As we enter election week, I want to share two moments that have challenged me to go deeper in love. On Saturday, while doing yard work and listening to The Bible for Normal People podcast, I was reminded by Bishop Michael Curry that when the Apostle Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 13, he didn't have a wedding in mind. Instead, as Curry says, “he wrote it to a church that was destroying itself with factions and divisions that were ego-centered...” It feels like our nation is deeply divided and tearing itself apart, with the church often contributing to the divisions. Paul calls us, the church, into a still more excellent way.
On Sunday, Michael Newheart the interim pastor at Kensington Baptist, shared a quote from Dorothy Day: “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” That quote was a powerful challenge for me.
Perhaps we could all benefit from taking time to reflect on Paul’s call to love in 1 Corinthians 13 and Dorothy Day’s reminder that our love for others reflects our love for God.
I Corinthians 13
New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition
The Gift of Love
13 If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have 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 do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast[a] but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. 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. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.
“I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least”
- Dorothy Day
Sean Roberds, Executive Coordinator - Mid-Atlantic CBF