Vision of Hope Weblog

VISION OF HOPE UMC–”Can You Sit in Section 404, Seat HH?” from Vision of Hope UMC on Vimeo.

Click on the above link.

VISION OF HOPE UMC–”God’s Shepherd in the Home” from Vision of Hope UMC on Vimeo.

Click on link above….

VISION OF HOPE UMC–”When Life Rocks Your Boat” from Vision of Hope UMC on Vimeo.

Click on the above link to view the video!!!!!

VISION OF HOPE UMC–”Are you a Hoop Trooper?” from Vision of Hope UMC on Vimeo.

Click on the above link to view the video!!!!

VISION OF HOPE UMC–”Jesus Tasers the Terminator” from Vision of Hope UMC on Vimeo.

Click on the above link to view the video!!!!!

VISION OF HOPE UMC–”Doubt Quest!” from Vision of Hope UMC on Vimeo.

Click on the above link to go to the video!!!!!

VISION OF HOPE UMC–”Famous First Words” from Vision of Hope UMC on Vimeo.

Click on the above link to go to the video!!!!!

VISION OF HOPE UMC–CrossWords–Trust from Vision of Hope UMC on Vimeo.

VISION OF HOPE UMC–CrossWords–Perserverance from Vision of Hope UMC on Vimeo.

MORE THAN A FEELING
I Corinthians 13
February 14, 2010
CLICK HERE!

INTRODUCTION
We all have certain Valentine’s Days we remember, and probably some we wish we could forget.
My most memorable Valentine’s Day did not occur in the company of my wife. It happened in the 3rd grade. I had this unrequited crush on cute little Tammy. And there was a loud-mouthed, scrawny girl with blaze orange hair named Anita who had a crush on me. We’re talking about serious love triangle here…
Well, near the end of the school day, right when I was getting ready to make my move on Tammy, giving her a box of those sugary conversation hearts, our teacher, Mrs. Whitten, announced to the class that she wanted to read the sweetest Valentine she had ever seen. It was a Valentine she had intercepted from Anita to me.
And so, with the entire class listening in wide-eyed captivation, she proceeded with the poem Anita had composed:
My dearest David, my sweetheart, when we get married and live in a truck, we’ll order our baby from Sears and Roebuck. All my love, Anita
Now can you imagine having to live that down in front of all your buddies, not to mention Tammy?!
Ah, Valentine’s Day–that day of wallowing in the syrupy, sanguine emotion of love!
Yet, with all due respect to the band Boston, I would submit to you that love is more than a feeling….much, much more. On this Valentine’s Day of 2010, with the help of the Apostle Paul, you are going to learn everything you ever wanted to know about love, and then some….

I. LOVE IS THE ULTIMATE VIRTUE vss. 1-3
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
The occasion for Paul’s letter to the Corinthians involves a huge schism in the church over spiritual gifts. Judgmentalism is rampant, with members treating each other with contempt over who has the most ecstatic and sensational of gifts. Kinda like the Pentecostal preacher I once knew who bragged over drinking poison and living to tell about it. Big whoop…
Well, Paul is never one to mince words. He looks upon all this childish silliness and tells the Corinthians that love is the greatest of all spiritual gifts…yes, love…and it is a gift made available to everyone by God. There’s no pecking order. All Christians are endowed with the capacity to love.
Now, the Greek language from which our New Testament is translated contains four words for love:
• There is eros – a shallow love based on sensuality, from which we derive the word erotic.
• There is philia – which is kin to bonds of friendship.
• There is storge – the strong caring that exists between a parent and child.
• Then, there is agape – love that selflessly sacrifices on behalf of another…that seeks not to be a sensation but a servant. It is love not based on hormones of the heart but rather on sacrifice of the will.
Such love asks not What’s in it for me but rather What’s best for you?
It is the deepest form of love we can have for others in relationships–be it marriage, family, church, work, school or community.
Agape love–there’s nothing touchy-feely, warm and fuzzy about it. It’s tough love. I witnessed it the other day in my rounds as a volunteer chaplain at Rockingham Memorial Hospital…
I walked into the room of an elderly patient. She was throwing up violently from the anesthesia she had received earlier for her surgery. She had no family. But she did have a neighbor who was standing at her bedside, holding the pan for her to puke in. The odor was horrendous. The front of the neighbor’s sweater was soiled. But this neighbor did not turn away. She remained at her elderly friend’s side, holding the pan, and gently wiping the lady’s forehead with a cool washcloth.
Love. Agape love. Love of the will. Love that is more than a feeling. Love that is the ultimate virtue.
Let’s talk about it more….
II. LOVE IS THE ULTIMATE VERB vss. 4-8a
It is not a passive noun; it’s a very, very active verb. It is always in motion, always doing, always reaching, always lifting, always serving others.
“I before e except after c.”
Remember chanting that little ditty back in elementary school? It was one of those odd rules of English grammar we were taught. It worked to help us spell ie words such as friend, thief and yield and ei words such as ceiling, receive and deceit.
But you may also remember that you soon had to learn several exceptions to that rule- for example, neither and weird. And there were lots of exceptions.
Thankfully we have spellcheck on our computers today to correct us.
In spelling love, Paul gives us a clear, hard and fast rule with no exceptions: U always comes before I. Plain and simple.
But just in case we are dense, Paul breaks it down into 16 easy-to-grasp illustrations that help us in our daily actions and attitudes:
Love is patient.
Love is kind.
Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way.
Love is not irritable or resentful.
Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.
Now, accepting Christ brings instant forgiveness of sin and immediate righteousness before God. But it also signs us up for a lifelong course in character-formation. We must learn to love others as Christ has loved us, and the rule for spelling this sacrificial love is simply U before I. If I put you and your needs before mine in all situations, I will never go wrong. I will live as a true Christian. (I told you love is hard–it’s definitely more than a feeling!)
And there’s one more point to make….

