I set up this blog before I became a pastor. I would write a sermon every week, just because. A friend said I should do something with them "even if it's just parking them in a blog somewhere" so I did that. Then I became a pastor and was actually delivering sermons and I would post them here. Then I became immersed in running the Parktown Food Hub and preaching wasn't as big of a deal and I quit posting the sermons.
But now I have retired from the Parktown Food Hub, and although I still preach occasionally it seems like a good time to be sharing more broadly, and maybe more often. So I'm s
tarting off February with the message I gave to my friends at Springmoor Retirement Village on Sunday, February 2, 2025. The text is 1 Corinthians 13 (aka The Love Chapter).
And here is the word map, to give you a preview of what words are used a lot (the bigger ones in the picture).
When delivering this in person I started by singing the chorus of this song by The Beatles, and went from there.
All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
I was at an exercise class on Friday morning and we did our thing to this song and I thought… oh… wait… that’s what I believe. My bottom-line theology is that God is enough and so love is enough. All we need is God, and therefore all we need is love.
Since then I have pondered how The Beatles – a boy band that was insanely and wildly popular and wrote and performed some excellent music – could write a song that names my theology so succinctly.
I don’t think they meant to do that, but here we are.
As I pondered I remembered a time, about 30 years ago now (doesn’t time fly?) when I was living alone in an apartment in Pittsburgh, PA, my first time away from home in central Texas. I was reading devotional booklets and library books and taking classes and doing whatever I could to figure out who I was and who I would be. It was a time of tremendous change and formation and opening me up to new ideas.
One day the devotional I read, in a booklet called Portals of Prayer, said that somebody or other had once said that if you read 1 Corinthians 13 every day for 30 days your life would be changed completely.
That sounds like an awfully simple way to change – just read a few words every day? - but I was also searching SO HARD for whomever it was that I needed to be, and I lived alone, and I was a student but also had a lot of schedule flexibility, so I tried it.
Every day for one month I read 1 Corinthians 13, the passage I read to you today. I paid special attention and took the time each day to NOTICE what I was reading. I decided that if I was going to read it every day then I would pay attention to it every day. I didn’t just skim the words or read them by rote.
I was so very, very ready to be changed forever!
And at the end of 30 days, well, I don’t know. I examined what I could see of my life and wondered… had I changed? I somehow realized that I didn’t exactly know who I was, or who I would become, so how was I supposed to know if I had changed?
Looking back and noticing the circumstances of my life today, though, I’m pretty sure I had indeed changed. There is something about reading this description of love that settled into me. Something that took root.
And now here I am, daily taking every chance I can to tell people – including you, my beloved friends here at Springmoor - that God loves you and that our best response to that love is to love one another. That God *IS* love and that Jesus came to earth – God in the body of a fully human being – and showed us what it was like to be human beings living according to how we were created to be. What it was like to live whole lives, death-defeating lives, lives that would never end because death is only for those who do not love perfectly.
Of course, no living person has ever been able to love perfectly except for Jesus. That’s what Jesus did. He always loved, always loved perfectly, and as a result, death could not hold onto him. He died like a human being, yes, but it turns out the death couldn’t stick because he had been SO human, so whole, that he never ceased to love.
So if all we need is God, and God is love, then all we need is love and The Beatles got it right, whether they knew it or not.
Kind of mind-blowing at first glance. But then…. What if that is how God’s love is?
Churches and church services are lovely places to go be in community and hear Scripture and learn more about God from people who have taken the time and energy to study those Scriptures.
But WHAT IF God’s love is independent of that study? What if we are born to know, and somehow we can all figure out that what we need is love, even without a church or a pastor? That we can, even if we don’t, or we take a maddeningly long time?
WHAT IF the point is not to arrange things so we keep living some kind of life after death does take us, but the point is to love each other so much right now that the pain and sorrow of this life are pushed aside and we are all freed to truly LIVE. To live into the wholeness for which we were created. To live lives now. To help all people live good lives now. To do the opposite of ignoring or discounting some people so we can take resources that don’t actually make life better anyway? Money and power are not the same as loving and living with each other and everything I read in Scripture is that we were created to live together and love each other. Even the Ten Commandments, so often used as a source of punishment, fundamentally show up how to best live in love with one another.
What if the point is to love each other now so that sin does not hold sway, so that when we do die we can die knowing we have loved and been loved, and can recognize the love that is God, and be in that love forever?
