An End to Childish Ways--February 7, 2025

An End to Childish Ways--February 7, 2025

"Love never ends. 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. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.  When 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." (1 Corinthians 13:8-11)

I don't fault children for being selfish when they are young; but I don't expect that to be the endpoint of their development, either.

I wouldn't deny that some level of self-absorption is probably our first instinct in life--I just also know that we mature beyond that perspective as we grow up.

I can even grant that it feels comfortable--maybe we would even say "only natural"--to be bent inward on ourselves in that "Me and My Group First" mentality when we are toddlers just learning how the world works.  But the more I read the New Testament, the more I would also say that our litmus test for a grown-up faith is not merely what someone else says it "natural" or "unnatural," but rather what fits the character of Christ.

All of this is to say that at some point in our discipleship, the old childish selfishness that used to be our gut instinct gets left behind, much the same way that a butterfly leaves the caterpillar and chrysalis phases behind in order to become its mature self.  The earlier phases may well have been a part of development--but it would be a terrible shame to tell a monarch or a blue morpho to stay constricted within the cocoon rather than to fly free.  And it would be a damn shame, too, for us to stay stunted in the immature mindset that teaches us to be bent in on ourselves, rather than to grow up into people who love like Jesus--which is to say, who love as we have been loved first.  In other words, at some point in our faith life, Jesus will lead us beyond our comfort zones and, as Paul says it, we will "put an end to childish ways."

One of the things I love about Paul's train of thought in this passage, which many of us heard read in worship this past Sunday as our epistle reading, is that he has such authentic empathy for our earlier immaturity, while he is also clear that it is no longer an adequate perspective for people of mature faith.  He can say, charitably, that he knows we all start out thinking, reasoning, and acting like children--when we are children!  We begin our lives seemingly ingrained with a zero-sum game notion of the world, where your win means my loss and there's only so much to go around.  We start out fearing that we won't be taken care of, and instinct tells us that we have to get our own needs met before thinking about others.  At some level that all just seems hard-wired into us as a matter of mere animal survival.  But we are, of course, more than mere mongrels in a dog-eat-dog world.  And Paul tells us that at least a significant part of what it means to grow to maturity in discipleship is to leave behind the old self-centered mentality that we used to take as gospel truth--or at least as conventional wisdom.  Growing up in faith means growing deeper in love, and both of those involve leaving behind the familiarity of a self-centered view of the world to a love-centered perspective that sees through Jesus' eyes.  At some point the motto, "Me and My Group First!" just sounds embarrassingly immature in our ears, and we come to recognize love for others (even others we regard as outsiders, strangers, or enemies!) as the hallmark of adult faith.

Today, we are going to step back out into a world where lots of Loud Self-Important Voices pontificate from podiums about how "We have to put our own interests first--that's just how the world works!"  And when they say it assertively enough with everyone else around them nodding their heads in sheepish agreement, it's easy to be duped into believing them.  It will all sound so very reasonable, so very common sense.  We might all purse our lips and wish it were otherwise, but alas, it's just the way of the world that we have to be selfish and that we just don't have the resources to care for others... except that it doesn't have to be that way.  Paul reminds us here in First Corinthians that every time we slip back into that mode of thinking it's like we're butterflies trying to crawl back into the chrysalis rather than unfolding the fullness of our glorious wings.  It doesn't have to be the way the Loud Self-Important Voices tell us.  We don't have to accept their assessment.  We are freed in Christ from the wearisome calculus of always gaming for our own advantage and always looking at how we can get our own interests met so we can "win" or be "great" or be "on top," and we are instead freed for love.  In a word, we are free to put an end to childish ways.

At some point in each of our lives, we finally played our last round of King of the Hill on the playground.  We let go of our old worry about "cooties" for the last time.  And we had our last diaper of childhood changed and thrown away.  Maybe it's time for us to leave behind the immature self-interest we used to call "natural" and pitch it in the dirty diaper pail, so that we can step into the maturity of faith that loves like Jesus.

Lord Jesus, enable us to grow into maturity of love today, and to be free for loving others as you have intended all along.