January 28, 2007 - Loving in an incomplete time

4th Sunday in Ordinary Time
28 January 2007
I Corinthians 13.1-13
Loving in an incomplete time
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007

The only African-American I remember from my high school was one of the brightest kids in my trigonometry class. I don’t recall his name, but his face was mocha, his hair was dark and kinky, and he had crooked teeth. He lisped, slightly, and was slender and gangly, and he was not into sports. The two of us talked casually in class most days, but outside of class we really didn’t have much contact. He was rather shy and didn’t have much contact with anyone, socially, as far as I could see.

One day during lunch, my classmate came walking past the cluster of benches where my group of friends had lunch. He walked as if he was always following a dot moving ten feet in front of him, eyes always cast down on that spot.. He didn’t make eye contact with you, unless you called his name. This day, no one was calling his name, but everyone around was soon noticing him. Some other friends of mine—swim team teammates who were one year ahead of me in school—were at a different cluster of benches opposite where I was with my friends. As my African-American classmate made his way along the walkway between our two groups, my teammates from swimming—there were four of them—began to clap slowly. They stared at my reserved classmate and clapped steadily, on and on, following him with cold, blank stares.

I don’t want you to think that I look for confrontation. I don’t. Nor do I often size up a situation that surprises me and know immediately what I want to do. I find the human spirit, and human society, too complex and baffling to know always what to do in the moment, but this day, something happened in me. I had a sense of the deep shame my classmate might have been feeling, and I felt a sense of the crushing hopelessness that comes from being hated for the kind of thing my classmate could do nothing to change. He was black, and people hated him. He was black, and he was living in a little part of the world, his school, which, though it was meant to be safe for every young soul there, was dangerous for him, at least for his personhood.

I felt deep pain. I could not change my classmate. His attributes were given to him by his parental genes and by God. I could not change my teammates. Their hatred was given to them by people of longer and closer influence on them than I could hope to have. And what about the school that was supposed to be a safe community for us all but had suddenly turned into its opposite for my classmate? Could I change that? A school, like any institution, has a culture, and it’s a daunting prospect to change a culture.

What occurred to me, though not quite consciously, was that what I could change was the situation. The situation was, right now, that people were demonstrating hostility against a young person because of who he was, and the world was just watching. The message to him was, It’s okay to heap racist abuse on you, and we all agree that this will happen without consequence. What was in my power to do was change that message. One way to do that would have been to go up to my classmate and tell him I thought he was okay and that my teammates were wrong. Another way to do that was to confront my teammates and tell them, myself, that they were wrong.

This would have been the spring of 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr., would be assassinated on April 4th, or perhaps, by the date of this incident, that had already happened. We would see Robert Kennedy assassinated on June 6th and watch, in August, the Democratic Convention in Chicago and its riots. The Watts riots had happened in our city, Los Angeles, in 1965, and racial tension was simply so high that anything confrontational that happened because of skin color could turn into a donnybrook. I apparently wasn’t thinking about any of that.

I walked across the pavement to my four teammates from swimming, people I’d been working out with every day for two swim seasons. I said to them something like: “Don’t do that. It’s disrespectful and it’s wrong. Leave him alone.”

The four teammates stopped clapping and stared at me. Then one or two of them said something derogatory about me, which I would not repeat to you. I turned around and went back to my own group of friends. The African-American classmate had already walked on out of sight. He and I never discussed what happened.

My best friend, who was there, did tell me years later that he was sure he would have to rescue me from a fight. He was also on the swim team, and he knew these guys, who were big, could be rough actors. I weighed 115 pounds and would have been toast without my best friend’s protection, had it been needed.

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What is love?

In church, teachers and preachers usually taught me that the New Testament agape love was different from filial love, which was the love of friendship. My best friend would have rescued me, and, in this way of understanding love, that was filial love. There is erotic love, the teachers and preachers have mentioned, but they have noted that in the gospels Jesus really didn’t get into that. Three kinds of love, teachers and preachers have said—agape, philia and eros—and agape, they said, was the Christian kind of love. Not love with the strings of personal attachment or the fire of passion, but love that extends to all persons, even enemies, because it is dispassionate and does not depend on feelings.

Call me arrogant, but I’m here to tell you that that is baloney.

Jesus was passionate about everything he loved, as far as I can tell. Loving your neighbor as yourself means being as full of feeling and connection to one another as you are to the things that matter most to your own heart. Love every life as you love your own life. Don’t tell me you’re dispassionate about your own life. So there was a moment when a cosmic nerve pathway was strung between the heart of a vulnerable black high school student and a momentarily passionate white high school student, and the love that was strong as self love triggered a passionate act. How could such love, indispensable to life and faith, be dispassionate? It wasn’t for Jesus, and it isn’t for me. Philia and agape go together. They are parts of a whole. (Eros belongs there, too, but that’s more delicate, and we’ll think about that another time.)

