A sermon preached by Pastor Johnny at Church of the Morningstar on 2/22/2025

1 Corinthians 13

If I speak in the tongues^[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ² If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³ If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,^[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

⁸ Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. ¹¹ When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. ¹² For now we see only a 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.

¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Love is furious. Love is impatient. It has no time for hypocrisy. It does not wait, it gives no quarter. Love is tender and easily bruised. It never forgets and cannot forgive a wrong. Love is a frightened child, a cornered beast, a lonely soldier. Love aches, love burns, love rages and weeps. Love is the strongest thing in the world, and yet it cannot help itself. Love is imperfect. It often fails. Love hurts like a wound and weakens like a sickness. Yet it is all we have. 

This, too, is true of love. 

This, too, is true love.

Why am I, a Satanist, who thinks in the way that I do, preaching on 1 Corinthians 13? It is in some ways the ultimate Christian text, for it defines Christian love. There are things I like about it, things in it that I believe are true; but also, as you have heard, things I disagree with, or rather, things I think it oversimplifies. So why choose this for the basis of my sermon? Simply because these are words that haunt me, words that I struggle with– just as I am haunted by, and struggle with, love.

Love is a struggle. Love is hard. I think that is actually something Paul and I would agree on. 

This famous passage, so popularly read at marriages, is not primarily about romantic love. Invoking Paul’s words at weddings is frankly quite funny because he took a dim view of marriage– he thought it was better than having sex out of wedlock, but worse than staying a virgin (1 Corinthians 7:9). When he praises love here, he is not praising romance. In fact, the Greek word translated as “love” in this passage is not “eros,” which means sexual or romantic love, but “agape,” which is universal love, love for one’s fellows, love for God. The King James version even translates agape not as “love” but as “charity.” 

1 Corinthians is actually a letter, written by the apostle Paul to a struggling church in Corinth. It is not the first letter he wrote to them, but it is the first of his letters to Corinth that we have. It seems like the church was pretty dysfunctional. There were power struggles between leaders (1 Corinthians 1:10-12). Congregants were suing each other (1 Corinthians 6:1-7). Wealthy members were bringing their own fancy food to church meals and eating it in front of poor members, without sharing, letting them go hungry (1 Corinthians 11:-17-34). There was a tendency for everyone to speak in tongues and prophesy at once, talking over each other (1 Corinthians 14). There was even a sex scandal in the church– a man sleeping with his father’s wife (1 Corinthians 5:1-5).

It is in the context of scolding this congregation that Paul’s famous lines about love appear. This might explain why he calls out the specific attributes of love he mentions. “Love is patient,” he says to congregants so out of patience that they are taking one another to court. “It does not envy,” he says to a church locked in power struggles over leadership and prestige. “It does not boast,” he says to those who are wrapped up in showing off their wealth or their supposed spiritual gifts. “Love does not delight in evil,” he tells a man accused of adultery and incest. (Or rather, he tells this to the church members who enabled him– ‘ban that guy’ was Paul’s advice about the wrongdoer [1 Corinthians 5:13]. Even Christian forgiveness is supposed to have limits.)

I think at this juncture it would be understandable to take a second and give our Satanic selves a pat on the back for being better at loving one another than the Christian church in Corinth was. But though we are far more functional as a community than those who Paul addressed, there is still much that we can learn from 1 Corinthians and its context. We, too, are a small church of a new religion. We, too, are a marginalized and persecuted community, as the early Christians were. We, too, exist under the heel of a repressive regime. And we, too, believe ourselves to be facing down the apocalypse– and this time we have more evidence of that than mere prophecy. 

Fascism has come to America. As predicted, it came wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. Ironically, the faith that once resisted Caesar has become the religion of Empire. We are living in terrifying times, in the age of hate. I don’t have to repeat the headlines to you. You all know what is going on–racism, fascism, genocide, climate change, hypercapitalism, transphobia, surveillance, pandemics and more. It’s an ugly world we live in right now, and lately, it just keeps getting uglier. 

And that can make it hard to love. 

Yes, it’s hard to love when everything hurts. It’s hard to love when you are scared and you are overwhelmed and you can’t seem to sleep enough at night. It’s hard to love when every atrocity, every injustice, means the deep reservoir of anger in you, already too full, can’t seem to stop overflowing and flooding your nervous system and splashing on those closest to you. It’s hard to love when your body hurts and your head aches from tension, when you’re tired from fighting, or even just from hearing the news. 

