I would like to confess publicly that many many years ago I had the Daily Mail newspaper delivered to my home.  I suspect there was more to actually read in it then than there is now, but that was not the reason that I subscribed to it.  No, I liked that paper because of the cartoons – the love is.. cartoon to be precise.  Looking at the cartoons each day provided a giggle, a smile, a little light in a miserable newspaper.  Not having opened that particular paper for some time, I was amazed to find recently that the cartoons are still going strong, and that it is possible to access them daily via a website rather than splashing out on the whole paper.

And I was also very interested in looking at the cartoons for the last few weeks.  There were the cute ones:

• Love is…realising mornings wouldn’t be the same without him (with breakfast in bed brought)
• Travelling in style (in a heart class railway carriage)
• The key note (at a piano)
• Being together at sunset (a clearly elderly love is couple sitting staring out to a sunset)

And there were the new, up to date, PC ones:

• Love is… signing your feelings (deaf alphabet)
• ..what helps you through each day (stuck in traffic jam but picture of him in thought bubble)
• giving her a break (man doing the ironing)

And then there was one which was very new and which made me think – and encouraged my faith in humanity:

• Love is… Having the same values (collecting for Save the Children)

You see although I enjoy the smile factor of those cartoons and although what they say is important and right, it can be mistaken as saying all that there is to say about love.  Today’s epistle must be one of the most well known passages in the New Testament.  It is often quoted and many couple choose to have it read at their wedding – and that is where I have a problem.  When Paul writes to the Corinthians about love, he is not writing about romantic, sloppy, slushy love. It is much deeper than that.

In Greek, as many of you will know, there are at least four different words for our one English word, love.  C S Lewis analysed these and wrote a book. ‘The Four Loves’, in which he explained that in English we use the same word to describe our feelings for: inanimate things and affections (I love my teddy bear) for other people as family or friends (I love my mum)  for other people as objects of sexual desire or romance (I love Cliff Richard)  and for our love of God and his creation.  Lewis also identified two ways of talking about love:  Need love (that which we crave to keep us going) and gift love.  The latter is effectively a new word in Greek – which we know as agape – the love of God for us.

And that is what Paul is writing about in his first letter to the Corinthians.  In another NT letter, St John tells us that God is love, and so God loved the world into being and holds the world and his creation in his hands – gifting us his love.  That love is tough.  It copes with all that we throw at God and it cares for all that life throws at us.  But it is also demanding love.  For if God is our creator, and if he made us in his image then we too are creative beings and we too have the capacity to love. 

And so we return to love is….  In his letter Paul explains to the Corinthians just how Christian love, agape, is identified – and what is required of them in their love.  And the city of Corinth certainly needed the sort of love that Paul describes.  Corinth was a seaport.  It was therefore full of sailors and people who supplied their particular needs.  It was a cosmopolitan city with more than its share of vice and trouble.  Real love was needed to help to solve the problems and the Christian church was ideally placed to show this love  – the gift love of God for the world – made visible through his people.

This love is tough, gutsy, deep, sacrificial and in fact revolutionary.  It is not eros, romance and sloppy – of course the qualities that Paul lists are valuable in a marriage – but they are also vital to all human relationships.  That is why I think that for some people this reading is very appropriate at a funeral – there are some people for whom it just sums up their lives – they lived out Paul’s teaching – as best they could within their human limitations.   And I am sure that we might all think of people we know or have known who apparently embody this teaching.

But it is difficult – I think almost impossible for a human to achieve.  Let’s look very briefly at Paul’s famous list of fifteen characteristics of agape.  These are not gifts.  One of the gifts of the Spirit may be the ability to be loving to others – a sort of caring and similar to hospitality or empathy – but what Paul describes is simply a way, a way of life which embodies all of these qualities.

So, love is patient.  It waits and waits and waits for a response, until the recipient is ready.  Love is kind.  I can think of many good people who are not kind.  Kindness is humble, it is the simple action or thoughtful word which can make another feel a million times better.  Love is not envious – how difficult that is to achieve in reality in the consumer and materialistic society we live in today.  We are encouraged to envy and to desire for ourselves.  Love is not boastful or arrogant or rude.  It has been interesting in my studies at Cambridge to note those Christian brothers and sisters who believe that their strand of the faith is the only right one and others are inferior.  We may know of folk like that – are we like that?  Love does not insist on its own way, but it is so much easier to do so.  Love is not irritable or resentful – the Greek word that is used is to store up, like an accountants record.  It is so easy to keep a mental record of the things with which others have wronged us.  Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing.  We just have to look at the media and see how the papers report events to see this peculiar human obsession which takes a delight in the faults and wrong doing of others.  Love rejoices in the truth – but it’s not as juicy or exciting as the opposite is it?

