No Counterfeit Loves--February 6, 2025

No Counterfeit Loves--February 6, 2025

"Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth." (1 Corinthians 13:4-6)

In the countdown to Valentine's Day, it is worth remembering that consumer culture's version of love (with heart-shaped boxes of chocolates and last-minute bouquets of roses from the grocery store) is easy.  It's the real thing--the kind of love on which the Christian community is centered--that's hard.  Over the next week or so, we'll be bombarded once again with ads, discount promos, and sales pitches for the consumer culture version of "love"--the quick purchases, the red and pink cards, the stock images of cupid babies, the chalky candy hearts, and the like.  And we'll have to decide like we do every year how much we will let ourselves be sucked into that version of what love means.

Hopefully, we'll be savvy enough to resist, and wise enough not to settle for a counterfeit.  Hopefully, we'll remember that authentic love isn't reducible to predictable displays of store-bought niceness or the momentary feeling of butterflies in your stomach, but means something more.  Hopefully we'll recommit to loving people with actions, with the willingness to put the good of others before ourselves, and with the persistence that endures even when we don't particularly "feel" like it.  In other words, hopefully we'll keep centered on the sort of love we've first encountered in Jesus, the same kind Paul writes about in these worst many of us heard this past Sunday in worship from First Corinthians.

The details might have been different when Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, but the central question is much the same: would they settle for shallow counterfeit knock-off versions of real love, or would they let themselves be re-grounded in the kind of love shown in Jesus and his people?  That's why Paul offers this beautiful (and now well-known) poetic description of what genuine love looks like.  It's a sort of litmus test to see if we have the Real McCoy.  And for Paul, genuine love is neither about flighty, fickle emotions nor about shallow, self-serving gestures.  Even more crucially, genuine love doesn't focus on its own narrow interests or the priority of its own group--because genuine love looks like Jesus.  For a first-century congregation that was fragmenting along fault lines based on which leaders they liked best and which cliques would give them most prestigious status, Paul reminded them that Christ-like love doesn't seek its own self-interest, and it doesn't need to brag or puff itself up, much less to belittle or push others down.  He called them away from just settling for baptized selfishness (and calling that "love") and called them back toward the kind of love they had heard about in Jesus--who laid down his life for the world, who put others before his own interests, and who showed mercy even to those who crucified him.  It's worth remembering that when we read the familiar words of First Corinthians: Paul wasn't writing a sentimental sonnet to be recited at weddings or printed on the inside of a Hallmark card in metallic red ink. He was describing a way of life, shared in community, through which we seek the good of others before our own interests.

That's vital for us to keep in mind today, too, because there are still plenty of cheap imitation versions of "love" being marketed out there like costume jewelry, and the New Testament keeps warning us not to fall for any of them. There are loud voices peddling some foolish notion that Christian love prioritizes our "in-group" members first, moving from family to community to country, in ever decreasing potency, until finally outsiders get the scraps and the dregs.  There are popular talking heads trying to sell the idea that we have to "look out for our own first" and wanting to say that's what Paul really meant when he described Christian love.  And of course, all of it flies in the face of what the apostle actually says here--that love DOES NOT seek its own interests.  After all, Jesus didn't seek the interests of himself or his own group first, but rather he emptied himself all the way to a cross for the sake of the whole world.  And because Jesus' kind of love wasn't just for "Me and My Group First," our love will also be oriented outward to include not just family and friends, but neighbors, strangers, outsiders, and enemies.  When we fall for the popular (but still very wrong) notion that love should prioritize "my group first" and cut off compassion to outsiders in the name of protecting my own interests, Paul reminds us that we're settling for a counterfeit.  That's not real love, because that's not how Jesus has loved us first.

Like I say, the details may have shifted, but the temptation is still the same.  In the First Church of Corinth to whom Paul was first writing, it was the factions of "Cephas" and "Apollos" and "Paul" who were all vying with each other for Number One status.  In our day, we splinter into groups based on our nationality, our skin color, our denomination, or our political party.  But the underlying mindset--to look out for my group first at the expense of outsiders, and to call that "love"--is the same rotten thinking that Paul called out twenty centuries ago.  That's why he wrote these words--he is offering us an alternative to the fake and phony knock-off versions of love we've been sold too many times before.

Today, then, our calling is to learn to say "No!" to the frauds and "Yes!" to the authentic love of Jesus, even when that pushes us outside our comfort zones.  Christ-like love will do that, because Christ-like love calls us beyond our own self-interest.  But of course, Paul is convinced that Christ-like love is worth that kind of commitment, even if it means unlearning our old mindset and being stretched into a new one, because it brings us more deeply into Jesus' own life.  I believe him.

In this day, let's commit not to settle for any counterfeits, and insist on the authentic self-giving love that comes from Jesus.  Anything else is just sparkling selfishness.

Lord Jesus, pull us into your kind of love when we fall away and settle for less. Enable us to love like you.