Sermon

Jillian Tijerina
Youth Led Worship

February 11, 2007

I spent fourteen hours yesterday at a debate tournament. My mission did not involve lengthy locution behind a shiny mahogany podium and it did not include angry rebuttals or majestically-spun attacks of my opponent’s logic. My event was about choosing.

In Domestic Extemporaneous Speaking, a contestant approaches a judges’ table and draws three current affairs topics, standing nervously for an eternity of nanoseconds before rejecting two based on their difficulty and settling with one. With our chosen topic and a plastic bin full of newspaper articles, we are given half an hour to write and memorize a seven-minute speech.

Following one of my rounds yesterday, I clacked through the hallways of an unfamiliar high school in precariously tall high heels and pondered my choices during the round. I had drawn three perfectly acceptable topics and could have arguably prepared a decent speech for any of the three, yet I had been inexplicably drawn to one for its simplicity and had thus disregarded the other two without a second glance.

While nervously wandering through the hallways awaiting the results of my round, I came to the ostensibly impractical conclusion that the process of an extemp draw mirrors subconscious actions in our religious lives.

You are standing at the judges’ table during the draw of your life, faced with love, faith, and actions. It is easy to unknowingly discard faith, for it requires an uncanny ability to replace the concrete security of knowledge with an elusive, albeit powerful, uncertainty. It is easy to unintentionally discard actions, for the sheer effort and time required is oftentimes seemingly too much to handle.

But we often discard love without even knowing that we are doing so.

We abandon love because it is, somehow, simultaneously the most simple and the most complex. We sometimes underestimate the capabilities of love and sometimes overestimate its difficulty.

1 Corinthians 13. You have heard this scripture before. You nearly have it memorized from hearing it at weddings, from its comforting predictability and optimistic characterization of love. You love your husband, your wife, your children, your parents, your neighbors, your friends, your dog. Of course you do. This passage is almost laughably obvious, right?

But it’s not. We compensate for our insecurities in love with our strong faith or our honorable actions. We make our religious lives intellectual and analytical, listening intently in church during Sunday and concocting our prayers with precision and with meaning but often without emotion. We can fathom mysteries and knowledge and our faith can move mountains, but we are quintessentially blind-sided by the magnitude of this love.

Love is not human. We are. This is how love compensates for our shortcomings.

Love is patient and kind when we are impatient and rude. Love does not envy or boast when we attempt to suppress our jealousy or stop ourselves from bragging. Love is not rude or self-seeking when we are. Love is not easily angered when our tempers flare; love keeps no record of wrongs as we silently record grievances in our imperfect minds. Love does not delight in evil and rejoices with the truth when we hide from it. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails when we do.

I think sometimes that love is made out to be like the queen, imposing in her perfection and frustrating in the fact that we can never achieve her status. Love may be the queen, but love is also a messy toddler and a rambunctious teenager and a noble elderly man.

Love isn’t on a carpool schedule, appropriate every other Tuesday and Thursday. Love isn’t Children’s Tylenol, watered-down and sugar-coated for convenience. Love isn’t red-roses, reassuring and pretty in their inevitability Love doesn’t disappear during fights and doesn’t flee when you find yourself strongly disliking something about the people you love.

Love is tiger-lilies, chocolate milkshakes, the blazing coral sundown lightshow at sunset. Love is driving over the 360 bridge with the windows down and watching the sun sparkle on the lake. Love is wanting to scream like a five-year-old because God can make you happy. Love is laughing during a prayer. Love is crying during a prayer. Love is every ridiculous and passionate emotion that we are taught throughout our adult lives to ignore but that constitutes everything we need.

We need to love. We need to always hope and always persevere, we need to be silly and have no qualms. We need to accept the fact that our love is often deficient, but to go ahead and try anyway. We need to stop making our attempts at love something purely automatic and actually strive for it. We need to put fire back in our love and therefore ignite our faith. We need to be delighted by love. We need to view love as a condition that is utterly inexpressible…the height of joy, the pinnacle of peace, the peak of acceptance, the zenith of truth, the apex of faith. It is what our Father intends us to do and what Paul encouraged us to do.

I want you to love. I want you to love blustery days and your children’s cartoons. I want you to love yourself, even though you know that you cannot love flawlessly. I want you to love God for being able to love flawlessly. I want you to love arguments, I want you to love your own tears and uncontrollable laughter, I want you to love disappointment and frustration because you know that your love never fails. And I want you to know that if it does, you have an endless resource of it above you. Most of all, though, I want you to love.

Please pray with me.

God, we cannot thank you enough for this fantastically spectacular thing you call love. We have tried to move mountains with our faith and we have tried to clang our cymbals of reasoning and logic. We have loved one another as much as we think possible, but now, we are going to love one another more than is possible. We are going to love, God. We are going to love you, we are going to love ourselves, we are going to love. Thank you for showing us how. Amen.