I Cor. 13: 8Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. 11When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. 12Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.  13And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Someone recently wrote to AskYahoo.com and asked, “What is meant by ‘eye transplants? Is it really possible for people born blind to get complete eye transplants so that they can see?” The answer, that I found confirmed on several other sites, was: No, its currently not possible to transplant an entire human eye. But for almost a hundred years we have done corneal transplants, transplants of the outer lens of the eye, and those are mostly successful. But they’re successful in part because the optic nerve, from the brain to the eye, is still there and working. If that’s not working, then to get it working, would currently require nothing short of a miracle.

Today we’re talking about something akin to the miracle of an entire eye transplant, not just improving the eyesight through a new outer lens, but something akin to completely new eyes, from the brain to the outer lens, or even a whole new kind of sight. Sight and eyes, that is, for seeing what is invisible, what is eternal, in effect, for seeing God. To see the invisible and eternal God, we don’t have any physical senses. With these physical eyes, and with all our physical senses, we can see, taste, touch, hear and feel the works and the wonders of God. Like what we see in a garden or the Grand Canyon. Like ourselves and each other. With our human logic and senses we can also know things about God. But seeing and knowing such things about God is not the same as seeing God and knowing God.

For that we need something on the scale of a transplant, even, the transplant of not just two eyes but three. Those three eyes for seeing God are listed in today’s Bible passage: faith, hope and love. Those three things are our direct connections with God, or more likely, God’s direct connections with us. That’s why I liken them to a transplant: because we wouldn’t have them on our own, if left to ourselves. We can seek them of God, and we must, but that only underscores that they are gifts. What hope, faith or love anyone has is a gift of God.

At the end of the previous chapter, chapter 12, Paul tells us to seek the greatest of the spiritual gifts. By the end of chapter 13, we know what those greatest gifts are: faith, hope and love. They are the greatest gifts because, of all the gifts that the Holy Spirit gives for Christian life and ministry, Paul says only these three will remain. They will be necessary and powerful in all times, places and situations. The other ones, like prophecy or speaking in other languages, or mercy, administration and service, are temporary tools, given as needed for the church’s mission in some times and places, but not others. But all these other spiritual gifts depend upon the three greatest gifts: faith, hope and love. Without them, we would not even seek other spiritual gifts in the first place. Or we would seek them for reasons other than faith, hope and love, such as for power, control or pride. To impress people with our giftedness. There was enough of that going on already in Corinth.

So “faith, hope and love,” are the gifts—the transplanted eyes– by which we “see” the invisible God, the ways in which we “know” God in ways beyond what our brains and bodies can do. Of these three, love is the greatest, Paul says. And I can think of two reasons why love is the greatest.

One is because love is so necessary to the other two gifts. Think of faith and hope without love. A loveless faith, or a loveless hope. A loveless faith would be nothing more than an ideology, and a mean one at that. Like the folks who show up at the funerals of soldiers or people who die from HIV/AIDS to proclaim that they deserved their deaths because God hates homosexuals, allegedly. They may call their beliefs “faith” but I’d call them an ideology. Sure, a religious ideology, but a mean one at that.

Or what are Communism or Islamic jihad but ideologies with all the fervor and organization of religion, but without the saving grace of love? To approach the kind of faith that Jesus would commend, to which he would say, “Great is your faith,” or “your faith has saved you,” there must also be love.

Or think of hope without love. Then you’d just have wishful thinking and mere optimism. Someone may hope to win the lottery. We may hope that our country’s team wins the World Soccer Cup (or at least that we get a decent referee), but we can’t credit the Holy Spirit with such hope. Because its lacking the kind of love this passage enjoins upon us. Love of money, or love of country won’t abide forever, because money and countries won’t abide forever.

God’s kind of love, for godly and eternal things, is the difference between living, saving faith and mere ideology. And its the difference between godly hope and mere desire or wishful thinking.