And it’s even harder to love when your loved ones all feel the same way, and all of you are spiky and short-tempered once. 

Yet under that spikiness is neediness, for this is the time when we all need love the most. 

Maybe love is not innately patient, but we must become patient to have love. Love may not be fundamentally kind, but we must become kind to have love. 

Because if we have not love, then we have nothing. Human beings are social animals. All of our so-called evolutionary success is due to our capacities for communication and cooperation. On our own we wouldn’t make it far– we’re not very fast, not very strong, don’t have sharp teeth or claws. We can’t fly, don’t climb so good or swim so well. Our babies are weak and useless and helpless, and take forever to become independent. Without care, they die. Without love, we all simply die. 

But we have big brains and opposable thumbs, and we can speak and work together and form strong bonds and lasting alliances, and build things together so much larger than any of us. We can do all of that together but very little alone. And love– agape love, love as solidarity– is both the social glue and the great motivator of human endeavor. Do you doubt me? Just think about how much labor people put in every day to provide for not just themselves, but their families. 

Love is also our primary source of pleasure and joy, and without those things we die. When I speak of the pleasures of love, I don’t just mean the pleasures of sex– although I certainly include them. Sex is an important form of social bonding. But so are a million other activities. Eating together, dancing, creating and enjoying music, sports and games, the creation and consumption of art– anything that humans do in pairs or in groups, anything at all that we enjoy together and not just alone. Face it– most things are better together than alone. Oh yes, of course, we all need our solitude from time to time. But we also all need friends. And the things that truly make life worth living, the memories that will be treasured forever, are usually the times spent with our loved ones. 

Che Guevarra famously said, “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” There is an echo of Paul here– the assertion that a faith that can move mountains is nothing without love, that sacrifice and personal risk are meaningless without love. I know and believe that without love, a person cannot be motivated to do great things for the benefit of others, neither can they sustain the effort that it takes to persist in such labor. 

Therefore, we must love one another. We must hold and support each other. And we must allow ourselves to receive love as well. 

My friends, my comrades, I do not command you to love any person in particular. You don’t have to love me. You don’t have to love everyone in this church, or even anyone in this church. You don’t have to accept obligation or neglect or abuse that calls itself love, and neither should you give those things and call them love. 

What you must do is figure out who you do love, truly love, and who does love you, and then you must love them ferociously and unconditionally. You must fight for the relationships that sustain you, that keep you alive, that hold your world together. When it comes to people you hold close, you must learn to choose them well, and then never let them go. 

And, you must also reach out in a broader and wider love, the love of solidarity. You must learn to join in the struggle alongside people you do not like. As we fight for our lives, you must become able to tolerate awkwardness, and to forgive foolishness and innocent mistakes. Choose your comrades based on a combination of intentions and actions, not based on words, because intentions and actions both matter, but words do not matter much at all. 

We are all in this together, every single one of us here on planet Earth, whether we choose to acknowledge that or not. As we stare down the barrel of apocalypse, we must remember that and we must love each other before it is too late. 

When you go forth among your fellows, try to love them, even if you don’t like them. Look for the similarities rather than the differences between you. Try to assume best intent. Forgive innocent mistakes. Resist your need to nitpick. And when you start to hate yourself, and just want to hide at home in your room, make yourself go seek love. God was right, for once, when he said “it is not good for man to be alone,” (Gen 2:18) but neither is it good for woman or for non-binary individual. The love you give sustains others. The love you receive sustains you. Be as determined to receive as you are to give, to be loved as you are to love– for so long as we are still living and loving, hate cannot win. 

I love you. Even if I do not know you well, I love you. I love you because you are here, and you are most likely queer, and that means you are blasphemous spit in the eye of the Lord of Hate. So love yourself. If you cannot love yourself for any other reason, love yourself because they hate you, and stay alive because they do not want you to. So long as you have breath your body, my beloved, they are failing. And the harder we love each other, the more assured our victory becomes. They cannot love. This is the reason they are constantly stabbing one another in the back and their alliances are always falling apart. We are many, they are few, and if we all come together against them, with love and fury, they will never be able to stand before us. 

So live! And love! Let faith and hope follow from this. 

Thou art God. Nema.