Confessing Evangelical

Our pastor's sermon this week (delivered by one of the elders, as our pastor is on holiday) was based on 1 Corinthians 13:1-7. As with Dick Lucas' definitive sermon on 1 Corinthians 13, our pastor was keen to stress that this is not a cuddly "hymn to love", but was instead aimed directly at the Corinthians' chief failings as expanded on elsewhere in the letter. As Lucas puts it:

No girl in Corinth wrote to the apostle with the request that he speak at her wedding when next he came by, on the grounds that he wrote so marvellously about ‘love’; if she wrote at all it would be to warn Paul about the angry and resentful reception he might expect from the elders as a result of his plain speaking.

For example, in verse 1, Paul compares speaking in tongues - very popular among the Corinthians - with the "clanging cymbals" used in pagan worship. In other words, as our pastor put it:

Paul takes [the Corinthians] back to their days of pagan idolatry to show them that speaking in tongues without the love of Christ behind it is as useless as pagans worshipping idols. Ouch.

But our pastor is never happier than when he is disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed, and he obviously felt the need of the former at this point in the sermon:

We must be careful here, because I think we can often come down too heavily on the Corinthians. Speaking in tongues is not an issue among us. But perhaps a bit of modern updating for Lutherans might do the trick.

He then goes on to offer the following rewrite of verses 1 to 3 for contemporary Lutherans (I've adapted this slightly to fit in more closely with the ESV text):

If I preach, teach and confess the true, unadulterated Word of God as expounded by the 1580 Book of Concord, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have The Lutheran Hymnal and, understand the proper distinction of Law and Gospel, and if I know that I am justified by grace alone, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give £x a week to the church, and occasionally show up to services, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Spot on. As our pastor went on to say:

Often, Lutherans take pride in their wonderful heritage and begin to sound a bit like the Corinthians with their tongue-speaking. That, I think, is a pretty close equivalent to what Paul was saying to the Corinthians.

He stressed that this is not to say that the Bible, the Lutheran Confessions, the liturgy, Law and Gospel etc are not "vitally important", any more than Paul was devaluing spiritual gifts:

[H]e just wanted [the Corinthians] to use them correctly: in love. So it is with us. We use the Bibles, the Confessions, the liturgy, our stewardship in love to God and in service to one another.

To listen to the sermon, click here, or click here to download it (MP3). As mentioned before, it is not our pastor you will here, as he is on holiday. But that's quite authentic in itself: after all, Paul's letter would have been read out to the Corinthians by somebody else!

Labels: 1 corinthians 13, love, lutheran, sermons