4 Epiphany C 2025
1 Corinthians 13
At the beginning of Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts in chapter 12, he expressed concern about the spiritual ignorance of the Corinthians. He reminds them that it hadn’t been too long before that they had worshiped idols. And so this whole teaching those of us who attend church weekly have heard these last three weeks has been about the hidden work of the Spirit in dispensing unique gifts to each, and knitting them together into one body, demonstrating that their conflict over which gift was most worthy of honor was a sign not of the Spirit, but of the spirits of the world they had left behind in their baptism into the one Spirit of God.
Paul is given to hyperbole, but there can be no doubt that Paul seems to believe that it would be possible to manifest an authentic spiritual gift that ends up being worthless or even destructive to the kingdom of God.
Take that in, church.
And Paul is careful to list five gifts and their manifestations.
The first is the gift of tongues, of two types. The tongues of humans is the miracle that occurred on Pentecost. I don’t speak Portuguese. But if I went to a Brazilian church, and when I preached, people there would hear my sermon in Portuguese, that’s what we’re talking about here. Now, I love our Pentecostal brothers and sisters, and I haven’t hear of that phenomenon among them. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. But if it did, I’d think we’d hear about it, don’t you?
Of course, it could also mean successfully translating the gospel of Christ to a different culture, a major project of the early church, which began as a Jewish phenomenon, but very quickly began to spread to other non-Jewish cultures. Missionaries throughout history have practiced this gift.
However you think of it, Paul is saying here that, without agape, the kind of covenantal, non-negotiable and all-inclusive practice of love, the love of neighbor as of self that is at the center of the life and teaching of Christ, being able to suddenly speak a foreign language you’ve never studied means nothing. Without that core of agape love, being able to eloquently interpret the gospel to a new culture is worthless.
Wow.
Then there’s the tongues of angels. Paul doesn’t say here that people aren’t really speaking in angel tongues. He’s saying, yes, the Holy Spirit might indeed bestow that gift, and it may indeed manifest, an authentic message from a real angelic being. But if you have not this central practice of agape as your motivation, your gift is absolutely useless, and really harmful.
He moves on to prophecy. Prophecy is the ability to understand heaven’s take on earthly events and to communicate it. Prophets often warn of the long-term dangers of neglecting the poor or coveting wealth and power, typically to the rulers of the nation. But they also promise God’s mercy and forgiveness if the rulers heed their warning and take action. In the church, prophecy probably had to do with the spiritual interpretation of current events now lost to history.
Again, Paul asserts that one might actually receive this gift, and truly be able to understand all mysteries, yet be without love! Friends, there are preachers today on both sides of the culture wars that are immensely popular. They seem to have a real grasp on what’s going on in the world today and what should be done about it. They quote scripture freely, and it all sounds so on the money! But their demonization of their opponents reveals the truth. They have not love, and so however gifted they are, they do nothing useful for the kingdom, and indeed actively work against it.
And let me be quick to add, God loves them anyway, just as he loves us all. Paul’s point is not to demonize, but to evaluate what makes any spiritual gift worthy of honor. He doesn’t say such preachers or their followers are going to hell. He says their contributions, however flashy, end up useless to the mission of the kingdom of God, and worse, their lack of love is positively destructive to the purposes of the Holy Spirit. If there was anything worthy of shame, I suppose it would be that.
Even faith! Lord, church, even faith! And Paul is not talking about inauthentic faith, but real faith, the faith that Jesus promised could move mountains. Even this could be made worthless and shameful by the lack of agape love. I’m struck by this. Dismiss it as hyperbole if you want, but it’s scripture, right?
And since Paul quotes Jesus about moving mountains, he’s clearly talking about what he regards as one of the most advanced spiritual gifts a person can get, the ability to do miracles. Think of the implications here, church. A person might receive such a gift who doesn’t have this commitment to agape. Why do you think this might be so?
On the day of Pentecost, Peter quoted the prophet Joel, who said that God would pour out his Spirit on all flesh. And yet, Jesus himself said that there would be those who must remain blind to the good news for God’s own mysterious purpose, and that there would be many who would name him Lord that he would deny ever knowing. Throughout scripture there is a pattern many miss: God often freely offers enough rope for his people to hang themselves with, and then comes and cuts them down when they do.
