Sermon:1 Corinthians 13:1-3 “The Worst Bankrupt of All”
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1 Corinthians 13:1-3 • “The Worst Bankrupt of All”
“Virtues that Sustain Us – Love”
Years ago, I served a church in a community where the local newspaper had a section in each Sunday’s edition in which they printed public records. You could see who got married and who got divorced. You could see who bought property and who sold property. You could see who got arrested and for what reason they got arrested. And worst of all, at least in my mind, you could also see who had filed for bankruptcy.
It was all the laundry hung out to dry, both clean and dirty, and you can imagine how each Sunday morning people went rushing out to their driveways to pick up their newspapers to see, in particular, who taken the bankruptcy route, given its “white collar” shame. I, of course, was among the inquiring minds, especially in light of how I might be called upon to do some extra pastoral care either with the filers or the gossipers, or in most cases, both.
Over that period of time I learned more about bankruptcy than I ever wanted to know – from a legal perspective and a business perspective and a tax perspective, but primarily from a personal one. I learned that one size of bankruptcy didn’t fit all. There were some forms that were more embarrassing than others, and that while some were used without blinking an eye, there were other forms of bankruptcy that were to be avoided at all costs. It was, I have to say, quite an education.
So, I can sympathize with the Apostle Paul as he looked for the best way to extend pastoral care to a community of faith that, if they were not careful, were on the verge of closing up shop because of how they were overvaluing certain spiritual assets, assets that would not be able to sustain them in the long run, while at the same time they were ignoring more valuable ones that were more firmly rooted in the essence of the gospel. And for Paul, the spiritual asset that was by far and away the most valuable of them all was the asset, or, what he called the gift of agape love.
Here is how Paul elevates this particular gift. “Though I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
Obviously, the word that jumps off the page of this most famous passage of Scripture to me is the word “nothing.” Unlike so many words in the Bible that we’re not really sure what they mean, this one is clear as crystal. It means exactly what you think it means. It means naught, nada, zero, ziltch. It means that you don’t have a leg to stand on or a pot to cook in. It means that your situation is empty, barren, desolate, and bleak. It means that from a spiritual way of seeing things, you, my brother and sister, are the worst bankrupt of all.
We like to think of this passage of Scripture as among the “sweet words” of the Bible, maybe even the sweetest. After all, who could get his or her feelings rubbed raw by such a treatise to love? My soul, it gets read at weddings and emblazoned on coffee cups and printed on posters. But the fact of the matter is that Paul intended for these words not to lull people into a state of rest; he meant them instead to be a wake-up call, one that might arrest them from their spiritual stupor before they found themselves in a position from which they could never recover.
One of the reasons we tend to miss that point is because of how, unlike the word “nothing,” which we do understand, we think we know what Paul was talking about when he invoked the word “love,” when the fact of the matter is that we may have the wrong interpretation. Ask most people to define love and they will answer in a way that suggests some kind of emotional response. But that’s not the way Paul intended his teaching on love to be understood, which is why he opted for the Greek word “agape” instead of the Greek word “eros” for romantic love or “philos” for brotherly love. Agape love was a God-ordained type of love. It was a love that expressed itself in unconditional regard for others. It wasn’t a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” kind of love. It was a love based on grace, which is why the King James Version translators rightly rendered it as “charity.” You can never pay back this kind of love, certainly not to God. You can only channel it so that God’s love in Jesus Christ flows through you to bring value and worth to the lives of others.
Perhaps you can understand now why our world needs such a witness today more than ever. After all, has our world ever been more polarized than it is today? From where I sit it sure doesn’t seems that it has. As someone has said, “The human ego tends to go after two things: it wants to be separate and it wants to be superior” (Richard Rohr, “Just This,” pp. 90-91). It wants to be left to itself and it wants to consider itself better than everyone else. But as Paul reminds us in this most famous passage of Scripture, understanding that your life is not about you is the first step in the journey of discovering the fountain from which abundant life consistently flows.
I think about when Paul himself made the discovery. We read the story in the book of Acts. Paul, then known as Saul, had been a part of the mob that had come together to interrogate Stephen, one of the early members of the Jesus community, who had just been selected as one of the seven deacons of the church. It wasn’t so much an interrogation of Stephen as it was a kangaroo court that had degenerated into a bloodthirsty mob, with their sights set on Stephen. As they dragged Stephen out of the city to be stoned, the mob members laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. After Stephen’s death, Paul made his way from Jerusalem to Damascus to see if he could identify any others who were a part of what Jesus followers called “the Way.” Little did he know that just before he would enter Damascus he would run smack dab into the Risen Jesus himself. It was a light from heaven that first got his attention and then the sound of a voice that he would never forget. “Saul, Saul,” said the voice, “why do you persecute me?” Knowing that in fact if it was Jesus, Saul deserved to be sentenced to death himself. But instead of being judged for his bias and his sense of supremacy, the Risen Jesus instead showed Saul an unconditional love, an agape love, so that his life was never again the same. As Paul would later write to the church at Philippi, he came to see what a bankrupt he had been so that he would say, “For whatever gains were to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. And what is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:7-8).
Have you made that discovery in your life? Have you come to see how much you are missing when you focus on yourself and how much you stand to gain when you direct your attention to Jesus? Have you been so seized by the power of Jesus’ unconditional affection for you that you now recognize that the best way for you to show your gratitude is by expanding your horizon to see a much broader and wider universe because you are no longer at the center of it – much broader and wider universe that includes scores of other people who are in desperate need of the same sort of love that changed you for the better?
Ruby Bridges was a six year old black child who was the first African-American to attend the predominately white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. The year was 1961. As you can imagine, her first day at Frantz Elementary was no walk in the park. There was an angry mob that had turned out to do their best to intimidate her and cause her to back down. But as she showed up for her first day at the new school, reporters couldn’t help but notice that Ruby had the most peaceful expression on her face. There was something else they noticed – that even though she was surrounded by federal marshals, she took the time to stop and face the mob, silently opening and closing her mouth in their direction for about a full minute.
Was she mocking them? Was she taunting them? No, as it turned out, Ruby was praying for them. As she explained it, she didn’t have time to pray for them that morning before she left for school, and so she stopped on her way in to say a brief prayer. When asked by the psychologist what in the world was it she prayed for, the psychologist had to admit that her prayer dumbfounded him and in many ways changed him. “She prayed because the people needed praying for,” the psychologist learned. And so Ruby Bridges took the time to pray a prayer that her parents and her pastor had taught her to pray: “Please God, try to forgive them, because they don’t know what they’re doing.” As she explained it, “when Jesus had that mob in front of him, that’s what he said too” (“When Ruby Bridges Prayed for Her Enemies,” The Christian Century, 3/24/17). You may remember that the famous American artist Norman Rockwell immortalized that scene in American history with his painting, titled, “The Problem We All Live With.”
It’s been almost 60 years and we’re still living with that problem. Maybe if we had bothered to pray for one another in that way, the same way Jesus prayed for us, our world would be much different today. It wouldn’t be as empty. It wouldn’t be as barren. It wouldn’t be as morally bankrupt.
But you can change that. And you can be certain that when you do, it will be front page news in the Book of Life, where all of heaven will see it and rejoice. And on that day when you stand before Jesus, you can be certain that he will have seen it too, so that you can stand before him without shame, because you chose to love others unconditionally, which in the economy of the Kingdom of Heaven is without question the greatest asset of them all.