Text: 1 Corinthians 13; Jeremiah 1:4-10

I spent a considerable amount of my time this past week going over the reports distributed this morning, which we will officially receive at next Sunday’s Annual Meeting. The reports tell stories of what various individuals and groups within the congregation have done in the past year. Together they give a picture of what it means to be the church in this place and at this time—“being” expressed in “doing.” The reports do not tell the whole story—that would be impossible—but they do help us to understand who we are at this time through what we have done. They also point us towards what we may be becoming.

The contemporary religious scholar commentator Joan Chittister once wrote:

Goodness is a process of becoming, not of being. What we do over and over again is what we become in the end.

We could take this saying and substitute a lot of different words for “goodness.” Her point, of course, is that making a habit of something eventually makes it part of us. If we discipline ourselves to do things that may not necessarily come naturally we will find in time that they do be come part of our nature—they will come naturally.

When Paul wrote to the Corinthian Church, calling on them to grow up in Christ and behave as one, he was very likely telling them to do what went against the grain for most of them. This church was a mixed bag of people—poor and rich, old and young, “weak” and “strong,” male and female—who brought their old societal norms into the new fellowship, and apparently allowed them to dictate their behaviour in the church. As I have observed before, the whole letter is an extended call for unity. Even the answers to the particular questions put to Paul are clearly intended to pull people together, not to draw lines through the congregation.

Paul wants his new converts in Corinth to “become Church,” living daily into the gospel he had preached to them, with their individual and corporate lives helping to proclaim that same gospel to the world around them. There is no sense of having arrived at a goal in this letter, but always the call to move ahead, to mature in the faith, always becoming more truly one in Christ—becoming Church in the deepest sense.

That same call comes to us today, almost 2,000 years later, daily to become more truly Church, never believing we have arrived, but knowing that God is not finished with us yet. There is still work to do.

There will always be work to do, as we strive by the grace of God to become the church God has called us to be. We don’t always see clearly what that work is, understand its purpose. But that’s OK. Paul told his people that “now we see in a mirror, dimly,” a reminder that our understanding of God and God’s ways are always limited, and more than that—that we never fully understand the objects of our love. As Bruce Epperly has written (Christian Century, Jan. 26, 2010, p. 20),  Paul portrays

…the agnosticism of love…although we pretend to know all about those we love and serve, we in fact “know only in part.”

He goes on to say

This agnosticism is a gift, a good thing, for when we think we fully know others or assume to know what’s best for them, we are on the verge of objectifying or manipulating them.

Paul’s beautiful ode to love is well-known for its frequent use at weddings, but is really aimed at the church, and at what binds it together, helping it to become church. And that, of course, is love. Not the hearts and flowers love of Valentine’s Day, but the day-by-day commitment to each other that builds true community, whether in a marriage or in a church. What pulls us forward into the future is the sense that this present reality is only a partial fulfillment of what God intended—the best is always yet to come. As Paul said,

Now I know only in part; then I will know fully…

Hope for God’s future gives us the motivation to continue working to build up God’s people—always becoming church, but never perfected in this life. The future pulls us ever forward.

Just as don’t see the way ahead clearly, we can often feel ourselves unequal to the task before us. And that’s OK too. We’re in good company, with Jeremiah and almost every other prophet of the Old and New Testament who answered God’s call. Jeremiah said,

Truly I do not know how to speak,
for I am only a boy.

God wasn’t having any of that. Jeremiah’s sense of unworthiness and inability was no barrier to God. God gave the prophet words and the heart to speak them, even when the message he was to proclaim was more that he or many others could bear.

God is never finished with us, whether as a church or as individuals. The call still comes to be God’s people, doing God’s work, speaking God’s words in the world—and all in the power of the love that only God can give to us.

Without that love, that holy desire to live and to be for others, we are nothing.

With that love, we are on the road to becoming what God wishes for his people—his church, his body, his hands and feet and voice in this world.