Manipur Baptist 125th Anniversary #2
Several years ago in the Netherlands, a contest was held to set the record for the world’s longest kiss. The rules were rather simple. Whoever maintained lip contact and remained standing for the longest time won the prize, which happened to be about $7000 in cash. Of the 13 couples that entered the contest, the first pair dropped out after two hours, and after 30 hours only two couples were left. The winning couple took home the prize by keeping their lips locked for 34 hours, 11 minutes, and 37 seconds. It was almost a “never-ending” kiss.
Who likes to kiss here?
To be able to kiss for such a long period of time—did the couple love each other that much, or did they just really want to win the money? When you think of it, it is somewhat amazing how many different ways we use the word, “love.” What is the Manipur word for love?
We say we love our pets. We say that we love chocolate! We say we love that outfit! We say we love God. We use that one word, “love,” to say all those different things.
Different Kinds of Love
In the New Testament they did not have just one word for love. In Greek they had three different words to describe three different kinds of love. First, they had the word, eros. Eros is romantic love, a Valentine’s Day kind of love. Do you celebrate Valentine’s Day in Manipur? Remember Valentines is only a few days away!
Secondly, they had the word, philia. The name for Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love in Pennsylvania, comes from the word philia. A philia kind of love is the love that you have for a close friend or for a family member.
Let me tell you a story about a fan of the Red Sox. The Red Sox is a baseball team in Boston where I was born and grew up. You play cricket in India. Baseball is like cricket.
There is a heartwarming scene of selfless love in the comedy film Fever Pitch. This is a story of the unlikely romance between an obsessive fan of the Boston Red Sox and a workaholic woman. Ben Wrightman teaches math, but his passion is the Red Sox. His apartment is filled with Red Sox memorabilia, even his telephone being in the shape of a baseball mitt. Having inherited his uncle’s pair of season tickets, every year he chooses who among his fellow fanatics will sit with him for which game. He and his buddies even travel to Florida in the spring to watch spring practice. A reporter covering the spring training camp asks, Ben, “Where do the Sox rank in terms of importance in your life?” and he replies, “I say the Red Sox…friends…and breathing.”
Lindsey Meeks, a business consultant who crunches the numbers for several big time corporations, hardly ever takes a day off, certainly not one to attend a baseball game. After their not so cute first date (she has food poisoning when he arrives to pick her up, so instead of going out, he puts her to bed and cleans up her mess), they become a pair. But after a series of ups and downs in their relationship, they split up when it becomes apparent to Lindsey that she comes in second to baseball in Ben’s list of priorities.
However, apart from each other each discovers that they do love the other so much that they cannot allow anything to stand between them. Each gives up something, in Ben’s case his chance to watch the big game with New York, and she an opportunity for the big promotion she had worked so hard for. They find a clever way to compromise, she telling him, “If you love me enough to sell your tickets, I love you enough not to let you.” That’s a combination of eros and philia love together.
So much for baseball, let’s get back to the sermon!
Agape Love
But there’s a third kind of love in the New Testament—agape. Agape love is unconditional love—the kind of love where you love and care about other people even if they do not deserve that love, even if they do not return that love, even if they do not appreciate that love. It is the agape kind of love that Paul talks about here in this 13th chapter of First Corinthians. Although marrying couples frequently have this passage read at their weddings, many have no idea about agape love. They think it’s about eros and philia love.
So often the good that we do for others is not motivated by such a pure kind of love. Instead we often do nice things for others in the hope that maybe some day they will return the favor: “I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine” kind of love.
God in a mighty act sent Jesus into the world to show us the agape kind of love. And even though we took Jesus and spat on him and beat him and nailed him to the cross and killed him, God decided that even after all of that, it would not keep God from still loving us. That is the kind of love that God has shown us. And that is the kind of love that God hopes we will show through our lives.
Love at Church
We know that Paul was writing to the church in Corinth that was torn apart by strife. Some felt that they were spiritually superior to others. Some who can speak in tongues felt that they were more superior than others but Paul said they can become just a noisy disturbance as a clanging cymbal. Some felt that they had the gift of prophecy and the knowledge to understand all mysteries, but Paul said that if they had no love, these things are meaningless. Even if they gave away all of their possessions but did not give in love, they haven’t gained a cent.
I have been praying about church unity in the US and the love that we must have for one another. For the past few years, we have experienced some challenging issues that have fractured the spirit in our congregations and our American Baptist denomination. Some of our issues have been over theological understandings.
I wonder about your church and the agape love you have for one another. For us to grow spiritually mature, we must strive for this agape love that Paul wrote about and Jesus Christ lived out because of God’s unconditional love is for us and for the world.
Zakali Shohe writing in “Redefining Relationships: The Role of the Spirit in Romans 8:14-17 and Its Significance for the Christians in Nagaland,” which I propose applies to Manipur as well, says “On many occasions in a multi-tribal context, instead of seeing the beauty in diverse groups coming together we are building walls. Instead of looking at each person as special we try to divide on the basis of ‘my tribe’ and ‘your tribe.’ There are also instances where churches have remained silent on the atrocities and violent acts committed in the name of freedom movements, nationalism or integration.”
There will always be the human tendency toward division. We see this in our American history. As the American colonies started to take shape, instead of cooperating with one another, they allowed divisions among themselves to persist. With no federal government in place, states formed regional alliances and established ties to foreign countries. Northern states “joined together and sided with England.” Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia “created a southern confederacy aligned with France.” Citizens in the West “banded together and chose Spain as their ally so they were guaranteed access to the Mississippi River.”
