Old Favorite
Sermon
You Have Mail From God!
Second Lesson Sermons For Advent/Christmas/Epiphany Cycle C
Most of us play favorites, whether we admit it or not. All parents try to love their children with equal devotion. That's hard to do. My own parents had a favorite: it was my sister, I'm convinced. Yet from her incorrect perspective, I was the favorite. Favoritism seems to be a part of our biblical perspective. Abraham and Sarah favored Isaac over Ishmael. Then old Isaac favored Esau the country boy, but his wife Rebekah favored pompous little Jacob. There's no doubt old Jacob himself later favored and spoiled little Joseph. Most of us would say that the true course of action for a parent would be to love and favor the child that needs it most at the time.
Even preachers play favorites when it comes to certain Scriptures for sermons. Fortunately, some preachers use a lectionary and move through the whole Bible, but it's still hard to generate enthusiasm for an obscure sermon on the Rechabites, whoever they were. One preacher always listed a different sermon topic, but every Sunday you knew he was going to preach on John 3:16 and money, and use the feeding of the 5,000 by Jesus with a few loaves of bread and some fish as a climactic illustration. The congregation contended that he had but one sermon, on tithing, which he could preach in 52 different ways in a year's time.
Sometimes we hear messages that are so familiar they cease to have an impact on us. Just as a child gets spoiled from too much attention, too much favoritism, so do some of our Scriptures get spoiled. They are so familiar they get taken for granted and rush past us. We repeat the Lord's Prayer or the Ten Commandments with hardly a second thought. At funerals the preacher reads the twenty-third Psalm, and the mind seems to click to automatic pilot well before the preacher gets to the part about "walking through the valley of the shadow of death."
Today's Scripture is an old favorite. It's an old favorite that for many of us has become spoiled. Since childhood, most of us have heard the words of Paul's treatise to the Corinthians on "love." When a man went to talk to his future father-in-law about marrying his oldest daughter, he was a little nervous, to say the least. He just wanted to get his quick permission and get out of the den as quickly as possible. After all, no father thinks any boy is good enough to marry his daughter. And nothing is ever as simple as it first seems. So the young man had to sit there and listen to the venerable old lawyer's philosophy of life. The old clichés whizzed past his head like a rocket in flight. Finally, the elder gentleman concluded, "And be sure to read together 1 Corinthians 13 at least once a week."
1 Corinthians 13. That's like reading yesterday's newspaper for most of us. Old news. A sugar stick from a previous era.
But it's a genuine mistake not to re-examine, occasionally, the abiding significance of this old favorite. Most of us are familiar with the tragedy that grows and festers from lack of love. The examples are everywhere. So many people could have been different if they had but known love. The scenarios saturate even our American history. He began his life without love. His mother was a powerfully-built, dominating woman who found it difficult to love anyone. The mother gave her child no affection, no love, and no training during those early years. He was absolutely rejected from earliest childhood. Despite a high IQ, he was ugly and poor and unlovable. When he was thirteen years old, the school psychologist commented that he probably didn't even know the meaning of the word "love." His mother even forbade him to call her at work.
He finally dropped out of high school in his third year. He thought he might find acceptance in the Marine Corps. But his lack of love went with him. He was thrown out and laughed at, with an undesirable discharge. A young, scrawny man in his twenties with no sense of worthiness, he went to live in a foreign country. But he found no love there, either. He married a girl, who had herself been an illegitimate child, and brought her back to America. She developed the same contempt for him that everyone else had displayed. She demanded more than he could provide and became his most vicious opponent. Finally, she forced him to leave.
He tried to make it on his own, but he was terribly lonely. He went home and begged her to take him back. He crawled. He came back on her terms: she could take his meager salary and spend it any way she wished. She belittled his feeble attempts to support the family in front of her friends. He began to weep bitterly in the darkness of his love-deprived nightmare. He was completely and consistently without knowledge of love. But the next day he was a different person. He went to the garage and took down his rifle. He carried it with him to his newly acquired job in a book storage building. And from the third floor of that building he sent two shells crashing into the head of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.1
Stories such as this rivet our attention. Love is important. Lack of love is tragedy. So we try to express love to people who are deprived of elementary things in life -- food, clothing, shelter, and affection. We try to love countless refugees who have lost their homeland, many who lack financial security, and the sick who are deprived of health. Love is a solution to many people's problems.
