It is interesting to hear I Corinthians 13 read outside of a wedding context . . . not read by the bride’s aunt, with a bride and groom standing at the steps to the altar, with the groom’s three-year old ring-bearing nephew rolling on the floor in front of the pews. This is a wonderful scripture for a couple getting married, to be sure, but Paul did not intend it for such an occasion. He had a much more urgent situation in mind. In Corinth, a rambunctious, wide-open seaport, the first generation of Christians was being fractious, contentious, and mean to one another. Each was bragging about how spiritual he or she was, but they were doing nothing together to make a difference in the city.

So, Paul writes this primer on love, a very practical, no-nonsense, unromantic, devoid-of-sentimentality definition of what Jesus meant when he commanded us to love one another as he loved us.

Paul starts by declaring that you can have all of the talent in the world . . . you can be spellbinding with words, you can be brilliant in understanding the world and how things work, you can have faith that levels mountains to a plain and be generous to a fault, but if you employ these strengths without love you are worthless at best, dangerous at worst. It is love that makes all else valuable.

Then, he describes love in very concrete terms. This is the paragraph everyone grasps. “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.” We all can understand that, what Paul is telling us to do as members of a Christian community.

If we are going to be the people of Christ in the world, then we have to get our act together by getting our actions together. To love one another means to choose to be patient, kind, gentle, and supportive, and conversely, to choose not to be arrogant, rude, self-centered, jealous, irritable, or resentful.  

Now, do we hear what Paul is saying here? He is describing love not as a feeling we fall into, or out of, but as an action that we decide to do. Willful love. 

Patience is not a feeling. In a situation where we are unsettled by a client, a customer, a family member, or a church member, and when there is every reason for us to be abrupt and no one would find fault with us, Paul says that the loving choice is to be patient.

Kindness is not a feeling. Someone is mean to us and we can think of a way to lash back, maybe even with a devastating putdown and insult (we Americans love putdowns and insults; it is the root of modern-day humor for us), but we choose to be kind, instead, that is love.

And so it goes through the entire list of descriptions that Paul uses to portray love, willful love, love by choice, a love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. A lot of things will come to an end, Paul says. Insight, glibness, comprehension, but this love of the will endures. When our Wesleyan tradition reduced this to three simple rules – do not harm, do good, and stay close to God – it was trying to make obvious what are our loving choices in life.

Can we really choose to love? I just finished reading a book entitled My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor. Dr. Taylor was a thirty-seven year old, Harvard-trained, brain scientist when she suffered a massive stroke. The left hemisphere of her brain flooded with blood, drowning all of her cognitive abilities – the ability to think, to talk, to do math, to make sense of her world. She said that all of that constant chatter in her mind that was a running narrative on life, deciphering what was going on, interpreting what others were saying to her, while at the same time remembering that she had to stop at the grocery store on the way home and she needed to mail her rent check . . . gone. Not a thing, absolute quiet from the left hemisphere. Someone tested her in the emergency room, “What is one plus one?” And she asked, “What is a one?”

It took her eight years to get back to “normal,” normal enough to live alone, work again, travel freely, and write and talk meaningfully. But, she confesses, that when her cognitive abilities shut down and her sensing side was set loose, her right hemisphere, she was ecstatic. She had never felt so peaceful before, so fluid, so “at one” with the universe. She was enthralled with the discovery of a part of herself that had always been overruled by another part. So, her “stroke of insight,” as the title promises? On page 140, “My stroke of insight is that at the core of my right hemisphere consciousness is a character that is directly connected to my feeling of deep inner peace. It is completely committed to the expression of peace, love, joy, and compassion in the world.”

Peace, love, joy, and compassion . . . that sounds like the candles of our Advent wreath! But Dr. Taylor is telling us that these are not just some sentimental ideals that would be wonderful to have but that they are beyond our reach. She is testifying to her experience that these attributes are imbedded in our brains. She says, don’t have a stroke to find out for yourself; take my word for it.

So, how do we access that, the right hemisphere? Well, as I read that I thought, “That’s partly what we do when we gather here to worship. We place ourselves in an unusual space with provocative symbols – altar, cross, candles, stained glass, an uncommon silence. We hear music that we will not hear during the rest of the week, and read from the scripture words that we will not hear the rest of the week, unless someone is taking God’s name in vain. We separate ourselves from as much of that brain chatter as we can in order to make room for our artistic, emotive selves.”

Prayer, meditation, yoga, a walk in the park without an i-pod, fasting, watching the sun rise over the lake, sitting still, enforcing quiet – it is hard to do. It makes many of us nervous. (“Gee, how long is this sermon going to take? If he hurries up, and let’s see, there is no Holy Communion today, maybe we will be out on time for a change. Then I can rush home, get my sweat clothes on, and watch the replay of ‘Meet the Press.’ I did set that, didn’t I?”) We have to work to be in our right mind, but it is a choice that we can exercise.

