Coal

So, in a week I have to preach on 1 Corinthians 13. I'm dreading it. Don't get me wrong, I (along with most everyone for the last 2,000 years) think it's one of the most beautiful, comprehensive, poetic statements of the Christian faith we've been given. And that's just the problem. The passage is so complete, so concrete, so...self-contained. An image comes to mind (a strange one)- I imagine an egg, made of marble, and I see myself with a chisel, trying to crack it, trying to get inside it, or at the very least trying to carve something onto the surface. In my imagining, it's impossible. I don't succeed.

That this is my image of love- the concreteness and completeness of it, the body of it- it's unsettling. As if I'm being left out, it's something I can't get inside. As if it's a language I don't understand. And I guess it is, to an extent. The language of 1 Corinthians is...well, it's absolutely beautiful, but I find myself reading it from afar. I can't seem to look it square in the face. "Love is patient, love is kind...". I want it to be a cathedral, quiet and high-ceilinged- I want to walk into it and wander, I want to take each phrase as I would stained glass windows, following them down the long walls of the chapel, stopping for each one, admiring each chip of glass, alight in a different way. I'd like to look and look and see the face of Jesus, broken and glorified, looking back at me. I'd like to be inside that place, with the winds outside howling and pushing the careening trees.

There's no better way to realize how little you know, how little you are, than to prepare a sermon. There's nothing in the world to make you feel more inadequate and false. Each time you do it, you search for the face of God, for anything you can say about that beautiful, terrible face that will do it any justice at all. Our language is so small. Our lives are so messy, our thoughts are petty and our imaginations almost nonexistent. Sometimes you do find Him, or rather, you find words to express some small piece of Him, but not before you've laid all your shit bare.

Today I came across the passage from Isaiah 6, the one that begins with the epic proclamation: "In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne..."- and I saw myself standing next to Isaiah, surrounded by earthquake shakes and wings and smoke- and I heard myself say with him, terrified and despairing: "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts!". How I wish for that burning coal, pressed against my lips, burning away all my falseness and disorder and guilt! How I wish to be clean from the filth and drudgery of my life. Such a strange, terrible, comforting image, that coal touched to the lips. A gift and an invitation. The gift of forgiveness, an invitation to the freedom of love, the smolder starting at the lips and moving throughout, shining through skin like a flashlight.

We know partially, and we prophesy partially,
but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.
At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror,
but then face to face.
At present I know partially;
then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.
So faith, hope, love remain, these three;
but the greatest of these is love.