In the World, But...

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8a; 1 Timothy 2:1-7

May 17, 2015 • Portage First UMC

His was a public life, and for a long time he had lived for the admiration and the status that a life in politics brought. He had grown up in a life of privilege and had been educated at a prestigious university, but during those years he had not been a serious student. He would stay out late at night at parties and then come back to his home and stay up the rest of the night talking with friends. And while he wasn’t worried about his classes, one of his friends commented that while he enjoyed their conversations, staying up that late didn’t do him much good in the lecture hall the next morning. And on he went, even being elected to a high position in the government where he formed a close friendship with the future leader of the country. That’s what you did, after all. You made friends who could help you down the road in your own career and ambitions. In fact, that’s how he spent most of the early years in the government, only doing things that would draw attention to himself. In later years, he admitted he did nothing in those first years to help anyone or accomplish anything of any value. And it was in the midst of that time that he was hit by a crisis of conscience.

That period of time was difficult and dark, because he began to see how he had wasted his life in so many ways. Later, he would say that no one ever suffered as much as he did during those months. And then came Easter, 1786, and something changed. It was like a light switch came on for young William Wilberforce, and he experienced a spiritual rebirth. As some have observed, it wasn’t so much that Wilberforce found God, but that God found him. And his life was different from that moment on. He even thought that perhaps he should leave politics and pursue full-time ministry, but friends, including William Pitt, the future prime minister of England, and Pastor John Newton, the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” talked him out of it. Why couldn’t he serve God by being in the public service? Wilberforce began to see then that God had put him in the Parliament for such a time as this, and he took as the goal of his life two things: the abolition of the slave trade (which was deeply entrenched in England at that time) and the reformation of manners (or the encouragement of a society that was moral and virtuous). The abolition of the slave trade he accomplished, though only a few days before his death. The reformation of manners was a constant struggle, but Wilberforce never doubted that his true calling from God was to serve where God had placed him and to love the culture, his culture, back to life. He was, we might say, willing to live in the world while not being of the world (cf. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/131christians/activists/wilberforce.html).

Wilberforce is one of my heroes, and his life in so many ways exemplifies what we’ve been talking about these last few weeks. We’ve been trying to see what “a more excellent way” of life looks like, especially as Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 13. We’ve looked at what this sort of love Paul describes, this agape love, looks like in the church and in our families, and this morning I want to broaden that out to the culture in general. But the way I want to get at that this morning is to look at it through the lens of politics and government. Many of us claim to hate politics, though I had a friend in seminary who absolutely loved the push and pull of politics and would record the news every night so as not to miss any of the political discussion. But many of us say we don’t want much to do with politics, and we’ve been consistently living that out lately. Last year’s midterm election, held in November, saw the lowest voter turnout in Indiana history. Only 29 percent of registered voters across the state bothered to turn out to cast their ballot. According to the Indianapolis Star, that makes our state number one in voter apathy. So…yay?…for us! We’re number one at being the worst! And it hasn’t gotten any better. In this year’s primaries, held just a couple of weeks ago and mainly centered around local offices, Porter County saw a whopping 14.5% turnout, according to a report on the county website. That means only 14.5% of those who had the chance to cast a ballot bothered to do so (those of you who didn’t have any elections in your area are off the hook!). 14.5%. That, to me, is an indication of the level of love we have for our culture. Granted, we don’t have any way to track the numbers of Christians versus non-Christians who voted, but we as a faith community tend to reflect rather than lead the general population.

Some of that happens because we have begun to believe that our votes don’t count; they don’t matter. But Chuck Colson, who received a felony conviction because of his part in Watergate, believed otherwise. Before his death in 2012, Colson wrote these words: “Now is not the time to buy into the lie that your vote doesn’t really matter. As a result of my Watergate felony conviction, I lost the right to vote for 28 years. When my right was restored, I was able to vote in the 2000 presidential election. That year, the national election—the presidency—was determined by just 500 votes in Florida. Mine was one of those votes. So your vote does matter” (BreakPoint commentary). But the bigger question we want to answer this morning is this: how do we love our culture when it seems, so often, to be difficult to love or even when it seems unlovable altogether?

So, as we’ve done the last couple of weeks, let’s take just one verse from Paul here in 1 Corinthians 13 to examine this morning, and then I want to invite you to look at the rest of these verses this week in light of what we talk about this morning. Today, we’re going to focus on verse 5, where Paul says this: love “does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs” (13:5). Four qualities of love (in addition to the ones we’ve already discussed the past few weeks). What do these have to do with loving our culture, loving our world?

