This is the last Sunday that I will take my cue from the readings and Eileen's talk about spirituality in connection to this passage from Corinthians in which Paul talks about the Spirit and how it animates everybody so that we constitute a single body. Today, we get more Spirit talk. Jesus is filled with the Spirit and the whole basis underlying this remarkable and memorable so-called "Hymn to Love" is the action of the Spirit. So, we need to talk about spirituality a little more.

There are a variety of notions, or rather, different aspects of the same reality of spirituality that we find here and they come under the headings of freedom, responsibility and love. We can start with the motivation that moved Paul to write this in the first place. The Corinthians were a contentious group. All of Paul's churches were. Paul is always complaining about this problem. In fact, this is the one thing that he complains about uniformly in all of the letters. He is talking about the breakdown of the community. Here, the particular breakdown is especially egregious because these people take what they think are the gifts of the Spirit, the capacity to talk in tongues, and use this as a way to one-up each other. In other words, the Spirit is understood by these people as providing the grist for a sense of competition which, of course, destroys the community. This is why Paul says, "Even if I had the ability to speak in tongues, not just peoples' tongues but angels' tongues, but do it lovelessly, I am useless and this would be a waste of time". What Paul is saying is that the Spirit enables us to operate in every aspect of our lives in such a way that we come closer to each other to constitute a community. The conventional way of talking about this is to put it under the rubric of freedom. In Galatians, Paul says, "For freedom Christ has made us free", and he goes on to talk about freedom consistently in his letters. He will say, "Where the Spirit is there is freedom".

What is freedom? In Paul's view and the biblical view it is not the normal view of freedom that we get from the politicians or the psychologists in today's world (psychologists in particular, especially since we frequently appeal to them in order to attain a better understanding of freedom). For Paul, to be free means to be free from our own neediness, a neediness which blinds us to the world and, therefore, renders us incapable of responding to it. That is what freedom means. Freedom is always freedom from this kind of blindness. It is not the kind of freedom that will make us absolutely independent so that we do not have to bother with other people anymore. This is why Paul, a good Jew, understands freedom (and this was a standard Jewish belief in freedom) in terms of our capacity to respond, to be responsive to this world. It is this freedom not to be hobbled, hag-ridden and blinded by our own neediness.

Finally, this ability to respond to the world is expressed in love because love is the free response to the other. In these texts it is written: "Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious". Now, I can read these sayings and say to myself, "All right Trojcak, I am going to leave this room and I am going to be patient, kind, not envious, boastful, arrogant or rude. I am also not going to insist on my own way or be irritable or resentful now that I have this rule in my head because I must be responsible to it". No, this is not the correct understanding of responsibility. However, I think that this is the notion of responsibility that is found in many places in today's world - - the idea that when you tell people about responsibility it usually is associated with a threat. Paul's definition of responsibility is different. He is saying that "to be responsible means to respond to what is out there". He is saying that "I am patient because I am aware of the one who is there standing before me and I will suffer because that is the true meaning of patience. I will be respectful of that other. I will not envy that other because I know (and this is related to last week's reading) that the same Spirit that operates in me is operating in them".

The clearest statement in this whole list is that the Spirit allows us to rejoice in the truth, not in wrongdoing. In other words, Paul is saying that rejoicing in the truth is the highest form of responsiveness. Of course, by truth he does not mean knowing the right answer to a mathematical question or when Washington crossed the Delaware, or when Wolfe died? This is not the kind of truth that Paul is talking about. He is talking about who is really there and how truly do you see them? He/she who does this is rejoicing in the truth. Therefore, the truth is not simply ticking off everybody's mistakes and saying, "Ah, gotcha!". And then, of course, Paul goes even further and talks about this business about handing over his body etc.. The point is that love is always a response that is generated by a freedom, a freedom that is created and engendered in us by the Spirit of God. All of these other things are subordinate to this. Prophecy is going to end, tongues are going to end and knowledge is going to end etc..

Paul sums his argument up when he contrasts being a child with being an adult. What is the hallmark of being a child? Children are need-driven. If you have ever raised a child, or if you can remember being a child (and none of us totally transcends this experience - - even at my age I am still waiting to grow up), one remembers that children are blind to the world around them and that they display a self-protecting and self-promoting reflex behaviour that makes them feel a need to compete, like the Corinthian tongue speakers who compete for attention, applause, approval and a place on the earth. This, of course, is a form of responsibility because children, or the Corinthian tongue speakers, are responding to everyone who is a potential enemy. However, this is absolutely the wrong kind of response.

So, the Spirit frees us so that we can be responsive to each other and to the world. This is what love is all about. There are some really important further qualifiers of this in the passage from Jeremiah and the passage about Jesus from Luke. They stand like book ends because they both contain the same point. In one, God makes Jeremiah a fortified city, iron pillar and bronze wall because he is going to have to talk against the kings, princes, priests and people. In the other, Jesus is going to have to talk against the people of Capernaum because, although he is a local boy, this does not mean that the people in his local environment are entitled to any special kind of priority. Jesus quotes all of these things from Jewish history which state: "Yes, there are these Jews, but the prophets responded to pagans". Why? Because, this lady, this widow in Zeraphat was starving, and Naaman, the Syrian, had leprosy. In other words, courage is entailed in love, and this is what these other two readings involve. Love is very hard and so I would suggest that courage is the epitome of loving, the epitome of the activity of the Spirit. This certainly is quite alien to the normal kind of sentimentalizing and emulsifying tendency we have with regard to understanding love as being something that is nice, warm and fuzzy. No, this is not what love is all about.

Finally, the other thing that is really important here, at least I think that it is important, is that Paul makes a clear distinction between growing up and being a child. Again, I am going to call upon this example of being a child. It is quite possible to understand all of this in terms of laws: I have to be patient and kind and I cannot be envious etc.. The church that I grew up in demanded perfection: "This is what you are supposed to do". And somehow, you went from not being able to do it to absolutely being able to do it. You were supposed to be perfect. Again, this is not where love and the truth lie. The Latin translation for "perfect" is "all finished", thoroughly done. This is wrong. We are on the way and this just adds another element that helps us to discern the meaning of "courage". Courage means to continue doing it, to continue trying day after day. Courage means trying to be faithful to the call of love. Courage means trying to be aware of our own narrowness and blindness so that we can finally be kind, stop from rejoicing in other peoples' wrongdoings and become patient with ourselves, and with each other.