The Gospel According to Journey--July 31, 2023

The Gospel According to Journey--July 31, 2023

"Love is always believing..." [1 Corinthians 13:7b]

It's not that love is gullible; it's more that love is brave enough to risk trusting.

I want us to be clear about that here from the get-go as we turn in our looking at love from First Corinthians to our next focal point, because it's easy to miss the point.  After all, a lot of our English translations take this next phrase from Paul's description of Christ-like love in 1 Corinthians 13 and render it as "love believes all things."  And that could make it sound like the hallmark of genuine love is getting duped into buying the Brooklyn Bridge--as if love requires you to be fooled, bamboozled, or hoodwinked by every schemer and snake-oil salesman that comes into town.  

But that's not really what Paul is saying here.  When someone has lied to you before, love doesn't obligate you to fall for another scam on the basis of some principle that "love believes all things."  And neither does it mean that love requires us to believe nonsense or outlandish conspiracy theories.  Genuine love still believes the truth about things (as we saw already earlier this year, when we looked how "love rejoices in the truth"), so we're not talking about subscribing to nonsense about faking the moon landing or nanorobots in your flu shot or lizard people in the government or Elvis still being alive.  It's not that love believes any impossible or deceitful thing you tell it; it's that love doesn't give up on the hard work of trusting, even for all the ways that trust can be betrayed, broken, or lost.  

Paul's language here in this partial verse has the feel of saying "always" rather than being woodenly literal with "all things."  That is, the apostle is saying "love always believes," or "love is consistently trusting," rather than "Love will be duped into accepting whatever malarkey you tell it."  So, not to be too on the nose here, but maybe it really is like the Journey song: to grow in love, Paul might tell us, "Don't stop believing..."

And again, it's not just the idea of faith in some abstract concept, or belief in the power of belief (it's not like Fraulein Maria sings in The Sound of Music, "I have confidence in confidence alone...").  Trust always has an object--the something (or, for our purposes, the Someone) in whom we place our trust.   Trust holds like an anchor.  Trust is willing to do what the beloved directs us to do, even if we can't see how it will work out or don't understand why.  To love anyone well in this world requires at least some level of trust, and that's certainly true of loving God.  Because we have found God to be trustworthy in our lives--always faithful, always reliable, always coming through on what God promises--we are able to love God, and also to follow God's direction that we love others, even when we don't understand how or why sometimes.  

Maybe that's as far as we can go for one day.  We start with deepening our trust in God--not merely believing in the abstract concept of a higher being, but trusting this particular God whom we have come to know in Jesus.   When we stop and think for a moment about how God has been faithful to us, how God has been worthy of our trust, it grounds us to take the next step... and the next... in faith.  We may not always see all the way down the road, but we trust the one who walks with us, and we find that trust allows us to love, both the God who guides us, and the people whom God calls us to love as neighbors and fellow sojourners along the way.

So as we continue to look for ways we can grow in love, both toward God and toward others, let's start with simply remembering again how God has been reliable in our lives all our days, and allowing our trust in God to give us the stability to risk loving the people around us.   In other words, if you want to grow in love today, don't stop believing.

Lord God, remind us of your trustworthiness today, so that we can grow in love.