“How’s Your Love Life?”

Text: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Over in Norway, a hospital was having a problem because too many people there were in love. Apparently every morning, as the employees arrived for work, there was this huge traffic jam in front of the hospital. What was going on was that people were driving their spouses to work and dropping them off in front of the hospital. But in many cases, before the spouse would get out of the car, they would first lean over and kiss their mate.

But apparently those kisses often weren’t just a quick peck on the cheek. Instead, many times they ended up being these long, passionate embraces that would go on for several minutes before the person would finally get out of the car and to in to work. And while those kisses were going on, traffic headed into the hospital kept getting more and more backed up. Finally, though, the hospital came up with a solution. Now they have two lanes that lead up to the hospital’s entrance – a kissing lane, and for those in a hurry – a non-kissing lane. The problems that love can cause!

What is love? That is a question that people have probably been asking about since the beginning of time. But one of the problems that we have in the English language is that we use that same word “love” to mean so many different things. For instance, we say that we love chocolate ice cream. When we see an elderly couple walking hand in hand along the beach, we comment on how great it is that they’re still in love like that. On TV shows, men and women jump into bed with other and we say that they’re making love. Or when we talk about how Mother Teresa devoted her life to caring for the poor and dying people of Calcutta, India, we say that she did that because of love. In each of those cases, we are using the same word “love,” but in each case we mean something different.

When the New Testament was written, they didn’t have quite the same problem. You see, in the Greek language, which is the language that the New Testament was originally written in, they had three main words for love. The first word, eros, referred to romantic kind of love. Eros is the root of our word “erotic.” The second word for love in Greek is philia, which is a brotherly or sisterly sort of love. For example, the name Philadelphia literally means “the city of brotherly love.” And then, third, in Greek they had the word agape, which referred to a pure kind of love, a self-giving and sacrificing kind of love. And it’s that love, that agape, self-giving, sacrificing kind of love that the apostle Paul is talking about here in this passage in 1 Corinthians. It’s that love, that agape, self-giving, sacrificing kind of love that Paul is trying to help us to see as the kind of love that God wants us to show forth in our lives.

The problem, though, is that for the most part we know that we ought to love other people. We know that in the Bible – like it says here in this passage that we heard today – that showing love to other people is something that God wants us to do. But the problem is that so often we think about love, but then we let opportunities to do love pass us by.

Some years ago they conducted a kind of experiment involving some of the students at Princeton Seminary in New Jersey. The students, who were studying to become ministers, met with the people running the experiment one at a time in a certain building on the campus. And each student was asked to prepare a brief, impromptu talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan – you know, the story Jesus told about the badly injured man who was left lying by the side of the road, and who two people then passed by without helping, and finally a lowly Samaritan stopped and cared for the fellow.

The seminary students were then told to go to another building on campus and give their talk. But what the researchers did was along the way to that other building, they had a person lying on the ground next to the sidewalk, acting as if they were injured and in need of help. The idea was to see how many of the students would stop and offer some kind of assistance. And what they found was that when they told students that they had plenty of time to make it over to the other building to give their talk, that they didn’t need to rush, most of those students, 63% of them, stopped and gave that person some kind of help. But when the students were told that they were running late and that they needed to hurry, only 10% of the students stopped to helped, even though some of the students had to quite literally step over the injured person to get to the place where they’d give their talk about the Good Samaritan.[1]

All of those students knew what their faith required of them. All of them certainly knew that they should have stopped and helped. But for different reasons they didn’t. They let that opportunity to do love pass them by.

So, what exactly does it mean for us to do love? What exactly does it mean for us to love other people? One time I heard someone[2] tell about an experience he had at an airport one day. He was in a hurry to get to the gate, but he was hungry, and he knew he wouldn’t be getting anything but a small bag of peanuts on the plane. So on his way to the gate, he stopped at a soft pretzel shop and said to the salesclerk, “I’d like one of your pretzel, but please don’t put any butter on it.” Well, when he said that, the clerk got a rather puzzled look on his face and walked back to talk to the guy who was making the pretzels. A minute or so later the clerk returned and announced, “I’m sorry, sir. But we don’t sell pretzels like that.”

So the customer said, “I don’t think you understand. All I want is that when the cook takes the pretzel out of the oven, instead of dipping it in the butter and handing it to me, I just want him to skip the butter and give it to me like it is.” Well, the clerk once again went back and spoke with the cook, but he returned and said, “I’m very sorry, sir. But we just don’t sell pretzels like that.”

So the customer tried one more time. He said, “Look! I’m not trying to get a cheaper price because the pretzel doesn’t have butter on it. In fact, look! I’m in a hurry. I’ll pay you double the normal price for a pretzel if you’ll just give me one pretzel that doesn’t have butter on it.” And so one last time the clerk went back and spoke with the cook.

This time the cook came out. He looked the customer in the eye and said, “Sir, I cannot conceive of eating a pretzel that doesn’t have butter on it. I would never eat a pretzel like that. And so I won’t sell one to you.”

Now, if you think about it, that cook was living by the Golden Rule. If you think about it, you’ll see that that cook was actually trying to love that customer by following the Golden Rule, which says that if you want to love other people, then “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” To that cook’s way of thinking, all pretzels have to have butter on them. To his way of thinking, if someone was going to do a pretzel unto him, it should have butter on it. And so, in return, if he was going to do a pretzel unto someone else, it had to be the same way.

Well, when it comes to love, if the Golden Rule doesn’t always work, what should we use as a guide to show us how to love other people? One answer is that instead of the Golden Rule, we should follow the Platinum Rule. The Platinum Rule says this: Do unto others as they would have you do unto them. Really, that’s the Burger King approach to loving people. Just like if you work at Burger King, you ask people what they want and how they want it, and special orders don’t upset you, and that’s what you give them. But from experience, we know that that’s not necessarily the best way to love people. Sometimes the things people ask for are things they don’t really need. Sometimes the things people ask for aren’t even things that are necessarily good for them.

So where does that leave us? Well, if the Golden Rule and the Platinum Rule don’t always work, then maybe we need to turn to the Titanium Rule. And the Titanium Rule is this: Do unto others as Jesus would have you do unto them.

And essentially it’s that kind of love, a Jesus kind of love, that Paul is talking about here in 1 Corinthians. In essence, Paul is saying that if you want to love the way that Jesus wants you to, then that love is going to be patient, that love is going to be kind. That love is not going to be envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. That kind of love, a Jesus kind of love, is not going to insist on its own way; it’s not going to be irritable or resentful. Instead, a Jesus kind of love is the kind of love that will never end.

So, be honest: How is your love life? Is loving other people something you believe in? Is loving other people something you think about? Or is loving other people something you do?