As with the latter part of verse 4, which we looked at last week, Paul focuses in these verses on things love is not. And remember, this “love” Paul is talking about is not the kind you find in the greeting cards or in the movies. This is agape—unconditional, no-strings-attached love. This is the kind of love God has for us, the same kind of love we are meant to reflect to each other and to the world. It’s a kind of love we don’t often experience, and they certainly weren’t experiencing it much in Corinth. That’s why Paul takes such great pains to tell the Corinthians—and generations of believers since—what real, true love looks like. So, Paul says, “love does not dishonor others.” Now, that was a huge thing in a culture like the ancient near east (and still today in the Middle East) which was built on honor. You didn’t do anything to dishonor those you loved; respect and honor were and are so central to the culture. And so you didn’t behave in a way that was unbecoming or that would reflect poorly on others. This is still rooted somewhat in our culture, like when as a teenager you were headed out for a night with friends and your father or mother says, “Remember who you are.” In other words, don’t behave in a way that’s going to embarrass your family. William Barclay translates this characteristic this way: “love does not behave gracelessly” (The Letters to the Corinthians, pg. 121). Or, to put it another way, love does not “dig in the bin of shame” (Green, To Corinth With Love, pg. 65).

When we’re thinking of the world of politics, that last image brings to mind the many, many politicians (who are supposed to be public servants, each and every one of them) who have been caught in various scandals. Leaders from both sides of the aisle have been caught and exposed in scandals of a sexual nature, an economic nature, or even just promising things to constituents that they then hide in other bills or they never come through with. The one who serves is meant to do so out of a love for the people, and if that love is present, you’re not digging in the bin of shame. You don’t do things that are going to dishonor those you serve. Now, for our part of that, for those of us who aren’t in elected office, we need to not be digging in the bin of shame by looking for problems or accusing people of things they have not done. It’s too easy to believe the press these days and convict someone before there is proof because American politics has largely become about image rather than substance. One bad report can be the end of a good leader’s career. Love does not dishonor others, and that applies to the leaders and to the led.

Then, Paul says, love is not self-seeking. The one who loves is not busy pursuing himself or herself, or constantly trying to gain advantage only for themselves. That’s what Wilberforce realized he spent most of his early life doing—pursuing his own privilege, his own advantage, his own pleasure. One Biblical scholar reminds us that there seem to be two distinct kinds of people in the world: “those who always insist upon their own privileges and those who always remember their responsibilities; those who are always thinking of what life owes them and those who never forget what they owe to life” (Barclay 122). Love is the second of each of those actions: remembering our responsibilities, remembering what we owe to life and, I would add, to God. The loving person puts others first; we’ve encountered this attitude of Paul’s about love in most every section of this letter, probably because this was the biggest problem underlying all the other problems in the church at Corinth. One way this showed up there is in the way they were practicing holy communion, of all things. We think of and practice communion as a rather orderly affair, but from what we can tell, in the early church, it was much more of a party, coupled with a dinner (called a “love feast”) and worship and then communion to wrap up their time together. But, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11, that some weren’t content to wait for everyone to arrive, and people started bringing their own private dinners to the gathering without sharing with others, and then some would arrive late and the food would all be gone, and it was a mess. He puts it this way: “One person remains hungry and another gets drunk” (11:21). Now, he may be exaggerating (or not), but the point is the same: they’ve forgotten that in the very act Jesus gave them to bring them together they are drawing lines between the “haves” and the “have nots.” They are self-seeking rather than caring for all. And the question then comes to us as to whether we are the same. The loving person is other-seeking, other-pursuing rather than self-seeking.

Then, Paul really gets to meddling when he writes, “love is not easily angered.” This one hits close to home for me, because Cathy will tell you when I was younger I had a very quick temper. It was easy to get me angry, and I didn’t always handle it well. I’ve worked hard over the last many years to bring that under control, to submit that to the lordship of Jesus and let him control it, but it hasn’t been easy and sometimes that old person comes roaring out. And it doesn’t help that, as you may have noticed, we live in angry world. Turn on any news channel and you’ll often find taking heads yelling at each other. I look at faces as I pass people either when I’m walking or when I’m driving and many, many people seem to live in perpetual anger, like a pressure cooker just waiting to blow. As I wrote in my blog this week, we are a culture that is easily offended, easily angered. Watch the “tending topics” on Facebook or Twitter and you’ll see many stories about angry people, people offended over this or that little thing. Paul is saying here that love is not easily stirred up, that the “sharp retort” is never a loving response (cf. Green 65). In fact, as William Barclay pointed out, “When we lose our tempers, we lose everything” (Barclay 122). I learned that many times myself, but our culture hasn’t yet learned that.

