We’ll begin this morning with two brief suggestions of what it is to be “complete,” one explicitly about love and the other, not.
We’ll start with the one about love.
It’s from the Tom Cruise movie, “Jerry Maguire.”
Any “Jerry Maguire” fans out there?
If you are one, you already know where I’m heading.
Jerry Maguire is a rom-com, really more rom than com, about a high level sports agent who somehow gets a vision of the shallowness of it all and then, not on purpose, abruptly blows up his whole life.
He writes a memo that ends up getting himself fired.
He’s abandoned by all his clients except one—inevitably, perhaps, the most frustrating and time-consuming one.
He’s summarily dumped by his girlfriend.
The only one who is willing to join him on this steep, seemingly relentless downward spiral is an assistant in the office to whom he’s never really spoken before.
It soon becomes clear that, for her, this is a real leap of faith, and risky in a way that Jerry’s situation may not be, however bad in the short-term it may seem.
But her faith turns out to be well-placed.
Jerry slowly grows as the commitments of his new life begin to claim him—and he falls in love with the assistant, named Audrey.
At one point, they are riding in an elevator together, and he notices a deaf couple speaking in sign language, certainly unaware that he can understand their signing.
“Oh,” he observes, sort of moved, “He just told her, ‘You complete me.’”
Well, of course, when that line comes back at the end of the movie, and Jerry looks at Audrey and says it to her, you’re not surprised, but you’re still happy.
Very clearly, this is what their life together has done.
So that’s one way to talk about being complete.
More quickly, now there is a second anecdote about being complete that bears mention.
When I was in college, one of my favorite professors had a side gig as an editor of a multi-year project – The Complete Papers of James Boswell, the great 18thcentury British writer.
The project started in 1949. From what I can tell, it’s still going strong. Boswell turns out to have had a whole lot of papers.
In fact, there are so many papers that my professor and his team were proud just to publish at long last a comprehensive list, a complete catalogue of all the papers that were out there, sitting in one collection or another, both the ones they’d gotten to and the ones that were still to go.
They deserved to be proud. Just that step had taken many years, and they did it.
In fact, according to my professor, they were having a small party to celebrate when they heard the mail come through the slot in their office door.
Party or no party, someone always goes over and checks, right?
Well, that happened…and guess what?
It turns out that there was news.
Someone had written to tell them that they’d located a bunch of new, heretofore unknown letters.
That “complete” catalogue they were finally celebrating?
It was already wrong.
On earth, there’s no such thing as “complete.”
Now, I realize that this is a long introduction to Paul, but the point is that he wants us to see that, like it or not, we are already wading in these waters.
“Love will never come to an end,” he says.
It sounds very “Jerry Maguire” of him.
But wait for it.
He continues, “Prophecies will cease; tongues of ecstasy will fall silent; knowledge will vanish. For our knowledge and our prophecy alike are partial, and the partial vanishes when wholeness comes” (v. 8-10).
His idiom is churchy, but his point is much broader.
What he means is that so many the things that seem so full now – so complete – so self-evident as to need no explanation or hesitation, may eventually turn out to be partial.
For a while there was a play that ran in New York called, “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.”
I never saw the play, and neither did the Apostle Paul, but he would have agreed that perfection and completeness (as we understand them) can pass just that quickly.
Jerry Maguire is surely right that, without others, our very selves are incomplete.
And yet, Paul suggests, something more fully-fledged remains possible – something we can only find as we let finally go of our own selfish ways of giving and receiving love, and learn to participate in God’s love, which is infinitely more full…infinitely more inclusive and generous…than we may be able to see right now.
In fact, it’s so full that any notion we may have of love right now, no matter how attractive, is like someone who thinks their junior prom date is meant to be their life partner.
Any notion of love we might have right now is like someone trying to cut their own hair using the rearview mirror of their car.
Any notion of love we might have right now is like that couple that refused to give their child a legal name until the child could talk and tell them her name for herself, and who came back 18 months later to announce that the name she had declared before the world was “Picabo.”
Love like that is wonderful and quirky and adorable and ridiculous…and, thank heavens, it is only scratching the surface.
It’s only a half-finished picture.
Because for Paul, whatever fullness may look like to us right now, no matter how convincing its allure may be, God has so much more yet to show and share with us.
Paul does not question that love as we know it now is already deeply fulfilling in many ways.
But right off the bat, he’s skeptical about the ultimate worth of a love that is not surprising, that is not evolving, expanding or, frankly, challenging us.
He believes that true love, a love that really reflects God’s presence, can’t help but do that.
In this sense, love as Paul understands it isn’t about how someone else completes us or meets our every need.
It’s about how true love, the love that comes from God, is full in ways that prompt us to become something new.
True love doesn’t just fulfill us. It expands us.
It teaches us to rise to occasions we did not even see before.
As has been observed: “To continue to give oneself in true regard for the other requires the development of the self also, so that there is more to give.”[1]
It’s only as we finally begin to live in that way that we finally begin to understand.
Love is the making of us, which is what I think Jerry Maguire actually means when he tells Audrey, “You complete me.”
There’s nothing complete about it.
There’s always more to be said, more to be done, more to be known, and all of it shared.
The minute you raise your glass, you’ll hear the mail come through the slot because God is like that.
Paul’s promise is that, with God’s help, we’ll learn to love it.
Amen.
[1] Enda McDonagh, The Gracing of Society, 39-40.
Faith Meets Week 