How do you know who you are and what life is all about? Let me remind you of 3 famous stories that you all know that are based on that question. The first is a fairy tale published in 1843 by Hans Christian Andersen. The title of the tale is The Ugly Duckling, and it tells us about a little bird born into a family of ducks, but it is so homely and strange looking that it suffers great abuse and ostracism from all the other barnyard animals. The little duck is one sad creature, until one day it discovers that it has grown to maturity, not as a duck, because it never was, but as a beautiful swan. The second story is a movie starring comedian Steve Martin as an Anglo kid adopted by an African-American family. Martin’s character Navin Johnston doesn’t have a clue that he is not like the rest of the family. It’s called The Jerk. And much of the humor in the movie of course comes from the fact that he is not who he thinks he is. The third story was originally a short story that became famous when made into a movie by the same name in 1970. It stars Richard Harris as an Anglo man kidnapped and enslaved in the old West by an Indian tribe who treat him like a horse. As the story unfolds he suffers and works and gradually earns his freedom and joins the tribe, proudly taking the name they had given him in scorn. It’s titled A Man Called Horse. Unlike the ugly duckling and the jerk, the man knew he was a man, and that made all the difference. How do you know who you are and what life is all about? In a profound way the simple answer is through others.

Since the beginning of the year we’ve been looking at the topic of “knowing God.” I’ve suggested that knowing God is the most important thing we can know, or more accurately, the most important relationship we can have. And just as we know who we are through others, it is also profoundly true that we know God through others. And here’s a related point: we don’t know who we are until we know who God is. Since we don’t know ourselves until we know God, and since we know God through others, then you can begin to see just how crucial it is who those “others” are. Hang with me a bit and let’s see if this all makes sense.

You and I can know who God is through certain things that God has given us so that we can know him, things like the Lord’s Supper, baptism, prayer, worship, and the Bible. What all of those teach us is that God is a God who wants a relationship with us because he loves us. That tells us something about God, and also it tells us something about ourselves. True religion, if you want to look at it that way, is all about a relationship with God in which we love God and God loves us. Here is the central point for today: The relationship that we have with God and that God has with us involves more than just “God and me.” It also and always involves others.

The story of the Old Testament that reveals who God is and who we are is a story that hinges on the birth and life of a whole nation of people. The greatest leader that nation knew in its history was a shepherd boy who became king, David. Under David’s leadership, Israel became a rich and powerful nation. When David had risen to power and consolidated his authority among the Twelve Tribes of Israel, he came up with the idea of building a temple for the God who had created Israel in the first place, the God who had guided him to become King. Through the prophet, Nathan, however, God made it clear to David that the task of building a temple for God would be left to David’s successor, Solomon. God wants David to build a different kind of house. This house will be not a building, but a people, a dynasty, a nation of believers through whose life God will dwell with all of his people, and through whose life God will bless all the other nations of the world. In the prayer we read from 2nd Samuel, David is realizing how God’s plan is so much bigger, so much more comprehensive and even world-changing. So David is asking for God’s blessing, that God will indeed build the house God wants to build, a house of people who will live on forever, and through whose life and witness all people one day will come to know God. David is realizing and then praying about the fact that Israel itself is the house of God, and through this house, God is about the business of redeeming the world. It would be many hundreds of years later in the history of Israel that some of David’s descendants would come to realize just how big God’s plan really was. They were part of David’s house—God’s house, really—who had become intrigued and then totally committed to a way of life and an understanding of God that they had seen unfold before their eyes in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus, too, was “of the house and lineage of David.” Jesus taught them and Jesus showed them that God loved them all and God wanted them all to love each other. Jesus taught them and Jesus showed them that their true identity and their true purpose was to love God and to love others. Jesus taught them and Jesus showed them that their life together as a family of lovers of God was a life in which they would come to know the blessing that God intended, the blessing that David had prayed for so very long ago.

After Jesus had left the earth, so to speak, his followers began to understand that God was building a bigger house than David had realized, a house of believers that they began to call “the church.” One of those followers realized this truth perhaps more profoundly than the rest, or at least he wrote about it a lot more. He saw that God was still building his house as he was building the church into a body of believers through whose life God would continue to reveal himself to us and we would continue to learn who we are as those beloved by God. This man’s name was Paul, and in Paul’s first letter to some of those believers, who lived in Corinth, we have a wonderful discussion of how that works.

