Thoughts on Love

I’ve presided at more than a few weddings where the bride and groom have had 1 Corinthians 13 read because they feel that it is such a romantic passage.  There may be a few of you here today who had this passage included in your wedding, or want to have it included in your wedding someday.  It’s a good passage to use as the “mission statement” for a marriage…as long as you understand that Paul is not referring to being “in love”…romantic love…he is not talking about Eros. The word he is using in Greek is Agape and what Paul means by agape is love like God has for humankind. (A short and somewhat sloppy definition, to be sure...)

Agape is…agape is…agape is…

The love God demonstrates for us is…

This is what Paul is saying.

Like I said, it is a good passage to use as a “mission statement” for a marriage…as long as you understand what Paul is talking about.

Putting this passage into context is important.  It comes on the tale end of Paul’s teaching about spiritual gifts.  Some ancient texts have “And I will show you a still more excellent way” as the beginning of Paul’s discourse on the gift of love, because living in and with the love that God has given to us the more excellent way.

Some have said that the goal of the Christian life is this thing called “Theosis,” a growing in Christ-likeness.  John Wesley called it Christian perfection.  Others have referred to it as entire sanctification, which begins with the moment of salvation and continues over the course of our life.  So if the goal of the Christian life is to live like Christ, by the Grace of Christ, then the greatest gift we can receive and share is Love of Christ. Or maybe think of it like this, any spiritual gift we have received is for the purpose of being able to love like Jesus and we need to use them in community to get the fullness of that love.

I read a sermon recently by Lutheran Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, where she speaks of the word faith being in the middle of Paul’s list of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12.  She says that she never thought of faith as a spiritual gift before, but once she stopped to think about it, it makes perfect sense and it gave her a certain amount of peace to know that some people are gifted with faith at levels some of us are not.  And in community, we need folks with mountain moving faith.  Amen?  The spiritual gift of faith comes up again in Chapter 13.  Paul says, “If I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but have not love…”

Love is a gift of the spirit, greater than faith, greater than hope.  Love is longer lasting than anything else.  Love is the gift Paul encourages us to strive after as we grow in Christ’s likeness.  

Practically speaking, what does love boil down to? Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:

There are neighbors or others who continually say evil things about us, who abuse us, who openly wrong us, who torment and harass us whenever they can. At the mere sight of them, the blood rushes to our heads, a terrible threatening anger. It is the enemy who provokes such a thing in us. But now we must be on our guard. Now we must remember quickly: I was met with mercy, not by people, no, but by God…Now we hear: repay no one evil for evil. Do not lift your hand up to strike, do not open your mouth in anger, but be still…perpetuating injustice does harm. Indeed, the evil one wants to accomplish only one thing with you; namely that you become evil…Therefore repay no one evil for evil.

This is love.  When tempers flare, when we want to lash out in a lack of patience, when we are exhausted and have no energy to talk with peace anymore, we are called to love.  Jesus never says to love when it’s easy, in fact he says that anyone can love when it’s easy.  He says his followers are people who love when there’s nothing to love.

Because that’s when we were loved.  When by all rights there was nothing to love about us, God kept on loving.  Like the words of a prayer of Thanksgiving, “When we turned away and our love failed, Your love, O God, remained steadfast.”

Love, especially the way God loves, is an eye opening thing to come to terms with.  If we can let ourselves believe it, it can change our self perceptions and then, if we let ourselves be overcome by it, it can change—it wants to change—our perceptions and dealings with others.

For example, it is very easy to jump on the bandwagon of humiliation and condemnation when public figures “fall from grace” (as the saying goes).  A few recent examples were when a pastor from Seattle sent out a tweet questioning the president’s faith in God and belief in the Bible he placed his hand upon for the oath of office.  After the tweet there was a firestorm of rebuttal and condemnation towards the pastor, as well as a flurry of tweets, Facebook posts and blogs in support of the statement.

More recently a pastor had an judgment failure with regard to a group gratuity on her bill at a restaurant—which in an of itself is a failure to demonstrate the kind of love Paul speaks of in this passage—but my news feeds have been full of shared slams of this pastor, some of which essentially question the integrity of her practice of faith…

It is so easy to fall into these traps…I even sent out this tweet the other day: 

“wish folks would stop getting hung up on the perceived sins of others; work on your own planks…and I’m not talking about fitness.”  

As soon as that tweet hit the ‘verse I sent this one out: 

“and suddenly I feel guilty for getting hung up on the perceived sin of being judgmental…crap balls this spiritual life thing is hard.”

Indeed.  This life of Love that God calls us to is difficult.  It means laying aside our selfish desires, working out our own salvation with fear and trembling, all the while remembering that we are God’s beloved--“forever  marked by God’s grace” as one of my favorite pastors recently said in a baptismal sermon—even when fall short of the mark.  Because the love that God has for us, sometimes, that’s the only reason we have for getting back up and trying again.