Bible Reading — 1 Corinthians 13
13 if I speak in the tongues of men, or men, or of angels, but do not have love. I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.
If I give all I possess to the poor, and give over my body to hardship, that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient. Love is kind.
It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud.
It does. It does not dishonor others. 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.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love 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.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.
When 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 the ways of childhood behind me.
For now we see only a 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.
And now these three remain faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
This is the word of the Lord.
Opening Prayer
Let's pray as we turn our hearts and minds to this word.
Heavenly father, you tell us that your word is a light to our feet and a lamp to our path.
And so, Lord Jesus, we ask that you would show us the way with more clarity this morning, with more insight, with the power in which you reveal yourself to us.
We ask Holy Spirit that you would bring light to our minds, and even more, that you would fire our hearts with that love, the love of God that you pour out into them.
And we pray this for your glory and our good.
Amen.
Introduction: The Attention Economy
Well, it's been said that we live in an attention economy, that right now the most valuable commodity is attention, yours and mine.
This is the reality that underpins social media, things like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok.
You know, these supposedly free services, of course, they're not actually free.
Right. The companies that create them need to make money.
And they do it by selling you your data and your attention.
And they kind of hook you in with notifications.
The dopamine hit ping and they get your eyeballs on that tiny little screen, and then they serve you ads.
Yeah, that's how it works.
It's not just advertising though, that tries to get people's attention.
We all do it.
And because we like the feeling of people paying attention to us, noticing us, seeing us, as long as what they see is, you know, suitably good and impressive.
The result of this is that we're in the middle of a constant competition for attention.
But there's a dark side to this attention economy.
Now, the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt argues that giving in to the urge to try and get attention hurts us more than we realize.
In particular, he says, it kills our creativity because creativity, he says, is something that requires us to give our attention to something or someone else, usually in a sustained kind of way.
But constantly trying to get attention actually damages our ability to give attention.
Now this is what he says, he says.
In my experience, the more I go after the powerful feeling of paying attention, the happier I am.
But the more I go after the powerful feeling of getting attention, the unhappier I am.
And then he gives an example from his craft as an actor.
He says, I'll be sitting there reading a script and instead of thinking, how can I personally identify with this character?
Or how is the audience going to relate to this story?
I'm like, what are people going to say about this movie on Twitter?
And what will I say back that will be good and snarky enough to get a lot of retweets, but not too harsh because people love to get offended and I don't want to get canceled.
These are the thoughts that enter my mind when I'm supposed to be reading a script, trying to be an artist.
Perhaps you've experienced something like that.
Maybe it happens to you in the workplace where your desire to be noticed, to have your contributions seen and given their due attention and credit kind of sabotages your ability to work with others, to praise them for the things they're doing.
Maybe it happens among friends or family members where you're longing to get noticed.
To be thanked and praised and made much of all the things you're doing can kind of hijack things.
It can throw off that sort of flat dynamic of being peers, being together with each other who want to just spend time because you're wanting to sort of raise yourself up, get a bit of attention, get noticed.
Now it's obvious which course of action makes for other people's good.
Which one is more loving? Right?
It's not going after attention for yourself.
It's giving attention to others.
Because love, you see, is the ultimate form of giving your attention to someone.
But what we find is that even when we want to give our best attention to others, to connect with members of our households or friends, to show love to a significant other, we keep finding ourselves trying to get attention.
Maybe it's not getting enough likes and retweets.
Maybe it's just trying to get a good response to that sort of devastatingly good joke.
Maybe it's getting seen and noticed for all the effort you're putting in.
Whatever it is, it strikes at the heel of our ability to love others, doesn't it?
This morning, I want to suggest that what Paul says here in one Corinthians 13 can actually help us navigate this stuff.
The choppy waters of the attention economy, and it can help us resist our constant tendency to try and get attention from others.
So that we can be free to give it instead.
So we're going to delve into the treasure chest of one Corinthians 13 under these three headings, exploring what Paul says about what love isn't, what love is, and why we should pursue love, which he calls the more excellent way first, then what love isn't.
Paul begins by talking about this, saying what love isn't, which is important for helping us distinguish between the genuine artifact and counterfeits.
What Love Isn’t (1–3)
Now, here in verses 1 to 3, Paul gives us a masterclass in making this distinction.
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I'm only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
And he goes on, if 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 do not love, I am nothing.
If I give all I possess to the poor, and give over my body to hardship that I may boast.
But do not have love.
I gain nothing.
