1
12
1
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/86da07c2cbbd262b72e5630074f8d960.mp3
83edbe89920fb9b4f2dd0ac414261848
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/257086eb072ade8db779523badb4f859.pdf
3fae04cfe61e98eb3180d9c688476948
PDF Text
Text
The Greatest of These is…
Mothers’ Day, The Festival of the Christian Home
I Corinthians 13; Luke 24:13-16, 28-35
Richard A. Rhem
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
May 11, 2003
Transcription of the spoken sermon
If you know anything about the Bible at all, you probably know at least the 23rd
Psalm and I Corinthians 13, and I Corinthians 13, Paul's hymn of love, would
seem to be an appropriate passage on which to preach on Mothers' Day. This is
Mothers' Day and in this community we honor our mothers and also on this
particular Sunday focus on the family and its importance for not only our
individual lives, our corporate lives, but far beyond that for, what is more
fundamental than the family, that basic social unit where we experience our
formation, where we are shaped for good or for ill for the rest of our days? So, on
this Mothers' Day once again, I invite you to think with me about the family and
the interpersonal relationships and those bonds of love and grace that bind us
together in the family.
I entitled the sermon "The Greatest of These Is..." You probably thought I just got
tired of writing. And you finished the title, I am sure. Obviously, the title is "The
Greatest of These Is Love." But, not really, because I wanted to shake you out of
your assumptions and your presumptions, to grab you by the nape of the neck,
wake you out of your lethargy and suggest to you that St. Paul might not have
been right. Maybe the greatest of these is something other than love. I have an
idea, but I'll make you wait for it. It is not that I really want to argue with Paul
because who can argue with love? I admit I am going to use Paul this morning not
exactly as Paul was meaning to communicate in this writing, and yet I don't think
I am going to use what he had to say.
To be honest with Paul, he was dealing with a concrete congregation and a
concrete problem that was going on at that time. This letter to the church at
Corinth dealt with some things that were happening and this hymn of love is
Paul's beautiful suggestion and model that is held up to a congregation that had a
lot of spiritual gifts and a lot of things going on, but was filled with tension and
strife because all of those spiritual gifts were being exercised with selfaggrandizement and with pride, and Paul had to say to the Corinthian
congregation, "Look, the church is like the body of Christ and the body has a lot
of different parts, a lot of different members, and all parts are necessary for the
© Grand Valley State University
�The Greatest of These Is…
Richard A. Rhem
Page 2
right functioning of the whole, so an eye cannot look down on a thumb or the ear
on the big toe. We need every part in order that the whole may be furnished, and
there is no place for superiority, there is no place for the denigration of someone
else in the body of Christ."
If you go to the last verse in the 12th chapter, he says, "But, let me show you a
better way." And then if you go to the first verse of the 14th chapter, he says,
"Pursue love." Then he goes on and talks again about the gifts. So, chapter 13 is
really in the midst of that discussion sandwiched between his appeal to the
congregation to exercise their respective gifts with humility and grace and his
conclusion at the end of that discussion that all things might be done decently
and in order in the body of Christ. In the meantime, in the midst of it, we have
this beautiful hymn of love, and even reading it this morning once again, really to
read it is enough. Just to read it and to hear it, one would hardly need a sermon,
but, of course, you will get one anyway.
I Corinthians 13, the hymn of love which concludes with Paul's claim, "The
greatest of these is love. My sermon, "The Greatest of These Is ..." Is there
anything that might be put in place of love in that title on this Mothers' Day as we
think about families in the context of our present world? Is there any other virtue
that we might substitute for love? Well, I would say only if we are Englishspeaking people who have to use love for the word that Paul used. Now, again if
you have hung around preachers very long or gone to church very often, you
know that at some point or other, every six or eight weeks, a preacher has to
remind you that he or she has studied the original language and give you a little
Greek lesson.
But, this Greek lesson is really important this morning because the English word
love is translated by three different words in the New Testament and actually the
Greek language has four words for love, the act of making love or sexual love is
epithemia, but that is not one I want to deal with. More commonly you know of
the word filia, which is the love of friendship, a love that has mutuality about it.
