Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. David Williams; 01.31.16
Scripture Lesson: 1 Corinthians 13
It was, when I woke up, the plan for my morning.
I looked out the window into the pervasive whiteness. The blizzard was howling, frosted flakes cascading from the sky, and it wasn’t particularly grrreeeeat. The snow looked as deep as my knee, rising up to the bumper of our Prius, and almost to the bumper of the big red Ford F150 XLT SuperCrew 4X4 I’d rented for the storm.
It was one of those snows that are so deep even walking is kind of a challenge, so deep that my usual boots just weren’t going to cut it. I took the dog for a walk, but it was short, because there just wasn’t anywhere for her to go, literally. She was up to her shoulders in the snow, and with no path, she quickly started giving me the “Oh please let’s stop this madness” look.
Which meant it was time to put the plan for the morning into effect. I remembered, from Snowmageddon, how we’d needed the tracks bludgeoned into the road by an eager driver of a giant SUV to get anywhere. My goal, for the day of Snowzilla, was to both insure I could get out to snag my parents and inlaws if power went out and to be the provider of said walking tracks.
I cleaned off the Ford, loaded and packed down snow into the truck bed, put it into four high, and proceeded to make those tracks down our street, blasting through the snow. Just as a community service. Not because it was a hoot and the inside of the truck sounded like a Dukes of Hazzard episode the whole time. That wasn’t a factor.
That day, I watched from our kitchen bay window, as folks walked up and down the street as the snow swirled and fell, the snow deepening, but the tracks still there, two clear paths for neighbors and dogs and children.
Every hour or two, I’d fire up the truck, and remake the path. It gave the day a sense of purpose, a plan, a clear pattern and structure.
But what does that mean now?
Those tracks are gone now, thank the good Lord, Fairfax County, and the great state of Virginia. The intent and energy that went into making them disappeared before the plows and the warming sun. It is as if they never existed.
I didn’t even get to keep the truck.
What are we to make of life, of those things that seem to be there one moment and utterly vanished the next? What is it that has importance? When the Apostle Paul was faced with a community sure that they had the answer, he was forced to tell them that their vision of what counts was completely off.
Where he went was the passage we heard today, one of the most justifiably familiar passages in the entirety of the New Testament.
Paul has just finished up a conversation about the varying different gifts and abilities given to all of us by the Spirit of God. He’s speaking that to a community that had a whole bunch of trouble figuring out what was important. That’s not to say they didn’t talk about what they viewed as most significant. There was apparently a great deal of conversation amongst the Corinthians about who was the bearer of the best truth, the greatest gifts, the deepest blessings.
It was a relentlessly divisive, compulsively competitive church. Paul’s struggles with the mess that was the church at Corinth were nearly constant. Corinth was a trading hub in the Roman Empire, and was legendary for its dog-eat-dog, do anything to get ahead, I’m-gonna-get-me-mine mentality. Proving you weren’t a weak loser and back-stabbing your way up the ladder of prosperity was just expected. It’s what Corinthians did, to the point that Roman historians and social commentators at the time invariably mention what a heartless, money-grubbing, uncharitable, and self-absorbed city Corinth was.
Within the church, the question of what was most important was couched in terms of who was right and who was wrong, who had the deepest spirituality. They took the gifts and blessings that they’d been given, and chose to make them a source of competition, conflict and chaos. So in response to that mess-making, what Paul offered up to them was to lay out what he viewed as the most essential and foundational characteristic of any Christian.
In doing so, he doesn’t pitch out dogma, or a set of rules. He doesn’t prescribe a checklist. Instead, he gives them a song, a hymn that sings the praises of what he views as the single highest value and purpose of all life. He shows them what he describes as the most excellent way, the single path that defines the essence of the Christian journey.
That way is the path of God’s love, the primary, essential, and most foundational gift of our Creator. Paul makes it radiantly and unmistakably clear: this love is the defining feature of any authentic Christian faith.
And as he sings out that hymn, Paul makes an assertion that hangs potent in the air: Love never ends. There it is, in verse 8: Love never ends.
Everything else comes to an end, or ceases to be. The Corinthian church was particularly proud of itself, of how holy and powerful and amazing it was. They declared themselves prophets, gifted with the ability to predict God’s plan for the future, better even than the Capital Weather Gang. They all spoke in tongues, working themselves up into a frenzy of Holy Ghost Incoherence. And they knew more. They were the smartest, the wisest, the most urbane, the ones who knew all of the secrets of God.
Those “gifts” were at the heart of the spiritual pride of Corinth, and Paul pops each of ‘em like a balloon. In the original Greek, Paul sings out the song: Eite de prophetai katarghethesontai, (But as for prophecies, they will come to an end) eite glossai pausontai, (as for tongues, they will cease) Proeite gnosis katarghethesetai. (as for knowledge, it will come to an end.)
Pausontai is familiar, the word that gives us the English word “pause.” But katarghethesontai and katarghethesetai are...well...they’re not so familiar. They sound, honestly, like the linguistic lovechild of Klingon and Elvish. Given that his was a hymn, I’m not even sure how you’d sing them. Maybe Paul rapped, a concept I will not even attempt to simulate here.
They’re compound terms, words built of other words, and what they mean, roughly, is that prophecy and knowledge will be “unacted downwards.” It kind of means discarded or trashed, but it also means that the energy required to sustain them will just fall away.
As complex as the term is, the essential meaning is simple. So much of what we consider valuable, the impressive things of life? Here at the heart of Paul’s teaching, and at the heart of the Christian faith, is the assertion that those things are impermanent, that they melt away like tracks in the snow, that they vanish like a rental.
What lasts, Paul asserts, is love. Love, understood not just as a fleeting emotion, but as the fundamental interconnection between all things that is both God’s nature and God’s gift to us through the Spirit.
That, for Paul, is the foundation of the Christian life, both our lives as individuals and our lives together as a community. It’s something that’s admittedly difficult to see, hard to quantify and measure.
Other things are easier to measure. You can take a ruler, and see that there is a twenty two inch variance between the top of the snow and the imprint of your passing. But what matters more deeply and permanently is the why of that imprint, the reason for it.
For all of us, impermanent and mortal as we are, that fundamental truth is worth holding on to.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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