Anger is everywhere today. It is estimated that half of all Americans experience road rage. One study, done in the Washington D.C.–area, showed that aggressive driving may be a factor in at least 50 percent of auto accidents. Another poll, done by the Gallup organization, revealed that drivers worry more about being the victims of road rage than about being hit by a drunk driver. The number one cause of firings in the workplace is inappropriately expressed anger. There are almost two million assaults every year in the workplace, and homicide is the second leading cause of death on the job. Maybe most revealing about where we’re headed is this study, done in a Massachusetts high school, which showed that 8 percent of the students there had been injured by or threatened with a weapon, 38 percent had been in a physical fight, 20 percent had carried some kind of weapon, and 10 percent had carried a gun to school. I doubt the statistics would be that different in our own high school. Love is not easily angered, but we are. What might happen if, in the midst of our angry world, we sought to be diffusers, people who are peacemakers (cf. Matthew 5:9), the ones Jesus calls “the children of God,” rather than inciters?

And that leads us to Paul’s last characteristic in this verse: love keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not count the bad. The word translated as “wrongs” is the Greek word kakos, which has come down to us in slang form as “caca.” Poop. (Can I say “poop” in a sermon?) It’s the nasty stuff that we like to hear and learn about people; it’s the stuff of which political campaigns today are made of. You announce your candidacy and immediately people start digging to find out the bad stuff—caca—about you. Paul says love keeps no record of such things. Love doesn’t pile up the poop. Unless you’re going to fertilize your garden, there’s no reason to. Michael Green translates it this way: love does not “brood over wrongs, real or imagined” (Green 65). Paul is reminding us that “Christian love has learned the great lesson of forgetting” (Barclay 122). In this, our example is God himself; the prophet Micah describes God’s action—God’s love—toward us this way: “You will again have compassion on us; you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19). You see, it’s not so much that God forgets the caca in our lives as that he chooses not to remember. Love does that. Love keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking, is not easily angered and keeps no record of wrongs. Now, if you’re sitting there and thinking, “This is an impossible task,” then I believe you’re in the majority. Most of our world would say that this whole idea is caca; it’s rubbish (Wright, Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians, pg. 172). That is not how the world works! And that’s exactly Paul’s point. This is a “more excellent way” to live. It’s not ordinary. If it were ordinary, Paul wouldn’t have to describe it in such detail. But it’s extraordinary to live this way, to seek to love even when love doesn’t come back to us. And when we think of it in terms of government and politics, it’s even more impossible to imagine a world like this. As I mentioned earlier, our political process, like most of our world, has become more about image than about substance. The ads tell you more about what the “other” has done or is doing wrong than they do about what this candidate will do if elected. It’s image management; it’s subterfuge and it’s deception. But how can we possibly make a difference? What can we do to show love in the midst of a loveless world? I want to suggest a couple of responses, a couple of solutions especially as we vote in a local election this year and as we ramp up for a presidential election next year.

First, in a letter Paul wrote to his son in the faith, Timothy, Paul gives one clear and overriding response we ought to have to our world in general and the government in particular. Timothy was a young man who had been converted under Paul’s ministry, and Paul had left him in Ephesus as the pastor there (1:3). This letter was written late in Paul’s life (cf. TNIV Study Bible, pg. 2027), just as persecution of the church was beginning to increase, and the temptation was great for some people to compromise their faith. Paul writes to Timothy to encourage the church to hold fast to what they believed, and then he says something that’s rather surprising. Well, maybe not surprising to us, but more than likely surprising to those in Ephesus. Paul says they are to pray for kings, emperors, all those in authority, anyone who has power to end their lives. Pray for them. Ephesus was a Roman city, a cosmopolitan city that, in the first century, was on the coast, and all sorts of influences came into that city. There are still altars standing there that were dedicated to various Roman and pagan gods and citizens were asked, or encouraged, or required to pray to the emperor as a god. But Paul calls the believers there to stand firm, be committed and pray to the true God for these civil authorities that are trying to pressure them to give up their faith or their life. Lift them up to God our Savior, Paul says, as he reminds the Ephesians that Caesar isn’t the savior (cf. Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Pastoral Letters, pg. 20). Lift them up in prayer, even if you don’t think they deserve it. Pray that they may be or become people who pursue holiness and godliness.

