The church of Jesus Christ is called to be a community of love and compassion, justice, and fellowship. Love, as I am using the term is the kind of love that the church calls agape love.

They may be among the best known chapters of scripture we hear. It is likely that they are the two texts that people who come to church only for special occasions hear most. The 23^rd Psalm is often heard at funerals. And I Corinthians is often part of wedding ceremonies, including the ones that I perform. But these verses have meaning far beyond their reading at significant life passage ceremonies. They speak to our daily lives now.

When we say, ‘the Lord is my Shepherd" we are saying something about where our faith is lodged. We are saying that our ultimate guide, our redeemer, our authority is this shepherd who is God for us. Will we respect and listen to human authority? Yes we will, but it is not the king, or the president, or the governor or the mayor, it is God who is the shepherd of our lives. It is God who is the keeper of our spirits’ trust and authority.

This shepherd is the one who by grace, mercy, and love goes about the work of leading us to the righteous side of the street, away from harm and evil. It is this shepherd who promises never to leave us and who responds to our spirit’s longing by making a banquet for us. It was part of ancient near eastern culture in those days to express friendship and hospitality by preparing a meal for friends. The good news of Psalm 23 is the declaration that God will provide and prepare for us what we need.

Even when we are surrounded by enemies, you know who they are; they wish us no good, they discourage us, they would if they could deprive us of shelter, food, and water. Even as they look to prey upon us, God is already there, watching out for us and taking care to prepare the food our souls need most. It was a gesture of hospitality to feed guests, and it was another to pour oil over the head of an honored guest. Then it was probably done to deal with the dust from the road. Now we know that anointing with oil is an act of healing and blessing. It says that God is pleased that we have found a place at the divine table, and that we are welcomed and protected and safe there. We are protected, we are anointed, and we are fed.

And what was true for the church then is true for us now. "The earliest Christians said, ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ and understood Lord to be also the title of Jesus. In John 10.11, Jesus says, ‘I am the good shepherd.’ They found him to be ‘shepherd and guardian’ of their souls. [When Christians read this Psalm] Jesus, as the shepherd in David’s place, is the one who restores our souls, leads us in the paths of righteousness, accompanies us through danger, spreads the holy supper before us in the presence of sin and death, and pursues us in his gracious love all the days of our lives (Mays, p.119).

This love God gives us in Jesus Christ is a gift for us to treasure and to share. This is the love we are called to have for one another. We have heard the call to this love before. Jesus quotes Hebrew Scripture (Deuteronomy 6.4-6) ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as your self. There is no commandment greater than these" (Mark 12.31).

That is the point Paul is trying to make when he writes to the Corinthians.

The truth is, despite the ways we most often hear it, I Corinthians 13, the so-called love chapter, was not written to be read at wedding celebrations. The words are at the heart of a letter written to a church that was at war with itself. They were at odds about the role of women, the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, the purpose of marriage in the Christian community, and the value of sending their money all the way to Jerusalem, instead of keeping it all for their own needs. They were not clear about the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I and II Corinthians cover all of these issues and more, and we are still talking about most of them today.

The major issue though, is centered, as much debate does today, on what happened in worship. We know that God has by the Holy Spirit given us spiritual gifts, but which ones are the better gifts? Knowledge? That is a good one, speaking in tongues, that is a great one, especially if there are people to interpret what you are really saying. What about giving all your money away. Are there any Warren Buffet’s in the church who can leave billions of dollars to another billionaire’s foundation? What about boasting in God’s love for us, what about all the other gifts we have, gifts of song, of laughter, of compassion, of hospitality, of living sacrificially? None of it means very much if love is missing.

Paul knows that "when people become Christians, they don’t at the same moment become nice. This always comes as something of surprise. Conversion to Christ and his ways doesn’t automatically furnish a person with impeccable manners and suitable morals.

"The people of Corinth had a reputation in the ancient world as an unruly hard-drinking, sexually promiscuous bunch of people. When Paul arrived with the Messages and many of them became believers in Jesus, they brought their reputations with them right into the church.

