"You Will Never Be Alone" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday July 28, 2024
Scripture Reading:  1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Note:  Every summer, we gather weekly for Church Family Movie Nights; and this year we are linking our Sunday morning worship to the movie we watched the previous Tuesday. This week’s reflection is tied to the movie Turtles All the Way Down. You can read a summary of this movie by clicking here, or watch the trailer by clicking here.


This chapter of 1 Corinthians is one of the most well-known passages in the whole bible – I would hold it up alongside the 23rd Psalm, the passage from Ecclesiastes made popular in the song, and maybe the 10 Commandments (though I suspect that the actual content of those 10 commandments isn’t as well-known as people think that it is).

 

1 Corinthians, chapter 13, is a reading that I hear as often at funerals as I do at weddings.  At weddings, it is often interpreted as the love between two people that will make the marriage succeed.  At funerals, it is often interpreted as the love that the person who died had for the people in their life.

 

And so, (at least to me,) it’s interesting to read this passage outside of the context of a wedding or a funeral.

 

This is an excerpt from a longer letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to the very early Christian church in the city of Corinth, and it is the pinnacle, the culmination of everything that comes before it.

 

We only have one side of the correspondence – we have Paul’s letters to the church, but we don’t have the letters that the church was writing to Paul – but based on what Paul wrote to them, it is a pretty safe assumption that the church in Corinth was a community divided. The letter, as a whole, reads like something that a loving but exasperated parent might write to their children who are continually arguing and fighting with one another.  Why do you guys have to fight like this? Why can’t you get along with one another? Why do you have to celebrate one person’s gifts while negating another person’s gifts? When you come to the communion table, why is there inequality between what you are receiving?

 

In the chapter right before the one we heard today, Paul reminds his readers that together they are the body of Christ.  It takes all of their gifts together to make up the church, so they need to honour the gifts of each other. And, if nothing else, if one part of the body comes to harm, the whole body suffers.

 

Chapter 12 ends with Paul saying, “And I will show you a still more excellent way,” leading us in to the beautiful poem about love that we heard this morning.

 

The love that he is writing about, like the love we celebrate at weddings, is the love the holds people together – not just two people, but a whole community.  The love that he is writing about, like the love that we celebrate at funerals, is love that persists even when circumstances are challenging.

 

Paul writes about a love that endures, a love that never ends. It is a love that is unselfish – it wants the best for the other person.  It is a love that is patient and kind – that keeps on going even when it isn’t reciprocated.  It is a love that rejoices in goodness and truth.  As I sometimes say at weddings, when the going gets tough, the love gets going.

 

And even though Paul isn’t explicit about it here, if we believe that God is love, then when we are living our lives in this sort of love, we are both living our lives in God and reflecting God’s love to the world.

 

Which brings us to our movie tie-in for this week! On Tuesday, we watched the movie Turtles All the Way Down. The main character in the movie is Aza Holmes, a high school student who has been dealt a pretty lousy hand when it comes to life. Her father died suddenly when she was younger, so she has spent much of her growing-up years working through grief. She also has severe mental health challenges in the form of obsessive-compulsive disorder that she is working through with the help of a psychiatrist and medication that she doesn’t always like taking. Obsessive thoughts take over her brain and lead to thought spirals that block out the world around her, and also lead to compulsive actions to try and get the thoughts to stop.  For Aza, this takes the form of obsessive thoughts about germs and bacteria and illness, and her compulsive actions include picking at a scab, and when it is severe, eating soap and hand sanitizer.

 

In addition to her grief and her mental health, Aza is also dealing with the more universal challenges of being a teenager. She has a best friend, Daisy, but in the timeline of the movie, they get into a fight that results in a car accident. There is also her relationship with her mother – Aza had always been closer with her father than her mother, and her mother is over-protective of her because of her obsessive-compulsive disorder, and afraid to let Aza spread her wings as she approaches adulthood. And there is a romantic timeline, where Aza and her childhood friend get together, then break up because he needs a partner who is more present than Aza’s illness allows her to be.

 

So overall, Aza, at a young age, is facing more challenges than many of us had to deal with at her age, and more challenges than some of us face in a lifetime.  She does not have an easy path to travel.

 

One thing that I love about this movie, unlike so many other movies and novels in the Young Adult genre, is that Aza isn’t healed or made whole through a romantic relationship.  There isn’t a 3rd Act reconciliation between her and her boyfriend – they stay broken up at the end.  But there is a beautiful reconciliation with her best friend after the fight and accident.  Aza is able to grow and recognize how her illness impacts her best friend; and at the same time, Daisy is able to grow in her empathy towards Aza and everything that she is dealing with.

 

And at the very end of the movie – the closing words of the movie to be exact – there is a speech from Daisy towards Aza that made me think of the Corinthians reading we heard today.  And I’m going to quote it verbatim here, because I don’t think that I could do it justice in a paraphrase.  Aza asks Daisy, “do you think I’ll ever be able to actually be with someone?”  And Daisy replies:

 

“Yes, I think you will. I think you, Aza Holmes, will have a very full life. I think you’ll go to college, and study whatever you want. And you’ll have a career. One that you’re proud of. And I think you will be with someone – someone great. I think you, Holmsie, will have an incredible love story. I even think you’ll have a family of your own one day. You’re going to make a whole damn life for yourself, and know what? I don’t want to lie to you. I think it will be hard sometimes. I think sometimes you’ll see that life un-built. But you’ll always re-build it. And you will never be alone. I promise. Because you will always love and be loved. And love is both how you become a person and why. Love, Holmsie, is how you become real.”

 

Aza is never going to be alone, because she is surrounded by a community like the one that Paul is writing about.  A community founded in unconditional, unselfish love that keeps on going even when the going is tough.

 

And because of the love that surrounds Aza, in the form of her community, she will never be alone.  The love that surrounds her will help her to become more human; and, even though it isn’t a Christian movie, I would say that the love that surrounds her will help her to become more like Christ.

 

And may the same be true for all of us.  May we be a people who not only are surrounded by love, but a people who emit a web of love that wraps around all of the people in our lives – in our church family and beyond.  May we be a people who are continually reflecting the love that is God.  Amen.

 

 

 

Inter-generational Church Family

“Love is both how you become a person, and why”