Beginning to Love Well—November 14, 2022

 

Beginning to Love Well—November 14, 2022

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” [1 Corinthians 13:1-3]

This is one of those times when you can draw a straight line between the teaching of Jesus and the witness of Paul and the early church.  Paul gets it that for the followers of Jesus, it’s all about love.  And for that matter, he understands what Jesus meant when he told his inner circle on his last night with them that he wanted the world to be able to identify his followers in the world by their love, before anything else.

I know it can sound cliché, or naïve, or unrealistic in a world full of mean-ness, to say this, but that is such a beautiful vision of how life could be for us, it almost brings me to tears to think of it.  And then… to see the ways that we Christians are actually known by the watching world, and how often we are not known at all for our love, but for our pettiness, persecution complexes, self-righteousness, and willingness to sell-out the way of Jesus for political parties… well, that actually does bring me to tears.

It's that utter contrast—between the compelling vision of what we are called to be, and the dismal disappointment of how we actually act in the world—that ties me up in knots.  It’s not that Jesus, or Paul, or any of the rest of the New Testament writers for that matter, are not clear—they are.  Love is meant to be the hallmark of our way of life, and Jesus makes it clear [as Paul will do, as we follow in this chapter] that “love” is neither the flighty emotion of romance, the empty sentimentality of nostalgia, nor the closed-circle of tribalism.  It is the commitment to do good all around, for those near to us, those who are strangers, and even to those we think of as enemies—and to seek their interests as inseparable from our own.  In the world, we are meant to be known for love—and without genuine, Christ-like love, whatever we do have is hollow.

That’s a difficult thing for us to hear, too—that without love, the other things we think of as assets turn out to crumble to dust in our hands.  Even “spiritual” things—like supernatural abilities to speak or to heal, or the insight to understand beyond what others can perceive, or faith that defies gravity and moves mountains—these are empty and devoid of power if they are not animated by love.  You can easily imagine Paul calling us on the carpet for boasting about the other things that Respectable Religious Folks like to pride themselves on, but which lack love.  You can almost hear the apostle saying, “If you have a million—or even a billion!—dollars to your name, but do not have love, you are bankrupt in all the ways that really matter.  And if you brag about your strong ‘traditional family values’ but cannot see how Christ’s love makes a new family of outcasts, God doesn’t want to hear it.  And if you spend your credibility on getting political influence with the loudest demagogue you can find but do not live in a way that embodies love, you have wasted your life.”  If Paul wasn’t impressed with other “spiritual” assets like faith, knowledge, or supernatural powers, he sure as heaven wouldn’t be impressed with the things modern-day Respectable Religion sells out for.

Look, we are about to take a deep dive into what it really means to love like Jesus, and if we are going to do that with integrity and authenticity, it’s going to mean we leave fluffy sentimentality behind and own up to all the ways we keep trying to live the Christian life without love, so that we can do better.  It sounds like a contradiction—or at least it should—that we would try to live out our faith in Christ without love, but honestly, that’s what so many folks perceive of us in the wider world.  They see Christians talking a good game about “love,” but quickly find out how narrow and limited that love turns out to be—it is reserved only for in-group members, or doled out only to the “worthy,” or offered only with strings to people think, look, or vote like you.  And we just need to be honest—that ain’t love.  That’s manipulative garbage.  That’s dressing up the same old transactional “I’ll-be-good-to-you-if-I-think-it-is-in-my-interest-to-do-so” thinking in the language of love and hoping it fools someone.  Paul is calling us to something more.  Something real.

Today, I invite you to begin a renewed commitment to learning how to love well—to love like Jesus.  And the place a lot of us have to start is to own up to the ways we have been settling for something less, or trying to make Christianity about power, influence, dominance, and culture-war nonsense rather than what Paul—following Jesus—calls us to be about.  Whatever else we have, if it missing love, is nothing—because when we are missing love, we are missing Christ himself.

That’s where we start.  Let’s go together from here.

Lord Jesus, re-center us in your love, and let that love re-orient us in everything else.