“The Greatest of these is love…”

The following sermon is from a funeral at which I spoke. Just before me, John 14:1-7 had been read.

The reading we just heard is and always will be one of my favorites. Not just because it is one of the many passages from Our Lord, Jesus Christ. But because I often heard it from my Grandma before she passed. It is easy, and it is natural for us to fear an end, either because it is the close of something good, or because we do not know what is beyond. She always quoted that passage when we talked about her passing. It helped her not to worry so much. It can help us, as well. When we remember the promise that God the Father gave to us through Jesus Christ, we know that his life, death, and resurrection opened up to us salvation by His grace, working through love.

Now love is a word we hear thrown around a lot in songs and movies and all over the place. It’s something that is essentially expected of us. Thanks to God, I have a tremendous capacity to love. Thanks to those who raised me, I have a tremendous will to love. But I still struggle with it every day. I am my own worst critic. I often chastise myself for minor things that I wouldn’t bat an eye at someone else doing. It comes from pride, and it comes from an unwillingness to give myself the benefit of the doubt. Last semester, I managed to flunk a course not by writing a bad paper, but by forgetting to change the name from the template author to my own. What a simple, silly mistake. I probably ate enough frozen custard the following week to justify opening a second Andy’s location next to my place. (If you haven’t been there- don’t, that stuff is habit forming!) I still kick myself for letting up on my diet. I just can’t seem to give myself a break and accept my own humanity or where I am emotionally sometimes, and that is not good, and certainly is not very loving. 

I’d say there are plenty of us here who struggle with a similar problem. We have trouble loving ourselves, or loving others. Maybe you keep kicking yourself for something stupid, or have trouble looking at yourself in the mirror. Maybe you have a friend or loved one who keeps making choices that we just cannot fathom or support. Maybe we turn on the TV, or scroll online and see the vast array of hatred and wrongness in the world and cannot seem to help ourselves against the urge to just be hateful towards those that we see as contributing to the wickedness at work in the world. I have to say, I understand. After all, our world seems to have embraced the ethos ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ So why should we then turn the other cheek? Because we are called by our Lord Jesus Christ to love our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us. So when Christ said “Therefore you shall be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.” He called us to be all-forgiving and all-loving, as God is all forgiving, and all loving. 

How can we be loving, then? What direction does scripture give? It gives a great deal, (some would argue that scripture is the love story between God and Mankind), but I will narrow it down a bit. 

In his first letter to the Corinthians, St Paul the Apostle wrote a passage that many of us should recognize,

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 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 have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,[a] but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;[b] 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians, 13:1-13)

Here we see a model and description of what it is to be loving. It’s a tall order, too. Not only are we supposed to be patient and kind, but we are supposed to avoid being arrogant or rude or resentful and there’s a number of other things, and to be honest with you, I have days where I can’t even get out of bed without messing up. The fact is, we cannot do it alone. Without God working through us, we cannot find the strength to be all loving, because we do not have it.
Therefore, what we must do is open ourselves up to God’s love through prayer and through practice. When we look in the mirror and see something or someone we don’t like, let’s remember that we are made in the image and likeness of God, and that we are beautiful because of that. When we feel challenged or slighted in some way, we must pray for compassion and patience. Even if it is as simple a prayer as breathing in and breathing out as we turn our minds to what God wants for us. Even when faced with something that we cannot stomach or allow, all our actions must be taken from a place of love and goodness. 

God blessed us with our lives so that we could share in his love for us and bless him in return by loving his creation. What an incredible thing it would be to see a world filled with love, where we all showed one another the grace and compassion we were taught by our Lord. We would see a time where instead of tearing one another down, people would lift each other up through accountability and supportiveness. Instead under the gun, we would live in a world under the olive branch. The holes we try to fill with any number of vices would instead be satiated by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, love itself. And all we have to do is be open to it, and seek it daily.