Being the church today: Love

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.  1 Corinthians 13:1-4

This is the climax of the letter, a treatise on love.  A vision for what it means to be whole and holy in relationship with each other.  A prayer written, not for two individuals getting married, but for the church.  Like Paul's metaphor on the body being interconnected and intertwined, this vision too sets the bar high.  To love in the way Paul describes and defines it here would take all our energy on our best days...even more when we wake up on the wrong side of the bed.  

But Paul was not the first to come up with this ideal of love, nor was the church or even Christ.  In the Hebrew Scriptures time and again the key characteristic of God is hesed (click here to read more).  That is important for a variety of reasons.  First, it is a counter to the oversimplified understanding that the God of the Old Testament is vengeful/full of wrath and the God of the New Testament is cuddly and (like Olaf in Frozen) likes warm hugs.  God is love.  Our Jewish brothers and sisters know that God cares about justice too.  There are times those two desires/prayers come in conflict with each other.  We know this from our own life.  A friend hurts us with words spoken hastily, do we keep loving or do we seek out reconciliation/forgiveness? The two don't have to be exclusive, but can create tension within our hearts.  God is hesed, or loving-kindness and caring.  God did not create all that is seen and unseen just because God was bored.  God wanted a living, breathing, changing relationship (although I do think God sometimes gets more than God bargained for).  That relationship is grounded and guided by love.  Always.  From both testaments.  Second, the truth that God is hesed, or loving-kindness and caring, means it is central to the way God moves in our lives and inspires our responses.

Yesterday, I went with my daughter to see the re-make of Cinderella.  The moral lesson is about being kind and loving in all we do, even in the face of mean and broken people.  At one point in the move, Cinderella, must look into the mirror and see herself...which is where Paul ends this chapter.  We all need to look into the mirror to see ourselves, to be authentically who we are.  Martin Luther, the 16th Century reformer, is famous for saying, "Here I stand, I can do no other."  It takes courage to be ourselves.  It takes courage to not hide behind masks of anger, brokenness, pain that we like to carry around like badges of honor.  It takes courage to set the stones down, and let God's hesed or loving-kindness take over.  Paul will say, "Love does not insist on its own way".  To be sure, in my family there are moments when I am in need and my need takes precedence.  But we share that... we each have needs, times we need the warmth of the loving spotlight shined on us....times we need to go and shine the light on others.  To do anything less is to be a clanging cymbal or noisy gong.  Honestly, we have enough of that in the world today.  That is what I hear in the news and endless commercials telling me I can buy my way to happiness and other noise around me.  So, I invite you to listen for the voice of God's love guiding you and grounding you this day and for countless days to come.

May we each sense more than a trace of God's grace.

Blessings