Granting the power of the Holy Spirit to those who are blind to the gospel of love may simply be a nice big spool of rope for those without love to make a noose out of. Or to uses Jesus’ metaphor, the blind lead the blind into a pit, and it is the hope of God’s love and mercy that he will come when we cry out from its depths.
Even radical charity isn’t automatically honorable. Few today among Protestant Christians give all they have to the poor, as many wealthy folks in the early church did. It was a way of divesting oneself from the greedy ways of Rome, and at the same time making restitution to those made poor by that greed. It was a way of stepping out of a world of scarcity that was collapsing and entering a new economy based on divine abundance. Leaving the world and entering the kingdom of God.
Imagine if a billionaire did that today? Sold all his property, his stocks and bonds, everything but the barest, most hand-to-mouth amount of resources, moved into a cheap one-bedroom in a poor neighborhood and devoted his life to caring for the worst-off of his neighbors, all for the sake of Christ. Wouldn’t you think that was worthy of the highest honor? How many millions of people might benefit?
And yet, this same billionaire may yet exclude from his circle of love some portion of the human race. Perhaps he loathes the rich! But God loves the rich just as much as he loves him, even if they are greedy and heartless. His gift ends up only hardening the hearts of those who admire him against those he considers his enemies. It is given freely by God, but used unrighteously.
This is why the first thing the Spirit did in Jesus was to literally lead him into temptation, and those temptations all had to do with the righteous use of the immense power now at Jesus’ disposal in his unique role as Son of God. Would he use it selfishly? Would he call an army of angels and become the world’s most powerful warlord? Did he secretly doubt God’s promise of resurrection? He had to pass these tests in order to be released into his mission, and really, what was being tested? Agape. Was Jesus motivated by love of God and neighbor, or was he motivated by love of self and those like him? The mission was to love all, and thereby to save those who believed from the horrors of the collapsing Roman and Jewish worlds, either by literally lifting the poor out of poverty, or by inspiring those with the resources to do so, but most of all, by teaching and practicing the Jesus’ unifying law of agape love.
The greatest and most advanced gift of the Holy Spirit is martyrdom, literally giving one’s life in testimony to the Lordship of Christ. It’s hard to argue with the faith of someone of goes willingly to their death. It’s about as authentic a gift of the Spirit as you can get. And yet, and yet, even here, if love is not their deepest commitment, martyrs offer their lives to their shame, for their exclusion of anyone from the circle of their love, and even worse, their indulgence of hatred for anyone renders their witness positively destructive to the growth of God’s kingdom. Those inspired by their self-sacrifice would be inspired to hate those the martyr hated.
In the end, Paul is saying, the unity of the Spirit is agape love, and without it, whatever great things we accomplish, however huge our church, however many members we have, however millions follow us on YouTube and Instagram and buy our books and go to our seminaries, however righteous or insightful or miraculous the works, even if believers go to their deaths for the sake of their faith, if they lack the commitment to agape love, the unconditional love of all, they work in opposition to the kingdom toward their own and others’ undoing.
(By unconditional love, I’m not talking about making excuses for obvious sin. In this same letter, Paul strongly demands that a member who has been having an affair with his mother-in-law be summarily dismissed from the church. Corinth was the Sin City of the Roman Empire, and many in the church has been victims of the sickening sex trade there. You don’t want to know what the Romans were into, what they considered okay. We rightly condemn rape and child molestation and human trafficking today. The Romans embraced them. The church in that context had to be especially concerned with sexual morality.)
The gospel for Paul was centered in the death and resurrection of Christ. At stake was what abides forever. All but three of the gifts of the Spirit are incidental to the mission of the coming kingdom, tools for a specific purpose. But if they are used without those three, the gifts will simply pass away and come to nothing, and so will those who misused them.
This is a prophetic warning to a divided church, one that has become diseased with a lust for honor, and the power that comes with it. If there is anything to honor, it is a spiritual gift that is used in service of the realm of love for all, the kingdom of God, whether by a beginner or a seasoned practitioner. And if there is anything to shame it is the misuse of spiritual gifts for the sake of personal status or gain, whether in a leader or a member who only comes on Christmas and Easter.