We live in a world that fights love like that. Our world kills that kind of love. Our world says that we can love ourselves if we drive a Lexus or wear a size six dress. If love means loving ourselves as who we are inside, in other words, we’re being foolish. Our world says that winning is not everything but that it is the only thing—really, the only thing. It’s not that love, in other words, might come in second next to winning; love doesn’t even exist next to winning. Our world says that if Wall Street ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. If love gets in the way of the bottom line, it’s too costly. Our world says that we should wait and wait to see if all the carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere is really going to destroy life for our great-grandchildren, but we should immediately wage a war against a penny ante dictator we think might someday have something to do with a threat against our country, the most powerful in history. If love means saving the planet, in other words, it’s overreacting, but if love means restraining our violent instincts, it’s too timid. The world has little respect for love.

But when Paul stacks faith and hope up against love, love, as he sees it, towers above both of the other two put together. Imagine that. One of the most famous passages in perhaps the most famous book of faith in history says that faith isn’t the main thing, never mind hope. What could that mean?

I have come to my own sense of what Paul means by saying that between faith, hope and love, the greatest spiritual gift is love. It is not that if you must choose between the three, you have to choose love. We all of us need faith and hope and love. Paul does not exclude faith and hope.

But faith is trust in the reality of God that already exists and which we have already come to know something about. Our faith grows out of what we have experienced, and so it arises out of the past. In faith, we reach back to the past to gain strength in life. Hope is about the future. Our faith, arising from the past, gives us hope for what will come when we arrive in the future.

Love, on the other hand, occurs in the present. Love about the past is nostalgia; love about the future is longing. The love Paul is talking about occurs in the present, or it doesn’t happen.

This is hard to learn. To love in the present is a hard commandment to obey. For what if faith is weak? and what if hope has faded? But this is love’s greatness. Love is simply knowing in the moment what to do. Love is seeing with compassion what is happening now, even if the vision of faith is clouded by the fog of history. Love is knowing how to act now with compassion, even if the object of hope is uncertain and unknown. Indeed, sometimes only when one has enacted love, then faith sees a past (a history) on which to build, and hope has a future toward which to live.

But love is hard, which is why we’re grownups by the time we really start to learn it. I was a youth, it’s true, when I did something I now consider loving, but I did not yet know how to make love my way of life. I did not have a mature practice of love in every moment. Even now, I feel as if, in so much of my life, I miss the moments of enacting love that run through my every day. Still, like Paul, when I was a child, it was one thing—I didn’t even know how to look for moments in which to love—but now that I am a man, something very remarkable and transforming has been growing in me. I am learning to see when and where to love, and that’s what matters most. You can take all the tricks I’ve got in my spiritual gift bag, and they all add up to nada, unless I am driving the present moment with love beaming out from the headlights.

The reason life is still hard, even once you get the hang of love—even once you’re grown up enough to know how to see by the headlights—the reason life is still hard is that where you’re going, in the end, is a lot farther than the headlights show you at any one time. Paul’s point is simply that, while the headlights only reveal the road just ahead, you can make it all the way home that way. There is a point where the trip will be complete, which is maybe when you die or maybe after that or maybe when the whole entire universe implodes again and God starts all over, but this side of paradise, everything looks to you like a dark mirror made murkier by the fog of your own breath.

There is a point where the trip will be complete, but you can’t know what that will look like, not yet. Meanwhile, you have love, and when you have enacted love, the act itself is always complete and is in that sense perfect. This will have to be enough for you, Paul believes.

And he this one more thing: “Now I know only in part; then [when the complete comes] I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” You may, in other words, only know just enough to enact love right now, but even in the simple and incomplete present you’re living in now, you are fully known by God. That’s a kind of completeness right there. Whoever you are, whatever has happened to you, whatever you have done to anyone or anything (or whatever you have not done), however confused or broken or lost you are—no matter, even, how faithless and hopeless you are—you are fully known by God, and that is at least the gift of existing in the mind and presence of eternity, which is a way that God, at the very heart of things, loves you. Enacting love and being loved go together, especially in the heart of God.

We have been, these last few weeks, working out what it means to have spiritual gifts. We all have them, and since each of us has a spiritual gift (or several!), the purpose of the church is to form a working whole of those gifts into what we call the body of Christ. What we realize, now, is that the way we have our gifts, know our gifts, increase our gifts, use our gifts and engage our varied gifts as one living body of believers is to enact them in love. Faith and hope will wax and wane with our strength and mood, but love will be a flash of splendor in every moment by which we practice living according to the grace of life, which we call Christ.

Amen.