As we pick up the story, Paul has been telling the Corinthian Christians about how the church is like a human body with many different parts that all have different functions but which serve the ultimate good of the whole body itself. He is trying to get these folks to learn to get along with each other so that they can encourage and support each other and ultimately, live successfully with each other. The best thing Paul can think of to tell them, however, is about love. His point is really quite simple. God is all about love. The love of God cannot be experienced unless it is experienced in the form of real people who love you. The people of God, the church, are meant to be people who love God, who love each other, and who reach out to love others. How do we know who we are and what life is all about? Through the church. What does the church teach us? That God loves us and we are meant to love ourselves and others. How does the church teach this? By being a place, a people, a house, of love.

We have all heard 1st Corinthians 13 so much that perhaps we think we know it. And we do. But we can always learn more. Paul has just written at length to the fragmented, confused, and sometimes even warring church in Corinth. He has told them how to get along with each other by each respecting and using the various gifts God has given them. But the best thing he knows, the most powerful thing, is God’s love. 1st Corinthians 13 is first and foremost a description of the kind of love God has for us and therefore the kind of love God wants us to learn and use in our relationships with each other. I know that I’m just a clueless guy but I do know that today is Valentine’s Day. Maybe you don’t know something I know, that this day was originally called Saint Valentine’s Day, because it is named for a bishop in the early church. In his day, the Roman Emperor Claudius banned the institution of marriage because he wanted men to remain free of the bonds of love so that they would make better soldiers in the army. Bishop Valentine refused to stop marrying people, however, and on February 14, about the year 270, he was executed. About 200 years later, that day was set aside as a day to honor Christian marriage, and Christian love.

But what is this love all about? It’s not about cupids and hearts and roses. It’s not about romance and candlelight and chocolate. Love, Paul teaches, and all scripture affirms, is more important and powerful than mystical gifts, or special knowledge, or sacrificial poverty, or even unshakeable faith. Love is what finally remains when all else has gone away. Love is described not by fluttery feelings but by words like patience and kindness. Love is about attitudes and actions that are filled with humility, truth, building others up, and surviving any onslaught. Love is very tough stuff indeed, as St. Valentine knew. Love is about what Jesus did for us on the cross and therefore what we are to do for each other in life. Love is what made God create the world, and love is how the world is designed to work. Without love, nothing works at all, including you and me. In a way, love is a curious thing. It cannot exist in a vacuum. Love demands one condition: that there be two. God is love, we say, which is true partly because God is more than one, God is three, in the mystery of the Trinity. God is love, we say, which is why God created a whole universe filled with creatures whom he could love and who could love him. God is love, we say, and God’s highest commandment is about love, Jesus said, because when perfect love is achieved, then everything else falls else into place. Or, as Paul wrote it, “when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.”

Love demands that there be at least two. Therefore, we need a place, a people, a house, a church, where people can love and be loved. Without love, we will never know God. Without people, we will never know love. Without love, we will never know who we are or what life is all about. All through this series of sermons I’ve used computer analogies to say that God has given us the means to know him as we download his grace in communion, as we gain access to him through the username and password of baptism, as we exercise online etiquette in worship, as we “text” him in prayer, and as we meet him on the facebook of Scripture and listen to him in the tweets of stories about Jesus. There is a web service called “Linked In.” It helps people connect to each other, especially for business purposes. The church is the way we link in to each other and thereby link in to God.

One of the best movies of last year told the story of Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney. Bingham makes a living by flying around the country firing people. He is very good at doing the hard job of telling people their company can no longer afford them, or no longer needs them, or no longer wants them. In a way, it is a heartless kind of job. And Bingham is the perfect man for the job. He loves living the rootless life, living in hotels and airports and often, literally, up in the air, which is the title of the movie. He is detached from everything, especially other people. One weekend, out of obligation more than anything else, he goes to the wedding of his sister’s daughter, his niece. But her fiancé gets cold feet and just before the wedding is to begin, he locks himself in a Sunday school classroom of the church. Bingham, the player who has perfected the life of feeling-free-bachelorhood, the life of anonymity on the road, the solitary life of living out of a suitcase and being the hatchet man who ruins other people’s lives, is sent in to try to convince the panicking groom that he should go through with the marriage. When asked why he should get married, Bingham says, “Life is better with company.”

Life is better with company. In fact, life is life as life is meant to be only with company. God wants our company. God has made us so that we can know him primarily through the company of other people who know him. God never meant for us to live up in the air and detached from him and detached from each other. God meant for us to be linked in to him and linked in to each other. And we link through love.

Amen.