But this is not the only kind of love 1 Corinthians 13 is talking about. Old favorite is not just talking about social improvement. Old favorite has something to say to people like us.
Ancient Corinth was a money town. But the people there really did not manufacture a great deal of goods. They were mostly collectors of money from goods others made. They were realtors, bankers, lawyers, professionals, and salesmen. They engaged primarily in trade and commerce. They were unlike the manual laborers, carpenters, farmers, builders, and fishermen that Jesus addressed in places like Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Galilee. The Corinthians were owners of ships like the fishermen Jesus addressed worked on. They handled the money from shops and furniture industries like Jesus and his father worked in as carpenters. The Corinthians were the first century's accountants, vice presidents of sales, CEO's and professors. They were also terribly good people, quite appallingly good. The Corinthians were not a bad lot at all, only a few of them. True, they did have a mountain towering above their town, topped as it was with the Temple to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. It was populated with a thousand temple prostitutes. But Corinth was the most important seaport of its day. That stuff was mostly for the out-of-towners who came during the trade seasons, kind of like the tourists who visit the red light districts in a major American city when they are far from home.
The Corinthians were affluent, church-going, and intelligent. They were new to Christianity but they were extremely wise in the ways of trade and commerce. They were competitive and totally cosmopolitan. They were like us in the fact that they were "knowledge workers." They were not laborers or small-town innkeepers and tax collectors.
Paul's letter to Corinth is an important one for us to consider. Direct production workers -- bricklayers, farmers, and machinists -- are a steadily declining segment of the workforce in our developed economy. They certainly are a declining segment in most churches.
The fastest growing group in our society are knowledge workers -- accountants, engineers, teachers, nurses, social workers, lawyers, salesmen, and managers. People who are paid for putting knowledge to work rather than using brawn or manual skill are today the largest, and most expensive, group in America. Like the ancient Corinthians, we do interesting work, are paid well, and engage in work that does not break the body. It's nice theological meaning for us to wrestle with the parables of Jesus depicting the farmer sowing seed, the builder building on sand, and the innkeeper opening up a room for the Samaritan to house the beaten traveler. But, frankly, you and I are closer in attitude and environment to the ancient Corinthians than to the Galilean farmers, carpenters, and innkeepers.
Paul's definition of love represents a critical statement of life for us. In today's world, the motivation and satisfaction level of knowledge workers is a real problem. Today, many affluent knowledge workers are totally dissatisfied with life. Though we are paid well and have more than any generation before us, we do not know how to evaluate our lives, measure our lives, or be productive except in terms of material gain. It is taking a toll on the quality of life in our society. The alienation and lack of meaning we encounter in our world today is not primarily a phenomenon found in the working class. It is, above all, a phenomenon of the educated class of employed knowledge workers. Those are the words of Peter F. Drucker, known as "Mr. Management" in our world. He is a business professor.2 And he's right.
At least at the end of the day the brickmason could take pride in a wall he had built; the farmer could watch the crops grow that he had planted with satisfaction, regardless of the prices they brought; the machinist could point to a piece of work turned out. Lord knows how you motivate a teacher, a preacher, a manager, a nurse, a lawyer, an accountant, and so on. Money? We've thrown money at knowledge workers. And that does motivate and provide a source of evaluation, for a while. Yet, those people get bored with their toys and houses and parties, and we all wonder if today's schoolteachers, preachers, engineers, managers, accountants, and lawyers are really more productive than their counterparts of 1900 who had even less.
Psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan maintains that "love begins when a person feels another person's need to be as important as his own." Frankly, life itself begins when a person feels another person's need is as important as his own. From the beginning of the Bible, the emphasis is on community. Adam is not complete without someone to love. The Lord God said, "It is not good that a man should be alone; I will make another who completes him." Adam alone is nothing; he does not even exist as a human apart from Eve. And Eve does not exist as a complete person apart from helping Adam. The helping of another person is what makes us human. Paul hammered home the point to the Corinthians: "Without love, I am nothing. Without charity I am nothing at all." Without love, regardless of my money, regardless of my power, regardless of my education, I am meaningless. Life has no meaning for me. I am dissatisfied, lonely, unfulfilled, and miserable.
To be a teacher who does not love the students, a lawyer who does not love the least of those in the community, a preacher who does not love the congregation, an accountant who does not love the unlovely, is to find no meaning in life whatsoever. Said Paul, "If I lack charity I count for nothing."
Paul was on target in broaching the subject of love with these Corinthians. They did not need a parable on evil or racism or knowledge. He was dealing with the age-old problem of the well-to-do: Charity tends to decrease as incomes increase. That has always been a strange fact of life. Even today it remains a truth. A Gallup Poll produced profiles of the most and least generous Americans according to income, family status, and region. It concluded that, "contrary to popular opinion, the well-to-do in America cannot be described as generous." The most likely to make contributions and volunteer their time were members of low-to-moderate income families, rural residents, and mid-Westerners.
The Bible has notions of life and death which are very different from ours today. We think of life as the functioning of the individual organism. Death is the cessation of such function. In the Bible, life means to be significantly involved in a community of caring, meaning, action, and charity. Life means relatedness. Conversely, death is to be unrelated, uncaring, and uncharitable. Death is to depart from charity. Thus to "choose life or death" (Deuteronomy 30:19) means to decide for or against the life-giving community.3
Paul would correctly state "If I lack charity I am nothing. In the eyes of God, I am dead. I cease to exist. I am nothing, nothing at all."
It is hard to motivate a dead person. It is hard to feel satisfied when you are religiously dead.
1 Corinthians 13. An old favorite. Yesterday's news? A sugar stick from a previous era? Perhaps not.
____________
1. As told by James Dobson on a number of occasions.
2. Peter F. Drucker, The Changing World of the Executive (New York: Truman Talley Books, 1982), pp. 105-113.
3. Walter Brueggemann, The Bible Makes Sense (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1977), pp. 109-110.
Even preachers play favorites when it comes to certain Scriptures for sermons. Fortunately, some preachers use a lectionary and move through the whole Bible, but it's still hard to generate enthusiasm for an obscure sermon on the Rechabites, whoever they were. One preacher always listed a different sermon topic, but every Sunday you knew he was going to preach on John 3:16 and money, and use the feeding of the 5,000 by Jesus with a few loaves of bread and some fish as a climactic illustration. The congregation contended that he had but one sermon, on tithing, which he could preach in 52 different ways in a year's time.
Sometimes we hear messages that are so familiar they cease to have an impact on us. Just as a child gets spoiled from too much attention, too much favoritism, so do some of our Scriptures get spoiled. They are so familiar they get taken for granted and rush past us. We repeat the Lord's Prayer or the Ten Commandments with hardly a second thought. At funerals the preacher reads the twenty-third Psalm, and the mind seems to click to automatic pilot well before the preacher gets to the part about "walking through the valley of the shadow of death."
Today's Scripture is an old favorite. It's an old favorite that for many of us has become spoiled. Since childhood, most of us have heard the words of Paul's treatise to the Corinthians on "love." When a man went to talk to his future father-in-law about marrying his oldest daughter, he was a little nervous, to say the least. He just wanted to get his quick permission and get out of the den as quickly as possible. After all, no father thinks any boy is good enough to marry his daughter. And nothing is ever as simple as it first seems. So the young man had to sit there and listen to the venerable old lawyer's philosophy of life. The old clichés whizzed past his head like a rocket in flight. Finally, the elder gentleman concluded, "And be sure to read together 1 Corinthians 13 at least once a week."
