Last weekend we went to a wedding. The children of two sets of long-term friends were getting married, and the church was full of people we know and love.
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away....
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
We are so familiar with this passage that it is easy for it to become wallpaper, or lift music. We hear it, recognise it as something old and familiar, and then our attention wanders. Yet as we pay attention to this passage we can see that it is the radical core of the Gospel, and a challenge to all of us (me as much as anyone) in our comfortable religiosity.
The idea that love is the cornerstone of Christian practice is not confined to this passage. Jesus, John and Paul tell us that the commandment 'love your neighbour as yourself' is the cornerstone of Christian ethics. Jesus' life and death, in sacrificing himself for us, are presented to us as the model of what love means. We are told that we must love our fellow believers, our neighbours. foreigners and strangers and even our enemies. Love as central to the Christian life is a constant theme throughout the New Testament and part of all the literary streams that come together to form the Christian scriptures.
What Paul adds to this tradition on 1 Corinthians 13 is a vivid picture of what it means to be loving. To love is to be:
- patient
- kind
- humble
- selfless
- self-effacing
- even-tempered
- forgiving
- trusting
- hope-filled
- persistent
- truthful.
Which of us can honestly say we achieve this, even among our closest friends and families? Who can say that these things are always a feature of our marriages? Even less could we claim that they are a feature of our dealings with strangers, with those who disagree with us or oppose us. I certainly wouldn't be so foolish and arrogant as to claim that they apply to me. They are a constant challenge, a light in the distance towards which we grope through the mist.
***
If we look at Christian churches, it can be hard to see this love as the central core of church life. Instead, as churches we have focused on other things which at best distract us from our task of loving, and at worst cut across it and lead us in the opposite direction. Let me just mention four of these - no doubt there are more.
1. Institutional Maintenance
Several times in my life I have been part of the lay leadership of churches I have belonged to. I have always regretted saying 'yes', because I am impatient and not very perseverant, but also because the task seems trivial. Lay leaders look after the money and the buildings, putting endless time and effort into ensuring the budget balances, making sure the paperwork is all straight, fixing the church building, finding and paying the clergy's wages and generally keeping the wheels of the institution ticking over. We are distracted, like the the seed that fell among weeds.
Sometimes this can become much more than a distraction. Nothing shows this more clearly than the long-running travesty of child sexual abuse in church settings. Over many years, we have seen how the churches prioritised the survival and reputation of their institutions over the wellbeing of those who had been abused - quietly shifting perpetrators around the system, making silence a condition of privately negotiated compensation agreements, resisting outside inquiries as 'witch-hunts' or 'persecution' and most recently engaging in tricky legal maneuvers to avoid having to pay compensation. These moves are neither humble, nor truthful, nor self-effacing.
How would a church centred on love relate to its property and institutions? What priority would they have, what claim on its time, attention and resources? I suspect a church centred on love would look very different, and would act very differently in the face of both its apparent successes and its manifold failures.
2. Enforcing Doctrinal Conformity
One of the longest running themes in church history is the struggle over doctrinal conformity. From the suppression of Gnosticism and Arianism in the fourth century, through the battles of the Reformation, and up to the present day with a multiplicity of denominations and sects jealously guarding their own distinctive traditions, doctrinal correctness has been a primary way to bind the 'true believers' together and shut out the 'heretics'. The Apostle John depicts Jesus praying that his disciple will be united, but we are fractured and fractious, mistaking the grasp of complex theological nuances for spiritual maturity. So often we have priests and pastors who are deeply versed in the Bible and in the teachings of the Church but whose people skills are rudimentary.
I have often thought (and I didn't form this idea on my own) that these doctrinal issues serve as proxies for agendas of power and control. The power to include and exclude is the power to impose one's will, with the riches and adulation that go with it. Hence we see both bloody wars and vicious law enforcement carried out in the name of doctrinal correctness. Yet Paul tells us that our knowledge is only ever partial, and will eventually pass away, with only faith, hope and most of all love surviving. Where can we find this delicate flower of love in the mighty forest of doctrinal correctness?
3. Policing Moral Boundaries
A third direction into which the church gets diverted is in the policing of moral boundaries. In different eras the moral points differ somewhat, but both now and at many points in history the greatest matter of contention is around marriage, sexuality and gender. Should people of the same sex be allowed to marry? Are sexual relations between people of the same sex tolerable or permissible? Should people have the opportunity to change their perceived or assigned gender? These questions divide the church, and split it off from parts of society as we quote Bible verses to support the claim that same-sex relationships are abominable, that there are only two genders defined at birth, and that to claim otherwise is to fundamentally contravene Christian tradition and undermine the basis of our shared social life.
