Pentecost 9 (NL4) John B. Valentine
1 Corinthians 13:1-13 July 26, 2026

“A BASIC SPELLING LESSON”

“I before E except after C.”

Anyone remember those fateful words from back in grade school ... reciting it along with your third grade teacher and the rest of your classmates?

How did it go???

“I before E except after C – or when sounded like A as in ‘neighbor’ or ‘weigh’.”

For generations ... since back in the 1800's even!!! ... “I before E except after C” was taught as a rule to young spellers ... as a tool for making sense of all those awful ‘IE’ and ‘EI’ words that challenge both kids and adults.

Heck ... I even remember my mom reminding me of that rule when I walked out the door to go to school on Friday mornings ... because Friday morning was always the time for the weekly spelling quiz at our elementary school!

And because that rhyme-y little rule helped you spell:

• IE words like ‘friend’ and ‘thief’ and ‘yield’ ... and

• EI words likes ‘ceiling’ and ‘receive’ and ‘deceit’.

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BUT ... you may also remember that there was a problem with “I before E except after C – or when sounded like A as in neighbor or weigh.”

And that was that there were a few ‘exceptions’ to the rule!!

That so-called ‘rule’ doesn’t work if you’re trying to spell words like ‘neither’ ... or is it ‘neither’????

And ‘ancient’ and ‘leisure’ and ‘protein’!

In fact ... take this one sentence:

“Isn’t it the height of inefficiency to realize that society conscientiously teaches this ancient spelling rule to feisty atheists and surveillant deists alike, while neither of these species realize it is counterfeit?”

In that ONE sentence ... there are no less than a dozen exceptions to the “I before E except after C” rule!

• height ... inefficient ...
• society ... conscientious ...
• ancient ...
• feisty ... atheist ...
• surveillant ... deist ...
• neither ... species ... counterfeit.

It’s just weird! (Oops ... there’s another one!)

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Actually ... the reason I bring up this whole “I before E” thing is that it’s a rule that really isn’t a rule at all.

There are so many exceptions to the rule that the rule just falls apart ... and teachers across the country and around the globe debate endlessly about whether teaching that rule is of any value at all!

In fact ... I read the other day where somebody did a study not too long ago that determined that those people who are good spellers of IE and EI words are people who’ve learned to ignore the rule and just learned to correctly spell those specific words one by one ...

Either that or they just let spell-check fix everything!

But I can’t but think that the same sort of fussing about rules and exceptions that is at the heart of the debate about “I before E except after C” is at the heart of this morning’s Bible lesson.

You see ... 1 Corinthians 13 is maybe one of the most well-known chapters in the Bible.

But what seems to have elicited those famous and familiar words of Paul was some confusion among the Corinthians about the nature of love.

I mean ... if you’ve picked up on anything of the course of the past couple of months in which we’ve been walking through First Corinthians ... it’s probably got to do with watching out for ... loving ... one’s neighbors ... both in the church and beyond.

And all of the those different issues we’ve looked at have ... at their heart ... questions like:

• What does it really mean to ‘love’ somebody?

• Jesus said we should ‘love’ our neighbors, but what does that really look like?

• What is the ‘loving’ thing to do?

It’s as if the Corinthians are trying to get Paul to answer the question: “How do you spell ‘LOVE’”???

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How DO you spell ‘Love’? What DOES love really look like? What DOES it mean to ‘Love our neighbors as ourselves’???

Paul seems to offer a succinct series of rules for spelling it ... actually.

• Love is patient.
• Love is kind.
• Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.
• Love does not insist on its own way.
• Love is not irritable or resentful.
• Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.
• Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
• Love never fails.

Paul’s rules are far more poetic than the sing-songy chant that I used to repeat with my third-grade classmates ... but it’s clear ... according to this ‘Apostle to the Gentiles’ ... that when it comes to spelling “Love” ... “I” doesn’t come before anything.

When you love somebody ... U always comes before I.

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Now ... obviously ... most people wouldn’t disagree with that ... that U always comes before I when it comes to spelling ‘Love’ ...