1 Corinthians 13. That's like reading yesterday's newspaper for most of us. Old news. A sugar stick from a previous era.
But it's a genuine mistake not to re-examine, occasionally, the abiding significance of this old favorite. Most of us are familiar with the tragedy that grows and festers from lack of love. The examples are everywhere. So many people could have been different if they had but known love. The scenarios saturate even our American history. He began his life without love. His mother was a powerfully-built, dominating woman who found it difficult to love anyone. The mother gave her child no affection, no love, and no training during those early years. He was absolutely rejected from earliest childhood. Despite a high IQ, he was ugly and poor and unlovable. When he was thirteen years old, the school psychologist commented that he probably didn't even know the meaning of the word "love." His mother even forbade him to call her at work.
He finally dropped out of high school in his third year. He thought he might find acceptance in the Marine Corps. But his lack of love went with him. He was thrown out and laughed at, with an undesirable discharge. A young, scrawny man in his twenties with no sense of worthiness, he went to live in a foreign country. But he found no love there, either. He married a girl, who had herself been an illegitimate child, and brought her back to America. She developed the same contempt for him that everyone else had displayed. She demanded more than he could provide and became his most vicious opponent. Finally, she forced him to leave.
He tried to make it on his own, but he was terribly lonely. He went home and begged her to take him back. He crawled. He came back on her terms: she could take his meager salary and spend it any way she wished. She belittled his feeble attempts to support the family in front of her friends. He began to weep bitterly in the darkness of his love-deprived nightmare. He was completely and consistently without knowledge of love. But the next day he was a different person. He went to the garage and took down his rifle. He carried it with him to his newly acquired job in a book storage building. And from the third floor of that building he sent two shells crashing into the head of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.1
Stories such as this rivet our attention. Love is important. Lack of love is tragedy. So we try to express love to people who are deprived of elementary things in life -- food, clothing, shelter, and affection. We try to love countless refugees who have lost their homeland, many who lack financial security, and the sick who are deprived of health. Love is a solution to many people's problems.
But this is not the only kind of love 1 Corinthians 13 is talking about. Old favorite is not just talking about social improvement. Old favorite has something to say to people like us.
Ancient Corinth was a money town. But the people there really did not manufacture a great deal of goods. They were mostly collectors of money from goods others made. They were realtors, bankers, lawyers, professionals, and salesmen. They engaged primarily in trade and commerce. They were unlike the manual laborers, carpenters, farmers, builders, and fishermen that Jesus addressed in places like Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Galilee. The Corinthians were owners of ships like the fishermen Jesus addressed worked on. They handled the money from shops and furniture industries like Jesus and his father worked in as carpenters. The Corinthians were the first century's accountants, vice presidents of sales, CEO's and professors. They were also terribly good people, quite appallingly good. The Corinthians were not a bad lot at all, only a few of them. True, they did have a mountain towering above their town, topped as it was with the Temple to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. It was populated with a thousand temple prostitutes. But Corinth was the most important seaport of its day. That stuff was mostly for the out-of-towners who came during the trade seasons, kind of like the tourists who visit the red light districts in a major American city when they are far from home.
The Corinthians were affluent, church-going, and intelligent. They were new to Christianity but they were extremely wise in the ways of trade and commerce. They were competitive and totally cosmopolitan. They were like us in the fact that they were "knowledge workers." They were not laborers or small-town innkeepers and tax collectors.
Paul's letter to Corinth is an important one for us to consider. Direct production workers -- bricklayers, farmers, and machinists -- are a steadily declining segment of the workforce in our developed economy. They certainly are a declining segment in most churches.
The fastest growing group in our society are knowledge workers -- accountants, engineers, teachers, nurses, social workers, lawyers, salesmen, and managers. People who are paid for putting knowledge to work rather than using brawn or manual skill are today the largest, and most expensive, group in America. Like the ancient Corinthians, we do interesting work, are paid well, and engage in work that does not break the body. It's nice theological meaning for us to wrestle with the parables of Jesus depicting the farmer sowing seed, the builder building on sand, and the innkeeper opening up a room for the Samaritan to house the beaten traveler. But, frankly, you and I are closer in attitude and environment to the ancient Corinthians than to the Galilean farmers, carpenters, and innkeepers.