The second reason that love is the greatest of all three is that love is the one thing that carries over into eternity. Once we’re standing on the other side of the Pearly Gates to the New Jerusalem, we won’t need hope anymore. Our hope will be fulfilled. We won’t need faith either, because our faith will have become sight. But however great our love is on this side of the veil, it will ramp up an infinitely higher notch on the other side. Heaven is pure love. Think then of all the love we show in this life as training for the love we will give and know in the life to come. Or think of all the love we know and show in this world as an appetizer and an advertisement for the world to come.

Love is how we grow up, in this life, into our eternal, heavenly selves. In all our works and acts of love today, we are like children playing dress-up with their parents’ clothes. They may seem awkward and too big for the children now. But whenever we see them in shoes twice as big as their feet, and in suit jackets or dresses that drag on the floor behind them, we don’t usually tell them to knock it off. Don’t we usually want to pull out the cameras and cheer them on? So it is with love.

You can tell what people are nervous and insecure about by what they laugh and joke about. One of the richest sources of humor is heaven and the afterlife. Because we’re uncertain about the details, and therefore a bit nervous, especially about the process of getting there, even when we have the assurance of salvation. So we tell stories about people smuggling satchels of gold bricks into heaven, only to get busted by St. Peter, who says, “O good; here’s our latest shipment of paving stones. Its been a bad year for potholes.” Or ones in which we can tell how good and godly people have been by the size and glamor of their cars. You get a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Not bad. Mother Teresa was finally seen in a stretch limo. Oh, and there goes the pastor!

On a tricycle.

Well, if we’re wondering or worried about what endures from our lives, and what we might carry with us from this life to the next, look no more. “And now these three endure: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.” In part, because its the greatest in duration. Like really, really, really great. Like forever.

You know, we could waste our lives and our resources worrying and running around looking for foolproof investments that will grow and pay dividends without fail (real estate? Stock market? Grain futures?), and miss the one and only foolproof investment that’s right in front of us: people, through acts and lives of love. Not only will those kinds of investments pay off in heaven, in a way, they are heaven. Love is even how heaven comes to us, long before we go to heaven. There’s nothing in God’s heaven for anyone who loves anything more than love.

Sometimes these investments pay off on both sides of the Pearly Gates. Sometimes they even pay dividends in hell. Like in the hell that was Rwanda, recently. But there, Pastor Gratien Mitsindo two years ago received a down payment on heaven. Fourteen years earlier, during the genocide of 1994, Pastor Mitsindo, though a member of the Hutu tribe, saved the lives of over 300 Tutsis by giving them refuge in his church sanctuary. When the Interahamwe militia found out about them, they came to the church building demanding access to the refuge seekers, to kill them, and him, for having sheltered them. Pastor Mitsindo, though unarmed, stood up to them with the force of his will and character. When the militia backed down and threatened to come again, for him as well as for the Tutsis, Mitsindo organized hiding places for the refuge seekers in other homes and locations, as well as a system of sneaking food to them.

Two years ago, a public ceremony was organized to honor Mitsindo. The surviving refuge seekers presented him with two cows and a motorcycle. Some of them had even become his adopted family members, even though they were from different tribes. So with two cows, a motorcycle and more importantly, all that family, Mitsindo is set for life. They are his social security. And if they are giving out wheels in the New Jerusalem, on which to zoom around the golden streets, for love like that, I’m pretty sure he’ll get more than a cow or another motorcycle. Not because he earned it: God’s love is not about accounts and rewards. It will be because whatever he drives in the next life, he learned to drive in this one.

And that’s my Father’s Day story today.

Love like that, you can’t even keep it out of the hell that was Rwanda, in 1994. Love is how the future keeps breaking into the present. Its God’s way of showing up; and it is our way of growing up. Since God and heaven and we are forever, so then is love. That’s why love is the greatest of the greatest three big-time all stars: faith, hope and love. With such 20-20-20 vision, we will even see God.

I Cor. 12:But eagerly desire the greater gifts.  And now I will show you the most excellent way.

13: 1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8Love never fails.

If you can almost repeat this passage word for word, its either because you memorized it—in which case, good for you!–or because you’ve been to a lot of weddings over the years. Which is also great. This passage is read at so many wedding ceremonies precisely because what Paul says about love applies so well to a marriage and a family.

