Love Broken

Do you want to be happy or do you want to be right?

These are words that a common phrase within the realm of 12 step therapeutic communities.

The point is this: sometimes in our quest to prove our point, to be right, to win an argument, we are actually creating our own misery. We are likely making those around us miserable as well.

We live in a society where the sin of certainty is prevalent. And we, as followers of Jesus, have not escaped such a fate. Christianity is such a diverse community that we have split off into many different expressions, almost all based on arguments over who believed the right things.

And honestly what often separates the Church universal from the rest of the world is not what we believe, but rather the way that we live out our beliefs in the world.

We are going to embark on a journey of discovery over this season of Lent. That journey is going to take us through the historic and foundational “Apostles’ Creed” that lays out the basic tenets of the Christian faith. But what we must always remember is that everything that we believe about God must be firmly rooted in who God is. And scripture tells us that God is Love.

So in everything that we believe we must understand that it is useless if we do not live out that belief through love. If we don’t have love, our beliefs land us where we are as a culture and as a church right now. Fractured. Broken. If we don’t have love, it doesn’t matter what we believe. If we don’t have love, what we believe might actually be the stumbling block that perpetuates sin. If we don’t have love then everything we believe is just ashes — Ashes that have for too long irritated the eyes of God’s beloved children, blinding them and bringing them to tears. And for that we must repent.

The Apostle Paul was deeply committed to a fledgling Jesus community in the Greek city of Corinth. And the fledgling Jesus Community in Corinth was deeply committed to conflict. They probably didn’t mean to be, but they were a community like any other… made up of humans. And even more challenging, they were trying to figure out how to follow Jesus long before the accounts of Jesus’s life were recorded and distributed. Basically they were the blind leading the blind.

One of the many things that they found conflict in was the role of gifts or God given talents. They wanted to create a hierarchy based on who had what skills. Kind of like how we make hierarchies about who holds what beliefs within the broader Christian community. And so, to address these squabbles, Paul writes these words to them:

1 Corinthians 13:1–3 NRSV

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.

You may be aware of what comes right after this: It’s the famous diatribe on love that is read at so many weddings. But we aren’t going there today. We are going to park right here and lets Paul’s words sink in. He’s talking about gifts, but these words are just as applicable to every other aspect of the Christian faith. With out love it is all vain. Without love none of it matters.

Paul was clearly speaking to them a word that is deeply rooted in the traditions and teaching of Jesus, who spent his entire life pointing out that the Religious people of his day were religious in word, sometimes religious in deed, but were rarely religious in the core of their hearts. Their motivations were typically anything other than love for their neighbor.

And Jesus’s word for them was this: Hypocrites.

This is not a word that I desire to describe myself with. And yet, I am not far removed from it. It is a word that seems to draw ever so near to me. On my best days it is still only an arms length away. On my worst days it seems to rest right on my heart.

If we are honest, I think we can all attest to this reality. Following Jesus in the ways of Jesus is hard, nearly impossible. But that does not and will not give us permission to abandon the task. Our job is to be a people who embody the theology and beliefs that we claim. For most of us, maybe even all of us, this is a task that is most unnatural. But the beauty about the Christian life is that we don’t claim to do any of the things that we do in a natural way. We claim the supernatural power of the Spirit of God working in and among us.

So my simple charge for you this lenten season is to give up one thing in particular… the need to be right for the sake of being right. Yes, correct belief and correct theology matters, but it matters only so far as it can shape us into the loving image of God and steer us in the direction of those who need to be connected with the people of the Living and Loving God. So drop your fists, take a deep breath, and just tell the ego and the pride to sit this season of lent out. See how being right for the sake of love and in the way of love can refresh your weary soul.

The 1200s mystic and monk, St. Francis of Assisi is associated with a prayer that I believe can and will help us to know what this charge looks like when we embody it, and it says these words.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen