God’s Love Frees Us to Love
Easter 6 – May 17, 2020
1 Corinthians 13 familiar to many, if not most, people – even people who have little to do with church or the Bible
· Famous for its use as a reading at weddings
· A beautiful, eloquent poem about the amazing-ness of love lived out
· A great description of love shared – what better reading to have as 2 people are beginning their lives as a married couple?
But Paul was not writing about love to a couple in the throes of young, romantic love
· Was writing to a whole faith community, the church in the Greek city of Corinth
And far from being a community bound in love, they were fractured and divided
· This church was on the verge of divorce – in desperate need of relationship counseling!!
· Talked about that a bit last week – so many conflicts in this young, diverse church, where there were rich and poor, slave and free, men and women, people of Jewish and Gentile backgrounds; differences across the board
· In chapter 1 of this letter, Paul had reminded them that God had poured out grace upon them, enriching them in speech and knowledge; that they were not lacking in any spiritual gift
· And here they are, a people in conflict – abusing their freedoms, refusing to share, scorning their neighbor’s spiritual gifts and bragging about their own – and on and on
And so we have this beautiful description of love – a reminder that it doesn’t matter how gifted or talented or amazing they are; if they aren’t living in love, Paul says, then all of it is nothing
· Though they have all they need to be the community God has called them to be and to reach out to the world around them when they use their gifts together, they are falling apart, crashing into one another in their competition to be the best, the greatest, the most important and valued
We are fractured and divided in our time too
· Paul’s call in this letter is for followers of Jesus to love above all else
o Love spouses or partners
o Love children and parents
o Love siblings and extended family
o Love pretty much every person we encounter (and those we never will meet!)
· Call to love is the central theme of God to God’s people – both in the Hebrew scriptures and in the words of Jesus (Mark 12:28-31 – Love God with all you are, and love your neighbor as yourself – the greatest commands)
o Love not as a feeling, but as an action – a deliberate choosing of relationship with the other over selfishness
o And yet we are so often divorced from one another
§ If we don’t have this damage in our close/family relationships, look at the world around us
§ Don’t listen to one another, don’t see or try to understand another POV, We judge one another, resent others, boast, envy, allow our irritation to spill over, cling to our own version of the truth, taking up our positions and refusing to budge
o We become noisy gongs and clanging cymbals, not playing in concert with others, but seeking to drown one another out
· We fail to live into this grand vision of love
Make no mistake – Paul has set the bar high when it comes to the topic of love and what it looks like to live that out
· When I preach this at weddings (which I often have), I often point out that there are clearly times when we fail – we are often impatient and unkind; we do get envious and boastful and arrogant and rude; We do insist on our own way and get irritable and resentful
· And maybe we don’t rejoice in wrongdoing, but we’ve certainly been known to say (or think!), “I told you so!”
We will inevitably fail when we try to live out this kind of active love
· Paul does not describe a warm and fuzzy kind of love, but a fierce, dedicated, hard-working love that chooses over and over and over again to work it out, to work it through
But the good news is that even though we cannot love in this way completely quite yet, one day we will
· Because we are already loved in this way by the God who created us, who came to be one of us, who lived and died and rose again for us
· The love the Paul describes, the love that Paul calls us to live out toward one another – that is a love that we have already received from God in Jesus
· It is unshakable. It is never-ending
· Though God knows us completely, with all of our faults and failings, God loves us with a love more powerful than death!
· Knowing that we are already loved in this way: fully, completely, with no reservation – we are freed to love one another, to be agents of God’s love in a hurting, sometimes-hard-to-love world, seeking not our own way, but God’s way so that we may be part of God’s mission to love, bless, and redeem the whole world
· May this love overflow from our lives into our relationships and the world around us so that they too may know how much they are loved.
· Thanks be to God. Amen.
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