But it was a church that Paul had in mind when he penned these words, not a couple about to be married. If he was thinking of them, he might have written, “Love does not leave dirty socks on the floor; love does not leave the toilet lid up; love does not start out a question with the words, ‘Why do you always….?’ and love does not give your spouse the silent treatment; love always helps with the dishes and the diapers and takes initiative to arrange dates and please the other, and yet also knows when to give each other some space.”

Instead, when Paul says that “Love is patient, love is kind. ..it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud,” and so forth, we can safely assume that he is writing to a church in which people have not been patient nor kind to each other, in which, in fact, they have been quite rude, self-seeking, easily angered, keeping record of wrongs, and delighting in evil–” each other’s evil. That fits with everything else we find in the letter.

Its not that these Corinthian Christians weren’t great and gifted people. In fact, quite the opposite. These words on love come in the middle of Paul’s lengthy words to the Corinthians about their spiritual gifts, which were quite impressive. The words we’ve heard about tongues and prophecy and special knowledge make sense only if some of those Corinthian Christians could indeed speak in the many tongues of people and even of angels, perhaps. Some of them must indeed have had the gift of prophecy and could fathom all mysteries and knowledge. Some of them must have had mountain-moving faith and were brave enough to give everything to the poor and even face a martyr’s death in the flames. So these Corinthian Christians were superbly gifted people in every way.

Except in one particular way. The most important one. The one without which all the other gifts are no longer gifts but dangers and liabilities: Love. Love is “the most excellent way” that Paul embarks upon showing them. It is the most excellent of the Holy Spirit’s gifts that they are to seek.

I say the word “love” with some reluctance, fear and trembling this morning. Because in our culture and our language, the word “love” is filled with so many meanings that it has almost become meaningless. If you love your country, we’re told, you’ll willingly kill people from another country. The ancient Greek king Midas loved gold above all things. So when the gods in the ancient Greek story gave him the power to turn everything he touched into gold, he inadvertantly turned his beloved daughter into a lifeless statue. Kind of like what’s happening to the Gulf of Mexico, only for love of oil. So the mere feeling of love, of desire and delight, does not justify everything. But that’s most often what we mean by the word “love.”

In today’s reading, Paul defines love in a way that is active and behavioral, not just abstract or emotional. Its about what we choose to do, and not do, and not just what we feel or want. Twenty centuries later, we are like the Greeks, in that we prefer verbal and abstract definitions of things like love. So here’s an attempt: If we desire anything, love is when we desire God’s best for someone, whether that is someone else, or the person in the mirror.

But Paul, good Jew that he is, understands love in terms of choices and actions, in flesh and blood. So he describes not just our desire for God’s best for someone, but our actions toward God’s best for someone. This may involve active demonstrations of love, as in “Love is patient, love is kind….. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” It may also require of us the negative, our restraint and refusal to do something, as in, “Love does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.”

Which is not to say that no feelings or desires are involved. But in Paul’s vision of us as the promised people of God under formation, in the process of becoming, feelings and desires are just as likely to follow actions, as vice versa.

A pastor once told me of a couple who came to him for marriage counseling. The husband wanted a divorce. He said, several times, “I just don’t love her anymore.” As depressed and neglected as she appeared, she didn’t look all that loved either. The counselor gave them this assignment, addressing the man: “Before I see you again to help you work out your divorce, I want you, Sir, to plan a date for both of you, one that includes doing something with your wife that she is most interested in.”

Two weeks later they returned, having completed the assignment. The husband said, “I’m reconsidering this divorce thing. I’m willing to give this marriage another try.” The counselor chalked up the change in the man’s feelings to the change in his actions, not vice versa. And that’s one part of the message that Paul is trying to get across to his Corinthian friends: love is a choice, love is an action. Even if it begins with feelings of interest, desire and attraction, it can only continue with choices and action.

