Through a Glass Darkly

Summer of Love 10  Seeing clearly

By September of 1967 the residents of Haight Asbury had fallen out of love with the 100,000 hippies and flower children who had descended on their neighborhood for what had come to be known as the Summer of Love.  The bloom was coming off the rose for the participants as well and many of the university students who made up the group left San Francisco to resume their studies. 

On October 6th a mock funeral was held that was called “The Death of the Hippie”, organizer Mary Kasper explained the purpose of the funeral:  “We wanted to signal that this was the end of it, to stay where you are, bring the revolution to where you live and don't come here because it's over and done with.”

And like the original Summer of Love we are drawing close to the finish of our summer of Love as we have spent the past 10 weeks in 1 Corinthians 13, the so called Love Chapter of the Bible.

And through the summer we’ve been taking the opportunity to read all 13 verses together.  This morning we are going to read it in unison.  Please stand with me as we take the opportunity to read God’s word.

1 Corinthians 13:1-13  If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing.  If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.  Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud  or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.  It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.  Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.  Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever!  Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture!  But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.  When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.  Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

Thank you, you may be seated.

Last week we looked at the childish things that we need to put away as we mature in our faith and this morning we are going to focus on verse 12,  1 Corinthians 13:12  Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

In the NIV we read 1 Corinthians 13:12  Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

In the King James Version we read 1 Corinthians 13:12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And while “through a glass darkly” is more poetic, and has been the title of a number of novels, several poems, umpteen television episodes and at least one movie it really doesn’t convey to us the meaning that Paul had in mind 2000 years ago.

I don’t know about you, but when I think of seeing through a glass darkly, I picture myself peering through a darkened window.  Which along with being just kind of creepy is historically impossible because when Paul wrote this letter there were no glass windows, either darkly or not to peer through.

The Romans had glass, but it was used to make containers.  Angela actually has a cross with Roman glass that came from Israel and dates back to the time of Jesus.  But the technology wasn’t there to create sheet glass. 

That was all said to say that the glass that was spoken of here was a mirror.  And not the mirror that you have in your bathroom.

Mirrors, as you know, are made of glass coated with a reflective surface, and two thousand years ago they didn’t have the technology needed to make flat thin glass.  So mirrors were simply pieces of polished metal, often times using brass or bronze because they polished well.

And because of the colour of those metals your reflection was often times dark and not detailed.

So you could tell that you were wearing a hat but you might not be able to tell that you had some of your lunch on your chin.  And It was puzzling.

And this was the metaphor that Paul uses to describe our understanding of our lives.

I’m not sure how you feel about mirrors, I kind of feel like Rick Wakeman who wrote “There must be something wrong with the mirrors in our house because every single one I gaze into makes me appear somewhat overweight.”

And the mirror in our bathroom is ever changing, when I look into it at 4:30 on Sunday morning I look a lot older than I do when I look into it in the afternoon.

1 Corinthians 13:12  Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

And maybe that doesn’t resonate with you at all, maybe you don’t find things puzzling,   maybe you have everything figured out and when things sometimes go off the rail you shrug and say “whatever”.

Or maybe your faith in God is so great that you never question what’s happening, you never ask

“Why?” or say “How come?

In which case, you are a better person than me because I scratch me head so often that you’d think I’d be bald by now.

And that promise isn’t that we will know now, but that we will know someday.  And the promise is that in spite of it all, in spite of the questions in spite of the doubts that God’s love is still there.

But, there’s that word “But” even when we trust him we still have the need to ask: why?

We are a little bit like Job who said Job 13:15  God might kill me, but I have no other hope. I am going to argue my case with him.

Even when we say “God is my only hope” we want to ask “Why”?  And that’s fine.

So, The Question is: Why?

The Old Testament prophet Habakkuk’s asked  “why do the righteous suffer?” and “Why do the evil prosper?”  Those are good questions. David asked the same questions in the book of  Psalms and Job personalized it in the book that bears his name asking “Why do the evil prosper and I suffer?”  That’s probably what we want to know.

The word why is used 595 times in the bible so it would appear that there are some questions in there.

Abraham asked why, Moses asked why, David asked why, Peter asked why even Jesus asked why.  And so I’m thinking that asking God why isn’t always wrong.  As long as we live in an imperfect world and things happen and don’t happen to us the way we’ve planned then we will ask questions.

