First Corinthians 13 may be my favorite passage in the whole Bible. By Monday I had the beginnings of three good sermons that stretched out 12 pages, one had a great funny opening story. None of them seemed adequate for our national moment that Bishop Tracy S. Malone, President – Council of Bishops of The United Methodist Church named as “Deplorably, racist, xenophobic, nationalistic, and anti-migrant. In such moments, we may hesitate to talk about love because love feels like a weak resignation to hate.  

Maybe love feels weak because we confuse love with romance, preference , affections or likeability. Doctor King described likeability as “emotional bosh” in the face of evil. God’s love is strong. Love bears, believes, hopes all things, and endures all things. Love can fight its way through terrible times. Love never ends.

Hate has no holding power like that of Love. Hate burns a hole in your soul if you hold it too long. Anger does not paint a masterpiece or write a symphony. Revenge does not plant a garden. Racism does not heal old wounds. Homophobia and xenophobia never open blind eyes. Hate never releases our spirits to soar. No one has ever said, “hey come meet this hateful person you are going to love them.”  Few of us want to talk to even an angry person. Hate may bind people together in misery, but hate offers no hope, no future, no solutions. Hate deepens fears and hardens hearts leading to our physical and spiritual death.  

Hate and anger are not the same thing. Hate might be anger that has come to rule our hearts.  Jesus grew angry. (Mark 3) Anger is not all bad, it can move us to action, but unmanaged anger harms our health from insomnia, hypertension to stroke. (Anger – how it affects people – Better Health Channel)  I watched again The Childish Gambino’s video “This Is America.” It is a jarring 4 minute masterpiece of juxtaposing American violence and racism with dancing. It is troubling and won a Grammy.   Danny Glover wrote it, maybe in anger, after Parkland, but it does not celebrate violence- it exposes evil. Evil must be acknowledged before we can resist it. 

I think we know that hate is not the-good-life even when hate seems to be thriving, but choosing Love can be as appealing as an old kitchen sponge. We misunderstand Christian love thinking it means we go around cleaning up other people’s messes.  Someone says or does harm and we repress our voices and soak the harm up carrying it for a season. Like Ned Flanders we chirp “Hi-diddly-ho, neighborino you didn’t mean that” excusing the harm and absorbing their mess into our souls. Many progressive Christians feel it’s our personal responsibility to bring justice and peace to the whole world. Even the responsibility of healing our own family is too much for any one of us to soak up. In Seminary one of my professors said “Paul there is only one savior and our savior’s name is not Paul Purdue”. Love is not a sponge to soak up and hold injustice and evil.  

One Sunday in church Jesus looked around and said, “you have taken this place that should be a place of prayer for all nations and made it a den of robbers enriching yourselves on the back of the poor”. (Mark 11)  Jesus’ rebuke is more pressure washer, shift brush and bleach than accommodating sponge. Doctor Cornel West, the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary said “unarmed truth and unapologetic love go hand in hand. The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak and justice is what love looks like in public.”  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGqP7S_WO6o)   

But people who are loving, kind, patient, and do not insist upon their own way tend to collect and hold a lot of the world’s harm and hurt, being unsure what to do with it. We need to wring that stuff out!  Christian community does this better than anything, as we engage in spiritual conversations, confess our failing, worship our God of Love, share tears, and lift up heartfelt prayers. Galatians 6:2 invites us to “Carry each other’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.”  A community of love and forgiveness helps us lay down our burdens and find our collective voice. Wesley called this watching over one another in love.  

I love how  Paul, who wrote this amazing Ode to Love, recounts in Galatians 2 how he opposed Peter, the resident bishop, “to Peter’s face because he stood self-condemned” . Peter had welcomed gentile Christians but when the traditionalist got mad, Peter backed off. Paul’s bragging about opposing Peter may not be Paul’s most inspired writing, but it reminds us of the complexity of Love.  

Our baptism calls us into complex and seemingly contradictory values: “resisting  evil, injustice and oppression” and “building a community of love and forgiveness”.  Resistance and forgiveness feel like very different forces, but they are not. Forgiveness is not about acquiescence or acceptance of evil and resistance is not about the destruction of enemies. Love is complex. I have seen people prayerfully working on the inner work of forgiveness while filing a restraining order against their abuser. Romans 12 says to not return evil or evil, ugliness for ugliness, but to overcome evil with good and leave some space for God’s judgment. The goal of our resistance to evil, injustice and oppression is the establishment of goodness, justice and equality.  The goal of forgiveness is wholeness, peace, and transformation. These are not opposed. 

Paul knew something about watching over his own soul in Love. Paul was arrested and rejected a lot and opens the chapter with words about care for one’s soul. The passage is very personal, very first person:  “If I speak like an angel but do not have love, I am a noisy gong.”  My sermon might inspire you. Your grooves might fill a dance floor with joy. Your touchdown may fill a stadium with jubilation. And yet the preacher, the artist or the performer may feel hollow inside. Love is a deep rejoicing in the truth of our belovedness: the very image of God within us all. I preached for a lot of years worrying about what you Methodists might think. That 3pm critical email could wipe out a week of hard work. I’d soak in that criticism feeding my inner critic. I’m trying to learn to live and preach without expectation of reward, to just open the Scriptures up, so that someone might find something holy, loving and good. (Luke 6)  Yes, pursue excellence. Yes, work hard. Yes, hone your craft- yes do your best to present yourself as a worker who accurately handles the word of God. ( 2 Timothy 2) Yes write letters, yes carry signs, yes keep organizing, but after you have done what you can release that work to God as a gift to yourself, your neighbors and God. In Matthew 10 Christ promises that even one cup of water given in the name of love never loses its reward.

So if you or I have prophetic powers, understand all mysteries, hold all knowledge and if we have all faith to move mountains but do not have love, we are nothing.  Paul, a pastor, is describing the perfect pastor here, dazzling preaching, understands the Trinity, can explain the book of Revelation and can mobilize the church to miraculous heights.  And surely knowledge, preaching, and faith deeply matters but if our inner lives are not  grounded in love,  we will slip into nothingness.  

Paul’s third point is that if I give away all my possessions to the poor, hand over my body like a martyr, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Paul is not saying that the poor will not benefit from my generosity or the college I found will never cure cancer. Paul is whispering to our inner person that Love is what gives life meaning. Love is the deep release that allows us to live into the beloved children God created us to be.  When we know love, when we know we are loved, then “the Complete can come” all the partial things can fall into proper perspective. 

Chapter 14, the next chapter, opens with a simple command: pursue love.  All God is asking us to do is pursue love. That is the best we can ever do.  If we do that, if we pursue love ,then whether we move mountains or understand all mysteries or speak like Dr King, or just give some folks clean water, we have done something that endures forever. Stick to love. ”Now faith, hope and love remain these three, but the greatest of these is love”. Stick to Love.  “Pursue Love”. Amen