And Paul’s list ends:  love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  That just about covers everything.  Love is supreme.  Real gutsy Christian love can cope with anything that is thrown at it.  And that was of course true on the cross where we see the ultimate example of love – love himself dying because he loved us – in order that we too might love others.

And that is where I think we come in.  Paul was writing not just to the very first Christians 2000 years ago, but to us today.  He was building on the model of Jesus and if we think of what we know of Jesus from the Bible and, dare I say it, from our own individual relationship with him, then we can see that Jesus in fact embodies this way of love that Paul advocates.  And that love we see in Jesus IS hard and brash and new.  In Jesus’ message we see a challenge to the authorities of the day.  In the gospel reading Jesus is in Nazareth.  In Luke’s gospel this is the very start of his ministry.  Jesus has been baptised and he has just left behind the temptations in the desert.  The first thing he does is to go to the synagogue in his home town and worship.  As we heard in last week’s gospel, he was invited to read the reading from the scroll of the prophets and chose to read from Isaiah.  As he sat down – the traditional way that a rabbi would start his teaching – he taught that the prophecy had come true and that the sick would be healed and so on – but not here in Nazareth – he hinted that he had come to heal, to teach and to help not just Jews but gentiles too- and that was what got their backs up. 

Jesus was on home territory.  He was demonstrating the love of God which was hard and demanding, as Paul would later require.  Because he was on home territory those who knew him well and lived with him in Nazareth expected that he would work with them first – they were wrong.  In a kind of reverse of the charity begins at home mentality Jesus pointed out that God’ s love and mercy were for others too – even first.

And so we too are called to love, to love all people in all situations and circumstances, often unexpected, and in the very deepest of ways.  In many ways Jesus’ example and Paul’s teaching are revolutionary and well nigh impossible without the guidance of the Holy Spirit.   Still, God calls us to love in this demanding way.  And there are many levels on which we can put this teaching into practice.  At the very simplest we can attempt to live our everyday lives in the way of love, prayerfully and sometimes painfully relating to those with whom we come into contact at home, work, socially.  These are often the hardest people to relate to and yet the first we must love.  I think of the community in which I live during the week – we are not all easy to get on with – but a little of the love that Paul proposes can help us to cope with each other’s foibles in a loving way, yet without becoming doormats either.

But I believe that we are called to love at a deeper level than just the everyday.  If Jesus was a revolutionary then we must be too.  I believe that the love that Paul describes is strongly political and requires action.  Those who live in this way will make a difference to the world.  Yesterday we commemorated Holocaust remembrance day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.  On Thursday I had the privilege of hearing a survivor speak of her experiences and more importantly of her feelings.  She was most angry at those who did nothing – who knew what was happening but did not stand up to the Germans and she spoke of areas of the world where similar things have since happened – Rwanda and so on – but no one did anything.  Love does not rejoice in wrong doing.  Love does not stand by and watch others suffer.  Just before Christmas Tear fund launched a campaign to eradicate the spread of HIV and AIDS in Africa and elsewhere in the next ten years – being part of that work through prayer or financial offering or telling others about it,  is love in action, even though the subject of our love is far away.  Fr Camillo Torres was a RC priest, a supporter of Liberation Theology – seeking to achieve fair treatment for the poor in Latin America.  Speaking to his own church he said: the Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin.  He might be speaking to us too.

If love bears all things, believes, hopes and endures all things then we must love as Jesus and as Paul loved.  We have no choice but to be revolutionary in the way that we live our everyday lives and in the concerns with which we involve ourselves, directly, financially, educationally or through prayer.  Love is.. not sloppy or slushy or timid.  Love is living wholly for others as a response to him who first loved us.  And if we do this we can be sure that we are supported by that love too.  C K Barrett wrote that love is God’s essential activity: If God did not love, he would not be God.  God loves his world today through those who love him.  Are we allowing him to do that in our lives?

Amen