There are some Bible readings that are hard to follow because they are just plain unfamiliar. “If a man loudly blesses his neighbor early in the morning, it will be taken as a curse” [Proverbs 27:14] - that sounds true, but it’s not a verse we hear very often! But there are other verses that are hard to listen to because we’ve heard them so often. A major contender in this class would have to be the so-called “Love Chapter” of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. If you have been to a wedding in the last decade, you have probably heard this lesson. If you have been to twenty weddings in the last decade, perhaps you can recite it from memory! In fact, this is the serial text for American nuptials today. Not even I hold out much hope that those in the wedding party really listen to what Paul has to say, as they shift uncomfortably in those plastic iron maidens called rental shoes.

In fact, the love spoken of here is just not easy for newlyweds to cultivate at home! I have taken the liberty of creating a Dave Rochford transliteration of the “Love Chapter” especially for weddings, factoring what it might mean to a new marriage: “If I become a senior manager, if I parent like Sheriff Andy Taylor, and have the faith of Mother Teresa, but do not consistently show perfect love to my spouse, I am a whopping failure. Love is always patient - so I will never stare at my watch when she is not ready to go, and I am. Love is always kind, so I will credit him with trying heroically to please me, even when his homecoming greeting is ‘Did they pick up the trash today?’ Love is never irritable or grouchy, and I’ll remember that every minute we’re on vacation. Love will never insist on its own way, period. Oh, and by the way, this love never ends, period. Love believes all things when he says he’ll get to it this weekend for sure, and endures all things when her credit card statement involves the terrible, four-digits-with-a-comma. Now go in faith, hope and love, ...but are y’all still sure you want to tackle this?” So far, I have not yet used this rendition, and if I ever do, I don’t expect to do a lot more weddings.

As you might suspect, Paul does not really have marriage in mind when he writes. He in concerned with the nature and purpose of Christian life together - what some of us call “Church.” When Paul mentions “speaking in the tongues of mortals and of angels,” he is referring to that obsessive Corinthian habit of ecstatic speech, or speaking in tongues. When he mentions “understanding all mysteries and all knowledge,” he is alluding to Corinthian smugness about worldly wisdom. The “still more excellent way” he shows to the churches of Corinth is in fact a remedial lesson on what are the ligaments that bind together the members of the Body of Christ. Paul is poetic, but he is also very clear - this is a whole new way to love. So he uses a very rare Greek word that we translate simply as “love”: agape, a self-giving, self-sacrificing love that does not count the cost, but finds its meaning in giving itself away.

But here’s the problem: most of us find Paul’s words to be beautiful, even inspiring - but we cannot imagine what it would be like to know love like that. The letters of John tell us that God is love, and we all rejoice when love touches our lives, but for most if not all of us, love has also brought disappointment, pain, frustration with others (and with ourselves), and sometimes, love has seemingly brought out the worst in us. Sure John, God is love. But if we have no direct experience of pure love, true agape, then how can we really know who God is, what God is like? And if millions of faithful people for thousands of years are and have been right, a pretty big part of our purpose is to come to know God, to know what God is like.

Paul acknowledges this dilemma - that we do not fully know the God who fully knows us. In the somewhat mysterious end of the passage he speaks of growing from childhood into adulthood, from ‘knowing in part’ to ‘knowing completely’. His image of ‘seeing in a mirror darkly’ seems clumsy, unless we remember that for people in ancient times, mirrors were made of polished silver or bronze, were more of a novelty item, presenting only a hazy approximation of what you looked like. We just don’t see God all that clearly on our own, Paul is saying.

For millions in our time, including a great many found in church on Sunday, God does appear in a mirror darkly. Certain aspects of deity, like omnipotence (all-powerful) or omniscience (all-seeing), we sort of understand these - but we do so in a way in that makes them basically incomprehensible. Immortal, invisible, God only wise - we don’t know anyone like that. We can believe God is like that...but that is not really coming to know God in an intimate, personal way. It is still seeing the image of God from a very remote place, darkly.

But there are other ways of coming to understand God, available to us as a species. Some find the awesome handiwork of the Creator in a sunset or a mountain range, others the brilliance of the Divine Mind in the atomic order of the universe. But this knowledge is fragile when an earthquake shakes the earth, or when cancer runs amok in our body. These may be times we see in the mirror darkly. Others find God in their fellow human beings, or in a dream for a nation or a society. But with murder and war coming at us on the news almost continually, this too ends up like peering into cloudy glass. And like most Bible junkies, I am sympathetic with those who discover more about God in the Bible, who come to know more of God in the poetry of the Psalms or in dialogue with the prophets. But all too often, dare we admit it, the image we are left with by some Bible passages is one of a tribal champion, a fierce little deity who seems to flit between fondness and wrath, parental concern and vengeful payback, a menacing person with bipolar personality disorder. Were God to be known only by the pages of the Bible, some people might feel that they are staring into a murky portal indeed.

Thus the dilemma. We desire to put away childish ways and to own our part of relationship, but God is God and we...are not. And I, for one, seldom find friends in those who are completely unlike me. How do you reach out to a fallen race, to a people who have learned habitually to use their freedom to love to love only conditionally and very selectively, their ability to make a living as the opportunity to make a killing? God needed a radical new way of knowing and being known.

And you know who he was, who he is. We must know. If we are struggling to get by on a diet of sunsets or friendships or even Scripture, we must not forget the One by whom, in whom, we are fully known, face to face, in our pain, in our weakness, and in our awful temptation to live and let die. “What is truth,” Pilate asked him, with tragic irony. The Truth made no answer, for he, truth in the flesh, was unknown to many. He walked among them. Still they saw in a mirror darkly.

A few years ago many saw a movie called The Passion of the Christ. You may recall it was a rather overwhelming portrait of the last twelve hours before the Crucifixion. In the film, as the Truth is driven through the street before a jeering mob, his naked back lacerated, his face set toward a hideous destination, one young Roman looks with growing alarm upon the subject of his crucifixion detail. The soldier does his duty, but it is becoming clear to him as they drive the prisoner to the cross that this man is going willingly, he is straining to do it, summoning every human ounce of strength and grit to go that terrible distance.

What is love, you ask? You know his name. Jesus is patient and kind. Jesus is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Jesus does not insist on his own way, but rejoices in the right way. Jesus bore all things, endured all things, so that you may hope all things. And Jesus never did, never has, never will, come to an end.

As for sermons, they will come to an end. As for committees and budgets and missions, they will pass; as for Sunday mornings, they too will cease. But on that Day the greatest of these will be there, and of his love there is no end.

For now we know only in part…but the part we know is enough. Don’t you think?

Thanks be to God.