Of course, the goal is balance . . . left and right, head and heart, yang and yin, judging and perceiving . . . we have a lot of ways to label this dichotomy. But now being aware of what is possible, Dr. Taylor disciplines herself to choose what leads to love, joy, peace, and compassion. She says that she no longer watches scary movies because it triggers her fears or hangs out with people who are always angry because it hooks her anger. “Since I like being joyful, I hang out with people who value my joy.” (p.183)

Since reading this book I have been praying, “God, make me patient and kind” while I am “on hold” with the hospital billing department. It is a long story. Since August I have been trying to clear up confusion over a single line of my bill for last summer’s cataract surgery. It is not much, as these things go, only $394.25, but I just as soon pay it once someone tells me what it was for. Now after six months no one yet can figure it out. Except that the insurance company will not cover it because they claim that, according to the billing code, the drug was “self-administered,” while the prescription drug plan refuses to cover it because they insist that it was not self-administered, otherwise I would have a prescription and a receipt. It logically cannot be both, so I have been asking for clarification.

So far, I have talked with Diane, Debbie, David, Theresa, Denise, Mary, Joanne, Jackie, Kevin, and Donna, but they seem incapable of talking to each other. So every time I call, it all starts over: “Please give me your account number. Confirm your mailing address. Can I have your date of birth? Know that this call may be recorded for quality control. Now, what I can do for you today?” I explain it all from the start, and then they say, “Okay, let me check. I’m putting you on hold.” And that is when I am driven to prayer. “Dear God, if it is your will, help me to be patient and kind.”

Finally, last week Theresa thought she had it figured out and gave me an 800 number to call. It turned out to be a hospital in Cleveland. “Why are you calling us?” the woman asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “This is the number they gave me. How’s the weather in Cleveland?”

Then I called Theresa back, “It’s cold and overcast in Cleveland. I didn’t want the call to go to waste. Now what do you want me to do?” “God, please help me to be patient and kind!”

Thursday I got a form letter threatening to send this to a collection agency if I do not pay $394.25 within ten days. That is when I got Donna. “Oh, you can disregard that. It’s from a different department.”

Trivial, to be sure, but if we cannot be loving in something as minor as this, imagine the challenge on a grander scale. Let us conclude by looking at what happened to Jesus. Last week we read in the Gospel of Luke that Jesus goes to his hometown synagogue and reads the prophesy from Isaiah where it is promised that the messiah will bring “good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed.” And then he declares, “I am the one who will fulfill this prophesy.” The local folks are thrilled. They think that all of this is going to come to them because he is one of them. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son, Mary’s boy?” 

That is natural enough. Certainly, we in Chicago know how it goes. A man from here gets elected President, and we think, “Oh boy, here come the goodies! All the money for high-speed rail improvements that we want, more money than anyone else for education, and the Olympics! Here come the Olympics!” Locally someone from our block gets elected alderman, and the buzz along the street gets going, “Our garbage will be the first to be collected, all of the potholes will be filled next week, and the city development money will be coming to us and not the other guys.”

We know how the local people felt, but Jesus infuriates them by saying, “Remember back in Elijah’s day when there was a terrible famine everywhere, including people starving here at home. Yet, to whom did Elijah understand God was sending him? To the widow up in Lebanon. And when there were lepers crying out for help in Israel, whom did Elisha cleanse? Only the man from Syria.”

Which was Jesus’ way of saying, God’s love is meant for everyone, not just for the insiders, the chosen few. If we willfully love by acting with patience and kindness, if we forego arrogance and rudeness and irritability and resentfulness, then it has to be indiscriminant. It has to be across the board, for everyone. We cannot play favorites, rewarding some with our love and punishing others with our hatred.

Tell that to the Israelis and Palestinians today to Iran and Iraq, to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, to Muslims and Christians and Jews, to Republicans and Democrats, to African-Americans and whites and Latinos and Asian-Americans. “Love one another as I have loved you,” commands Jesus. It is not a suggestion; it is a command. And that love transcends all divisions and distinctions. And it causes disruption.

As soon as Jesus interprets the prophesy of Isaiah to be universal, not particular, the adoring crowd becomes a murderous mob. Love is not always a popular choice. Love is not always universally accepted. But, it is what we are to do as Christians.

Paul writes to the Christians in Corinth, “You are very talented in many things, but without love those talents are useless. What you cherish, your own giftedness, will fade, but the love you choose, that love which is a conscious, willful decision made by you, that love will bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. That love will never end.”

The Church is a community in which we help one another individually to act in love, and together that we choose to be a force of love in the world. It is our choice; it is Christ’s command; it is God’s will. Amen.