The city of Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love, literally from the Greek
language. And then there is the Greek word eros and the Greek word eros may
remind you in English of erotic, but that is too bad. Eros in the Greek meaning
has gotten a bad rap because we so quickly identity it with the word erotic and
really the erotic dimension is a declension of eros in its original meaning. Eros in
the Greek language meant that being drawn, that attraction to that which is
attractive, that love of that which is lovely, that which draws me, that which lures
me on, and it is a wonderful thing. It is that which marks our humanity. We are
drawn to that which is true and which is good and which is beautiful, and that is
all very positive. Eros in the Greek sense is that quest for fulfillment, that quest
for completion. It is that quest for union and communion. So, it has a very
positive meaning in the Greek language. We translate it love, but we really could
better translate it that desire for union and fulfillment, the yearning for God is an
erotic quest, understood correctly in the Greek language. The desire for oneness
© Grand Valley State University
�The Greatest of These Is…
Richard A. Rhem
Page 3
with all of reality has at its base that word eros in the Greek language, so it is a
very positive conception. The word sex in the Latin is secare, and that means to
cut or to divide, and in ancient wisdom, those who thought deeply about these
things said the human being is cut and is divided and there is within, intrinsic,
endemic, indeed human, that longing for reunion, for communion, and so that is
in the Greek language the idea of eros.
But, the word that Paul uses in I Corinthians 13 is agape, and agape is love that
accords love and value to the other. It is the recognition of the dignity and value
of the other.
When I was learning my Greek and studying theology, I had a misconception of
agape. Now, it is probably the most common of the Greek words. To get that one
wrong was to be wrong right at the center of things, and of course, I was. I
understood agape initially as the love of a lover for that which is unlovely. It is a
love that flows out of the lover unmotivated, unelicited, and of course, that is the
love of God. It is the love of God for dirty rotters like us. While we were yet
sinners, God loved us. We have that written so deeply within us, that the love of
God for us is so amazing because we are nothing.
I was saying to Bob that, for some reason in the shower this morning, I was
singing "Jesus Loves Me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." And then I went
on to that verse, "Jesus loves me, Heaven's gates will open wide, he will wipe
away my sin and let his little child go in." And I thought, "Dear God, from a child
I'm warped." A child, a little sinner that has to sing about Jesus opening the gates
wide for this little child who is a sinner. What an awful thing we have done to
children. I am surprised I've made it this long. My conception of agape was the
love of God for that which is totally unlovely, worthless. That is the amazing grace
of God and I realize what I was doing, and I only reflected what the church has
done forever and that is to exalt the love of God at the expense of God's creature.
We were at the Jewish Temple one Friday night for a Sabbath service, and Krister
Stendahl, that great New Testament scholar who preached here that same
weekend, was talking about agape in a sense in which I had never understood
agape. It was agape which sees, recognizes and acknowledges value in another,
and I raised my hand in the discussion and said, "Krister, that's not how I
understand agape. Agape loves what is worthless. That's the way I have been
taught."
He said, "You have been taught wrong." Well, who was I to argue with Krister
Stendahl? To be sure, I was taught wrong. The love of God that flows out of God
is not a love that embraces that which is unlovely, worthless. The love of God
dignifies us, recognizes the value, calls us to be all that we can be so that agape is
a love, to be sure, different than eros. I see you, I am so attracted to you, there is
something lovely and beautiful about you, or maybe it is a sunset or a starry sky,
or maybe it's a pizza or a martini, but that which is really wonderful I am drawn
to. That is eros.
© Grand Valley State University
�The Greatest of These Is…
Richard A. Rhem
Page 4
But, agape is serious; that is the love that recognizes value and values by the
expression of love. Eros has a kind of mutuality about it, a mutual attractiveness.
With agape, the lover dignifies the other because the lover sees in the other that
which is of worth and of value. And so, the greatest of these is...
If you go with the Greek, I'll grant you the greatest of these is agape. But, the
English language being so unable to convey that, how about if we said the
greatest of these is respect? What if perhaps our highest calling in our
interpersonal relationships and our human family relationships and in our global
relationships, what if the highest value or virtue were respect in the sense of that
loving, positive regard for the other that sees in the other that which is of worth
and value? For, what is the human but the embodiment of the divine? What is
incarnation? What do we say at Christmas - the word became flesh, the word
became human, the divine intention was realized in the human. And, of course,
as I have said over and over again, we isolate that and say it was a Jesus period,
put Jesus over there and all the rest of us over here, but as a matter of fact, Jesus
was the paradigm, was the model.
What was recognized in Jesus is what is true and that is that the human is the
embodiment of that mystery of being, that infinite who comes to expression, that
becomes concretized in the cosmic drama and consciously in the human being,
and therefore, when I look at you, I should see in you the sacred and the divine,
and it will totally determine the manner in which I relate to you. The greatest of
these is agape. The greatest of these is respect. The greatest of these is to be able
to see in the other the image of God, and I wonder if that is not what is most
important in our families and in our world - to be able to recognize the sacred in
the other?
When Charles Kimball was here a couple of weeks ago, on Saturday morning in
his lecture, he was relating an incident that had happened to him shortly before.
