Quinquagesima 2025

Well while in this last week of Epiphany heading into lent, the Epistle ready reminds us of God’s love. Starting on Wednesday this coming week we are going to spend significant time being reminded of God’s anger towards sin and our role in it. So just like Marti Gras is a chance to eat sweets before giving them up for 46 days. Today we meditate on the great love of God before taking our meditations else where.

I have to admit that 1 Cor 13, and its constant use at wedding and in romantic contexts always left me a little turned off and I tended to avoid it. That is not a healthy instinct. No passage of scripture should be avoided especially one defining love in a time when people have no idea what love actually is.

We need to dismantle love as both feeling and and a self serving event. When we think of the romance of films and lore, love is often portrayed as romantic love and it serves the protagonists need to feel their most selves. There are exceptions but they are rare.

With that in mind let us approach the topic of love and see how Love brings us into the knowledge of God.

Before we get into the text, let me say quickly that poetry can sometimes lose its power when pulled apart. That old addage, a joke is like a frog…This is a beautiful poem, and I will handle with care as I want us to be as enamored with it when I am done as when we begun.

The text begins by looking at different spiritual gives, and how love plays a role in unlocking them

Tounges, are just noise without love,

prophecy, knowledge and knowing mysteries would be quite a set of gift to have, but without love, again meaningless, the holder of these gives is nothing.

Later in the chapter we are told that Love lasts forever, but a time will come when several spiritual gifts are no longer needed.

But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.

Faith without love is nothing. That is quite a statement when you consider that for the apostle Paul, faith is the thing needed to be right with God, faith has power, and yet without love faith again is meaningless to the one who haws faith.

If you have the gift of Charity, that is giving what you have to the poor, or even if you offer your whole self as a sacrifice to be burned on the altar of God, yet are not motivated by love there are no heavenly rewards to be gained.

And now the list, the part of this text that is most often remember.

Two positives to begin, Love is patient and kind and then 6 at the end of the negatives: love rejoices with the truth,, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, love never ends.

Knowing that God is love, and we know that our perfect God expresses these things, we know God does all these things completely,

He is patient, kind, her rejoices with the truth…

Being a three in one, our triune God knows how to perfectly live in community where all of the positives of love are expressed to the maximum.

St. Paul also gives us 6 things that are not present in love, some negatives. Does not boast, is not arrogant or rude, not selfish not irritable. It is not resentful and does not rejoice in wrong doing.

Not only are these things absent in the God who is perfectly love, these things are relationship poison. Something we will look more at in a moment.

So we have looked at how love unlocks the true power of spiritual gifts, we have looked at what love is and is not. finally the chapter finishes with the transforming power of love on the believer.

St. Paul Acknowledges that we do not have the complete view here, but there will come a time when God will unlock our relationship to him. Right now faith is required, the trusting of the unseen. But one day we will come into Gods. presence and have the overwhelming experience of his presence. Till then we will have to keep a stead diet of faith hope and love, the greatest is love.

That is pastoral of me to say. And I do have a couple more pastoral things to offer.

First is remember that without love much of what we do can feel like manipulation. If I serve my wife as a husband in order to gain something, as opposed to satisfy her needs at that moment, it can be self serving and manipulative.

We have the troupe in our culture of the used car salesmen. It’s not often seen as a good thing. But truthfully if you have a salesman that understands your need and is trying to connect you to the best thing for your family. In a way there is a selfless love there, and btw I have had that kid of pleasant experience in the past. Love allow us to do the things of our life, from family life to our economic lives as creatures of God’s love, and not of selfish gain and manipulation.

The other pastoral note, be mindful of the of relationship poisons. These are the opposites of Love.

Love does not envy, but if you do it will poison your relationships. Love does not boast, but that can hurt you with your loved ones, arrogance, irritability, resentfulness, celebrating bad for the other, these things will destroy marriages, friendships, church families. This coming lent might be a great opportunity to ask God where these things are resident in you, so you can partner with the Holy Spirit in being transformed away from these things.

Let us finally be mindful of Jesus. In every way we will fail the test of perfect love. That is what is means to be children of Adam and Eve. The fall in the garden allowed all these anti-love characteristics to enslave mankind. But Jesus perfectly accomplishes love and to the maximun on the cross. And in your baptism God took your death to sin and unloving life, and made you into his children of life and love. And today we will experience the love of a God who did not hold onto resentment from the cross, but instead invites us to his banquet, to feast at his table the food that he has given from himself. Amen.