Why Am I Doing that?!?

 

If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere.

 

Paul continues with the extreme examples of what our ego demands and decrees we do to be seen as amazing.  Yesterday, he said you could make a mountain jump, but without love, the action is empty.  You could walk on water, but if that is led/fed/fueled by a desire to be famous, then it is your ego that grows, not our capacity to love.  Today, he says, even if you give all your money away to the poor ~ which means you would be poor.  Even if you die, gulp ~ that got dark real quick ~, but if this is done for you to be revered, then we are stuck and stymied in the human realm.  We see all around us examples of Paul’s words.  We see billionaires wanting more money and giving away very little.  We see people hurting and harming others just for the sake of having the most clicks on social media, and our society is regressing.  We see a world where love can be curated with an AI-generated bot online, because human love is messy and hurtful and will ask our whole lives.  Today, where do you see human beings trying to feed their egos and not the common good?  Love is not sentimental or soft; love is more powerful than fame, fortune, and followers, but the gospel according to the World doesn’t preach that truth. 

 

Rewind and reflect on your past year. When did you do something out of love for another?  Maybe anonymously?   Maybe you opened your heart as wide as you could, prayed that would be enough, and by the grace of God, it was.  Not by my will, not by my planning, not because I had a fantastic strategic plan where my matrix was established and I hustled to get ahead.  In times of conflict, Paul is inviting us to be awake and aware of God’s movement in our lives.  We are invited to ask the hard and holy question: why am I doing what I am doing?  I pray that question stirs and swirls in your soul.  I pray you take that question with you today, let it interrupt you inconveniently, especially at a meeting or when responding to someone who pushes your buttons.  Let the question, why am I doing what I am doing, let that question interrupt you the way the Wise One’s question disrupted people thousands of years ago.   And may that question clear out the chaos and clutter of life for God to enter into that manger-shaped place you prepared and rediscovered at Christmas just a few weeks ago. Amen.  

Let Love Shift Your Soul

 

If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.

 

Paul is using exaggeration or extreme hyperbole, just like last week when we commented that we could understand “all mysteries”.  He is saying, even if you wear a Super Spiritual Superhero and Super-shero cape (which I wonder what color that cape would be?  Maybe chartreuse, just because that is fun to say).  Even if you could perform miracles that mystify the minds of people, even if you could cause world peace to happen in the blink of an eye as everyone joined hands to sing "Kumbaya," even if everyone thought you walked on water.  Paul proclaims you’ve missed the point.  You are not here for fame and fortune and followers on social.  If what I do/say/and how I show up is not fueled by love, then my efforts may fall short of releasing heaven from my soul.  Please note that the love Paul is describing here flows not from humans but flows first from God.  The love we need to feed and fuel our whole lives is a pure gift (unearned and undeserved) from God.  Paul is inviting people who are at each other’s throats to think about what is motivating and moving within them and between them.  Which is a good question for us: what is motivating you today?  Is it a divine love that needs to be let loose in the world?  Or is it the desire for respect and to be revered?  Is it to score points on an imaginary scoreboard of life?  What motivates us is complicated and contradictory, because we can say and even believe that we are moved by love, but really our ego is wearing a mask that wants our friends to admire and for us to feel like we achieved something. 

 

Paul is also being sarcastic here…because you and I know that we can’t know ALL mystery and make EVERYONE comprehend our point of view.  I have never moved a mountain or a rock or a pebble or a speck of dust.  I have never changed another with a sermon.  But I do believe, like a river slowly shaping a stone with its slow flow, love does change us.  I have been married to my best friend for 25 years now; her love has changed me.  I have served our church for 11 years, your love has changed me.  I have friends whose words spoken in love cause my shy soul to shift, not in spectacular or splashy ways, but slowly.  This is what Paul is saying.  You can aspire for great things and step on people to get to the top, or you can let great love (God’s love) guide you and ground you every day.  That is the invitation that challenges and changes us when we let it.  I pray today you fold up the chartreuse cape and be who God creates you to be ~ ordinary, beautiful, and especially loved.  Amen.  

