1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
We most often read this at weddings for couples who are quite obviously in love. When it’s read that way, it feels like sappy wisdom, like a toast at a wedding. Perhaps that’s what Paul is doing in this scripture, we might imagine—writing for lovers. But that’s not the truth at all.
The church in Corinth was a community of believers that have forgotten how to love one another. They were a community torn by disagreement and strife. It’s a theme lifted up chapter after chapter. Paul isn’t preaching to the choir; he is telling them to get their ducks in a row, because they don’t look like a loving community of believers. He’s reminding them what it looks like to love.
We need to be reminded how to love one another. It’s about being honest with our hopes and fears and dreams, being honest about all the ways we are grieving right now, and all the emotions we are feeling. Love is also remembering that we are all in different boats at the moment. Some folks are financially secure but physically vulnerable; others are financially vulnerable but physically secure; others are both or neither. Love considers the place of the other.
The last couple weeks I’ve talked some about meaning-making in light of the pandemic, especially that one of our great weaknesses in this moment is that we don’t know how to wrap our heads around this one. When we find ourselves confronted with meaninglessness, it is all the easier to fail to see the humanity in others. We need to feel secure first; then we can consider loving others.
Still, we need to love.
Love is the greatest—even greater than faith and hope—because love is both for right now and for eternity. It is not faith that once realized is no longer needed, and it is not a future hope that is always elusive; it is available to us in this moment. But this also means that love is the easiest to lack, because there is counter-evidence to living a life full of love everywhere you look. There are people to disagree with, people who just don’t get it, and other people who seem to get it but, worst of all, willingly choose to treat us with disdain nonetheless.
Love persists through these things, because it is the ultimate; it is not dependent on anything, not even agreement. Loving someone is not weakness; it is not letting others off the hook. Love is the strength to understand the actions of another come from a place that we will never completely understand. Love is believing that even though I don’t get you, nonetheless you are a beloved child of God. You don’t need to like other people to love the humanity in them, and you don’t need to hang out with them on weekends.
At the end of the day, loving people is a reflection of God’s love for us—love we don’t deserve. Which is great! Because most people don’t deserve our love either. We are truly all in it together, because none of us are good enough to earn love.
We need to remember these days that most people are doing what they are doing out of love. Those who would like to see everything stay closed are operating out of love for the most vulnerable. Those who would like to see everything reopened are operating out of love for businesses, workers, and their families. Both are incomplete pictures; both are also necessary pictures. Just because we disagree doesn’t mean we aren’t trying to love one another. We’re just in different boats.
I had a professor in undergrad who used to often say, “Think that you might be wrong.” I have found this to be good advice for important moments. In situations like these, we tend to dig in to positions. We become certain when we should be the opposite. We should realize that the problems facing us as a society are so big and varied that we can’t possibly hope to wrap our heads around them, so we should approach the problems humbly. The more serious the difficulties, the more cautious we should be to assume we are right. This might feel backwards, but it is important, because the moment we presume that others are out for the worst for us, then we will have divided ourselves in a way that is not easily reconciled. We need to admit that we don’t know.
Uncertainty is the fertile ground for love. We are all just human beings who don’t know. That’s doesn’t feel comforting, of course. It’s much easier to believe in miracle cures and simple narratives to make sense of things. And it’s not to say that there aren’t those who will use uncertainty for malice—they will. All I’m saying is that there is power in staying united even especially in our uncertainty. Love requires vulnerability.
It is hard to love, like most great things. I don’t want to love people who don’t get it; most of all, I don’t want to love myself, who also doesn’t get it. I am not in love with the situation. I often don’t know what to do with myself. I start doing one thing, forget what I was doing, and two hours later I’ve accomplished nothing. This is life right now. Our inability to process things is not a sign of a lack of love. Instead, we should be reminded that God loves us for the scatterbrained people that we are. That we can’t wrap our heads around the vastness of it all is simply a reminder that we are human and therefore in need of love.
So, it’s funny, but Paul writing to the church in Corinth about love may be much more applicable in this moment than it is for weddings in saner times. We need to be reminded of what unites us—our humanity. We are people who don’t get it, who won’t get it, and who will let one another down, but we are also capable of loving one another and of remembering we are children of God, full of grace we don’t deserve.
So, let’s work on remembering that together.
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