A sermon for the fourth Sunday after Epiphany given at the United Church of Acworth, New Hampshire on Sunday, February 3, 2013.
In High School
band I was in the percussion section.
I had the most
fun when
I got to play
the various cadences as we marched onto the field.
Left-right-left.
. . .
Or when I got to
play Wipeout during half-time at the basketball games.
Or offer up a
drum solo in 5/4 time to Dave Brubeck's Take Five in Jazz band.
But there were
less thrilling moments too.
Like when I had
to play the suspended cymbal or the triangle in a concert piece.
When the music
would show a sea of rests
with isolated
scattered notes throughout the piece.
I had to count
diligently or I'd lose my place and crash my cymbal or ding the
triangle
What is it that
we imagine?
I think of all
the time I spent waiting
I had the
mallets in my hands
but I couldn’t
hit the cymbal.
Not yet.
“If I speak in
the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a
noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
The Corinthian
Christians were experiencing some frustration of their own.
(But it sounds
far from boring)
Their intense
religious experiences had them speaking in incomprehensible languages
– the tongue of angels.
And there were
some among them who in moments of inspiration gave words to the
assembly,
prophetic words,
words from the
Spirit.
This was not
orderly.
They were not
following the bulletin.
Not scanning the
score, waiting for their instrument to be summoned.
AND YET
Paul says
nothing to dissuade these Christians
from their
ecstatic practices.
But he does do
this.
He reminds them
that while these spiritual gifts might seem like the pinnacle of
spirituality,
they've got to
be done in the proper way
A way that
builds up the community.
“If I speak in
the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a
noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
Last Sunday when
we gathered together
we heard Paul’s
reminder that while we have many gifts
we are still one
community
created by and
united by one Spirit who works in us all
equally.
And this Spirit
is the one who enables the speaking in tongues.
But this Spirit
also gives other gifts, some more ordinary in human eyes and some
more extraordinary.
Many gifts, one
Spirit, one purpose: the common good.
And this is
where we get messed up by modern notions of love.
Love is not
sentimentality.
Greetings cards
and paper hearts.
Warm fuzzies.
Bright shiny
faces.
The love that
Paul presents is
A love embodied
in words of Jesus in John's gospel:
“No one has
greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s
friends.”
This is the
foundation of our life together as a church.
This is the
model.
This is the
charge.
This is the high
calling.
This is the
impossible task:
To love one
another as we have been loved by Christ.
And that love is
the sheet music we follow to know when to play the cymbal, when to
chime the triangle.
The Holy
Spirit's greatest gift to us is the possibility
for our whole
lives to be redirected away from our own pursuits
to the bigger
picture of the common good.
The greatest
gift is the gift of love which frees us from the tyranny of
self-interest and opens us up to the possibility of community.
(pause)
Without that
love which has been poured into our hearts, our spiritual pursuits
are “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
The clanging
cymbal – that misplaced cymbal –
In the
awkwardness of life together we find ourselves
crashing at the
wrong time, chiming when hindsight showed that silence was what love
needed.
And what do we
do when the music is broken?
Love does not
rejoice in wrongdoing, but love neither is love resentful.
Love in the form
truthfulness and forgiveness points the way forward,
not ignoring the
wrong,
but seeking the
healing and restoration of the community.
Or sometimes
we're a noisy gong.
Actually this
translation is poor.
Paul more
properly meant something like: “sounding brass”
which is what
the King James has.
A sounding brass
was a vase placed on the stages of theaters and used to amplify the
voices of the actors.
Without love,
our grand
spiritual gestures
our acts of
selflessness
our devout
spiritual practices
they are as
empty as the cold metal vase.
But when the
sounding brass is used in the play,
filled with the
dramatic voices of the stage
These vases give
volume and rich resonance to our collective performance.
When the cymbal
is used in its right place –
it can be a
beautiful crescendo or accent to a symphonic movement.
(pause)
Love is the
music which the Spirit longs to create through us as the Christian
community.
Without this,
our communities become incoherent.
Our music
becomes a cacophony.
But if we place
our gifts, our triangles, our suspended cymbals –
in the context
of the music of a love that is patient and kind,
not seeking its
own,
we can manifest
a community and not just a collection of individuals.
“We are not called by God to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things with extraordinary love.”
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