Faith, Hope, and Love
A Sermon by the Reverend Dr. Bob Prichard on the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany (C), January 30, 2022.
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
From the Epistle: “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. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.. . . And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
This is among the most beautiful passages in the Bible, but it is also one of the most misunderstood, at least in the sense for which St. Paul wrote it. Our confusion comes from lack of the English language. When it comes to love, contemporary English has but one word for the four different words for love found in the Greek of the New Testament era. That point is one that the mid 20th century author C. S. Lewis made in his book The Four Loves. The Greeks had separate terms for love in sense of sexual attraction (eros), of deep friendship (philia), of the comforting and familiar (storge), and of the self-giving that Christians see in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. The love of 1 Corinthinians 13 is the self-giving love, best known in Christ.
The 16th and 17th century scholars who translated the Bible into English tried to distinguish the self-giving love in this passage from other loves by using the English word “charity,” based on the Latin caritas, which had been used in church Latin for the Greek agape. (Some may recognize that Latin use from the hymn title ubi caritas, rendered into English as “Wherever True Love is found, God himself is there.”) The King James translation of the Bible produced by the Church of England, the Douay Bible of the Roman Catholic Church, and other early English Bibles used the word charity: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” (1 Corinthians 12:13, King James Version). By the 18th century, however, the word “charity” had been weighted with new meaning. It was increasingly understood as referring to the giving of financial contributions to those in need or to the corporations organized to provide that help. The three graces mentioned in this passage—Faith, Hope, and Charity—began be understood by many as a kind of parallel to the prayer book’s description of Christian duty: “to work, to give, and to pray for the spread of the kingdom of God.” (BCP, 856). I suspect that some who worked for non-profit agencies came to regard 1 Corinthians 13 as a gift to fund raisers, for it was easy to read it as suggesting that the greatest and most abiding gift of God was the gift of financial contribution.
The translators of the Revised Standard Version (1952) tried to remedy the situation by changing the translation in 1 Corinthians 13 from charity to love; virtually all other translations into English since that times have followed suit. It took Episcopalians a while to catch on to that shift, because the lessons for the Eucharist had been printed in the 1928 edition of the prayer book from the King James Version; clergy could use the RSV (which had been approved for use in 1952), but those who read gospels and epistles for the Eucharist from the prayer book continued to use the King James Version. This lesson fell on the last Sunday in Epiphany in the 1928 lectionary. By the 1970s, however, Episcopalians had caught on to the shift. Like Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians, they had designated this lesson as appropriate for use at celebrations of marriage. It became a popular favorite. One indication of that popularity is the line in the movie the Wedding Crashers (2005), in which the character played by Owen Wilson bets the character played by Vince Vaughn that he can predict the upcoming reading in a wedding service. He guesses 1 Corinthians 13 and wins the bet. The new use has given us a different lens through which the passage is seen—as Paul’s words to us on romantic love.
It is not a bad choice for a wedding lesson. Certainly, those who are about to be married do well to hear about the self-emptying love of Christ and to be called upon to practice it in their own lives. Paul’s intention in writing the chapter was something different, however; he was not writing about charitable giving or about marital love. He was trying to address the in-fighting that was taking place in the church at Corinth. Paul already identified the problem of division in the first chapter of the letter, and he returned to it repeatedly. He passes on what he has heard from “Chloe’s people,” either the members of her household or of a church group that met in her home. “It has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ. (1 Corinthians 1:11-12).
He is outraged, because he sees that division into parties as endangering the central message of salvation in Jesus Christ. He asks, “Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” (1 Corinthians 1:13) He fears the loss of the central vision of faith of which one reads in the Letter to the Ephesians and elsewhere in the New Testament. We are called to “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, one body and one Spirit; as [we] are called in one hope of [our] calling: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all (Ephesians 1:3-6), who is above all, and through all, and in us all.” We will use words from that passage in the acclamation in the service today at 10:30, as we do for all Baptisms and Confirmations.
Paul returned to the question of division among followers of different evangelists in Chapter 3, suggesting that he and Apollos had intended cooperation rather than division: “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose . . . for we are God’s servants, working together….” (1 Corinthians 3:5-9)
Paul comes back to the problem in chapters 12-14, but this time from the perspective the members of the congregation rather than from divisions related to leadership. Paul asserts that God gives different gifts to the members of the church, and cautions believers not to fall into debate about which one of those gifts is most important. It is then that he makes his beautiful appeal in chapter 13.
I think that Paul is doing something very clever here from a theological and pastoral point of view. Rather than simply criticizing those whom he regards as involved in quarreling, he portrays the divisions of the congregation at Corinth as a result of their effort to respond seriously to the gifts that God has given them. They have not fallen into problems because of lack of faith or of disregard of the word of God, rather they have fallen in division precisely because they have taken faith seriously and are trying to be good Christians, but they have to remember not to elbow one another out of the way in their effort to exercise the gifts they have been given..
350 years later the theologian Augustine of Hippo will make a similar move in addressing the question of Sin. People sin—or often do so—precisely because they seek something that is good. Their problem—our problem--is that they often seek the lesser good. One seeks, for example, one’s own security, or standing in the community, or freedom of choice, or comfort. These are good things, which God wants for us, but not at the cost of what is needed for the larger community or of all creation. One worries about financial security, and so steals from others. One worries about reputation and tries to guarantee it by demeaning the reputation of others. We sin when we seek the lesser good in such a way as to endanger the greater good.
So in the beautiful hymn we have heard from Corinthians, Paul isn’t talking about romantic love or charitable giving. Rather he celebrates the gifts that we have been given from God and cautions us to exercise the gifts that God has given us in such a way as to respect and rejoice in the gifts given to others.
“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. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.. . . And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. Amen.