All We Need Is Love
All We Need Is Love
|
The Beatles said, “All we need is love,” and Paul may happen to agree, though he starts this passage by couching his comments in the negative. “If we don’t have love,” he says, “we are noisy, we are nothing, and we gain nothing.” Interestingly, Paul here is probably trying to dispel some spiritual myths that still linger on today. Some would say that if you speak in tongues, can prophesy, or in whatever way have a direct line to God, that would be something important and impressive. Some might say that would be a sign of God’s great favor. But Paul says, no, if you have those things but not love, you’re little more than a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. Same goes true for those who are insightful, intelligent, who have prophetic powers and faith strong enough to move mountains. We might treat those folks with great respect in our houses of worship, but Paul says, without love, they are nothing. And what about the great givers, the ones who can boast about tithing or get their name on every charitable organization’s donor list? What about the ones who martyr-like give all their time and energy to the church bazaars and sign up for every committee? Won’t their reward be great in heaven? Paul says, no, they have nothing to gain from this – unless it’s done in love. These are pretty powerful words. We attach meaning to these things ourselves, to spiritual insight, to great faith, to unconditional giving. We look to these things as signs of the true and honest life, yet Paul gives us reason to pause and reflect. These may be great things, but without love in the gift, the gift goes bad. Too bad we don’t have a way to measure that! We could see someone speaking in tongues, although it won’t likely be here on Sunday morning. We can appreciate someone who lives a life of faith and prayer. And we can look around at who’s here all the time and guess who the spectacular givers may be. But love, we can’t measure that! We can’t know if someone has in their heart a reason for committing themselves to God or to their fellow human beings. There may be a few indicators to watch out for, but overall, the love-meter can probably only be truly accurate through God’s eyes and not our own. Paul is willing to go out on a limb here though and tell us a little bit about what love is and what love isn’t. He says, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful 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. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” Scholars sometimes dispute whether this diatribe on love was written by Paul or simply echoes the community’s observations about love – perhaps an old Greek poem or something like that. I don’t think it matters all that much. What matters is that it’s still a fairly reliable list of what love is and isn’t yet today. That’s why, of all passages of scripture, it is the one most frequently chosen for weddings. For some reason couples don’t pick the “wives be subject to your husbands” text anymore. The sad reality of those few verses is that we human beings get love wrong – a lot. We get tired and forget about being patient or kind. We get good at insisting on our own way. Truth is elusive, and love in our view has been known to come to a screeching, burning crash of an ending. Famous theologians throughout the ages have tried to figure out how we can take something like love and get it so twisted up. Augustine said that our greatest sin was not loving the wrong things, but loving the right things wrongly. We know to love our families and our brothers and sisters in Christ but we try to love them “our way” instead of showing God’s love that resembles what’s best about this list. Jonathan Edwards, an American theologian, echoes this truth about our sin by saying that it is the worst human sin to take something that God made beautiful and make it ugly. (quoted in “Napkin Scribbles,” a podcast by Leonard Sweet) We take the beauty of love and try to make it suit our own purposes. Whenever we do that, love goes sour right before our eyes. It’s no dumb accident that in every legend of the genie coming out of the bottle or story like it that not even the most powerful magical beings can make someone fall in love with someone else. Scripture is clear, “Love is not insistent, or irritable, or resentful.” But human beings certainly are this way from time to time. That’s where my favorite benediction comes in. I don’t know who said it first, but wherever I picked it up, it has stuck with me like glue. The first part of the blessing is this, “May you love God so much that you love nothing else too much.” This is real. It hits home. We sometimes love – too much. As this text starts out, we can even love our faith, our beliefs, our generosity too much so that it gets in the way of our relationship with God. We all perhaps know someone who loves the Bible too much, or their own children too much, or their country too much, or their job too much, or perhaps even themselves too much. Maybe that someone is closer than we think! So we wonder…how will we know? How will we know if we’re getting it right? This passage is both a prelude and a postlude to Paul’s conversations about the Christian life that he was trying to have with this congregation, not unlike our own, in first century Corinth. Paul reminds us that we only ever really know in part. We may grow from children to adults in the faith. We may be on the path of love, but even then, our picture is not complete. A sermon on the web suggested that Calvin may have somewhere said that we can only be faithful to the Christian path 80% of the time. (Russ Wills, www.wikiletics.com) The other 20% of the time, we have wrong belief, or a lack of love, or sin that’s keeping us from doing right behavior. Someday, Paul suggests, we might know, in God’s time, certainly not our own. But there’s a hidden blessing in this lack of knowledge. Even though we don’t know, we are fully known. God knows that we really do want to point our internal Christian compasses toward love, even if we veer off several degrees here and go the wrong direction there. Paul is not ready to abandon faith and hope altogether in his list of virtues, but it’s clear where he will put his money. It’s all bet on love. Love is the greatest of these three and the greatest gift we have in our spiritual treasury. When we’re not doing well in the other areas of our spiritual lives, love will cover a multitude of sins. And when we think that we’ve attained the realm of the spiritual Dali Lamas, do a gut check for love, because without it, we’re sure to miss the point of all our spiritual exercises. Perhaps those mop-topped British theologians were right, “All we need is love.” Amen. |
