How Love Lasts--November 2, 2023
"As God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony." [Colossians 3:12-14]
It really can happen. It really is possible. In fact, it happens all the time... probably right now, right around where you are. People go on loving each other, despite the ways we get on each other's nerves, say the wrong thing, and hurt each other. Love does keep on going.
I know that can sound hopelessly naive. And to be sure, it's not a guarantee--there are lots of times when people's love for each other cracks and fractures, where it buckles and fails, where our love for one another just doesn't last. I'll be honest: just about every time I have heard those words from First Corinthians 13--"Love never ends"--read out loud in worship, some part of me winces as I look across the room at the people I know who have lived through love that ended and feel like they are being targeted as failures by the Bible because their marriage ended, or a grown child is estranged. I know that our relationships do not always last. They do sometimes end. And I know how very often those same folks who have been hurt also find ways to begin again. All of those things are true.
And yet... for all the wreckage of abandoned friendships and romantic break-ups in the world, you and I are witnesses to a two-thousand-year-old community that has persisted despite near constant arguing, messing-up, misspeaking, sinning, and getting-it-wrong. We are a part of the community called "church," which--for all our failures--continues to be bound in love, and which keeps starting over with one another. And I want to suggest, following the letter to the Colossians here, that what enables us to keep this community going is not some moral perfection where we never harm each other, but the power of love to forgive, to put others' needs before our own, and to empathize with one another rather than bailing out. What enables the Christian community to persist isn't our political power, social standing, or leverage in the culture war issue of the day; it is the way love keeps bringing us back to one another... because we are convinced that God doesn't give up on one another.
And in that sense, these words from Colossians about the practice of humility, meekness, forgiveness, and patience are utterly practical. I know all this talk of "clothing yourself in love" can sound like so much empty poetic pontificating. I know the impulse to say, "Oh, come on! It's a lovely metaphor to say we should clothe ourselves in love, but what does that actually mean?" And for anybody who has lived through the end of a relationship and didn't know any other way to save it or force it to keep going, this can all sound like a bunch of hot air from a preacher who hasn't actually had to live through the hard times (and given that the Apostle Paul, whose name is attached to this letter, was notoriously single, it is sometimes hard to hear his advice on matters of love or marriage). But the more I think about it, the more these few verses actually sound to my ears like they are borne from real life conflict and resolution, and from the long-haul work of keeping a community together.
I don't think anybody pretends that this kind of community-building is easy. It's always easier to bail out, give up, and walk away from the people we have either wronged or who have wronged us. It is always hard to resist that impulse to look out for our own interests rather than the interests of others. It is always a challenge to stifle the need to weaponize people's past actions against us, wielding old grudges like throwing knives. But without some willingness to do that--to start over, to bear the hurts without returning them, to be patient with one another--our communities fracture before our eyes. The only way a community like the church can continue beyond its first fight over the color of the new carpeting (much less some higher-stakes issue of the day) is if we are willing to take seriously that Jesus loves each person in the circle and won't let go of them... so we are going to have to find ways to stick with each other, too. In order to be the kind of community where love "never ends," a goodly number of other things will have to end: my need to be "right," my need for "control," my staying inside of my comfort zones, and my option to hold grudges. You just cannot have love that lasts AND also keep any of those other sacred cows, so I guess you pays your money, and you takes your pick.
As we watch cycles of violence spiral out of control on the news, and while we overhear polarized neighbors who won't talk to each other anymore because of their mutual loathing and past grudges, these words from Colossians are exactly what we need--even if they are hard to live. We can be the alternative to that animosity, because we can be the community that takes Jesus' love for all of us seriously enough to believe that we have to keep extending love to each other, too. And if we recognize that Jesus isn't going to let go of anybody in the circle, we will have to find ways to set aside the things that come between us... things like kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. In other words, we will be the community that dares to do what the letter to the Colossians has been calling us to do for the past two millennia.
What are the ways you and I can practice patience with someone who has been exasperating us... or the ways we can at least attempt an empathetic approach to the person we've been struggling with? Let's just admit it now: it's going to be hard work to keep up those kinds of practices and attitudes. But love is like that; it's not just sentimentality, but the willingness to do the hard work of bearing with each other and letting go of the grudges we've been holding. And we do that hard work because we have first been loved by Jesus, who just won't give up on loving us, either. That's how it's possible for us to be a community in which love never ends.
Lord Jesus, enable us to keep bearing with each other because we know your love won't let go of us.
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