Sometimes Christians who make these assertions claim that they love those who express sexual or gender differences, that they 'hate the sin and love the sinner'. Why, then, do LGTBIQ+ people not feel loved? It is because love is relegated to second place in this scheme (or perhaps even further down the list). They are not loved as they are, but as we wish they would be. Such claims all too easily shade into homophobia or trans-phobia. We say we love them, but seek to control them.
What would it look like, in this context, to love without preconditions? To embrace a love that is humble, self-effacing, trusting and filled with hope?
4. Seeking Political Power
The final way in which churches can get diverted from love is the quest for political power. This quest is as old as the Constantinian Settlement, in which Church and State were fused together as the civil and spiritual arms of the same power complex. The settlement freed the institutional church from persecution and enabled it to establish lavish cathedrals, develop beautiful and elaborate ceremonies and set up a complex, powerful bureaucracy. At the same time it placed a worm at the heart of the apple - the church was now a political body a much as a spiritual one, with the same vulnerability to authoritarianism, corruption and self-protection. The Church freed itself from persecution, but it could only do so by becoming a persecutor itself.
In our day, things have changed. The growth of liberal democracy throughout the Western world has led to church bodies being politically marginalised once more. Yet churches still pine for political influence and even authority, and political leaders will still nail their Christian credentials to the mast in order to attract the 'Christian' vote. The result is frequently not pretty. Scott Morrison was feted for his Christian profession despite his rather loose acquaintance with the truth. Senator Alex Antic wields massive influence in the South Australian Liberal Party via his harnessing of support from fundamentalist churches, and uses his position to promote culture war agendas on sexuality, climate denial and abortion. In the US, evangelical churches have become so wedded to the Republican Party that many are prepared to proclaim Donald Trump as God's Anointed.
It's notable how the politicians in our era who are most eager to proclaim their Christianity are the lest likely to enact love in their politics - the most likely to launch 'law and order' campaigns, go to war, play the race card, cut services to the poor and spread disinformation. This is what happens when we lose sight of the fact that love should be central to Christian faith, not an over-idealistic aspiration.
***
If this is what love doesn't look like, then what does it look like? Let me go back to the wedding which inspired this post. At its centre, of course, were two young people promising to live together in love - the kind of love described in the passage they asked to be read. The preacher, a long-serving and respected priest and pastor, readily acknowledged how hard he finds it to live by this vision of love. I'm sure the couple, and all of us gathered to support them, nodded in agreement. All of us desire to love this way, but none of us find it easy, or do it consistently. Yet we keep trying.
This community was united in our support for the couple, but we are also diverse. Among us were Catholics and Protestants, conservative fundamentalists and theological progressives as well a people who no longer believe or never did. There were campaigners for peace and justice, anti-abortion campaigners and some people who are both. There were people with disabilities and people who were passionate about disability rights. There was an Aboriginal friend who acknowledged the country we were on. There were people of different ethnicities, all ages, from a variety of different backgrounds. It was the usual diverse crowd you will find at a 21st Century Western wedding.
The groom's father posed the question, 'who are my mob?'. He didn't pretend to know the answer, but clearly at least part of it is that all the people there were part of his mob. No doubt there were other members of the mob who were not there, for many different reasons. This is the group of people who, in our interactions over many years, have tried, sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed, to live together in love.
Our mob is challenged, then, to continue to love one another, but we also face the challenge of not simply turning this love inwards. It's easy to invite your friends to your wedding party, but what about strangers, and even enemies? Yet our mob, in hearing the Christian call to love, is also called to love these people. Neither Jesus nor the apostles said it would be easy, but none of them said it was optional, idealistic or 'nice to have'. This is why we can't do it alone, why we need a mob to do it with, to share the load and make up for one another's weaknesses and blind spots.
If you look at all the four ways I have suggested we betray love, each of them involves an 'us' and a 'them' - 'us' who are inside, 'they' who are outside; 'us' who are righteous, 'they' who are sinful; 'us' who are right, 'they' who are wrong. Yet love does not focus on those distinctions but on our commonalities. It desires the good of the other person, not their harm, their submission or their conformity.
This is a lifetime's discipline and one we will never fully master. It is a discipline for each of us individually, and also for us collectively. It is our task as Jesus' mob. We don't know how to do it, but our starting point will be to make learning it, and getting better at it, our priority instead of being distracted by institutions, doctrines, moral conformity or the lure of power. Where will this path take us? I don't know, but I'd sure like to find out.
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