Read 1 Corinthians 13.1-13

If ever there were such a people, we Americans sure are a people who are into feelings, are we not? We sure are these days. Listen the next time you see some disaster reported on a news channel. A reporter will thrust a microphone into the face of a woman in obvious agony and what will that reporter ask her? "Can you tell us how you feel?"

How do you feel? That’s the question on Oprah, Dr. Phil, in the tabloids, all over the talk shows. We want, above all else, to feel good. And we’ll go to many lengths to lift our spirits. We seem a people, a culture, caught up in the question of our feelings, absorbed in our moods, anxious about our state of mind. Advertisers appeal to it. Publishers stack the shelves of it. Entertainers feed it. Therapists live off it. Don’t get me wrong; “How we feel” is an important question; it’s just not the only one.

I remember the first time the question was put to my college theology professor: What is you’re formula for happiness? My professor, while a well-respected pastor and theologian, was a bit on the serious, if not curmudgeonly side. "What makes you think the world is designed to make you happy, that we have a right somehow to happiness?" Every party has its pooper, I know, but maybe Dr. Ray was on to something.

The sages through the ages have always insisted that we will never know such a Kingdom of circumstantial happiness in this world. But perhaps a needs-oriented culture has seduced us into thinking that we can, along with all the conveniences, the gadgets, and the gizmos, somehow purchase that life. And the result for many of us is an inability to settle for what we know to be true, a difficulty accepting life lived among its moods swings, its joys and pains, in a world chock-full of ups and downs that are part of our days here.

When we turn to the biblical story – the narratives of God with us – in order to get some sense of ourselves, we find there very little interest in our feelings, per se. Oh, to be sure, there are the exhortations that we should be courageous, and not fear, not be troubled. The promise there is about peace, that deep peace that is beyond all understanding. But these are never viewed as the central quest of life, as an end in themselves. No, these appeals are always in the service of that for which we are to give ourselves to others in this life together, that for which we are to live. And what is that? That, quite simply, the old, old story says, is love.

If you ask me – I’ll say it back to you like an old record: “What is the most important thing we ought to do?” “To love God with all of who we are; to love our neighbor as ourselves.” It’s that simple. I think we often make the question of the meaning of life more complicated and obscure than we need. But it is important to add immediately that when the scriptures and when this faith talks about love as the heart and center of our existence, they are not talking about the kind of love we celebrate, for example, on Valentine’s Day. The Bible – having been written in a largely Greek world – makes use of four different words to articulate love. The word Paul employs here is agape. He’s not talking about romance, not talking about a certain emotional moment that we hope for. Nothing, of course, against romance or Valentine’s Day, even – I as much of a sap at the next guy - but look for a moment at this familiar picture by the Apostle Paul. I suspect it’s read at more weddings than any other, but one has to wonder, really, if a wedding is the most appropriate place for this jailhouse talk, and if anyone is even listening.

First of all, Paul’s words are a criticism of his friends in Corinth for whom religion has become the attainment of a kind of emotional high, an ecstasy that takes the people there “out of themselves,” a religious enthusiasm that carries them far out of the mundane things of life and beyond the real world. Paul’s parishioners in Corinth are majoring in the quest for a “religious experience.” They speak in tongues, that’s a sort of utterance that takes them to heights of fervor - mountaintops. They revel in it, they are almost, one might say, addicted to it. Now, he doesn’t dismiss their religious fervor outright. He himself speaks in tongues. But he does begin by saying, "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but have not love...then I am nothing."

And the love of which he speaks is not so much something one is swept up in emotionally, as it is something one decides and then does; it is something you are called to, committed to. And it is certainly not a love that grants continual bliss or peace of mind. For example, love is patient, Paul says, and God knows, being patient can be painful, can it not? Love does not insist on its own way in life, and that is often hard to handle, to accept, right? Love bears it all. This is not the Hallmark brand of love we’ve become accustomed to.

The reality is, we give ourselves to this business of love only by setting aside and keeping in check our absorption in our own feelings, our longings for our own happiness, our desire for a kind of ongoing pleasure in what is. Mike Harden of the Columbus Dispatch wrote a piece a few years ago which I think illustrates as beautifully as anything the kind of love that Paul describes.

"When Frank Steger pushed himself into an upright position in the hospital bed, the heart monitor's fluid cursive line disintegrated into an erratic scribble. 'I told the doctor,' he said, peeking at the edge of the curtain to make sure that his wife, Mary, was not within earshot, 'I told him that I felt like I was drowning. He said this is what happens when you have congestive heart disease. I told him I'd rather he throw me off the roof instead.' 