Getting Heaven out of Your Soul

 

We continue to dwell on the words Paul wrote to Corinth, a church that was in the middle of a conflict.   It was a fierce and ferocious family fight.  Imagine a moment where people were bickering, belittling, boasting, and blaming.  Imagine people who wanted to rate and rank everything and everyone.  Imagine people who made The Real Housewives arguments look tame and lame in comparison.  Imagine the moments in your family when someone said something that hurt and harmed you.  Imagine the moments with friends when you could hear the sound of a rip and rupture as the friendship ended.  That is what and who Paul wrote to (not a wedding couple).  Paul still writes to ~ you and me and we today who still resemble this fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flock overload of our brains in response to the world today.  As we explored in the wilderness with Jesus yesterday, we are having a devil of a time.  So breathe and be.  Breathe and remember that humans have both the capacity to care and conflict.  Breathe and know that something in our mental hardwiring can have a short that sets ablaze all the normalcy we thought was stable and now feels like sinking sand.  Hold the headlines in your heartline and read these words from 1 Corinthians 13:

 

 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.  If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.  If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.  We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

 

Was there a word that leaped from the page/screen into your soul today?  Was there a sentence that your shy soul exclaimed, “Tell me more”.  Meditate, ruminate, and dance with these words, letting them weave their wisdom in living God’s realm today.  Into the invitation of faith to not just get our souls into heaven, but get heaven out of our souls into the world.  So let the love of God feed and fuel your life this new year, this first month of 2026, and especially this day.  Amen.

The Wayless Way of Love

 

Please pray with me these profound and powerful words of Thomas Merton:

My Lord God,

I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,

and the fact that I think I am following your will

does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you

does in fact please you.

And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,

though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always though

I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. 

I will not fear, for you are ever with me,

and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Amen.

The Mystery of the Love Ethic

 

What if I have the gift of prophecy, am blessed with knowledge and insight to all the mysteries. 1 Corinthians 13:2

 

When we race and run through reading Scripture, we sometimes miss the subtle and subversive.  Take the sentence above.  There is one word that sticks out like a sore thumb ~ all.  I remember growing up, my grandmother cautioned me not to be a “Know-it-all”.  Don’t miss Paul’s jab here at thinking we can have “insight to all mysteries”.  We don’t know it all.  In fact, many people have said, “It seems the older I get, the less I know.”  Or with every birthday candle on my cake, the I realize there is more mystery to life than I will ever explore, experience, or exhaust.  This doesn’t mean I know nothing, but it does mean I continually question what I know, how I know it, and what bias might be dripping from my conclusions.  Brian McLaren points out a few ways we can be tripped up by and trapped by our own thinking:

Confirmation Bias: We judge new ideas based on the ease with which they fit in with and confirm the only standard we have: old ideas, old information, and trusted authorities. As a result, our framing story, belief system, or paradigm excludes whatever doesn’t fit. 

Complexity Bias: Our brains prefer a simple falsehood to a complex truth. 

Comfort or Complacency Bias: I prefer not to have my comfort disturbed. 

Confidence Bias: I am attracted to confidence, even if it is false. I often prefer the bold lie to the hesitant truth. 

Where do you and I find ourselves falling into one of these biases?  Is there a time we think we understand everything exactly as it is?  Or do we see how we want things to be?  I pray today you would notice where you are convinced, confident, comfortable, and shying away from the beautiful complexity and contradictions of God born in a barn.  May you and I learn to be open to the mystery of the Holy that moves and creates in ways we may never fully understand.  Amen.

Ethic of Love

 

What if I speak in the most elegant languages of people or in the exotic languages of the heavenly messengers, but I live without love? Well then, anything I say is like the clanging of brass or a crashing cymbal. 1 Corinthians 13:1

 

Where do people today sound like clanging brass or crashing cymbals?  My first response is, “National, state, and local leaders!!”  My second response is, “Christians who preach hate, putting down beloved of God to push themselves/egos up!”  My third response, from my shy soul, is to softly say, “Um, sometimes me.”  Pastors sometimes love the sound of our own voices.  We love to wax poetic and go on and on ~ not only in sermons, but some pastors even post daily to a morning meditation online ~ can you imagine such a thing!  (Insert my face turning red with embarrassment here).  I can be a clanging brass and crashing cymbal, only I think I am playing beautiful music everyone should hear!

