Noisy Gongs and Clanging Cymbals: Look For The Love

I have a confession that I realize will probably change the way that most of you think about me...

I am a Halloween person. Some people are Christmas people, and some are Easter people, and some really enthusiastic folks are St. Paddy’s Day people, but I am a Halloween person. When the stores start putting out all of the orange and black things when it’s 100 degrees in July, most people groan and say, “too early.” However, the stores do that for people like me – the people who start planning weeks and weeks in advance for their family costumes.

The yard decorations went up at my house on September 22nd, which is appropriate as it’s the first day of fall. This year, along with our 9 front yard inflatables, orange and purple lights and ghosts and bones hanging from the fence, we added the infamous 12-foot skeleton with animatronic eyes from Home Depot. My kids even named him - “Sonny John Skelly.” I love this holiday, mostly because of the child-like enthusiasm that surrounds everything, the promise of cooler temps and colorful leaves on the way, and the oodles and oodles of chocolate candy that I consume that doesn’t really count because it’s only “fun sized!”

(Now, here is the fine and delicate balance with me being a Halloween person. I like the spooky things, but I don’t like being scared. There’s a distinction there. Giant skeleton with moving eyes in the yard, yes. Movie about a house inhabited by actual ghosts, no. Cobwebs and plastic spiders, yes. Haunted houses where actual people with chainsaws jump out at me, hard pass.)

As much as I don’t like being scared, right now there is something that is happening that I find absolutely terrifying. Every few years, as the Halloween season approaches, and the days get shorter and the nights get a chill in the air, something scary begins to happen, like clockwork. Something that I can’t control and that is the most persistent, reappearing fright. This fall, I am once again being haunted, terrorized by…..political ads. They are haunting me everywhere I look. If I dare to turn on the television to check the score of the ballgame, there they are. They pop out of my mailbox. They are calling me on my phone from numbers in Wyoming, Florida and Vermont. What I find truly frightening is that I can’t escape the noise of election season, and it is far scarier than the flaming eyes of the giant, green inflatable over my front doorway.

Noise. That’s the word that keeps coming to mind when I think about the current election cycle, and really, a word that describes the entire political climate in this country - so much noise, finger pointing, quotable quotes (some of them ridiculous), and talking points that have become ingrained in the brains of those talking the loudest. And with everyone so busy making noise, very few are listening. No one is taking the time to stop making noise and listen to what the others are saying, so it just gets louder. Noise, noise and more noise. Far more than any creepy, dead thing that appears during this time of year, I am most terrified by the constant, inescapable noise that pervades American life right now.

Ok, so I’ve talked about Halloween, terrifying political ads, and we just read 1 Corinthians 13, which most folks associate with weddings. So, like where is this all going, right?

Let me tell about about my relationship arc with this text. I, like many of you I presume, always associate this text with weddings. It was the scripture read at my parents wedding. Of the 30 or so weddings I have officiated, this text has probably been read at over half of them. It’s a popular selection for wedding ceremonies. When I was a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School, my New Testament professor, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, gave a rather mocking commentary on Christians using 1 Corinthians 13 at weddings. The gist of her critique was: “That’s the wrong kind of love.” This text is talking about Agape (communal love, love of neighbor love) not Eros (romantic, sexy, fireworks love). She said if you want to read scripture about love at a wedding, read Song of Songs or something that’s actually talking about passionate, romantic love.

So, in the early years of my ministry, every time someone asked for 1 Corinthians 13 at a wedding I was officiating, I kind of chuckled under my breath, remembering Dr. Levine’s words about the “wrong kind of love.” But then something happened that changed forever, how I understand this text and particularly its use in marriage ceremonies. I got married – and stayed married for a few months beyond the honeymoon. And you know what I learned? 1 Corinthians 13 is talking about the exact kind of love that folks need to be talking about at weddings! Sure, on the wedding day, it’s passion and fireworks and grand gestures of romance, but once the honeymoon is over and marriage settles into normal life with normal routines, it’s time for some Agape love to take hold. Eros may be the kind of love that gets two people to the altar, but Agape love is probably the kind of love that will take people from a wedding to a marriage that lasts for a long time. That selfless, concern for other’s wellbeing-kind of love is the real stuff that makes marriage work, and keeps it working.

In marriage and in life, Agape love is the pinnacle. It’s why Paul ends this chapter with the words, “the greatest of these is love,” and he is talking specifically about Agape love. Eros, romantic love, is beautiful, but it’s a narrow kind of love – often me-centered and shared between a very small number of people, usually one other person. Philia, the third kind of love, is the love that is shared more broadly, between family members and friends, or even within a church or larger organization. But Agape is the pinnacle of love. It is the Love that emulates the love of Christ. It’s the hardest to live into. It’s self-less, and self-sacrificial. It’s a love that and gives abundantly to complete strangers, or even to enemies. It’s a love that moves us outside of ourselves, sometimes in very uncomfortable ways, and without expecting anything in return.

So, I’ve been wondering how to make sense in this season of terrifying, excessive noise – about politics and all matter of things that keep finding me at every turn – this noise that I can’t seem to escape. When there’s so much noise in this world, how do I discern what is good and what is true? How do I hear the call of God when I so rarely feel that I can escape the incessant noise? With all these messages coming at us, how do we know what is right? How do we know which ideas are representative of the ways of Christ?

Thanks to Paul, and the “wedding” scripture of 1 Corinthians 13, we have an answer. Look for the love. Listen for the love. Follow the love.

And what does that look like? Paul shares some help for us there as well. 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; it keeps no record of wrongs;  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.

With all of the noise we are hearing, with the many messages we are receiving, often delivered to us with a touch of fear to add to their effect, start by looking for the Agape love. Use it as a litmus test to guide us toward knowing what is true, and how we should respond to the noise. Because as Paul reminds us, if it’s not anchored in Agape Love, it’s just a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. Start by looking and listening for the love - the patient, kind, self-sacrificial, sometimes uncomfortable but always true, Agape Love. And all of God’s people who could said, “Amen.”