Paul's definition of love represents a critical statement of life for us. In today's world, the motivation and satisfaction level of knowledge workers is a real problem. Today, many affluent knowledge workers are totally dissatisfied with life. Though we are paid well and have more than any generation before us, we do not know how to evaluate our lives, measure our lives, or be productive except in terms of material gain. It is taking a toll on the quality of life in our society. The alienation and lack of meaning we encounter in our world today is not primarily a phenomenon found in the working class. It is, above all, a phenomenon of the educated class of employed knowledge workers. Those are the words of Peter F. Drucker, known as "Mr. Management" in our world. He is a business professor.2 And he's right.
At least at the end of the day the brickmason could take pride in a wall he had built; the farmer could watch the crops grow that he had planted with satisfaction, regardless of the prices they brought; the machinist could point to a piece of work turned out. Lord knows how you motivate a teacher, a preacher, a manager, a nurse, a lawyer, an accountant, and so on. Money? We've thrown money at knowledge workers. And that does motivate and provide a source of evaluation, for a while. Yet, those people get bored with their toys and houses and parties, and we all wonder if today's schoolteachers, preachers, engineers, managers, accountants, and lawyers are really more productive than their counterparts of 1900 who had even less.
Psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan maintains that "love begins when a person feels another person's need to be as important as his own." Frankly, life itself begins when a person feels another person's need is as important as his own. From the beginning of the Bible, the emphasis is on community. Adam is not complete without someone to love. The Lord God said, "It is not good that a man should be alone; I will make another who completes him." Adam alone is nothing; he does not even exist as a human apart from Eve. And Eve does not exist as a complete person apart from helping Adam. The helping of another person is what makes us human. Paul hammered home the point to the Corinthians: "Without love, I am nothing. Without charity I am nothing at all." Without love, regardless of my money, regardless of my power, regardless of my education, I am meaningless. Life has no meaning for me. I am dissatisfied, lonely, unfulfilled, and miserable.
To be a teacher who does not love the students, a lawyer who does not love the least of those in the community, a preacher who does not love the congregation, an accountant who does not love the unlovely, is to find no meaning in life whatsoever. Said Paul, "If I lack charity I count for nothing."
Paul was on target in broaching the subject of love with these Corinthians. They did not need a parable on evil or racism or knowledge. He was dealing with the age-old problem of the well-to-do: Charity tends to decrease as incomes increase. That has always been a strange fact of life. Even today it remains a truth. A Gallup Poll produced profiles of the most and least generous Americans according to income, family status, and region. It concluded that, "contrary to popular opinion, the well-to-do in America cannot be described as generous." The most likely to make contributions and volunteer their time were members of low-to-moderate income families, rural residents, and mid-Westerners.
The Bible has notions of life and death which are very different from ours today. We think of life as the functioning of the individual organism. Death is the cessation of such function. In the Bible, life means to be significantly involved in a community of caring, meaning, action, and charity. Life means relatedness. Conversely, death is to be unrelated, uncaring, and uncharitable. Death is to depart from charity. Thus to "choose life or death" (Deuteronomy 30:19) means to decide for or against the life-giving community.3
Paul would correctly state "If I lack charity I am nothing. In the eyes of God, I am dead. I cease to exist. I am nothing, nothing at all."
It is hard to motivate a dead person. It is hard to feel satisfied when you are religiously dead.
1 Corinthians 13. An old favorite. Yesterday's news? A sugar stick from a previous era? Perhaps not.
____________
1. As told by James Dobson on a number of occasions.
2. Peter F. Drucker, The Changing World of the Executive (New York: Truman Talley Books, 1982), pp. 105-113.
3. Walter Brueggemann, The Bible Makes Sense (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1977), pp. 109-110.