 

Remember, Paul is writing to a church, a community who were fighting and feuding about everything!  They were putting each other down, saying hurtful and hateful things.  There were factions in the church in Corinth.  Some elegantly said that Paul did the best baptism, while others said passionately that such a perspective was “Hogwash!”  Paul was shining a light on the behavior of people who thought they could convince each other through words and logic.  And two thousand years later, we are still stuck and stymied by the same mistake.  I invite you to meditate on this quote from Edwin Friedman: “The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. If you want your child, spouse, client, or boss to shape up, stay connected while changing yourself rather than trying to fix them.” 

 

To stay connected is to love, which will demand much of us.  May these words of Paul roam around your heart and inspire your living/speaking/words/presence this day and every day this year.  Amen.  

Ethic of Love

 

We are beginning the month of January by focusing on Paul’s words to the church, not a couple in love, but how the body of Christ is called to be in the world.  Today, I invite you to re-read 1 Corinthians 13 using Lectio Divina ~ or Divine Reading.  To review this prayer practice as described by Brian McLaren. “The first step is Lectio, where you read, which really means you deeply listen to the text, you try to take it in, you just try to let the text reach you. Second, is Meditatio. That's where we meditate, or we have an internal conversation. Respond to the text, ask questions about what you’ve read and imagine the response, summarize the text in one word or one short, succinct sentence. Third comes Aratio, which simply means prayer.  In this step, we turn our words and express ourselves to God in a conversation with God. In step three, we want to see what is evoked and provoked in us that speaks to the sacredness of desire. Step three is to name the desires that shape us from the scripture, shining a light on our lives. What do you desire after hearing this passage? And then you end with Contemplatio, which simply means contemplation to sit or rest in silence, sense marinate in what we have read and meditated upon.”  Today, move slowly through the above steps with this passage from 1 Corinthians 13:

 

What if I speak in the most elegant languages of people or in the exotic languages of the heavenly messengers, but I live without love? Well then, anything I say is like the clanging of brass or a crashing cymbal. What if I have the gift of prophecy, am blessed with knowledge and insight to all the mysteries, or what if my faith is strong enough to scoop a mountain from its bedrock, yet I live without love? If so, I am nothing. I could give all that I have to feed the poor, I could surrender my body to be burned as a martyr, but if I do not live in love, I gain nothing by my selfless acts.

Love is patient; love is kind. Love isn’t envious, doesn’t boast, brag, or strut about. There’s no arrogance in love; it’s never rude, crude, or indecent—it’s not self-absorbed. Love isn’t easily upset. Love doesn’t tally wrongs or celebrate injustice; but truth—yes, truth—is love’s delight! Love puts up with anything and everything that comes along; it trusts, hopes, and endures no matter what. Love will never become obsolete. Now as for the prophetic gifts, they will not last; unknown languages will become silent, and the gift of knowledge will no longer be needed. Gifts of knowledge and prophecy are partial at best, at least for now, but when the perfection and fullness of God’s kingdom arrive, all the parts will end. When I was a child, I spoke, thought, and reasoned in childlike ways as we all do. But when I became a man, I left my childish ways behind. For now, we can only see a dim and blurry picture of things, as when we stare into polished metal. I realize that everything I know is only part of the big picture. But one day, when Jesus arrives, we will see clearly, face-to-face. In that day, I will fully know just as I have been wholly known by God. But now faith, hope, and love remain; these three virtues must characterize our lives. The greatest of these is love.

 

What was stirred, swirled, and spinning in your heart/mind/body/soul with these words?  What prayers did you pray during Aratio ~ I know I prayed, “Help!!!!” because I am not sure I can live this way on my own.  I think that is Paul’s point.  If left to our own scheming and dreaming, our humanness doesn’t naturally go this way.  But when we are inspired and invited by God, something shifts within us, and space opens for these words to sing to our soul.  Write down your thoughtful intentions and prayerful reflections on this passage as we continue to make the road by walking into this New Year.  Amen.