Jack Hardaway
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Lately I’ve been listening to love songs.
I’ve even made a play list on my phone called, “Love.” I know, very creative.
Love songs. I keep singing Al Green, Love is a Beautiful Thing, I can’t get it out of my mind.
There are so many kinds of songs, but love songs make up the vast majority of the history of the world’s songs.
There are plenty of hate songs and rage songs.
But they are few and far between compared to love songs.
Love songs are the best sellers, all through history.
I love that. It makes me smile. It fascinates me. It is our contrary default, when the dust settles, after we rage and stomp around, we get back to singing love songs.
It is more than a romantic notion, or a sappy and sentimental valentine marketing ploy. Love works its way into everything. Love is sneaky that way.
Despite our efforts to sugar coat, gift wrap, and wedding planner it into insipidness, love works its way into everything and it surprises us. Even at our most trivial and petty, even in our rage and hatred, even in our indifference, and oblivion, love turns our head and raises our countenance.
Love is endemic. Love is mysterious. Love is viral, subliminal, and subcutaneous. Love is the miracle that holds us all together.
First Corinthians chapter 13, the wedding scripture, the hymn of love. Except it isn’t really either of those things. We hear Paul’s words today. Paul at his most powerful. We have wasted our lives. That is the lesson of his words. We have wasted our lives.
Only love lasts, and love is about more than feeling good, it is about deep abiding care and patience for other people to grow and be built up.
Are we for another person? For them to be the best that God has made them to be? Can we care and help and encourage another? That is love.
Christian marriage, rightly understood, is about discipleship in following the way of Jesus, the way of love, in making covenant with this one person, we then learn the long-life lesson of what love is, of building up another to be the glory of God.
In that case it is a great reading for wedding liturgies. Telling us to stop wasting our lives on the trivial, the meaningless, and the transient. Only love lasts. Love abides. It doesn’t matter if it is marriage, a carrier, a family, or going to the grocery store. We are a complete waste of time, water, air and space without love.
First Corinthians 13 shouldn’t make us feel warm and fuzzy. It should be a shocking and sobering bucket of ice water over our heads. If we don’t ask, “What have I done with my life?”, then we need to hear it again.
Love makes everything work as it was created to work.
There is no mention of Jesus in this chapter. Love just is. And in being in love we find Jesus, that is the freedom of Jesus breaking all our chains.
We know so little. Love teaches us that. We know nothing without love. Paul shows us a way of humility and humor before the steaming, stinking pile of our arrogant human certitude, our habitual offended-ness, our entitled condemnation.
We know so little because we love so little.
But love endures, it abides, it never ends, it compiles, all that love throughout all of time, it is all still there, a vast cloud and witness of God’s intention and purpose and grace.
Everything else has faded away.
Love Songs.
They are part of who are, we can’t get away from them, at least not for very long. Our head is turned. Our countenance rises.
Those songs, they tell us in one way or another, round-about and between the lines to learn the ways and habits of love, to give in, because love wins.
Do something worthwhile for a change. That is the lesson today.
Love.
That is who Jesus is, the worthwhileness of God, that we may grow to be so much more than we know.
May it be so.
Love is a beautiful thing.
May it be so.