The Greatest Gift
February 02, 2025
The Highest Gift
1 Corinthians 13
by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones
First Central Congregational Church
2 February 2024
One of the most astonishing things about newborns is that they are able to imitate the facial expressions of their caregivers. One reason this is astonishing is that newborns have never seen their own face. Which is evidence that newborn human babies arrive with the capacity for empathy. They almost immediately understand that they can imitate the looks and the feelings of their adult caregivers. And almost immediately they learn that they can use their own facial expressions and feelings to compel those caregivers to attend to their needs.
We are so used to these behaviors in babies that we probably haven’t taken the time to realize how astonishing it is that the newborn brain functions in this way, has these incredible skills from the beginning.
And, of course, we now understand how important that early care-giving is. A child who receives care, attention, touch, affection will development attachment, leading to empathy, and ultimately love.
By one a child assumes that their mind operates similarly to the other minds they encounter. By two or three they have developed a basic understanding of empathy, understanding that others feel similarly to them.
And that’s when children are ready for the next stage of moral development—understanding rules—taking the way you want to be treated and extending that to everyone. If morality only operated from empathy, then we would have a rather small sphere of ethical action. We also have to learn how to treat people well even when we don’t feel it. As Allison Gopnik, who had studied and taught this child development, points out, “Simply relying on immediate emotion isn’t going to work. Somehow we need to extend that emotion to people we aren’t close enough to see and touch. We need to care about people we don’t know.”
It is so much easier to mature and grow in love if we have the grounding early in our lives of being well cared for. From that stable base of care and affection, we can expand our moral consciousness, ever-widening the circle of concern, to the point that we can extend the ethics of love to all people.
This is the goal of the human life.
James Fowler, in his classic work Stages of Faith, writes about the levels of development we pass through as we grow and mature. In the higher stages, we become more open to other people and other ideas and do not see them as a threat to ourselves and our beliefs. The highest stage of human development, stage 6, he calls “universalizing faith” and claims it is quite rare, found in heroes like Gandhi, King, Mother Theresa. These are the people who express a universal love for all humanity and are willing to sacrifice themselves for that love. They have an openness to all people and, quite simply, appear to be, as Fowler writes, “more fully human than the rest of us.” He believes such people embody the future which we long for.
I believe this is the sort of love Paul is praising here in First Corinthians.
He ended chapter 12 by writing that he was going to tell them about the highest gift. This directed to the people in that congregation who felt they should be developing the “higher” gifts, out of some bent desire to feel superior to other people.
Paul has been at pains in this letter to knock some sense into those folks. The church is a radically egalitarian community. No one is superior to anyone else. In fact, the folks that seem, by normal human standards, to be less important, are in the church, MORE essential. So no Christian should lord themselves over another or mistreat anyone who is vulnerable. Those are affronts to the Body of Christ.
And, if you actually want to be more spiritual, to pursue the highest gifts, then you need to be pursuing this universal, unconditional love. Because not only is that the most important gift for building up the common good of the church, it is also the goal of what the best human life is. It’s the kind of life Jesus modeled for us and invites us to follow.
Of course, reading 1 Corinthians 13 today, one can’t help but compare and contrast with the current administration and the actions they’ve taken over the last two weeks, so many of which have been devoid of mercy and compassion. And you’ve already felt these decisions beginning to harm your friends, your family, your own lives.
It is important for us to gather in church and hear that we have not mistaken the Christian faith, we have not misunderstood morality, we have not been fools—unconditional, universal love and its expressions in grace, mercy, and compassion are what God expects of us, are what the best human life should aim for.
But this moment also means that we have to double-down on love. We have to continue our own spiritual and emotional growth and maturation.
So, what is God calling us to?
First, we should remember that this love talked about here isn’t a feeling. Or isn’t just a feeling. It is, as New Testament scholar Anthony Thiselton describes, “an attitude and habitual practice for everyday life.”
Yes, love arises for us foremost and most powerfully in feeling. The feelings we have for our children, our spouses, our closest friends. But mature love must expand beyond immediate feeling and begin to encompass everyone we encounter and ultimately those we never meet.
