Full Circle--December 1, 2023

Full Circle--December 1, 2023

"For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love." [1 Corinthians 13:12-13]

So now we've come full circle.  And it will not surprise you, I suspect, that the place we come back to, the place from which this year's devotional journey began, is love.  This year's exploration of what it means to "love in all directions" grew out of a month-by-month focus on each of the descriptions Paul gives of Christ-like love here in First Corinthians, going all the way back to "love is patient..." way back at last Advent, and working our way through the whole poem we call Chapter Thirteen of First Corinthians.  We've started with love, and we end with love, because--well, because that's how our whole life of faith as God's people works.  

We had to begin with love because, as we've seen over this year, our very existence comes to us as a gift we did not earn.  Creation is here, and us with it, because God loved us into being, to borrow the phrasing of Mr. Rogers.  We are here, not by our own achievement, and not by our own brute strength or cleverness, but because God decided the party wouldn't be complete without us, and the nature of love is to flow from the Lover to the Beloved--even if God has to invent the ones who will be loved in order for that to happen. So of course, we start with love as the gift of God.

And just as obviously, we come back to love as the goal of our existence.  For one thing, that's because we are made for relationship with God, and at the last, that's exactly where God will bring us--back into perfect relationship, despite all our ways of messing it up.  But love is the destination of this journey also because, as Paul says it, love is one of the very few things that really lasts.  "Faith, hope, and love abide, these three," the apostle says, and with that dismisses all the claims of empires and governments to last forever, all our attempts to make our legacies endure with marble monuments and enormous endowment funds, and all the possessions we spend our time and sweat trying to accumulate in our years, only to have them rust, crumble, break down, wear out, or go out of style.  The clothes you were certain would make you cool back in high school are no longer in your closet.  The technology they told you would permanently maximize your efficiency stopped working three updates ago. Scientists tell us that even the sun won't last forever!  But even after both our stuff and the solar system finally wears out, Paul tells us that love will still abide.  When our belongings bite the dust, God remains, and God insists on holding onto us forever, so that the love between Creator and creatures will continue as well.

Now, when Paul says the greatest of those Big Three (faith, hope and love) is love, he's not trying to insult or denigrate faith or hope.  But by definition, faith and hope both point toward a future you can't yet see, or a reality that you have to take on trust.  But at the last, when all that we have hoped for has come true, and when the One we have believed in is finally seen, faith and hope will change.  They will be realized, like a journey is over when you reach the destination you have been walking toward.  But love doesn't stop being love, no matter how far into the future or how long we are in relationship with God.  Like the last verse of Amazing Grace says it, "When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we'd first begun."  Love keeps going, even when everything else reaches its conclusion.

So where do we go from here?  Well, if this year together (however much of it you have been on with me here in 2023) has had anything to offer, I hope it's been clear that love isn't something you can master and exhaust like learning your times tables or memorizing Shakespeare.  Love is our way of life now, in addition to being both our beginning and our destination.  What we do today, and tomorrow, and the third day, too, is keep finding ways to grow more deeply in loving other people and God.  We will continue to love by being patient and kind; we will continue to leave resentments and arrogance behind.  We will keep striving not to demand our own way and rejoicing in the truth.  We will keep bearing, hoping, and enduring.  In all of it, we will find ourselves more fully alive the more Christ's kind of love shapes us. And in the end, we will not feel we have missed out on "the good life" by daring to live in such love; we'll discover we have lived most authentically and deeply because of it.

Come Monday, we'll be starting a whole new year's worth of devotions, heading in a new direction with a new focus.  But that doesn't mean we're done with love--only that we'll each keep discovering and daring a million different ways to embody it, and we'll keep meeting Jesus along the way as we do.

Like the line of T. S. Eliot puts it, "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."  We end where we began. We will be brought back home to the Love that first brought us into being as a gift of sheer grace.  And every step of the way, Love himself walks on wounded feet beside us.

Amen and amen.

Lord Jesus, keep walking with us in the way of love, and lead us home to love at the last.