When the
Oscar nominations came out, everyone’s eyes went straight to the best picture,
directing, and, most of all, acting nominations. Will this be Leo’s year? I’ve got to back the Brit (Eddie
Redmayne). How about Brie Larson, who I
thought was great in Room? Not many people looked to the small print at
the bottom of the articles, that told us who got nominated for best sound
mixing or best sound editing. I have to
admit: I have no idea what the difference between those two things is. Can anyone tell me why Bridge of Spies got nominated for sound mixing but not editing?
Most of
us probably don’t care too much about sound mixing and editing, at least not as
much as we do about acting. But, we
recognize that there is definitely a lot of skill, and no small measure of
artistry involved, and we don’t begrudge those people their Academy
Awards. But, there’s no award category
for best speaker system in a cinema. I
guess we need them to hear the dialogue, but they don’t capture and hearts and
move our spirits the way acting does. In
St. Paul’s time, there were no academy awards.
There were actors, but no sound mixers or editors, and no electronic
speakers. There were ways of amplifying
sound though. Concave beaten bronze
plates were put around theaters and other public spaces in places like Corinth
to reflect back and amplify what the actors or orators were saying. They were called sounding brasses, or, as our
translation puts it: resounding gongs.
Paul
says to the Corinthians: if we have no love, we are just like those sounding
brasses around the edges of the audience; we’re not actors, and we won’t win
laurels. Now, a sounding brass might
reflect and cause to echo wonderful dialogue, but no-one credits the brass for
that. “If I give away everything I have
and hand over my body… but have not love, I gain nothing.”
Friends,
God calls us to be more than sounding brasses, simply reacting, reflecting
whatever’s around us. He wants us to act
out His drama: the great cosmic drama of redemption and love is the way to do
that. Paul tells us that without love,
anything we do, however impressive it may seem, will just be an echo, it won’t
be a true self-expression of who he calls and empowers us to be.
This
applies first to a proper love for self.
When it comes to self-gift, you may have heard the expression “you have
to have a self to give a self.” Paul
might say: “you have to love your self to give your self.” It applies to love for others, which puts our
gifts, which we love and cherish and give thanks to God for, at the service of
the Church and of the world, for building up the body. It applies to love for God.
And when
Paul says that all we do only has value if we have love, that’s not meant to
sound like an extra burden (though love is surely costly and painful at times). It’s not an extra thing on our to-do
list. We’re not saved by check marks on
our to-do lists, or by our resumes, or our transcripts! We’re also not saved by our love. We’re saved by Christ’s. God doesn’t ask us to love on our own. Like any playwright, he doesn’t expect the actors
to make up the play. Christ has come and
shown us love with a human face. Look to
our cross. That’s what love looks
like. That’s what patience and kindness
looks like. That’s what believing all
things and hoping all things looks like: not naïve credulity or optimism, but
trust, trust that God will receive and redeem any lovingly made gift of self,
that He will raise from the dead.
That’s
love, and He shows us love and gives us love and calls us to love, because, as
Paul says, in the end it’s the only thing that matters. We were made from love and for love. We were made to dwell forever living wholly
and holily with God, with creation and with each other. But, we don’t do that. We know we don’t. And God acts to restore us to be able to truly
live out those relationships of love forever, and that’s what heaven is.
Before I
entered seminary, I worked in a State Prison, and there was a program there
called IMPACT. It drew its name from
this reading: Incarcerated Men Putting Away Childish Things. It was a program for inmates who recognized
that there were not living lives characterized by that kind of love, and who
wanted to. One of the things I found
most inspirational about working in a correctional setting was seeing all the
things people were doing to reform themselves.
It was inspiring in the sense that it inspired the same desire in me:
the desire to put away all that keeps us from living that kind of love. And I know I’m not a finished product yet,
but I know the call is worth trying to respond to. Because, in the end, the call to love is the
only one that will remain.
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