We are in a time when saying “all you need is love” seems very naïve and silly. We are in a time when cruelty is held up as somehow necessary, and anyone who does not look or act or think like that small group of men is obviously deficient. We live in a time when it is not only ok but financially profitable to lie and deny obvious facts and connections and accumulate power by destroying those who would protest.
We live in a time when the response to that cruelty and greed is often violence. When our first response to the harm being done is “why don’t they get punished? Put them in jail! Kill them! Punish, punish, punish.”
We live in a time when we as people of the United States (but not just US citizens – it’s happening in other parts of the world too) have been convinced that someone else should solve the problems, that the most important thing is money and financial wealth (and, buried somewhere in there, power… but only a few can actually attain that power), and that there isn’t anything we can do to stop the horrors, the disasters, the cruelty, the abuse of public power and disregard for the systems that have been developed over the last few hundred years. People say “how can the richest country in the world be so mean to its citizens?” and I say “how can the richest country in the world be anything else?” We got this way by privileging money over all things, including humanity, and here we are.
But that emphasis on money and power and punishment (even punishment of those who have caused harm) is not what God has given us to do and no human being is called to wield the power that belongs only to God. I am most definitely saying that those who cause harm should be left unchecked, but I am saying that our current focus on punishment rather than, well, anything else, is not at all in line with who God is.
Please hear me… regardless of what some people would have us believe – MONEY AND PUNISHMENT AND THE POWER ASSOCIATED WITH THEM ARE NOT OF GOD.
Because God is love.
And as God’s creations, we are called to follow that example – the example set by Jesus when he came and showed us that it is actually possible to love during times when some people are treated badly, to give love so that power, such as it is, can be spread more or less equally across all people, not concentrated in a very few.
We are called to love each other, to recognize our own foibles and brokenness and in so doing, to show compassion and grace for the foibles and brokenness of others. We are called to care for each other, especially for those who are harmed but also for those who are causing harm in creative and individual ways. We are called to shine God’s light on each other so that the darkness of evil is cast aside and hearts are made new.
I could talk on and on and on about love and some of you may even think that’s what I do. That I’m always talking about love and never about how we are supposed to call one another out. But when God says “vengeance is mine, I will repay” I think God is saying “I’ll take care of the punishing, you just carry the healing love to everywhere your hands can reach.” Everything we are called to do is to begin and end with love, to be literally soaked in love.
But loving is a tricky business. We are tempted to try to decide who DESERVES love, especially given how soaked we are in this culture of money and power and punishment and hierarchy. Loving is not some kind of rule. Love depends on the person being loved. A particular behavior may be loving to one person but not to another. That is why I admire my old friend 1 Corinthians 13 so much. It explains how to tell if something is love or if it is not love, not as a list of rules, but as a set of characteristics: what love is and what it is not.
When The Beatles say “All you need is love!” just what does that mean?
Paul, who started out as that lover of power and punishment called Saul; Paul who was knocked off his horse and shown in a flash what the truth is, tells us:
· Love is not being the loudest, winning arguments by shouting over all other messages
· Love is not knowing everything and being able to do huge things by sheer determination
· Love is not martyrdom or being a hermit, it happens in community
· What Love is, you see, is
o Patient
o Kind
o Humble, not jealous or boasting or arrogant or rude.
· Love
o does not insist on its own way, get angry, and threaten to harm or punish those who disagree
o does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.
· Love
o bears all things – including ridicule
o believes what people speak from their hearts
o hopes all things,
o endures all things instead of prioritizing only ourselves
· Love never ends. Everything else ends – everything else dies – but love does not die. Our proof is that Jesus, who only ever loved, was not held by death.
And so it is in love that we also defeat death and all the things that bring so many kinds of death to so many people. Cruelty to people whose skin is not white, mistreatment of women, harassing people who are loving in ways that the situation calls for but that might not meet some money-and-power-driven idea of how things should be.
Paul acknowledges that we won’t get it right. After all, no human being is God. But we can know God. We can catch glimpses. We can see what is going on, kind of like when you stand in front of a big store window or car window and see enough of your reflection to know if your hair is a mess or there is tomato sauce or chocolate on your face. We can definitely see the difference between loving and not loving. I think that’s one of the things that reading the passage for 30 days did… it somehow internalized what love is and what love is not. What a tremendous gift that has been!
Regardless of what we can know or not, regardless of how our knowledge changes and we learn new things, regardless of how scientific understanding and fashion and worldviews change, there are three things that will last, three things that will sustain us:
· Faith
· Hope
· Love
And the greatest of these is love.
Amen
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