On the day when the bombs began to fall in Baghdad, he took his car for servicing
at a dealership and he was sitting there waiting and some of the employees came
into the showroom and they were sort of bumping each other and congratulating
each other and saying, "I guess old Saddam knows who was boss now," and so
forth, in a kind of male, macho way, and Charles began to speak and then he was
quiet and waited for a few minutes. And then he said to them, "Would you feel
that way if you were a parent crouching in an apartment huddled with your
children, worrying about whether or not a bomb might fall?" And when he told us
that, and this is why I am telling you now, he choked up and when a speaker
chokes up, ten seconds is like an eternity. He felt it so deeply, and I think in a
moment we all did when we recognized that agape, that kind of love disallows the
demonizing of the enemy, the dehumanizing of the other.
As I was studying for this day, I looked at what Jesus said in Matthew 5:44 - Love
your enemies. Agape your enemies. I thought to myself, "Love your enemies!
That's ridiculous. If love is like we have love in English where love covers
© Grand Valley State University
�The Greatest of These Is…
Richard A. Rhem
Page 5
everything like loving pizza and loving my friends and loving my family and
loving God, if that is what loving my enemies is, forget it! I don't love my enemy
that way. I don't feel any kind of emotional attachment, any kind of affection.
What do you mean, Jesus? What kind of an impossible ethic is that? I might as
well just scrap it."
But, Jesus said, Agape, love your enemies. Could we understand it better if we
had a better English word, if we could say have respect for your enemies?
Recognize the sacred and the divine in your enemy? That little paragraph in the
Sermon on the Mount ends with Jesus saying, "Be ye therefore perfect as your
father in heaven is perfect." (King James Version) But, what is perfect in Greek?
It is telios. What is telios?
Telios is mature or complete. Be a mature human being. Respect your enemy. We
are told that when Gandhi was assassinated, he bowed to his assassin
acknowledging the divinity in his enemy. Of course, Gandhi had his rich Hindu
tradition, but he hung around a bit with Jesus, as well, who on the cross said,
"Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing. But they are still
human. They still bear your image. They still call forth from me respect. I'm not
ready to hang out with them, hug them, but to respect them."
It seems to me that this is maybe the greatest of these. I'll go with love if it is
agape, but I don't think you're going to go around the rest of your life
remembering the Greek word. So, how about if we just say the greatest of these is
respect? How far would respect go? Wouldn't it go a long way? And in our world
today which is a global society, that's not just pulpit talk. You want to talk about
SARS? You want to talk about the interconnection of world economy?
We are bound up in the bundle of life. It is a global society. We have moved out of
the swamps and out of the mud; we have moved through all those stages of
development; we have moved finally to human consciousness, human awareness.
We have moved into clans and tribes, and tribalism could have been brutal and
fierce, but it wasn't too bad because it was so localized and who could do anything
anyway? And then, of course, the tribes became nations and nationalism became
the great sin. Nations could get more serious. They could create a lot of havoc, a
lot of devastation, a lot of death.
But, today it is a global society and we are one, whether we like it or not.
Therefore, it would seem high time that we become mature as God is mature, and
that we acknowledge that being still so held back by our survival instincts and
jungle instincts, yet in this old world of ours today there will be those moments
when that which is evil and wrong is so obvious that it needs to be struck down.
What we need to see even more fundamentally is that war is a primitive solution
and with the technology we have today, the potential we have today, we can end
the whole story, unless we become mature as God is mature, and learn to love our
enemy, not like him or her, not feel any affection, no emotional attachment,
disgust, recognizing, calling a spade a spade, but knowing that this whole human
© Grand Valley State University
�The Greatest of These Is…
Richard A. Rhem
Page 6
story is too precious to let us go off with our swaggering macho ways, with our
triumphalism, with our nationalisms. Maybe into the future at some point we will
mature enough and we will find the solution which would probably be to elect a
Mother President.
© Grand Valley State University
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Richard A. Rhem Collection
Description
An account of the resource
Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rhem, Richard A.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Kaufman Interfaith Institute
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
KII-01
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1981-2014
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/mp3
text/pdf
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Event
Mothers' Day, Eastertide IV
Scripture Text
I Corinthians 13
Location
The location of the interview
Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
KII-01_RA-0-20030511
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2003-05-11
Title
A name given to the resource
And the Greatest of These is...
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard A. Rhem
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Sermons
Relation
A related resource
Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/mp3
application/pdf
Description
An account of the resource
A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on May 11, 2003 entitled "And the Greatest of These is...", on the occasion of Mothers' Day, Eastertide IV, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: I Corinthians 13.
Love as seeing the sacred in others
Mothers' Day