgetting that we are all part of the body and that we need each other the hand has said to the foot, “I have no need of you.”  The glbt community has felt that from the church.  And we are here to witness to the fact that this is not the final word. 

            We participate in the pride celebration today in part to celebrate the freedom which we share in this church.  But we also participate because a part of the body is still hurting.  A part of the body of Christ would never step foot in a church because of the evil that has been done to them in the name of Christ.  The church by and large has chosen amputation to deal with the part of the body which bothers them.  And it leaves us all incomplete.  We are there because we know part of the body is hurting.  We are hurting, so we are there to witness to healing and to love.

            There are 1,500 welcoming churches in the US. across denominations.  In the Twin cities, it’s no big deal to find a welcoming and affirming, Reconciled in Christ, Reconciling, Open and Affirming, or More Light congregation.  But across the country there are 300,000 churches.  The ones that have declared themselves Welcoming to the GLBT communities are a very small percentage.  Many people feel amputated from their church as if it has said, “I have no need of you.”

There has to be a better way than amputation.  And that’s what Paul gives us.  Once we say that we can recognize the gifts of each other and not put into place some kind of false hierarchy, Paul says, “I will show you a still more excellent way.”  The more excellent way is the way of love.  The best spiritual gift is the gift of love.  It needs to be the basis for all we do.  Recognizing the different aspects of the body of Christ is the preamble to this wonderful poem about love.  We hear it at weddings all the time.  But it holds particular significance to us right now as we seek to launch our ministry teams which will fulfill our mission as passionate believers and seekers, who seek to live out our faith in the best possible way here at UBC and in the world.  As we look at our future together as a church, we need to look at our differing gifts and at our goal of love as Paul would have it. 

Paul’s poem about love is a poem about growing up, “as a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child, but when I became an adult, I put away childish things.”  Another way to say this would be, “When I was a child, I believed my way was the best way.  I believed that some gifts were better than others.  I believed that we could be a better society if we simply got rid of the bad guys.  That’s why I watched over the stoning of Steven and sought to purge the world of Christian troublemakers.  But I realized that we all need each other. And that God’s love is a force more powerful than my own judgementalism.  When the scales came off of my eyes, I grew up.”  Paul then goes on to say that “Love is patient and kind, not jealous or boastful, it’s not arrogant or rude and it doesn’t insist on its own way.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”  I find myself wanting to remind Paul of this ethic as I read other parts of his writings, because here I think he gets at the crux of life and faith. 

            Love is a gift given to us by God.  It is also a method by which we see God in each other. The more we do acts of love, the more we see God.  Let us seek to embrace love as a method, love as a goal and love as a grounding for all that we do.  For when we do that, then we are a new creation. 

            The presence of love is the best example I know of for God. 

Paul said that the love of Christ is open and free for all people.  The love of Christ is given without restriction. Therefore it is the most powerful force in the world.  It is the most potent weapon against intolerance and bitterness and bigotry.  It is the strength that helps us to carry on.  I always get energized at a Pride parade.  I look forward to seeing people at the booth.  It makes people do a double take.  Baptists?  At Pride?  But then the conversations begin and we tell them how we live out the will of God at UBC.

Doing the will of God gives us energy. 

The commitment to following the right path gives us energy. 

Loving on behalf of others gives us energy. 

And that energy—the love of God alive—is what we as Christians and as the collective Body of Christ are all about. 

It is the work of the church to build up the possibilities in people to see what futures might come, what dreams might still be out there.

What gives us strength, what gives us a sense of purpose, what gives us inspiration, what gives us power is love.

            Love needs to be a decision which you keep making each and every day.  And it is the most potent and powerful force in the world.

            The musical RENT asks the question “How do you measure a year in the life?”  It is made up of 525,600 minutes.  Think of how we spend our time, our days, our lives.  How do we spend our lives?  How do we measure a year in our lives?

            The answer Paul would give, the answer we could all give is to measure it in love.

            So the question comes back to us, if love is the greatest manifestation of God, then how are we measuring that?

            How are we living that?

            How are we showing that?

            If we can answer this, then we know the will God.

            We are not there at the pride parade to grow our church.  We are there to save lives.  With the rate of gay teen suicide seven times higher than other teens, we need to say that God loves us all.  That may save a life or two.

            Thomas Merton’s letter to a young activist grants the following insight:  “Do not depend on the hope of results.  When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on…you have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and achieve no result at all.  As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the truth of the work itself.  Gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people.  In the end it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.” 

            May our lives not be measured by how much money we make,

by how good we look,

by the size of our congregation,

by how many of the right friends we have,

by our relative health or even by the number and variety of ministries we do at UBC. 

May our lives, rather be measured in the love which we share, the love which we exude, the love we embrace and let flow through us.  When we do that, when we live our lives measured by love, we cannot help but do and experience the will and the love of God.

            I hope and pray on this Pride day that we will remember that God loves us.  I hope and pray that we also remember that God loves those who are opposed to us.  The goal of a faithful life is to reestablish community, not to have one side vanquish another.  When we see God in our enemy’s face, then we have taken a step toward love.  Remember love is the only measure God uses.

            How do we measure a year in a life?  How about we measure in love?

            Amen.

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