And now I’m going to say something quite opposite and sound like I’m contradicting myself. Maybe I am. Its happened before. But if I am, then so is Paul. Just before he talks about our choices and actions of love, Paul also calls love a gift. “Desire the best gifts,” he says. And then he adds, “And now I’ll show you the most excellent way,” that is, the most excellent of all gifts. And then he talks about love. That permits me to say that while love is a choice, it is also a gift. The most excellent of all spiritual gifts. The most important of them. Its so important that this gift of love is the difference between whether our other gifts, like tongues or prophecy or faith, are banes or blessings, whether they are helpful or harmful, whether they build up community, or whether they divide it and destroy it. So important is this gift of love that, no matter how gifted we are, no matter how heroic and sacrificial and right and intelligent we may be, Paul says, “Without love, I am nothing” and “without love, I have nothing.”

So what is love, a gift or a choice? Ultimately, love is our choice to accept God’s gift of love. God’s love for us, and God’s love through us. Because not only does God want to love us, God wants to love others through us. And to love us through others. Which brings me to the most important definition in the Bible for love: “God is love (I John 4:8).” At heart, then, love is a person. This person is the source and fountain of all love between persons. When we give and receive love, God is giving us himself, and nothing short of himself. Love is how we receive and share God. Love is the only capacity we even have for knowing and experiencing God.

I read a letter in the New York Times this week, in which someone wrote and said something to the effect that, “I don’t need any faith, any church, any religion or any God because I have people like my five-year old son to love me. And he’s just woken up this morning and come in to hug me even as I write this.”

Blessed are he and that child. Good for them.

But as a Christian, I have to believe that the writer is missing the most important evidence of God literally right under his nose: the love between himself and that child, and his good morning hug. Such love is so much more extravagant than what we need for the mere survival of our species and our genes. It has to be God.

These signs and presences of God are nothing if not surprising and persistent, even in the face of tremendous odds. Well into the late 1970′s, two men had long become such good and close friends that they and their families regularly visited each other, even though the trip was costly, involving air fare and the crossing of at least two international borders, and hundreds of miles, or kilometers, in their case, so deep was their friendship. It all began when both of them had actually been trying to kill each other, in April of 1945, in the last days of World War II. A young German soldier saw an attacking British soldier crumple up and fall to the ground in front of him, wounded and immobilized, in the line of fire. So the young German man crawled out of his trench, with bullets and shrapnel flying all around him, and dragged his wounded enemy to safety. As the medics carried the man away to an army field hospital, both soldiers had the other one’s name and address in their wallets. Leaving aside the question of whether either of them should have been there shooting at the other, you have to marvel at the care and mercy that suddenly overwhelmed the one soldier’s fear and hatred of the other. How to explain their enduring friendship in spite of the hatred and violence that had previously separated them? I believe that the power and tenacity of love to emerge even in situations like that is nothing short of God giving himself to the world, and showing himself to the world, as he did most clearly through Jesus. It can happen anywhere, to anyone, in or out of the church. The advantage of being a Christian includes knowing where such love comes from, and that we can therefore trust such love to assert itself in even the most unlikely of places. Like our graves.

We love because God first loved us. And God won’t stop loving us, no matter how hard we might try to make him stop. One day eleven years ago, we were shocked and disheartened by the tragic and stunning news of the shootings at the Columbine high school in Colorado. The next morning, still sick at heart and fearful, I was parking the car at a shopping mall near a Brueggers Bagel Restaurant, when I saw a young teenage man just a little under the age of the high school killers. I found myself wondering, “Could he too be so alienated and violence-prone that he might be led to violence and vengeance like those two high school seniors?” He did have a certain slouch and slump to his shoulders that made me wonder about him. How many hours has he logged on shoot-em-up video games, or listening to head-banging screaming death metal music with hopeless, violent and women-hating lyrics? I wondered. Then I and my fear-based stereo-typing were put to shame as I saw his sister and his father get out of the same car he had left, as they took their places together, with Dad in the middle, putting his arms around both son and daughter, as they walked into Brueggers’ Bagels for breakfast together before school. Oh me of little faith, I thought. I was ready to despair and write this young man off. But God was not, as we could see through his father.

Love: Nothing can keep it down or out of our world. It is the most important of God’s gifts, without which all other gifts can do more harm than good. Through the gift of love, God gives us nothing less than himself.