It struck me again, as I listened to Patty read from 1 Corinthians, that this enormously familiar passage is still very moving. However, I think it is terribly important that we be aware of what Paul was getting at when he wrote this letter. Think back to last Sunday's reading from 1 Corinthians in which Paul talked about all of the members being interconnected and interdependent. This was all the work of the Spirit. So, we need to delve into this business of the Spirit a little more because that is what lies behind this text.

A group of the Corinthians apparently were able to speak in tongues. They understood this as being a gift of the Spirit. However, in doing this they considered themselves superior to the people who did not speak in tongues. The problem in this instance was the same problem that agonized Paul more than any other difficulty he experienced in all of the towns that he preached in and all of the communities that he founded: the breakdown of relationships between people. In other words, this group of Corinthians used the Spirit as the basis for competition, for one-upmanship and, therefore, absolutely contradicted what Paul was talking about in the readings last Sunday - - the Spirit as the precise force that moves, enlivens and animates all of us. This is why he starts this passage by saying, "Even if I could speak in tongues, angelic tongues, but did it lovelessly - - it would be a failure, a catastrophe". He pushes this to the highest possible point when he says, "Even if I give away all of my possessions, if I hand over my body but do not have love, I gain nothing". In other words, what he is saying is that there can be all sorts of counterfeit instances of the action of the Spirit, but the real action of the Spirit is what moves us to be able to love.

Next, he breaks into this speech, giving content to the notion of love being patient and kind, not envious. Here, Paul, as a good Jew, is simply talking about what the Spirit does. He is saying that the Spirit enables us to move beyond our regular way of addressing the world - - which is to address it through the filter of our needs, desires and appetites. For Paul, this form of experiencing the world cancels out vast ranges of reality and, consequently, we are unable to respond to what is around us. In other words, the action of the Spirit opens us up and enables us to respond to what we find before us. That is what love is. Love is about seeing the other to the extent that one is therefore able to react to the other. And again, Paul's conviction lies at the heart of the entire Jesus business. He lays this out in some of the other letters when he says that, "For freedom Christ has made us free". Thus, he is basically talking about freedom in 1 Corinthians. And for Paul, a Jew, this was what the God of the Exodus and religion was all about. Religion exists to make us free! But free in what sense? Free in a nice kind of eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophical understanding of freedom? No, freedom means freedom precisely from all of the things that keep us from seeing the other; freedom which blinds us because we are driven by our own neediness so that we cannot see and, therefore, are not free. For Paul, love was the fruit of the Spirit animating us in such a way that we are free to see the other and to respond to the other. That is why it is kind, patient, and not envious, boastful or rude.

In Paul's reading, love is ultimate responsibility. This is very different from the kind of notion of responsibility that I grew up with. To be responsible meant that I had this kind of inner code that I had to live up to: "You have to be a responsible human being. You have to be accountable for yourself". This is not the biblical understanding of responsibility and freedom. In fact, it interferes with the biblical understanding of freedom, love, and responsibility in major ways. It distorts and cripples it and gives us the illusion that we are loving, free, and responsible when, in fact, at least according to this way of looking at things, we are not at all. So, this is why the heaviest thing that Paul attributes to love is that "love does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth". And by the truth, of course, he does not mean some kind of abstract propositional entity or the bottom of a mathematical process, but the reality of who we, and the people whom we live with, are. This is the truth. In other words, there is a kind of eccentricity in love where our center is not in our own self-serving and self-preserving impulses, but, as the great Martin Buber put it, "between us and the other". For years and years I had read, with great confusion, Buber saying, "It is the in-between. That is where real life takes place". Now, I think I understand what he means. It is not just what is in me and what is over there, but it is precisely in my responsiveness to what is there that life goes on.

I should add one more point about Paul and his response to the Corinthians who could speak in tongues. I think that what I have been talking about is connected to the instance in which Paul contrasts himself with when he was a child: "When I was a child and when I became an adult". A child necessarily sees the world in terms of their own needs and desires. Or, a child is going to say, "Because I can speak in tongues I must be really special in God's eyes, and to all of you people around me as well". In other words, this is all about the competitive impulse. So, Paul is saying, "Now that I am an adult I do not do this anymore".

Finally, it is interesting to see this text situated between these two ferocious texts. As usual, Jeremiah is in trouble. Jeremiah is always in trouble. He is always called the "lamentable" and the "lamenting" prophet. So, we have God saying, "I am going to make you a fortified city so you can stand up against the entire land - - an iron pillar, a bronze wall". And then you have this extraordinary instance where in a few verses in the Gospel of Luke, Luke has Jesus saying, while reading Isaiah, "God had sent me and anointed me to bring good news to the poor"; and the people say that all of this is wonderful. Within a few minutes, however, they are ready to kill him. They are ready to kill him because he said, "Listen, I am not just responsive to my fellow Jews but, taking the example of Elijah and Elisha, I am responsible to whoever is needy and suffering in the world". We do not want this. I, for example, want to determine whom I love. I want to curtail and tailor to my own desires who it is I love and how I love. And so, I think that it is really important that we see this hint of love between these really hard words of Jeremiah and this really hard event in Luke because it finally illuminates a very important aspect of love; namely, that love is basically an act of courage, as well as an act of freedom and responsibility.

Love takes courage. Love is the very act, the very epitome of courage. We want to run away from the world and ourselves quite often, and here, as it is laid out in Jeremiah, is there going to be a bronze wall? People are going to want to knock you on the head. But love is stronger than death.