And the only way to do that is to make loving actions a part of our daily habit and routine. Which is something you have the power to do, regardless of what’s happening on the news. Every day you can be kind. You can be empathetic. You can reach out in care and concern and support to someone who is vulnerable and hurting. You can be generous with your time or money. You can offer to help.
Make these sorts of actions our daily habits, and we will continue to grow and develop into more loving people.
We also can’t be consumed by rage. This week I read the book Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times by Elizabeth Oldfield. My UCC colleague John Allen, who is a pastor in Maine, highly recommended the book, and now I’m passing that recommendation on to you. It would be great book for you to read, right now.
In one early chapter she explores how appealing wrath is, but how we must learn to confront our rage with the skills of peacemaking. I liked how she described this emotion—“wrath, in the form of self-righteous rage and contempt, is a compelling, borderline pleasurable emotion.” Admit it, you’ve felt that.
She says wrath often helps us to avoid the fear, guilt, or overwhelm that we are actually feeling. Wrath helps to distract us from those other negative thoughts, partly because it feels more powerful. She also points out that wrath is addictive, like a sugar-high. And that we can also use it to bond with other people in “our shared contempt.”
Any of that sound familiar? Yeah. She’s on-the-nose that that is one of the sins holding us back from experiencing the fully aliveness that God dreams for each of us.
She is quick and careful to separate anger from wrath. Anger can be healthy, effective, and required. But wrath is that feeling that ultimately disconnects us from other people and from who God intends us to be.
So Oldfield invites us to engage in spiritual practices to confront our wrath so that we might grow in peacemaking, which is clearly one aspect of the love we are talking about today.
One practice she recommends is to make two lists. One of the types of people you are most comfortable with and the other of the types of people you are least comfortable with. And then to get really specific in writing down why. Why one type of people makes you comfortable and another uncomfortable. And she gives the instruction that you can’t write down an attribute of theirs, you have to make it about you. What has happened in your experience that makes you feel that way? What is it that you feel? What is it that you fear?
And she points out that “if your list isn’t slightly painful, you’re probably not being honest.”
What’s the purpose of this exercise? To better understand our feelings, particularly our fears. And with a better understanding, then maybe we are less likely to get caught up in fight-or-flight mode. Because when we are in fight-or-flight mode, we can’t summon empathy. We can’t calmly stand-our-ground and speak truth in helpful ways.
Our turbulent times require more love. We can’t just criticize the lack of it in other people. We also have to focus on our own spiritual and emotional growth and maturation.
Which we can do, because we are powerful people, filled with the Holy Spirit.
In the passage we read last week, Paul contrasted weakness with the normal ways in which humans think of and use power. And he’s rather critical of the ways humans normally use power. Paul writes about how God works differently, using what humans consider weakness in order to achieve God’s purposes. And love is the most important way that God works.
Which really means that love is powerful. Not powerful in the way humans might ordinarily think of it. But truly powerful because that’s the way the God who created the world works. And that’s the way God designed the world to work best. So when humans operate from love, they tap into the deepest source of real power.
I think many of you, right now, are feeling powerless. But you are not powerless.
Listen to these words from the feminist theologian Meggan Watterson:
The good news . . . is that true power rests within us. . . . no one outside of us can keep us from finding this power. Because it’s not a power over us or outside us. It’s a power that rests within us, and we can rest in it, be led by it, and be carried by it.
And what is this power? You’ve guessed it already. She answers, “It’s a power that’s the opposite of power. It’s love.”
Later she adds, “the love that’s hidden within each of us is the only power that can save all of us.”
You are a beloved child of God. You are created in love. And you are redeemed by-and-in the love that Jesus Christ demonstrated. A love so powerful that it defeated death and through it we have the power of resurrection. And that you-are-risen love fills every cell of your body because you are a vessel of the Holy Spirit. Which comforts you, advocates for you, and gives you the skills and talents you need to live well and fully. And you’ve been called into the beloved community of the church, where you are not alone, but where your gift is shared with my gift and everyone else here’s gifts, and together those gifts are multiplied to become part of God’s mission to heal humanity.
No one can take any of that from you.
So here is what you are capable of:
You can be patient, kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. You don’t insist on your own way; you aren’t irritable or resentful; you don’t rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoice in the truth. You can bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things. Because the love that empowers you never ends.