Up in New Haven, Connecticut, where I went to divinity school, there is a burial ground called the Grove Street Cemetery. It is completely surrounded by the campus of Yale University.

One day, the president of Yale was walking through New Haven, and he looked up at the inscription on the gate of the cemetery. It said, “The dead shall be raised.”

The president commented, “They certainly shall … if Yale ever needs the property.”

The Grove Street Cemetery was founded in 1796 as America’s first planned burial ground. It contains a number of notable Americans, including Noah Webster, of dictionary fame … Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin … and Walter Camp, pioneer of American football.

It also has some gravestones with fascinating inscriptions. John Boswell was a scholar whose research into same-sex unions in the medieval church caused a stir in the 1990s. His stone has a line from The Chronicles of Narnia: “He was not a tame lion.”

Yale president Kingman Brewster’s grave includes one of his own lines: “The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept. In commonplace terms, it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, in the stranger.”

That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? It is carved into a wall of stone that goes all around his grave.

My favorites are the headstones of John Kirkwood and Lars Onsager. They were chemists, and were both friends and rivals. Kirkwood’s stone is inscribed with a long list of academic positions and honors — it looks like a complete professional résumé.

Onsager’s stone, on the other hand, simply says, “Nobel Laureate … etc.”

You can guess who came out on top!

All of this talk of gravestone inscriptions makes me wonder how I will be remembered when my time on this earth is over. Pastor of Fairfax Presbyterian Church? Husband and father? Midlife Man on a Mission? Runner of marathons … with unimpressive times?

We need to realize that each of us is carving an inscription through the choices we make every day. So, how about you? What’s on your gravestone?

The apostle Paul puts some advice in his first letter to the Corinthians that we need to hear as we think about the legacies we are leaving behind. Paul is writing to a church full of very talented people, and he admires the spiritual gifts that are at work in the church in Corinth. Some can speak in tongues, others have prophetic powers, others have wonder-working faith, and still others have enormous generosity (1 Corinthians 13:1-3).

These gifts are great, says Paul. Enormously impressive. But wait, he says … without love, they are nothing.

Speaking in the tongues of mortals and of angels. Nothing without love. Prophetic powers that enable a person to understand all mysteries and all knowledge. Nothing without love. Faith that is powerful enough to move mountains. Nothing without love.

Today, we might extend this list a bit to include President of Yale.. Nothing without love. Nobel Laureate. Nothing without love. Speaker of the House. Nothing without love. President of the United States. Nothing without love.

Paul is not getting all sweet and sentimental in this chapter. In fact, I want you to completely forget that you have heard this passage read at countless weddings over the years.

Paul is not talking about romantic love here. Not erotic love. Not even brotherly love. What Paul is speaking about is the love that comes first from God, the love that should be alive and well in the life of the church and its members. Paul is talking about a particular love called “agape,” a love which is given freely, without expectation of return … a love which always seeks first the welfare of the other person. It’s the love that Jesus showed us when he gave his body for our salvation, and when he shed his blood for the forgiveness of our sins.

This love is at the very heart of Christian life, and it’s a word that should be inscribed on the gravestone of every faithful person. A few years ago, Life magazine asked a number of prominent thinkers the question, “What is the meaning of life?” Martin Marty, a church historian at the University of Chicago, answered by saying, “Love. To love and to be loved.” That is the meaning of life. The first letter of John tells us, “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8).

The meaning of life is love. That’s a message that we should take to heart, as we think about how we’ll be remembered after our time on earth is over.

But what exactly does this agape love look like, in the rough and tumble of daily life? Paul says that it is patient — unwilling to rush to judgment and push people out of the church. Love is kind, treating others according the Golden Rule. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude — it does not see life as a game of winners and losers. Love “does not insist on its own way,” writes Paul, “it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth” (vv. 5-6).

This love is not simply a warm and wonderful feeling. At its core, it is a committed decision to show the love of God to others. Almost a hundred years ago, in the year 1917, Mahatma Gandhi made a commitment to read the 13th chapter of First Corinthians over and over again, for three months. When he saw his supporters drifting toward violence, he would advise them to pick up the Bible and read what Paul said about love.

For Gandhi, love was much more than a feeling. It was a commitment to live in a particular way. And it was anything but easy.

For a new year’s gift, Gandhi sent his nephew a handwritten copy of this chapter on love. In an accompanying letter, he spoke of his own ongoing struggle to become truly loving. He describes love as a dagger, and he says, “If we could get hold of this dagger [of love] and get also the strength to stab ourselves with it, we could shake the world.”

The dagger of love. It’s a strange and disturbing image, isn’t it? What would it mean for you to stab yourself with the dagger of love?

It might mean that you stop insisting on your own way, or being so irritable and resentful (v. 5). It might mean that you put to death your envy or arrogance or rudeness. When you stab yourself with the dagger of love, you kill the parts of yourself that are keeping you from being the person that God wants you to be. So part of you dies, but at the same time you make it possible for something new to be born.

God wants nothing more than to see us turn around, start over, and begin to grow into people who can love as he loves. Love is the one thing that never ends, according to Paul. Prophecies will come to an end, knowledge will come to an end, and our childish speech and thoughts will come to an end. Eventually, we will outgrow our fascination with ourselves — like people who get pleasure from looking in a mirror — and we will be able to see God face to face. Then, we will know and love God fully, even as we have been fully known and loved by God (vv. 8-12)..

This growth is a process, one that can take a lifetime. But God is patient with us, loving us with a love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (v. 7). God is working on us, filling us with a love that is truly powerful — my favorite poet Dante Alighieri called it the power “that moves the sun and the other stars.” God wants us to grow up in faith, in hope, and in love, and to discover, as Paul did, that “the greatest of these is love” (v. 13).

So, what are you carving into your gravestone? An earthly achievement such as a prize or a presidency? Or are you making a commitment to love — a decision to show the love of God to others?

Choose love. And live it. There is simply no better way to be remembered. Amen.

Sources:

Mark Alden Branch, “Stories in the Stones,” Yale Alumni Magazine, May-June 2006, 46-53.
William W. Emilsen, “Gandhi and the greatest thing in the world,” Expository Times, 113:4 (Jan. 2002), 118-119.