The Corinthian Context
Now it's worth remembering the context of one Corinthians.
We started to explore this together last week.
You may remember that the church in Corinth had some issues with how they were treating each other in their pursuit of being impressive and exercising impressive spiritual gifts.
They were trying to show the people of the city and community in which the church was located, that they were sophisticated, that they were powerful.
And in doing so, the members of the church were actually treating each other pretty poorly.
They were looking down on those with kind of less impressive, less qualified, less spiritually visible gifts.
They were making those who couldn't boast in possessing and using the kind of spiritual, spiritually pyrotechnic stuff they were making.
Those people feel less than.
Inadequate, shameful even.
And so here, as this chapter opens, Paul wants to stress that they're missing something.
There's a missing ingredient.
There's something missing in the way the church and relationships were going.
For the Corinthian Christians.
They were missing love.
When not done in love.
Even the most impressive seeming spiritual gifts, the most heroic acts of self-sacrifice, giving away everything, giving your own body to the flames, to hardship, he says.
Well, they end up being about getting attention rather than giving attention.
Now, just quietly, I'm a little bit of an expert on this.
A “Silent Martyr”
A counselor I once spoke with observed that I tend to be what he called a silent martyr, so I constantly sacrificed myself and put aside my needs, never mentioning them silent.
But I'm always hoping that other people will notice, that they'll applaud me and give me what I want and need, and I get resentful when I don't receive it.
So silent martyr.
It's kind of passive aggression on steroids, right?
During the Protestant Reformation in Europe 500 years ago, Martin Luther actually observed that this dynamic was the thing that was the heart of sin.
He spoke about it clearly, Luther.
Luther’s Insight on Attention and Merit
You see, he wanted to uphold the glorious, liberating reality.
We sung about it before.
That salvation is a free gift.
It's not earned.
It's not merited by things we do to get attention from God.
It's based entirely on his kindness and his abundance, on his initiative in turning towards us and giving us his attention in Jesus.
But Luther's opponents said, hang on.
If you go around saying that we can't earn or contribute to our standing with God, then you're going to take away people's incentive for doing good and giving attention to others.
They're not going to.
Why would they bother if they can't earn it?
Luther had a brilliant comeback, though.
It was really insightful.
He said.
If you do good things for other people, even for God, with one eye always on how that's going to benefit you, you know, kind of beef up your standing, get you approval, will you actually hollow out moral action, right.
When you're trying to be focused on other people and their good and their needs?
You're secretly or not so secretly keeping an eye on your own.
Good.
What looks like you're giving to others, you're actually giving to yourself.
And in doing this, Luther said, you're becoming turned in on yourself.
And that's actually the essence of sin, self-centeredness now infecting every good and other person centered thing you try to do.
Every time you try and give attention, you're secretly looking to get it.
And maybe, like me, you're a bit disappointed and resentful if you don't get it.
And this very much reflects what Paul is getting at here in one Corinthians.
Even the greatest acts of self-sacrifice, when done with an eye on how it benefits you and draws attention to yourself.
This hollows out every attempt to do good.
It gains us nothing.
So that's what love isn't.
What Love Is (4–7)
In the next verses, Paul goes on to say what love is.
Let's read it again through verses 4 to 7.
Love is patient. Love is kind.
It does not envy.
It does not boast.
It is not proud.
It does not dishonor others.
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.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Now, it should go without saying that love here, as Paul has just described it, is far more than a feeling we might kind of find ourselves falling into or out of.
In some ways, it's more like a skill you learn by practice, or a muscle you build through regular and repeated use.
I started doing some rock climbing coaching during the week, and I have some muscles that I've clearly not been regularly and repeatedly using.
I've been feeling it all week.
It's also worth noting, though, that love isn't something we simply kind of exercise here through sheer willpower, you know, offering to others through gritted teeth.
Although it does say it bears all things.
But I think this is where giving.
Attention, this idea of love as attention really comes into its own.
You see the positive vision that Paul paints here of love, patience, kindness, humbly seeking the good of others.
Well, these are all about giving attention to others, right?
Rather than relentlessly trying to get it from them.
Think about patience as an example.
I think we all learnt a few things about patience a few years ago during lockdown, both as we tried to cultivate it ourselves and as we may be observed, other members of our family attempting to kind of get hold of patience.
There were some hits and misses in my household, I have to say, but one thing we learnt in my household was that patience isn't just sitting on your hands while you wait for your turn to speak.
It's not even listening to the other person, only for the purpose of proving them wrong or having a sizzling comeback.
