Love is the Measure of Leadership

2000 pages in my bible and this is the second time that Dr. Belt has used this piece of scripture in our class. Either he thinks we don't like him very much or it's just his favorite passage. Indeed, this is one of the classic passages of the bible. There are two times that we encounter this soliloquy on love in the Episcopal lectionary. We remember that it is a selected reading for weddings. But we also see this in the regular cycle of the lectionary on the last Sunday after Epiphany in Year C. I prefer this lectionary reading, because it starts in Chapter 12 and thus retains some of its context. Because if you just start at the beginning of Chapter 13 you think that this is a recitation on how wonderful love is, but it isn't. Before we can break open this chapter, we need to back up a bit and find out something about the Corinthians so we can begin to understand why Paul is giving us this warm squishy love talk.

The Christian community in Corinth received this letter around 54 AD. They were rich and poor, they were free and slave, they were home to a group of people who felt disenfranchised by the larger community. They formed cliques of like-minded persons and based worthiness on indicators of wealth, both physical and spiritual. Furthermore, they used those indicators to determine leaders and judge possible converts. In short – they were just like us.

All communities of Christians place preference on some selection of Christian values and gifts. These preferences encourage those so gifted to be called as leaders. None of us have ever found a way to balance all of the benefits and moral imperatives of the Christian ethic. This is because we all come to Christ from somewhere else. Now, the Corinthians placed their highest good on gifts of the Spirit. If we look back to verse 8 in Chapter 12, there is a list of the gifts of the Spirit. This is not a list to inform the Corinthians what these gifts were, they already knew. Paul is enumerating the gifts that the Corinthians are emphasizing to the detriment of other things.

This list includes:
wise speech,
knowledgeable speech,
faith,
healings,
miracles,
prophecy,
discernment of spirits
and the speaking and interpreting of tongues.
These are all wonderful, indeed miraculous things. We look at people who have been gifted with these things, and if our cynicism allows, we imagine them more holy, more blessed than ourselves. All Christian communities value these things. All Christian communities use these and other gifts to determine who are our leaders and shepherds of the faith. We are all Corinthians in this instance.

After all, we have to determine leaders and followers and sincerity of purpose somehow, don't we? Of course we do. “And I will show you a still more excellent way,” says Paul at the end of Chapter 12. Does Paul say that we should discredit gifts of the Spirit? No. But he says they are in themselves, worthless. The only thing that makes the gifts of the Spirit, indeed any gift of Spirit or position in the body of the church, is love. Every other thing, every prophecy, every tongue, all knowledge, will become obsolete. Every other thing will change over the course of time. The Corinthians, like us, had a cultural context. Like us, that context held that rich people controlled politics and the means of production. They thought that the music of the day was vain, that children were disrespectful and people were having too much sex. The Corinthians put themselves forward in the community of believers as a group especially blessed in tongues, prophecy and knowledge. Today, we do not read the letters of the Corinthians to Paul. We read Paul's letter taking them to task for not loving each other.

And he doesn't stop there. He does not simply reiterate, Jesus said, Love your neighbor as yourself. He offers up a whole list. Have you ever noticed how much of this list is presented in the negative? That is because Paul is not creating verses for embroidery, he is accusing the Corinthians of engaging in all these behaviors. First Corinthians is a long letter and in the first 12 chapters of it Paul has gone over all the offenses the Corinthians have been engaging in. They have been envious of each other, they have been boasting and resentful and they have celebrated their wrongdoings. The Corinthians are not loving each other. Paul is pissed off and it is we who need to be afraid. Because we are just like the Corinthians. We engage in these behaviors all the time. We are not loving each other.

These are the ten commandments of love:
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 truth
It bears all things
Believes all things
Hopes all things
Endures all things.

This is the list. The basic requirements of healthy, Christian relationships. And while they seem self evident here in the pews, they are not the rules of our common culture, any more than they were the rules of the Roman Empire. When Paul tells us that we are called to be something completely different in Christ, this is exactly what he is talking about. Love.

That is all well in good for our peer to peer interactions. Of course, we should be loving each other, and of course we fail and we keep at it. But how average Christians treat each other is not enough for leaders of the community. Of them, surely we need a more stringent requirement.

Why not faith? That seems a reasonable test of worthiness. After all, faith is what saves us. But how do you test for faith? Paul raises up hope as well. Could we test for leaders by measuring hope? I don't see how. Hope and faith are personal measures of our Christianity. Only God can measure the depth of our hope or the width of our faith. It is love that is the measure of our community. It is our love that others experience, it is love that sets us apart. Not love to the exclusion of outsiders, but love that obliterates the line between inside and outside. This love is our mission. Love your God with all your heart and soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.

Therefore, our leaders ought to exemplify love before all other gifts of the Spirit or talents in the other offices of the church. When we consider ecumenical leaders such as Pat Robertson, we are put off by the use of technology, the physical distance and one-sidedness of televangelism, but we are disappointed, ultimately, by the lack of love displayed by him and by others. I will not say that televangelism or even Internet churches do not have a place, but it is a fact that we care most about people we must look in the eye.

We are called to be something different in the world. We are called to put away childish things. If we want to build the kingdom of heaven, if we want to realize that which we have been promised, we must stop acting like children. Children are very concerned with replicating the common culture and nailing down the temporal. Children are involved in community building only in so much as creating a place for themselves. Children love what they get, the do not understand what they give. The Corinthians were a bunch of children playing at church.

When we are called to bring forth new leaders in the church, do we bring forth leaders who exemplify love in all they do? Or do we look for those blessed with the gifts of money management and charisma? How can we bring our friends and neighbors and co-workers to church, our individual church and the Church writ large, when we engage the world in ways no different than politicians and businessmen? We must love each other, and we must bring up leaders in the church who will guide the way.