The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
January 28, 2007
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
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. And if I have prophetic powers, and
understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to
remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I
hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
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.
But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they
will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy
only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an
end. When I was a child, I spoke like a
child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult,
I put an end to childish ways. For now
we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know
fully, even as I have been fully known.
And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of
these is love.
Sermon:
In the minutes before the wedding ceremony, I wait downstairs in Pilgrim Hall with the groom and the groomsmen. Upstairs, the sanctuary is lovely, with freshly vacuumed carpeting and wedding flowers that are a cut above the usual Sunday morning bouquets. But down where I wait with the men, it is the usual church fellowship hall, with its folding metal chairs, chipped Formica tables and years of cookie crumbs and juice ground into the rug.
“We used to run around this place like crazy,” the groom tells me, as other young grooms have told me before, recalling their upbringing in the church in which now they will make their wedding vows. “We’d stay down here with our sleeping bags for youth fellowship lock-ins. But we’d run around all night, sliding on the railings, playing games. We never slept.”
It is an irony for these young men raised in the church that in the minutes before their elegant weddings, they will wait downstairs in Pilgrim Hall, where over the years, they sprinkled glitter on glue-dripping felt banners, ate chicken casserole, drowned their Yule logs in showers of spray-on snow and played dodge ball late into the night.
These grooms always reminisce, “We used to run wild here,” as if confessing a secret that as pastor, I would not know. Yet still today, the old church hall reflects, in its shabbiness, a wild variety of activities of a holy space well-used. It is a shelter for the homeless on Sunday nights, a banquet hall for an Hawaiian dinner in a snowy season. It is an indoor playground whose handicapped ramp seems to only have been constructed so that packs of children could run down the slope and swing their little legs and then their whole bodies over the railing like gymnasts.
“Kids, get off that thing!” the youth fellowship leader says, “You cannot run wild in here!” But, of course, they can and they do, as they always have.
The groom pulls the best man aside, to explain, “Sometimes, we just took off exploring into this creepy old secret passageway, that ran behind the back of the church.” His look is wistful, as he tries to convey to his buddy, to me, and perhaps to himself, that he has not always been tuxedo-clad husband material, about to make promises for an adult lifetime. He was once a raggedy rebellious teen, tearing around the church, searching for secret hideaways amidst the exotic mysteries of growing up.
“You may not know about that secret passage,” he tells me, as the minister. “Has anyone ever shown it to you?”
“We’re going to use it right now,” I say. “It gets us from Pilgrim Hall to the door that opens out to the front of the church.”
And so he joins those grooms who have taken the long walk into the sanctuary to be married, through a short, dark passage in which he once played chase, Sardines, and perhaps even stole a kiss.
We walk up some old stairs, and then into the passageway, that takes us past the back of the organ, around some Christmas pageant scenery, a broken music stand, and there, we wait at the end of the passage, behind a thick wooden door. A peephole, a little curved glass eyeball, allows us to peer out at the faces of the people in the pews, to check to see if the doors behind them have yet been thrown open to reveal a flower girl, a bridesmaid, or even a bride.
The groom notices that the view through the peephole is distorted, so that straight angles are curved, familiar faces are blurry, and the world outside that door looks like a twisted wonderland. But it is as clear a view of the future as any of us can hope to get. We all see through a glass darkly.
So often the wedding scripture comes from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the famous chapter thirteen. These are the words that strike couples as fresh and ministers as perhaps too familiar; words about love being patient, kind and everything but blind. But scriptures become popular for a reason; they express some truth that never gets old.
The clergy must explain that these words were not written for couples, or for romance, but were delivered to the larger body of Christ.
Still, in the wedding, everyone hears “Love does not insist on its own way,” and notes it as another piece of good advice for newlyweds, up there with “Never go to bed angry,” and “Don’t forget to say ‘I love you,’ every day.” Couples seize upon 1 Corinthians 13 as a rare practical word from that relentlessly impractical book. “We like this reading,” the couples tell me. “It’s good advice. It makes sense.”
But marriage makes so little sense. The actions that take place at the front of the sanctuary will be as mysterious as the travels through the secret passageways of youth fellowship. Amidst the clanging cymbals and gongs of any marriage, love jumps out unearned, illogical and miraculous. In marriage, we promise to love when it makes no sense, as Christ has loved us, when it made no sense.
The groom sees his mother seated. Now, he thinks he observes a flash of white at the back of the church, the fluffing of a dress he will see for the first time in just a minute; a hint that the woman he plans to spend his life with is hidden, but there waiting, as he waits. He presses his hands against the passageway door, leans forward, pasting his eyeball up to the peephole, as close to his future as he can get from here. “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then we will see face to face.”
“The youth fellowship, the overnight lock-ins? Do you still have those?” he asks me, pensively. “Do the kids still run wild and do crazy things all over the church?”
“They sure do,” I say. “But this may be the craziest thing you’ve done here yet.”
The groom steps back from the door. He breathes in and stands up straight. Adjusting the flower in his lapel one last time, he pulls open the old door and prepares to meet his bride.
With one foot in the old secret passageway, and another stepping out into the church, he freezes, as if something has just occurred to him. His great adventures are not behind him but out in front.