“Mary returned to the room, drawing a chair to his bedside. 'Thirsty,' he complained. She lifted the straw to his lips as he pulled the oxygen mask aside. The medicine made him sick then. She fetched the basin, wrapped a firm arm around his spasm-racked shoulders, mopped the sweat from his forehead. In sickness and in health. They were supposed to be preparing for a Florida vacation, not holding on to each other in a cardiac care unit. 'Help me sit up,' he whispered hoarsely.

“In the end, love comes down to this; not Clark Gable's devilish first appraisal of Vivien Leigh, not Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling in the surf, but, 'Help me sit up.' A sharp-toothed rain spattered against the windowpane. In the room, a procession of medical courtiers came and went, trading pills for blood and tinkering, ever tinkering, with the buttons and dials controlling the tubes and wires to which their patient was trussed, like some latter-day Gulliver.

“One evening Frank was sitting asleep in the chair next to the bed. Mary paused in the waiting room to remove her street shoes and put on her slippers. She did not want to wake him now that sleep was such a rationed luxury. Soundlessly, she slipped into the chair next to his. In the end, love is not the smoldering glance across the dance floor, the clink of crystal, a leisurely picnic spread upon summer's clover. It is the squeeze of a hand. I'm here. I'll be here, no matter how long the fight, even when you want most to close your eyes and be done with it all. Water? You need water? Here. Drink. Let me straighten your pillow.

“'Help me into bed,' he said, he who had once been warrior triumphant in the business world. He was tough, demanding, but never as much on others as himself. If you gave him your best, no one could hurt you. If you gave him less, no one could hide you. She had been with him and beside him when the future was golden, beside him when health sent his career into eclipse. 'I'm thirsty,' he said. 'Here,' she said, 'let me get you something.'

“Along the road they once traveled so often to visit family, the hearse wound its way past stubbled fields, shuttered roadside markets. The minister, clutching his Bible against his chest as though it was sufficient cloak against the winds whipping across the rural countryside, passed final benediction: 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.' He stooped to pick up his hat as the funeral director placed the folded flag in Mary's lap.

“So when all is said and done, love is not rapture and fire. It’s a hand steadier than one's own, squeezing harder than a heartbeat. Wine changes back to water. Endearment is exhibited by what once might have been considered insignificant kindnesses, but which, in the end, become the tenderest of ministrations. On the day after the funeral, trying to busy herself with chores that could easily wait, she plopped the laundry basket down in front of her granddaughter. The child tugged out the end of the sheet her Frank had always held when they did the wash. When the child brought the folded end to meet the corners her grandmother held, she kissed her playfully, just as he had once done. 'I'm thirsty, Grandma.' "Here, let me get you something."

We all know of people just like this “Mary,” people who give of themselves entirely and completely to another. A beautiful picture of what life is about when we’re paying attention. Question: Through all of this was she blissfully happy, untroubled, content? I doubt it. Through all of this was her life deeply meaningful, full of importance and purpose? I certainly think so.

A beautiful picture of what love is all about, but not just the love of a married couple. And hear me, too, when I say that in some places – in some homes and in some arms – the word love is a dirty word with a painful definition. I am by no means advocating a complete giving up of one’s own identity in order to be swallowed up into someone else’s disease or disregard. Sometimes “loving” another means saying no, letting go, and walking away. Sometimes it means you stay.

The words Paul lifts up before us reminds us that – whatever our situation, love is as near to each one of us as someone who needs us. And there is always someone who needs us. Both the loveable ones and the ones Paul calls “enemies.” This is why we are here, for the love that does not insist on its own way in life, that not only hopes and believes, but that bears and endures the sufferings and the needs of those with whom we share life’s way. It’s love that makes our life together.

But there’s more than commitment and work here, as well. There’s also promise. Did you hear it? Love bears it all and never ends. Why? Because love is the bedrock reality beneath all of the other realities of this world; love is the power that sustains the universe and each one of us.

God – who stands above, among, and beneath all that is – God is love, and when we, under the impress of that love, stretch ourselves beyond ourselves to love as Christ did, even to the point of a cross, we participate in that which is forever, and from which nothing in this life ever separates us. Love bears it all, and love never ends. That’s the promise, that in the end there will be faith, hope, and love. And love is the greatest of them all. Amen.