No, patience is an exercise in removing yourself from the center and giving your attention to someone else.
Not passive aggressively, but confident that something better will emerge from the two of you than just one of you alone.
One writer calls the positive vision of love here in this chapter a vision of co agency.
This is not just me as an agent, with my plans and actions that matter, and the other person as a prop at best, or an obstacle at worse, right?
That would be my agency one one directional agency.
But it's not me disappearing either.
Vanishing so the other person's agency is all that matters.
It's co agency.
It's the two of us.
A beautiful harmony in which two work together and work out something bigger than either one of us, with neither self at the center nor the self completely squeezed out of the picture.
Co-Agency in Church Life
Now. I think there are examples of this all through church life.
One of them happens when you serve on a ministry team.
Usually this is the way it goes.
You start on a team.
Maybe it's leaving the kids program, or driving the sound desk, or welcoming people as they come in the door.
And when you start, your job is to do the coalface stuff, right?
That that ministry team exists to provide to, whether it's teaching and discipling the kids in a safe and caring environment, or ensuring that people can hear and see and participate here in the room and online, or greeting people so that they know from the moment they arrive, they're welcome and wanted here.
It's the coalface stuff.
That's why you get into it.
But over time, as you serve on a team, you may find that you have opportunities to take on more responsibility.
Perhaps you get to start helping plan the lessons, or communicating with others about their roles, or training and organizing, or work at developing others.
You step into leadership and those who serve in leadership on ministry, teams are needed, even though it often means them personally giving up some of the things they love doing, the things that got them into serving in that way.
Maybe you've experienced this.
And you do it, though, so that others have the opportunity to serve and grow through serving, doing more of it than you ever could on your own.
Right. This is this is cogency in practice in the church.
It's a way of expressing that giving of attention to others.
My agency and my attention given in leading, organizing the rosters, writing material, planning and communicating your agency, and doing the frontline work.
And when we embrace this, this is a way to love one another in the church, because it doesn't need to be all about me.
You know, I don't need to get myself on the front line of every team and every roster every week.
And if I did.
That wouldn't be sustainable very long, would it?
But it also doesn't need to not be about me as I just get squeezed out and disappear.
Rather, it needs to be about us making space for each other, being willing to play different parts for the good of all.
And of course, that's just the start when it comes to loving and serving each other in church.
But there's a theme there, right?
A standard kind of pattern.
And when we experience that, when you get a taste of that in community, this, this love that creates space for others.
I think, you know, whet to appetites.
We want more of it, don't we?
It's good.
So good.
Manifestly good, because it manifests God's very presence and working in our midst.
Right. This is absolutely central to how the church can show and bear witness to the fact that God is present among us.
When we make space for each other and give our attention to each other and stop trying to just get all the attention for ourselves.
So this is a picture of what love is, what it isn't, what it is.
Now we come in verses 8 to 13, to the third shining jewel in the crown of this passage.
Why Pursue Love? (8–13)
Why pursue love? Although hopefully you might have had a little sense of that already.
Here's what Paul says.
Love never fails.
Where there are prophecies, they will cease.
Where there are tongues, they will be stilled.
Where there's knowledge will pass away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.
When 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 the ways of childhood behind me.
For now we see only a 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.
And now these three remain faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
Now, there's lots going on here, obviously, but the basic message is clear, right?
Love is worth pursuing because it lasts.
It endures.
And because its lasting.
Love, Paul says, is the greatest thing, the thing that belongs and has its home in the new creation.
Love is how we get a taste of heaven, a foretaste of glory given to experience now ahead of time taking effect.
Going to work in our lives here and now.
Now.
For the past several years, my brother and I have been receiving from our parents something they call an A.
Oh, why an advance on your inheritance?
They want us, and they're giving us opportunities to experience now, ahead of time, the kind of financial freedom and stability they want to leave to us as a legacy.
Love is an advance on our inheritance, our eternal inheritance in the new creation.
Ordered Loves
Think a bit more about how this works.
The great American theologian Jonathan Edwards.
He diagnoses that all of our problems in life come from our love's getting kind of disordered and messed up and out of proportion.
You need to strap in for this because this is deep theological insight.
He says we're meant to love small things a little bit.
And medium things.
A medium amount and big things a lot.
And God, most of all.
Right. You needed a theologian to tell you that, right?
You need to get your loves in order, he says, and heaven, glory, the new creation will be when that's all right.
When we do love little things a little amount and big, big things a big amount, and God, most of all, because when we do that, we'll get to enjoy them as we should.