The next time you’re tempted to complain about the president or Congress or the Supreme Court, the governor or the mayor, stop and ask if you’ve prayed for them lately. We like to complain more than we like to pray. Complaining is easier, and it’s more fun. But it is not the loving response. There is a place for civil discourse; there is a place for discussing issues. But there is an even bigger place for prayer. Pray that God will move, that God will work in and among the lives of our leaders. There are times when I don’t agree with what this politician or leader does, and there are times I want to try to tell God what he needs to do with those people. Even prayer can become complaining! But I’ve tried, over the years, to begin to pray for particular things, that our leaders would live in righteousness and that they would pursue justice. Those are things, I know, that please God’s heart. So we pray for righteous and holy lives for our leaders, and for all who desire to be leaders, from the very top all the way down to the leaders of our community and of our church. Do our prayers outweigh our complaints? When was the last time you prayed for our leaders, for our government?

The second response, which Paul does not mention (mainly, I think, because he did not live in a republic but in an empire), is to get out and vote. When I was in seminary, I worked at the Seminary Post Office and got to interact with most everyone in the school at one time or another. I remember one year when there was a presidential election, and somehow I got in the habit of asking everyone who came to the door of the SPO if they had voted. One guy seemed surprised I would ask. “Don’t you want to know who I’m voting for before you tell me to go vote?” And that response sort of took me back. There was a mindset among some at the seminary that there were right ways and wrong ways to vote, so I had to stop and think about what he said for a moment, and then I said, “No, I don’t care who you vote for. Well, I do, but I wouldn’t presume to tell you who to vote for. I just care that you vote.” I don’t know if he did or not, but that conversation has guided me for a long time. The key is to exercise our civic duty. Even though the Bible doesn’t talk about voting in particular, it is clear that we should fulfill our duty to our culture as long as it doesn’t interfere with our responsibility to the Kingdom of God. We have a marvelous freedom, and it is the loving response to our culture to vote, to exercise that freedom.

Now, as an aside, let me address a complaint we Christians often hear from the world, that we’re just trying to control things so we can cram our faith down everyone’s throats. If we were really doing that, we should back off because that’s not the loving attitude. Instead, we invite people to follow Jesus, to get to know him, not to follow a religion or even a church. But that doesn’t seem to be the way the vast majority of Christians approach the culture. If anything, we’ve been too afraid and too passive and allowed others to be aggressive in their approach to us. Chuck Colson, in words that still ring true today, put it this way: “When a rabid secularist tells you to stop forcing your religion down his throat—simply correct him. You might say, ‘Excuse me, but who is suing the government to remove crosses from cemeteries? Who has filed lawsuits to remove “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance? Who’s trying to tell doctors and nurses and pharmacists that they have to participate in medical procedures that violate their religious conscience? Who’s banning Bibles from schools? In other words, who is forcing their point of view on whom?’” Good questions. Our calling is to pray, vote, and love.

And the result, Paul says, will be something we can’t help but desire. He says we will be able, then, to live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness (2:2). When I think of a modern-day Paul, the name Saeed Abedini comes to mind. Some of you may have seen my posts on Facebook from time to time about this Christian pastor, originally from Iran, who had returned to his home country several times to visit family and to build an orphanage. Despite having the government’s permission to visit, Pastor Saeed was detained on his last trip, in 2012, while trying to return home. He has been in various prisons ever since, often beaten and deprived of medical care. In the midst of horrible conditions, he has been able to send letters out, letters that are full of faith and confidence in the God he loves even when the government is against him. And even though he is an American citizen, his own government has been reluctant to tie his release, as well as the release of other American prisoners, to any agreement with Iran…until this week. This past week, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling on the administration to not leave the prisoners behind in Iran as the final details of the nuclear agreement are being hammered out. It’s the first sign of pressure being put on the diplomats. And yet, no matter how all that turns out, Pastor Saeed has held his head high in prison, determined to pray and love and live a live of godliness and holiness even in the worst of situations. So can’t we also? We don’t live in such conditions. We live in freedom. We also ought to live in love toward all, not just those who love us back. We are called to be in the world, but not of it, extending love toward all. Love that does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking, is not easily angered, and keeps no record of wrongs. That kind of love will change not just our own country but the world. Let’s pray.