The aim for Paul is the new creation evolving through the organic, Spirit-led growth of the church. By definition, this is a temporary mission. Speaking in tongues, prophecy, miracle-working, giving away one’s riches to the poor, even giving one’s life in witness, are all tactics for spreading the good news of the love of God. When the mission is completed, these become the toys of childhood, of no further use.
But the three gifts that are most honorable and righteous and true, and above all eternal, are faith, hope and love, with agape love the highest of all.
Three weeks ago, I spoke about the atmosphere of division and mutual suspicion in the public sphere and wondered if the gospel had anything to tell us about it.
In his very first sermon in Luke, Jesus preached that the love of God might leave behind Jews who didn’t believe in it, and go to outsiders who do, and the synagogue got so angry they decided to murder him right then and there! They were believers, during an act of worship, but so invested in self-dealing and so afraid that others might get what they believed to be exclusively theirs that they become a murderous mob.
When God called Jeremiah, Jeremiah worried that unwanted warnings from God to the powerful would get him killed. But God told him he was giving him a two-edged sword to wield over kings and nations, one could build up and the other could tear down, and that nothing could touch him, because God walked with him. The same promise was given to Jesus. We bless God because both preached from the place of God’s love and desire to save, even though both of them faced worlds that were marinating in conflict and injustice and violence.
What might unite us again after so much bitterness and confusion? What common language can we find?
If the world we hope for, and believe in, and have decided to love without condition, is a world that is good for all the people in it, then we are committed to the most offensive path possible to the world we live in today. These days, to be friends with me, you have to be against the people I’m against, or so it seems. If you dare to contradict, if you dare to speak kindly of those your friends or family despise, you risk joining their circle of perceived enemies.
For all the beauty of First Corinthians 13, hidden under the elegance of the rhetoric is a stark warning to all Christians of all times and places. Do not be ignorant of spiritual matters. Be educated by the visionaries we all agree are the authorities, the authors of the New Testament. Learn to discern the worthiness of spiritual gifts rightly, yours and others, by the service they give to the God who loves the world.
Amen.
1 Corinthians 13
At the beginning of Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts in chapter 12, he expressed concern about the spiritual ignorance of the Corinthians. He reminds them that it hadn’t been too long before that they had worshiped idols. And so this whole teaching those of us who attend church weekly have heard these last three weeks has been about the hidden work of the Spirit in dispensing unique gifts to each, and knitting them together into one body, demonstrating that their conflict over which gift was most worthy of honor was a sign not of the Spirit, but of the spirits of the world they had left behind in their baptism into the one Spirit of God.
Paul is given to hyperbole, but there can be no doubt that Paul seems to believe that it would be possible to manifest an authentic spiritual gift that ends up being worthless or even destructive to the kingdom of God.
Take that in, church.
And Paul is careful to list five gifts and their manifestations.
The first is the gift of tongues, of two types. The tongues of humans is the miracle that occurred on Pentecost. I don’t speak Portuguese. But if I went to a Brazilian church, and when I preached, people there would hear my sermon in Portuguese, that’s what we’re talking about here. Now, I love our Pentecostal brothers and sisters, and I haven’t hear of that phenomenon among them. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. But if it did, I’d think we’d hear about it, don’t you?
Of course, it could also mean successfully translating the gospel of Christ to a different culture, a major project of the early church, which began as a Jewish phenomenon, but very quickly began to spread to other non-Jewish cultures. Missionaries throughout history have practiced this gift.
However you think of it, Paul is saying here that, without agape, the kind of covenantal, non-negotiable and all-inclusive practice of love, the love of neighbor as of self that is at the center of the life and teaching of Christ, being able to suddenly speak a foreign language you’ve never studied means nothing. Without that core of agape love, being able to eloquently interpret the gospel to a new culture is worthless.
Wow.
Then there’s the tongues of angels. Paul doesn’t say here that people aren’t really speaking in angel tongues. He’s saying, yes, the Holy Spirit might indeed bestow that gift, and it may indeed manifest, an authentic message from a real angelic being. But if you have not this central practice of agape as your motivation, your gift is absolutely useless, and really harmful.
