DESERT PALMS PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Sun City West, Arizona

Reflections

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Dr. David S. Hodgson

January 31, 2010

Psalm 8:1

O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Corinthians 13

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

            Those of you who remember Stan’s ministry at Desert Palms might remember that he intentionally scheduled his Bible Study for the same time slot as the second service, so he would have a reason to leave the service and not have to listen to the sermon twice. Teaching a Bible class is not in his present job description, so I happened to mention to Stan at the coffee hour that he needed to sit up here in front of all of you and look interested and awake during the second sermon. You won’t believe what he said to me. He said, “Remember, I can hear you but I never get to see your front side and the view from where I sit never changes.” 

            My text is taken from the Book of 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verse 12 in the Revised Standard Version, just because I like the imagery better there. “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.” Let us pray for strength and encouragement to see ourselves, even in these words of God to us. Let us pray. We come looking for you, O Lord, and so often find your spirit looking for us, finding us long before we ever find you. So meet us here, with all that you intend. Amen.

            The thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians is without a doubt the most eloquent, the most profound soliloquy, on love ever written, and it is at the same time the most haunting and disturbing. Let me show you why.

            Corinth was the love capitol of the world at the time. There was actually a temple there to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, where love was worshipped in carnal ways. But in Corinth there was also a Christian church, where love was celebrated in sacrificial and sacramental ways. The contrast could not have been greater and it was in that setting that Paul wrote his great soliloquy on love. It is profoundly true, so true that whenever we hear it read as it has been read through the ages, the mind races out to gather evidence of its truth because we know it is inherently true, in all of its perfection. 

Love is patient. We hear the word and in that little breath’s space between patient and the next word, the mind searches the landscape of life for evidence. It seems to understand that there were times when life actually stretched the capacity for love beyond what we thought were its limits, only to discover that love proved to be resilient, to have endurance, and the mind says “yes”: love for others is patient.

            Then the next phrase is carefully offered: love is kind. We know it’s true the moment we hear it for the mind goes out looking for those times when, as an act of love, we demonstrated the goodness of life in some spontaneous act of kindness. It made the soul feel good, the heart feel alive, and the mind convicted, so much so that we can say “yes”: love of others in its noblest form is always kind.

            Love is not jealous. You’ll notice with each line the descriptions of love become more personal, more threatening, because when the mind hears the word “jealousy”, it begins to make excuses for it: “Well, yes, there may have been a time when my mind felt a little jealous but I have come to understand that was insecurity,” or that was fear, or that was my own controlling nature, but love in its purest form is not jealous. 

Boastful. Well, sometimes the mind explains, “and yet, those were immature moments, carried away by the situations in life.”   But love in its purest form does not need to boast; it is its own reward. 

Love does not insist on its own way. Okay, “well maybe once in a while,” the mind will say, “but looking back on it from a more mature standpoint I now understand that love of others, which is able to be generous and help others to find their way, is the nobler form of love.” Yes, love does not need to insist on its own way, and so it goes.

Love never faileth. That’s usually the point in that soliloquy of love where we kind of sense it should stop. Sometimes we may wish it did, because we cannot finish the soliloquy on love without coming to that very disturbing image of a mirror dimly lit in Verse 12: “For now we see in a mirror dimly.” We have to pause in front of that mirror and realize that the only image one sees in a mirror is one’s own image, and that learning to love oneself is the most difficult part of all. It is the great commandment in visual form: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, strength and mind and thy neighbor as thyself.” Paraphrased, that means if you do not learn to love yourself then your love of neighbor is always inauthentic and your love of God is empty. Thou shalt learn to love thyself. It is an image dimly lit, for learning to see ourselves as we are and love ourselves as we are, is the most difficult thing of all. 

One of the fundamental rules in politics, which we forget at our own peril, is this: your opponent understands you better than you know yourself. It’s true. Your supporters are wonderful. They create an image of you and they promote it. They cheer you on and at times you even believe them, but if you want to see your weaknesses, your peculiarities and your arrogance, then take a look at yourself through the eyes of your opponent. It’s the mirror dimly lit, and our opponents can often see us more clearly than we can see ourselves. 

So we stand in front of that mirror before the soliloquy is done and look at ourselves. We see righteousness, but sense that somehow in the dimness of that image there is self-righteousness. 

We see what looks like conviction but it may well be insecurity. We see what looks like justice but it may indeed be anger. We struggle to see ourselves, and even more to love what we see. Only then, you see, when we come to this mirror image, does the prologue to that soliloquy

begin to make sense for if we do not love ourselves authentically, then all of the words we speak about love are nothing more than the noise of a clanging symbol or a noisy gong. 

If we do not learn to love ourselves as an object of God’s love, then all of our giftedness, of prophecy, of wisdom and of healing, creates nothing for us for we will still feel empty, trying to give away what we most need—the experience of being loved—not by others, but by ourselves. If we do not love ourselves then all of the sacrifices we make on behalf of love—you know the phrase, “after all I’ve done for you”—accomplishes nothing. We gain nothing if our love of ourselves is not authentic.

I spent a big chunk of my life at the Jersey shore. I used to love to walk on the boardwalk. There was a particular place on the boardwalk in Atlantic City where there were three huge, funny mirrors positioned in such a way as to distort the images of those who walked by. Stand in front of one and it made you look like you were skinny as a beanpole. Go over and stand in front of another and you were short, squat as could be and wide as a barn. Stand in front of the third one and you looked like you were a balloon being blown up from the middle. I used to hate that part of the boardwalk. In fact I would actually quicken my pace, looking away as I passed those mirrors. I would look off at the horizon to see that place where the endless sea meets the endless sky. I don’t know why I looked away except that I have known enough of life to know that a distorted self-image is no laughing matter. A distorted image of oneself undermines our potential for happiness, for success, for creativity and for peace, seeing ourselves as we wish we were, not as we are. People used to stop in front of those mirrors and giggle at themselves, but a distorted self-image is no laughing matter.

The Psalmist, I know, walked on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The reason I know that is because he, too, looked out to that place where the endless sea meets the endless sky and he was in awe of the splendor of creation: “O Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth”; thy fingers, creation; the majesty of it all, thy wisdom. Then before the Psalm is over he looks back at the distorted human image in those mirrors and says, “What is man that thou art mindful of him and the Son of Man that thou visiteth him?”

I love the way the Bible talks to itself. That question raised in the Psalms is actually answered in the New Testament and in the letter, 1 John, Chapter 3, Verse 2. It’s almost like one part of the Bible calling out to another here in the Psalms: “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” And the answer from the New Testament: “We are the children of God.” There is the image of who we are as human beings, as objects of God’s love. Then John goes on to say, “It does not yet appear what we shall be … ” That’s the mirror dimly lit, right? “ … but we know that when he comes we shall be like him.” Learning to love ourselves the way God loves us, unconditionally, is probably the hardest thing we ever have to do.

The thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians is eloquent and profound. Read by the ages, learned as children, it is beautiful. Standing before the mirror and learning to love ourselves may be the most important thing we ever do in service of our Lord.

Let us reflect from the moments we have known. And in the stillness, O God, grant us thy peace. Amen.