April 13, 2010 | Editor’s note: Faith & Leadership offers sermons that shed light on issues of Christian leadership. This sermon was preached Jan. 31, 2010, at North United Methodist Church in Indianapolis, Ind.

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1 Corinthians 13

It is one of the best-known passages of Scripture. You wouldn’t even have to open a Bible at any point in your life to have heard these words if you’ve ever attended a wedding. In fact, couples coming to be married often say to me as we’re planning the service, “Now we want to be sure and include that love chapter -- that crazy little thing called love that Paul talks about.” And I try to explain to them, “You know that wasn’t written for a wedding. That was written for a group of people who came together. They cared about each other, but pretty soon it was clear that some of them thought they had better ideas than some of the other people, and some of them began to have voices that got a little louder than some of the others, and pretty soon they were saying to one another, ‘Well, we’re all equal. It’s just that some of us are more equal than others.’”

And it’s at that point that the couple usually looks at me and says, “Yes! Yes, that’s exactly what we need read at our wedding.”

Oh, there’s some wonderful poetry in this chapter. Love is patient and kind. Love is not arrogant, or rude, or boastful. Without love, I’m a clanging cymbal. It’s wonderful imagery on how we have discovered in our own life that the things we say, if they are not said with love, what they can sound like. But there’s also a passage in this chapter that isn’t quite as beautiful, quite as poetic, and yet it is on these words that the beauty rests.

When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I understood like a child. But when I became a man, when I became a woman, I put away those childish ways. It’s almost as if Paul is saying that love is for grown-ups. But that can’t be right. That can’t be true, because we all know Jesus had a preference for the children. He always seemed to be saying that. We have a preference for the children. We remember how sweet and innocent and loving they are. We learn from their love as they wrap their arms around us. Why, we even publish books by children that remind us what it means to love unselfishly. And then we remember, or we talk to people who’ve had children, and it occurs to us that maybe they’re not always that way, because we recall that sometimes a child’s favorite word is “Mine!” They like it so much they like to say it repeatedly: “Mine! Mine! Mine!” We grown-ups are more sophisticated than that, of course. We have a vocabulary slightly different. We don’t come right out and say it that way.

Do you remember that wonderful musical comedy “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change”? It was a wonderful comedy that reminded us of the truth of our lives together, how often we fall in love with somebody because of their looks, their charm, their wit, their humor, their intelligence -- and then a few months pass along and we suddenly realize how much they would benefit from our wisdom about who they ought to become.

All too often this thing called love needs a little growing up. And the grown-up Christian recognizes that marriages and friendships and relationships and church communities bring together all kinds of different people with different gifts and different ideas. And, as wonderful as it is, sometimes that all just sort of drives us crazy. And we are reminded once again: Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not arrogant, resentful, rude.

When I was a child, I understood as a child ... But understanding is so difficult to understand, isn’t it? The advent of understanding, the starting posture of understanding, is listening. A grown-up love listens. It listens not just with the ears; it listens with the heart. It listens in a way that listens deeply, not only to what is being said, but also to what is left unsaid.

Lonni Collins Pratt is the co-author of a book some of you have been reading called “Radical Hospitality,” and she talks about the time that she and her husband lived across the road from a small log cabin. It was empty for much of the time, but then someone moved in. A man moved in to start to fix up the cabin, and, while Lonni was quite an introvert, her husband wasn’t, and was quick to go over and introduce himself and talk with the man who lived there. Lonni’s husband came back and said, “You really ought to get to know this guy. He’s fascinating. He’s fixing up this place. It’s going to be wonderful.”

A few weeks passed and then, in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep, Lonni heard a scream -- a scream of an adult that came from across the road. She knew it was coming from that cabin. She bolted straight up in her bed because it was the kind of scream that wakes you up in the middle of the night and makes you want to just hide in a corner. And she went to the window, and she listened until that scream began to fade. And she went back to bed, but she could hardly sleep. And the next night the same thing happened: a scream coming from the cabin.