Communal Love

1 Corinthians 13:1-13
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.


Communal Love

In the armed forces, as you may know, chaplains not only serve God, but serve as "morale officers" for the enlisted. It presumes that there is a thing called morale that is a general term for the feelings of a group. Chaplains presumably are to monitor these feelings and keep them high.

Our culture isn't very skilled with words about feelings and even less with feelings held by groups of people, but this is one example. When Jimmy Carter was president, he described a certain emotional tenor of the country as a "malaise."` When we attend football games, it's easy to see the spirit of supporters wax and wane given the success of the team. School spirit describes some feeling of enthusiasm that is expected of loyal students.
This morning we'll explore the idea of group emotions then consider how Paul might be getting at such and idea in his chapter on love, then we'll try to apply this to what it might mean.

Group Feeling

It's easy to determine the ideas of a group of people. They write them down in constitutions and creeds and policies. They teach their ideas to their children. They organize around ideas into political parties and religious denominations. They are often able to identify and articulate their ideas and how they differ from others. The ideas of these groups may even take on legal status as with the bylaws of a corporation.

The thoughts of the group obviously have influence on the individuals. "Group think" is a negative term coined in 1952 by William H. Whyte describing how the ideological culture of a group can shape the individual's perspective.

In an article in the New Yorker a few years ago, the editors quote Randall Collins who finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves: Wang Ch'ung, Bassui Tokusho, and Ibn Khaldun. I have ten dollars for anyone who knows about any two of those people. The editors write, "Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another's spouses. Freud may have been the founder of psychoanalysis, but it really began to take shape in 1902, when Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler would gather in Freud's waiting room on Wednesdays, to eat strudel and talk about the unconscious."

While it is obvious that we influence and share each other’s ideas, it is less clear how we share and influence each other’s feelings. We know that the attitudes and feelings of prejudice are learned from the culture and largely from the family setting, but generally, there is far less we know about the feelings of our social systems.

Intuitively, however, we know that a group can have a tangible emotional atmosphere. How many times have you walked into a room and felt tension, even when you had no reason to know of any. As a pack animal, we constantly send off hundreds of non-verbal messages that influence each other and result in a shared emotional experience.

Rational people may be uncomfortable with feelings in general or experiences that can’t be clearly reduced, so religious emotion may be discounted, especially in group experiences. I know a man very well who is the model of an intelligent, rational being, yet when he went to see the Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, he was so overcome by the complexity of the feelings in the room, he passed out and an ambulance had to be called to the movie theater.

Emotions, personal or communal, are not easy to understand or control, yet they are of course, what makes life worth living. Who would want to reduce the exalted feelings we have in the midst of a big hymn or a perfect silence? In fact, I would suggest to you that a part of the important experience of First Reformed is the particular feelings of worship in this place, the big organ sound, the fine choir, and the emotional flavor of the people around you.

There were no cathedrals for the early Christians, though. There was only the arching spirit that drove their community.

Communal Love

In Chapter 12 of First Corinthians, Paul talks at length about the differing and needed gifts individuals bring to the body of Christ. But in the 13th chapter, he is well on his way to the transition of talking about the church as a whole. We usually hear this chapter in terms of our individual experience of emotion. We even twist it into use at weddings when the agape love here described is far from the romantic love celebrated.

American culture has taught us to think of all ideas and feelings in the individual contexts, but think for a moment about what Paul is after for the early church. He is all about the stability of the community, all about being the corporate body of Christ. The agape love he describes is not some feeling we have by ourselves in a corner, but the feeling we encourage in the community as an atmosphere.

Communal love is not the feelings we have for the community, or even for each other. It is the general emotional disposition that we share that becomes an infectious force in itself.
This may sound a little mystical, and perhaps it is. When we understand the feelings that we share that go beyond the sum of our emotional parts, perhaps we are approaching the realm of spirit. It may be that some of our spiritual language is a way of talking about the subtleties of personal and communal emotions.

But so what? How does this idea play out in our lives?

Loving as a Group

What would it mean to foster and develop feelings in our families and churches, specifically love?
Patience, for instance, as a component of love, is not only something practiced by individuals, but whole communities can conspire to be patient. One of the marks of a spiritual community is the way it treats unusual or annoying people. When we set a standard together of patience with folks who need love in a patient way, we form a tangible expectation that children learn and that others can sense.

Kindness is more than acts of graciousness, it is a felt attitude of benevolence that we can decide will happen in our midst.

Arrogance, rudeness, and stubbornness are qualities that we can challenge with the gentleness of love and firmly place outside the culture we establish as the body of Christ. We conspire, you and I, to create an emotional environment that is just as important as any doctrine, any confession, any policy. Policies will become charming history and creeds will look archaic rather quickly. As for knowledge, it will become obsolete. The attitudes of caring will continue to ripple out to the generations. Love never ends.

People were not attracted to the religion of Jesus because of the rigorous theology. In the early days, there simply wasn’t any. People understood and understand the emotional intelligence of humility and love. In his warmer moments Paul understands this. He understands that for all he talks about faith, something is more important. For all he dwells on hope, something is more important.

As a people of God, we will approach the divine to the extent that we can develop the culture of love. John wrote that God is love, and so by algebraic extension, God is patient, God is kind, God is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. God never ends.

May this God, this love be ours today.