He moves on to prophecy. Prophecy is the ability to understand heaven’s take on earthly events and to communicate it. Prophets often warn of the long-term dangers of neglecting the poor or coveting wealth and power, typically to the rulers of the nation. But they also promise God’s mercy and forgiveness if the rulers heed their warning and take action. In the church, prophecy probably had to do with the spiritual interpretation of current events now lost to history.
Again, Paul asserts that one might actually receive this gift, and truly be able to understand all mysteries, yet be without love! Friends, there are preachers today on both sides of the culture wars that are immensely popular. They seem to have a real grasp on what’s going on in the world today and what should be done about it. They quote scripture freely, and it all sounds so on the money! But their demonization of their opponents reveals the truth. They have not love, and so however gifted they are, they do nothing useful for the kingdom, and indeed actively work against it.
And let me be quick to add, God loves them anyway, just as he loves us all. Paul’s point is not to demonize, but to evaluate what makes any spiritual gift worthy of honor. He doesn’t say such preachers or their followers are going to hell. He says their contributions, however flashy, end up useless to the mission of the kingdom of God, and worse, their lack of love is positively destructive to the purposes of the Holy Spirit. If there was anything worthy of shame, I suppose it would be that.
Even faith! Lord, church, even faith! And Paul is not talking about inauthentic faith, but real faith, the faith that Jesus promised could move mountains. Even this could be made worthless and shameful by the lack of agape love. I’m struck by this. Dismiss it as hyperbole if you want, but it’s scripture, right?
And since Paul quotes Jesus about moving mountains, he’s clearly talking about what he regards as one of the most advanced spiritual gifts a person can get, the ability to do miracles. Think of the implications here, church. A person might receive such a gift who doesn’t have this commitment to agape. Why do you think this might be so?
On the day of Pentecost, Peter quoted the prophet Joel, who said that God would pour out his Spirit on all flesh. And yet, Jesus himself said that there would be those who must remain blind to the good news for God’s own mysterious purpose, and that there would be many who would name him Lord that he would deny ever knowing. Throughout scripture there is a pattern many miss: God often freely offers enough rope for his people to hang themselves with, and then comes and cuts them down when they do.
Granting the power of the Holy Spirit to those who are blind to the gospel of love may simply be a nice big spool of rope for those without love to make a noose out of. Or to uses Jesus’ metaphor, the blind lead the blind into a pit, and it is the hope of God’s love and mercy that he will come when we cry out from its depths.
Even radical charity isn’t automatically honorable. Few today among Protestant Christians give all they have to the poor, as many wealthy folks in the early church did. It was a way of divesting oneself from the greedy ways of Rome, and at the same time making restitution to those made poor by that greed. It was a way of stepping out of a world of scarcity that was collapsing and entering a new economy based on divine abundance. Leaving the world and entering the kingdom of God.
Imagine if a billionaire did that today? Sold all his property, his stocks and bonds, everything but the barest, most hand-to-mouth amount of resources, moved into a cheap one-bedroom in a poor neighborhood and devoted his life to caring for the worst-off of his neighbors, all for the sake of Christ. Wouldn’t you think that was worthy of the highest honor? How many millions of people might benefit?
And yet, this same billionaire may yet exclude from his circle of love some portion of the human race. Perhaps he loathes the rich! But God loves the rich just as much as he loves him, even if they are greedy and heartless. His gift ends up only hardening the hearts of those who admire him against those he considers his enemies. It is given freely by God, but used unrighteously.
This is why the first thing the Spirit did in Jesus was to literally lead him into temptation, and those temptations all had to do with the righteous use of the immense power now at Jesus’ disposal in his unique role as Son of God. Would he use it selfishly? Would he call an army of angels and become the world’s most powerful warlord? Did he secretly doubt God’s promise of resurrection? He had to pass these tests in order to be released into his mission, and really, what was being tested? Agape. Was Jesus motivated by love of God and neighbor, or was he motivated by love of self and those like him? The mission was to love all, and thereby to save those who believed from the horrors of the collapsing Roman and Jewish worlds, either by literally lifting the poor out of poverty, or by inspiring those with the resources to do so, but most of all, by teaching and practicing the Jesus’ unifying law of agape love.