"Paul spent a year and a half with them as their pastor, going over the gospel in detail, showing then how to live out this new life of salvation and holiness as a community of believers. Paul doesn’t disown them as brother and sister Christians, doesn’t throw them out because of their bad behavior, and doesn’t fly into a tirade over their irresponsible ways. He takes it all more or less in stride, but also takes them by the hand and goes over all the old ground again, directing them in how to work all the glorious details of God’s saving love into their love for one another" (The Message Remix. Eugene Peterson. Introduction to I Corinthians, p.2062).

There are three things we need to know about what it means to be a loving church. First, a church without real agape love is a church with no real meaning, and if there is no love, all of our words about God, about relationships, about justice are just spiritual noise. No matter how eloquent, if our words to one another are not loving, then what we say has little meaning.

We heard about the reputation of Corinth. The town was also famous for its production of bronze vessels such as the acoustic vases that were used by actors so that they could be heard from the stage. The "clanging cymbal" was used by the cult of Cybele. Who is Cybele? She was worshiped by the Romans as the Mother of the Gods and worship in her name was known to be ecstatic and wild. Paul was saying to the Corinthians, "even if you can speak with the heavenly language of angels, but have no love, your high-toned speech has become like the empty echo of an actor’s speech or the noise of frenzied non-traditional worship" (Interpretation Series. I Corinthians. Richard B. Hays. Louisville, John Knox Press, 1997, p.223).

What is the sound of unloving words? It is the sound of excuses, without effort, of blame without accountability and reconciliation, it is the sound of anger and fear with no thought to healing and hope. Loving words build up, speaks to our desire to be honest and real with each other, reminds us when we have offended and gives and receives forgiveness. Loving words point us to Jesus Christ and help us to move in his love and in the love we have for each other.

The second thing we need to know is that where there is no love, the church has no character. When we act in love, we act in self-respect and with respect for others. Does that mean we won’t become angry? No. But it does mean that we will not disregard each other, or let our anger control us. It means that we do not replace our sense of injury with a grudge.

A loving people in a loving church acting in patience and kindness will not let itself be over come with envy, or boasting, or acting pride-fully to the point of seeing no good in anyone else. We will not act shamefully, or in a self-seeking way. Loving churches and loving people keep no record of wrong doing, and take no joy when evil is done.

In other words we will know that love is not about revenge, or loving it when other folks are in trouble, nor is it about getting what I want, when I want it, the way I want it. Love is giving, it rejoices when others do well, it acts with integrity, it seeks the best for others, and is distressed by evil. Love loves what is true and good, and does all it can to work differences out.

Several years ago, a couple was in premarital counseling with a friend of mine. They wanted I Corinthians 13 to be read at their wedding, but with some verses left out. They wanted to know if they could leave out the words, "love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things". Why? Because they didn’t think they should have stay in a marriage if things got too hard. They were encouraged to keep the words in the ceremony, and to really hear the words and to remember them when the glow of the honeymoon wore off, and barring any physical or emotional abuse, to recall them as they did the hard work of building a life together. Love holds up, trusts in, sees a future with, and endures with the beloved, now and into eternity.

That was good advice for that couple, and it is good advice for the church today. And for us, there is this: we practice love now to be able to live into eternity, and so we come one last word from Paul about love. We are called to love in a world we know to be temporary. There will come a time when our gifts will come to an end because there will come a time when our lives, with all that we know now and see now will come to an end. But in the meantime we love because our legacy to others is the heritage of love we will leave to them. Our inheritance from God is love, unconditional and unbreakable. We take what God has given us through Jesus Christ, and do all that we can with it as we love and build and do.

We claim the love of God and love others with what we have been given. It is not perfect yet, it is not totally clear yet, it is not quite complete yet, but the promise is that by the unbreakable love of God, it will be. Faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

"Faith is the trust that we direct toward the God of Israel, who has kept faith with his covenant promises by putting forward Jesus for our sake and raising him to new life; hope focuses our fervent desire to see a broken world restored by God to its rightful wholeness, and love is a foretaste of our brothers and sisters….Only when love presides over our common life in the church will the spiritual gifts find their rightful place and achieve the purposes for which God has given them to us" (Hays, p.231).

Thanks be to God, Amen.