III. LOVE IS THE ULTIMATE VANTAGE POINT vss. 8b-13
But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.9For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Bill and Hilda’s kitchen window looked out upon their neighbor’s back yard. Their neighbors were a young couple, Mark and Maggie, with three small kids. The young couple was very environmentally-conscious. One day they put up a clothesline in their back yard, and began hanging their wash out instead of using the energy-consuming electric dryer.
Well, this amused and perturbed Hilda to no end. The first day she saw the clothes of her young neighbors hanging on the line, she smugly told Bill, “Look at those shirts–they’re dingier than dirt!”
The next day Maggie hung out some sheets. “Will you look at that!” Hilda told Bill, “I’ve never seen shirts as grimy as that– I need to go over and teach that poor girl how to use bleach!”
A couple of days later, Maggie hung out some more linens on the line. As Hilda peered out busy-bodily out her kitchen window, she was quite surprised. “Bill, I wonder what happened? Maggie’s wash is clean and bright as snow!”
“I’ll tell you what happened, dear,” Bill replied, “I went outside before you got up this morning and took the Windex to our kitchen window!”
Are you the type of person who is always noticing the dirty clothes on someone else’s clothesline? Do you always make it a point to see the worst, the negative, the bad in everyone and everything?
Perhaps your window on life needs cleaning. Perhaps you need to pray with the psalmist David, “Create in me a clean heart, O Lord, and renew a right spirit within me.”
Perhaps you need to ask Christ to enable you to see the world around you from the vantage point of love.

The late renowned pastor of Riverside Church in New York, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, once stated, “There are people and things in this world, and people are to be loved and things are to be used. And it is increasingly important that we love people and use things, for there is so much in our gadget-minded, consumer-oriented society that is encouraging us to love things and use people.” —William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Westminster, 2005), 35.
These words were spoken over a decade ago, yet they are even more contemporary today. Our “things”, our gadgets, our devices, have served to make us oblivious to one another. How can we love people when we do not even notice their presence around us?
We’ve got our earbuds in and cranked, our Blackberries texting and we just don’t relate to folks face-to-face anymore except to complain when they’ve failed to pour enough steamed milk in our latte.
Perhaps we need to reboot ourselves and begin looking at the world through the vantage point of love–love that perceives and gets to know and gets involved in the lives of others.
Do you take the Bible literally? Ray Waddle writes, “There are many folks who declare the entire Bible to be literally true, and they mean it. For others, literally is one of those litmus test words–a gotcha term in religious debate when one side tries to outdo the other for first place and top ranking in the Bible-believer playoffs.
“Usually literalism focuses on the 6-day creation story in Genesis or Jonah in the belly of the fish or on the miracles of Jesus. Such debates never get around to this famous passage in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. But what if everyone indeed took this passage literally; that is, took it to heart, as if the words had the unflinching, divine quality of authority, which they do?”
“What would the world look like then?”
The Upper Room Disciplines, 2010, p. 41.
Indeed, what would change in your life if you made it a point to put these words of Paul into practice this week? What would happen in your relationships with family members, friends, co-workers, fellow students, strangers if you began to engage them with sacrificial, selfless love? What would happen if you took this portion of the Bible literally and did your utmost to live it?
At the end of the day, such love is the true gauge of maturity. A person who is truly grown-up is one who has learned to quit navel-gazing and begin focusing upon others with compassion and caring. We truly are able to catch a glimpse of Jesus, however dimly, in the faces of persons we respond to out of love…and one day we will see Him face-to-face, and hear His words of affirmation, “Well done, my good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Master!”
There’s an old Quaker saying that summarizes it well:
What shall I do? I expect to pass through this world but once. Therefore any good work, kindness or service I can render to any person or animal, let me do it now. Let me not neglect or delay to do it, for I will not pass this way again.

CONCLUSION
Yes, on this Valentine’s Day of 2010, we proclaim that love is more than a feeling.
Virginia Monts was a dear saint of our church, a woman lifted by Christ’s love and always seeking to share that love with others. She passed away December 17, 2009 at the age of 88. Many of us, including myself, never got to know Virginia well–the twilight years of her life were eclipsed by the debilitating onslaught of Alzheimer’s.
During WWII, Virginia served in the Army Air Corps as a nurse. She spent those dangerous years in field hospitals, tending to wounded and dying soldiers with tender compassion. Following the war, she returned home, continuing her calling as a nurse for many years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC.
Wherever she lived, she was involved in the lives others in her community. She received numerous awards for her efforts to better the lives of children from civic and government organizations. She was full of life, always on the go, noticing the least and lost among us, and giving of herself in ministry to them.
Virginia came very late in life to Mt. Sinai UMC, the forerunner congregation of VOH. It was here that she taught Sunday School to teens–sharing her life experiences and molding many of you as people of God.
As the Alzheimer’s took hold, Virginia’s world shrank to the confines of a nursing home. And yet, she still had a beautiful smile and glowing countenance about her.
Last November, Virginia fell and severely fractured her hip. She was taken to the ER at Rockingham Memorial Hospital.
Her daughter Mary shared with me that, as Virginia lay on that ER gurney, her mind completely confused and clouded over with Alzheimer’s, her body wracked in horrific pain, Virginia began singing these timeless words of this old gospel song with clarity, with conviction:
Love lifted me,
Love lifted me,
When nothing else could help,
Love lifted me…
A few short days later this dear woman, who had spent her life sacrificially lifting others in love, was herself lifted home to God by his enduring, eternal and healing love.
Yes, faith, hope, love abide–these three–and the greatest of these is love!