The greatest and most advanced gift of the Holy Spirit is martyrdom, literally giving one’s life in testimony to the Lordship of Christ. It’s hard to argue with the faith of someone of goes willingly to their death. It’s about as authentic a gift of the Spirit as you can get. And yet, and yet, even here, if love is not their deepest commitment, martyrs offer their lives to their shame, for their exclusion of anyone from the circle of their love, and even worse, their indulgence of hatred for anyone renders their witness positively destructive to the growth of God’s kingdom. Those inspired by their self-sacrifice would be inspired to hate those the martyr hated.
In the end, Paul is saying, the unity of the Spirit is agape love, and without it, whatever great things we accomplish, however huge our church, however many members we have, however millions follow us on YouTube and Instagram and buy our books and go to our seminaries, however righteous or insightful or miraculous the works, even if believers go to their deaths for the sake of their faith, if they lack the commitment to agape love, the unconditional love of all, they work in opposition to the kingdom toward their own and others’ undoing.
(By unconditional love, I’m not talking about making excuses for obvious sin. In this same letter, Paul strongly demands that a member who has been having an affair with his mother-in-law be summarily dismissed from the church. Corinth was the Sin City of the Roman Empire, and many in the church has been victims of the sickening sex trade there. You don’t want to know what the Romans were into, what they considered okay. We rightly condemn rape and child molestation and human trafficking today. The Romans embraced them. The church in that context had to be especially concerned with sexual morality.)
The gospel for Paul was centered in the death and resurrection of Christ. At stake was what abides forever. All but three of the gifts of the Spirit are incidental to the mission of the coming kingdom, tools for a specific purpose. But if they are used without those three, the gifts will simply pass away and come to nothing, and so will those who misused them.
This is a prophetic warning to a divided church, one that has become diseased with a lust for honor, and the power that comes with it. If there is anything to honor, it is a spiritual gift that is used in service of the realm of love for all, the kingdom of God, whether by a beginner or a seasoned practitioner. And if there is anything to shame it is the misuse of spiritual gifts for the sake of personal status or gain, whether in a leader or a member who only comes on Christmas and Easter.
The aim for Paul is the new creation evolving through the organic, Spirit-led growth of the church. By definition, this is a temporary mission. Speaking in tongues, prophecy, miracle-working, giving away one’s riches to the poor, even giving one’s life in witness, are all tactics for spreading the good news of the love of God. When the mission is completed, these become the toys of childhood, of no further use.
But the three gifts that are most honorable and righteous and true, and above all eternal, are faith, hope and love, with agape love the highest of all.
Three weeks ago, I spoke about the atmosphere of division and mutual suspicion in the public sphere and wondered if the gospel had anything to tell us about it.
In his very first sermon in Luke, Jesus preached that the love of God might leave behind Jews who didn’t believe in it, and go to outsiders who do, and the synagogue got so angry they decided to murder him right then and there! They were believers, during an act of worship, but so invested in self-dealing and so afraid that others might get what they believed to be exclusively theirs that they become a murderous mob.
When God called Jeremiah, Jeremiah worried that unwanted warnings from God to the powerful would get him killed. But God told him he was giving him a two-edged sword to wield over kings and nations, one could build up and the other could tear down, and that nothing could touch him, because God walked with him. The same promise was given to Jesus. We bless God because both preached from the place of God’s love and desire to save, even though both of them faced worlds that were marinating in conflict and injustice and violence.
What might unite us again after so much bitterness and confusion? What common language can we find?
If the world we hope for, and believe in, and have decided to love without condition, is a world that is good for all the people in it, then we are committed to the most offensive path possible to the world we live in today. These days, to be friends with me, you have to be against the people I’m against, or so it seems. If you dare to contradict, if you dare to speak kindly of those your friends or family despise, you risk joining their circle of perceived enemies.
For all the beauty of First Corinthians 13, hidden under the elegance of the rhetoric is a stark warning to all Christians of all times and places. Do not be ignorant of spiritual matters. Be educated by the visionaries we all agree are the authorities, the authors of the New Testament. Learn to discern the worthiness of spiritual gifts rightly, yours and others, by the service they give to the God who loves the world.
Amen.