How about here in Manipur and NE India? I know that there are 7 states and within those states there are many different tribes, some sharing the same culture, history and language while others do not. And for many of your early histories, the tribes went to war against each other and you became infamous around the world as “head-hunters!”
How often does the church do the same sort of thing, allowing ourselves to degenerate into warring factions rather than permitting ourselves to be bound together into a common purpose through love?
Have you ever noticed how, if you are waiting for something, your expectation defines your world? Take for instance; you are waiting for a phone call about a new job or the birth of a baby, or the results of a test, or the safe arrival of a loved one in a distant land. That expected outcome overcomes any time that you may be watching on your watch. Whatever you are waiting for, the future frames the present and preoccupies your dreaming.
If we as a church can expect agape love to pervade and prevail in our church even if at this time we have yet to experience genuine unconditional love for one another, our present life together will begin to reflect agape love. When we expect love, when we wait for love, when we assume love to be among us, this hopeful commitment will frame our present and in time, it will become reality. I wish and pray for this to happen here among us.
Instead of seeking things for ourselves from God—powers and knowledge and faith to do great things—instead, God would have us seek love, love to see and hear the other, love to patiently enter into the experience of the other and let compassion grow, love to still any self-assertive yearning for vindication and bear patiently with the other, and so to hope and dream of a future beyond exclusions and suspicion and all the immature fears that keep us at each others’ throats today. Are you willing to offer unconditional love?
There’s a real story about what happened to author Catherine Hyde one day. She was driving home very late one night through a rather dangerous section of Los Angeles. All of a sudden her car stalled and smoke began to pour out from underneath the hood. As she leaped out of the car, she saw two men running at her with a blanket. Immediately she imagined that they were coming at her to attack her and rob her. But it turned out that the men used the blanket to beat out the flames.
Later, when the fire was out and she had learned that the throttle line had been on fire, and that the car very likely would have exploded and killed her had the fire not been extinguished, she wanted to find the men who had put out the fire to thank them. But by that time, they were gone.
So from that day on Catherine Hyde decided that if you cannot pay someone back, then you should pay it forward. The theme of her story became a movie and it is about what the world would be like if everyone helped three undeserving people without any thought of being repaid for their good deeds. And then each of those people would show some act of kindness to three other people, and so on, and so on.
If we might take Catherine Hyde’s advice of “paying it forward” and apply it to our church, can we begin to love each other first without expecting to receive anything back? That’s what God did in Jesus Christ—For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so whosoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. God gave first—he paid it forward and is inviting us to do the same.
Agape love is an act of the will, a choice, and a commitment without conditions. Love is a mighty act.
Love Never Fails
Love is the greatest in Paul’s mind because it never ends. In the future times, love will be the one thing left in the end—the love of God for us and our love for each other. Prophecies, tongues, powers and abilities are great and potentially useful in the present, but they will all come to an end for us individually and corporately as a church. What matters in the end are not what we’ve been able to accomplish in our giftedness but with whom and how we’ve loved.
Just as a child grows out of childish things and just as a mirror reflects an indirect image, compared to when we see someone face to face, so, too, will some of the things that we practice in the church or the perspectives that we have about our Christian ethics be unnecessary when the end comes. But love never ends.
Someone once said, “What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.”
When I think about the love that we can have for one another at our church that can build up trust and church unity, I know that love takes time. Paul says, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” Our culture often tells us to demand immediate results. If a relationship is not instantly gratifying and pleasing to us, we feel we have the right to sever our ties at any moment and search for something else. Yet Paul suggests that Christian love is a love that is willing to persist through good times and bad.
There’s an ancient monastic discipline on stability that we might be able to learn from. The discipline is that a monk vowed to stay within his community no matter what. Even when conflicts arose, even when situations became intense, the monk vowed to stay with his fellow believers because they were bound together forever by love. What would it mean for us if we reclaimed that vow of stability in some way?
It is relatively easy to disagree with and demonize those whom we do not see eye to eye with. Yet it requires love to be able to bridge the divide and to seek to maintain fellowship with one another. The Russian novelist Dostoevsky once said, “While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him.” Are you ready to understand your enemy in agape love?
The word, “love” is often heard these days. It’s hard to turn on the radio and not hear a song that has the word “love” in the lyrics. But the definition of love that our culture has is quite often at odds with the definition of agape love that God has. As Christians, as people who live in the midst of an often loveless world, are we willing to embody that kind of agape love? Are we willing to practice the “pay it forward” love with no conditions attached or expecting anything in return?
What marks us as Christians is not who you will feed but with whom you will eat. The essence of love is not merely providing goods and services to those in need. Rather the heart of love is a willingness to enter into a deep and caring relationship with them as well. We must be willing to spend the precious little time in our lives to develop these deep and caring relationships. Are you ready to love one another as your commitment to act mightily for the sake of Christ Jesus?
Again from Zakali Shohe, “…for every time a border is crossed and a bridge is built, Christians get another opportunity to critique the past built walls and through the guidance of the Spirit move towards creating space for openness and being a witnessing community.”
Paul said at the end of this chapter, “And now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” If we embody the kind of love that God first gave to us, we will experience a never-ending love that will build-up the unity in our church and fulfill the mission of love God has commanded us to be about in the world.
Let us pray.
Merciful God, you know us better than we know ourselves, but we have not believed this. You care about us even when we do not love ourselves, but it has been hard for us to understand that this is true. We see dimly and hear your Word so faintly that we doubt your truth. O God, grant us the faith to believe in your good news that we have seen in Jesus Christ our Lord. Empower us with the courage to change from our mistrust of each other and to love unconditionally as you have loved us in Jesus Christ. Thank you, O God, for your never-ending love and we pray that we may serve you by spreading your agape love in this love-starving world. Amen.