When things happen the way we were hoping they would happen we never ask God why.  “Why are things going so well God? Why are the kids healthy, why do I have a good job?  I was just curious thought I’d ask.”  We don’t do that, things go well and we presume that we deserved it or we were lucky.

Sometimes when we ask “why” the answer is self-evident.  And many times, the answer is one we don’t want to hear.

We ask why and the answer is very plain and very easy to understand, “Because you were stupid.” 

Now I know that you are thinking, “Well Denn that wasn’t very nice.”  No, but true.  We ask “Why did I have to get that speeding ticket?”  “Because you were stupid and were speeding.”  “Oh, right.” 

“Why do I have lung Cancer?”  “Because you insisted on lighting a noxious weed and sucking the poisonous smoke into your lungs.” “Oh, right.” 

I remember 30 years ago a colleague of mine was in a very serious car accident, and I heard people say, “Why did that have to happen?” They wanted to blame God or blame fate but the blame lay with my colleague who was rushing home in a bad storm and crossed the centre line into the path of an oncoming car.

A girl gets pregnant and she and her boyfriend ask why?  Obviously they had skipped that class in grade 7, grade 8, grade 9 and grade 10.  I skipped various classes in school, never that one.

Not always but many, many times we are the author of our own misfortune.  And that’s tough to accept because from the point when the very first couple sinned we have refused to accept responsibility for our actions. 

It’s so easy to play the blame game and try to shift the responsibility onto somebody else.  And so it’s not our fault that we are fat, and unhealthy it is McDonalds because they make food that is fatting and unhealthy and then obviously they hire people to sit on us and force feed us that very same food.

And people say “It’s not my fault that I smoke, it is the tobacco companies fault. If they didn’t make and sell tobacco then I wouldn’t have that problem.”  Interesting that nobody ever sues breweries and distilleries, I wonder why that is? 

Let me wander into the wilderness of political incorrectness an area that I am quite familiar with. 

A man beats his wife and she packs up and leaves and he asks why his marriage ended?

Duh!  Or a wife cheats on her husband and he files for divorces and she wonders what happened?

You ever wonder when you hear someone on the news saying that it’s not their fault they can’t find work in their community, the economy is a mess and there is no fish or the pulp mill has closed down, and so they have to be on unemployment and social assistance, it’s somebody else’s fault. 

But if everyone had of taken that view through the years then Toronto and Calgary would be empty for that matter the Mic Macs would have a lot more room in Nova Scotia.  We all make choices.

George Bernard Shaw said “No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.”

Of course, the real question that we are often asking is; “Why did it have to happen to me and not to somebody else?” “Why did I have to get cancer and they didn’t?” “Why did I get the ticket and not the person behind me?” “Why did I get pregnant and not her?”  And those are selfish questions.

So, sometimes the answer to why? Is: because of something you did.  And sometimes the answer to why? Truly is: because of something somebody else did. 

Somebody else drove their car over the line, a terrorist set off the bomb.   A girl is raped and becomes pregnant; someone ends up at the mercy of the justice system and is victimized.

We live in a fallen world and as long as people have the freedom to make decisions and mistakes other people will be hurt.  Sometime intentionally and sometimes inadvertently, but that doesn’t make it any easier. 

But we can’t blame God.  Oh, I know that we can say why didn’t God stop it? Why didn’t he make the car miss the pedestrian, why didn’t he keep her from walking down that particular street?   Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t and I wish I could explain that but I can’t.

Here’s a thought, have you ever felt that you should pray for someone, and you do and later you find out that they were in danger and God seemed to miraculously intervene? 

Sometimes we feel to pray for someone and we do and later we find out that there didn’t seem to be any reason why we prayed.   Unless of course it was because we prayed that things didn’t happen that we will never know about.   

I wonder if sometimes we miss or ignore those feelings. And if we had of interceded that things would have turned out differently.  When you feel you should pray, pray.

People starve to death in third world countries and we ask: Why? and then we pay farmers not to produce certain products, stock pile others and destroy still others.  It’s not a supply problem it’s a distribution problem and a greed problem.  And if we wanted to then we could feed the hungry of the world.