We won't get kind of mixed up and scrambled and tangled up, because that's where our problems come, right?
we love getting attention, which is a good thing.
although maybe only a small or perhaps medium sized thing, but we love it like it's the biggest thing.
All right, we make sacrifices to get it.
We move heaven and earth.
Because we're addicted to it.
Our lives are tangled up, mixed up, out of order.
And it's these mixed up loves that cause us to struggle with getting ourselves out of the center of the universe, even out of the center of church.
Yeah. To return to the example of serving on teams that I mentioned before, we sometimes struggle to remove ourselves from the front lines and make space for others because we get used to having things done in a particular way.
Perhaps we tell ourselves that the way we're used to doing them is the best way, maybe even the right way.
Maybe if we've been doing it long enough, it's the only way.
But more often than not, it's just the way that matches our preferences.
A number of years ago, I worked in a ministry with university students, and every semester we had to kind of try and greet new students and find them as they arrived on campus and get them connected with each other.
And one of the key things we had was this was back before, like smartphones and dating myself.
Right? We had those those brochures, you know, the ones that you got like two folds and they look like this.
Yeah. You know them.
There's there's a science to it.
Right. I looked it up.
There's like the way that the brochure folds and the story you tell what happens on each panel, what you like.
There's a right way to do it.
I know it. I did the research, and I.
I designed our brochures with the photos in the right place.
And, and then one of the student leaders came along and moved them all around.
Oh, boy, oh, boy.
I mean, I'd put a lot of work into this, and they were wrong.
Right. It took me a moment to sort of pause and reflect and ask the question.
Will getting the brochures exactly right cause revival to break out on the campus?
Probably.
I mean, maybe. No.
Probably not.
We're getting it wrong.
Stop revival breaking out if God wants it to happen.
Of course not.
Maybe it's a small thing that I love too much, because I put all this time and effort into researching it.
Ask me later how to get your brochures sorted out.
Power, Control, and Approval
The reality is that that our preference for having things done our way, our reluctance to bring other people in, to delegate and allow others to have a say and maybe do it, you know, slightly wrong notes differently.
This speaks to our addiction to control, or perhaps that feeling of being powerful and this this power and control.
Addiction is one of the key reasons we struggle to get ourselves out of the center.
When it comes to our relationships, when it comes to church, it sabotages our attempts to cultivate a shared life of love together.
Of course, there are other ways we can struggle with this.
Maybe it's not power and control for you.
Maybe it's not speaking the truth, not confronting the fact that someone's actually not a great fit for the role they're serving in, because that might upset them.
Or maybe someone from their family.
In that case, it's kind of our addiction to other people's approval that prevents us getting ourselves out of the center so that something good and beautiful can emerge in the life of the church.
People finding their way into serving with their gifts, or being supported and developed in the areas they're less gifted.
You feel the problem, right?
As we love getting attention more than giving our attention to others.
It keeps tripping us up.
And we can only treat our addiction to getting attention by making God the center of our personal universes.
And we can only do that when we embrace the fact that the living and personal center of the universe, the God who is love.
That he took the initiative, paid attention, and he came to be with us to be one of us.
God in the flesh, God with skin on.
The love that set the universe into being and moves the stars and the planets walking among us.
And instead of loving him, we we pushed him aside.
We tried to squeeze him out.
We crucified Jesus outside the city gates.
But he endured that more.
He bore it with perfect patience, kindness, without envy or boasting or pride.
He didn't insist on his own way.
He wasn't irritable or resentful.
No silent martyr him.
He rejoiced only in the truth.
And he did it for you and for me.
He gave.
He loved.
He loves.
And to the degree that gets into your heart.
It grips you.
It can rearrange and reorder and untangle your loves.
It can teach you to resist the counterfeits.
To let go of putting ourselves at the centre can free us to give our attention to others without trying to get it.
Because actually, the God who made the universe sees you and knows you and loves you.
You have all the attention you could need.
And as we do this, we get to experience now ahead of time in our relationships, in the church that rightly ordered delightful life of glory.
That life that the theologians tell us is one of loving small things, a small amount medium things, a media amount, big things, a big amount, and God most of all.
Let me pray.
Our Lord Jesus, we praise you for your love, that you are love and that you pursue us in love.
We pray that that love would melt.
Our hearts would assure us that we are known and seen, that we don't need to desperately try and get attention.
Please free us.
That we might live in our lives individually and together as a church.
Something that that echoes and points to your great love for us.
Amen.