But agreeing with it and really believing it ... much less living it ... can be very VERY different things!

I mean ... a number of years ago now ... there was this TV series on the Nova Channel which advertised that it was going to do a show that was an intimate portrait of two groups of utterly selfless individuals.

Two groups ... ‘societies’ even ... whose members labored exclusively for the good of the community as a whole.

In other words ...

The individuals in these two communities always prioritized the group and the other over their own needs.

In each of these two societies ... no member put his or her own needs first.

And those ads got folks to wondering who were these remarkable groups that were marked by such selflessness???

• Some tribe deep in the Amazon rainforest?
• Some isolated community of monks living high in the Himalayas?
• Some clan eking out an existence on the edge of the Arctic Circle?

No .......... sad to say .......... it was ants and cockroaches!

To find individuals who are truly selfless ... we have to look beyond our own species!

I mean ... think about ... say ... Mother’s Day.

That day set aside to celebrate the selfless love of mothers in our community.

I can’t help but wonder what percentage of all the gifts that were purchased in preparation for that celebration were given truly ‘selflessly’?

• Is giving Mom a new KitchenAid mixer in hopes that she’ll make more cookies truly selfless?

• Is giving Mom a macaroni-framed portrait of ourselves truly selfless?

• Is buying yourself a new cell phone in order to justify giving your old one to your Mom truly selfless?

Sorry ... folks ... but in every one of those cases ... the divine Spell-Checker would tell us that we just put I before U!

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Or think back to the year 2020 ... back to that grand sociological experiment we endured together under the label “COVID-19".

Immunologists told us that ... when that new virus had just gotten a foothold among us ... that the truly selfless thing to do was to just stay home ... to hunker down and ‘shelter-in-place’.

“Doing nothing” was identified as the single most effective thing that any of us could DO to slow the spread of the virus that is ravaging our planet right now ... and really help keep the community which we are a part of to be safe.

But there were countless excuses that you and I ... and umpteen of our neighbors ... ginned up as to why we couldn’t ... but rather needed to be out-and-about.

Similarly ... “Wearing a mask” was identified as something we might do ... but do you remember the litany of excuses people made as to why they couldn’t wear them??

• Too uncomfortable.
• Too inconvenient.
• It messes up my hair.
• I’m not going to be told what to do by the government.

Honestly ... we didn’t understand all the science behind COVID-19 back then ... heck ... I’m not sure that we really understand it even now ... and particularly whether mask-wearing was and/or is of any real value ...

But if we were going to put U before I ... U in this case being the grocery clerks and the delivery people and the first responders and doctors and nurses and our own neighbors and the like ... wouldn’t it be wise for us to figure it out??

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Speaking of ‘try’ .... maybe here’s one other thing we should TRY ......

Try NOT to allow the opinion-generators to define the state of our existence these days!

I mean ... if there’s one thing that has become really clear in the past decade ... its that all the places from whence we get ‘input’ ...

Be it the online stuff or the mainstream media stuff or the print media stuff or whatever ...

All of them ... ALL of them ... are in the polarization business!

• They make money by building their brand.
• They make money by building customer loyalty.
• They make money by demonizing the other side.

And WE???? We just soak it all in!

But from what I can tell ... precious little of what they generate is patient or kind or humble or forgiving ...

But rather they are chock-a-block FULL of things that are boastful and arrogant and rude and resentful ... and insistent that their own way is the only way.

And NONE of us are well served .... and the cause of the Christ is not well-served ... when we allow them to tell us what it is that we should DO.

For:

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way. Love is not irritable or resentful. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

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Our congregation has a mission statement ... right??? It’s simple, brief and to the point. "Build Up Households of Faith".

But if we want to embrace and embody that mission statement ... if we want to spell it right and get it right ... we need look no further than that simple phrase itself ...

Because if we want to spell B-U-I-L-D correctly ... as in “Build Up Households of Faith” ... ‘U’ always comes before ‘I’! No exceptions!