And sometimes there is no answer and nobody to blame.  Last month a mud slide in Sierra Leone left 1000 people dead and 20,000 homeless.  And perhaps if corrupt leadership through the years had of led the country into development then maybe they would have been better prepared, but who knows. 

When a hurricane like Harvey hits a low-lying area like Houston bad things happen.

I remember when Juan ripped through Halifax a paramedic was killed when a tree fell on his ambulance.  What’s with that? 

Or a couple of weeks ago 32 year old Chris Godfrey was playing softball in Courtney BC, was running to 1st base and got hit in the back of the head with a softball, and died.  How do you explain that to his widow or one year old son?

Sometimes stuff just happens and it’s hard to explain why and maybe God does have an explanation but I certainly don’t.

And sometimes a “Why” doesn’t even deserve an answer “Why is it raining?” Because it is. “Why don’t the Leafs win the cup?”

We don’t have answers to a lot of question and we don’t like the answer we have to some questions. 

Paul was telling us that part of the problem with the question is that we now see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror,

And so The Answer Is: Wait.  Often, we have a timeline and we can’t understand why God doesn’t do everything according to our time line.  We look at the puzzling bit of the picture we can see and we don’t understand it and we don’t realize what we are seeing is only see one portion of a much bigger picture. 

Remember when Habakkuk questioned God about why the righteous sometimes suffered? God’s response to Habakkuk was simply; wait.  Listen to God’s response in Habakkuk 2:3  This vision is for a future time. It describes the end, and it will be fulfilled. If it seems slow in coming, wait patiently, for it will surely take place. It will not be delayed.

I am not the most patient person in the world, as a matter of fact I’m not the most patient person in this room, truthfully, if there were only two of us here I probably wouldn’t be the most patient person in the room. 

I want things to happen right away.  If I do something today I want results tonite, at the latest. 

And that isn’t always the way life works or the way God works.  And sometimes just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen.  French Naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, said “Never think that God's delays are God's denials. Hold on; Hold fast; Hold out. Patience is genius.”

It is so tough when we think it should have happened yesterday or at the latest today and it still hasn’t happened. 

We can’t understand why we haven’t been healed, why our child is still rebellious, why our spouse still isn’t a believer, why we don’t have the perfect job, why our church still hasn’t grown. 

And we need to listen to God for he is probably saying “Wait” the story is not finished. 

Angela and I were at a movie once and with 15 minutes to go I leaned over and said “Let’s leave now and guess how it ends.”  We wouldn’t think of doing that, well actually I did but that’s me. 

But we want to skip out on the movie of our lives before we get to the credits.  The prophet Isaiah wrote in one of the verses that we all know Isaiah 40:31 NKJV But those who wait on the LORD Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.   We ask “why?” and God says “wait.”

And remember that ultimately, we may discover that what we thought we really, really, really wanted or needed wasn’t what we needed after all.  But we wouldn’t have made that discovery without waiting.

A lot of us are kind of like Margaret Thatcher who said “I am extraordinarily patient provided I get my own way in the end.”   But sometimes the answer when it comes is not the one we want or the one we were looking for. 

And so Paul tells us to trust that Love will win,  If the question is Why and the answer is wait then The Response Is: Trust  Bottom line is that there will come a time that we have to trust that God knows best.  Even if what happens isn’t what we think should have happened.

We learned that lesson from Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego when  they were standing before King Nebuchadnezzar after he demanded they bow down and worship the idol he had built or die.  And they said “We believe that God will deliver us but even if he doesn’t we still will not bow.” 

The prophet Habakkuk writes,  Habakkuk 3:17-19  Even though the fig trees have no blossoms, and there are no grapes on the vines; even though the olive crop fails, and the fields lie empty and barren; even though the flocks die in the fields, and the cattle barns are empty,  yet I will rejoice in the LORD! I will be joyful in the God of my salvation!  The Sovereign LORD is my strength! He makes me as surefooted as a deer, able to tread upon the heights.

I heard someone say recently that being born in North America is like winning the lottery.  And the poorest of us are wealthier then the majority of the world, so maybe the next time you are tempted to ask why ask why you were born in Canada or ended up in Canada.

And when we don’t get our own way or when we don’t understand what’s happening in our life we still need to be able to say, “Even though. . . yet I will be joyful in the Lord.”  Because someday you will see everything perfectly.