Love is Patient, Love is Kind

Greetings everyone,

I just received back a DVD with the copy of my first sermon for preaching class. I like the audio; I even like the visual even though I am reminded that the camera (sure, the camera) adds ten pounds. I waited for the DVD to send a transcript to you since I changed some things at the last minute. It is below:

Le Anne Clausen

April 3, 2007

1 Corinthians. 13:1-13

“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. 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. 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.

“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

“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. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 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. 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. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

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Brothers and Sisters,

I am not about to preach a wedding sermon from this text.

Instead I am going to preach to you here in this room, church leadership, in this season of Holy Week. Or, for you who will be working in the church, Holy Hell Week for the rest of our working lives. I don’t know about you, but as far as I’m concerned right now, I’m only concerned about survival until Sunday afternoon. There are so many prophecies to preach, words to speak; so many songs to sing and lessons to rehearse and rituals to perform, I’m already exhausted.

Love is patient; love is kind;

It’s just as bad around here this week, isn’t it? How many of you are feeling absolutely buried under papers and midterms and presentations right now? Or Academic Council, fifteen committees, 76 phone calls, 110 emails to return, is there time to even get to worship this week, and if we do get there, will it come off without a hitch? Will all the pieces and all the people be in order, the logistics all planned through and carried out?

Love is patient; love is kind;

Some of you know I’m trying to figure out what to do with my life next. I have a lot of things I could do; and little clear sense of which to do first. Do I go back into activism? Do I go to the parish? Do I go to jail? Do I get a Ph.D? What is required of me, in order to do the good I want to do in the world? What kind of formation, or even credentials, do I need to be accepted? These are questions as real as where my heart leads me, and I worry they will drown out the speaking of the Spirit. They can’t be ignored; I just don’t want them to take over.

Love is patient, love is kind;

We’re good at talking about stepping back from the rush at Christmas to remember the true meaning. We’re maybe not so good yet at talking about this in Holy Week. Rather, we rush through, don’t we, just as everything rushed straight through in all its full-steam confusion 2,000 years ago.

There was a religious leadership at the time, also, and crowds of religious people, trying to do the right thing, trying to observe the formalities, trying to preserve the traditions…somehow missing the core, not seeing the forest for the trees.

None of these things here we’re trying to do in our seminaries and churches and lives are bad; in fact all these things are good and probably have good intentions and noble purposes. But, when love is lacking; they are empty.

The apostle says love is patient, love is kind—and I’m already convicted. Opportunities to love always seem to show up when I’m already fifteen minutes late; when my hands are full; when I’m tired and don’t want to play any more. The people in my path who need loving are too stubborn, too crazy, too needy, they ask too much; I want to tell them to go away! I’m a seminary student, isn’t that enough?

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Seminaries, unfortunately, are not always places or communities of amply-realized Christian love. What if we were to rewrite this epistle: If I could conjugate all of Greek and Hebrew, memorize all the theologians and the Bible, and profess all theories of transformation, be published in all the prestigious journals and make national news…but have not love, I gain nothing?

What is it that we’re all about? What is it that we should be about?

But as for prophecies, they will end. As for courses and tests and practice sermons; faculty disputes and student uprisings; they will end. We have our necessary struggles in the quest to do good, but we cannot neglect the love, the patience, the kindness. For what else then shall we be faithful or hopeful?

Oh, how we see in a mirror darkly, but miss so much of the beauty. We get the general idea—do good; we just forget so often in our harried lives to love.

If you’ve ever been to Jerusalem, you know it is packed wall to wall in every street with people running errands—to work, to school, to the market. It probably wasn’t any different at the time Jesus entered, cleared the Temple, ate with his disciples, was arrested, and then taken out to be crucified. What an interruption, the crazy man, in the midst of the hustle.

There were a lot of learned, faithful people in Jerusalem that day. There was lots of arrogance and rudeness, and insisting on one’s own way. Yet here is this man in the midst of the craziness whose love is patient, whose love is kind. While we go about in our lives like children thinking childish ways, acting childishly, here is a love who bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Here is one who sees completely while we see partially.

Here is love for us that does not end.

Wherever we go in this life, whether here in seminary, or this neighborhood, or into the churches, wherever we go there’s going to be expectations, demands, to do lists and on and on; they will surround us at all times. We will be tempted to dig in our feet, get stubborn, grow stagnant, and miss the point.

Don’t get distracted. Don’t miss the point: love is patient.

Love is kind.

Love never ends.