February 2, 2025

1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

I could not tell you how many times I have preached on this passage. Most of my weddings and funerals contain at least one reference to these verses. So, it was surprising when I was reading over the passage for today, as listed in a different translation, and I noted something different.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs…

No record of wrongs. I have seen that more typically translated as not being resentful. But I like no record of wrongs because it lays out plainly what it means to be resentful. To tally up the ledger of someone’s misdeeds and then to use them at some opportune moment to get a dig in at someone. As we all know, from years of meticulous record keeping, you have not been perfect. And so, I will now catalogue any and all mistakes you have made since we first met a few decades ago. By the way, if that is a familiar pattern of discussions in any of your relationships, it is worth reflecting on this passage—as the recipient or as the source of such detailed critique.

This Sunday, I wanted to talk about three things, three ideas that are central to Christian thought. These are faith, hope, and love. I talk about love a lot—basically every Sunday—but faith and hope are less frequent topics. And yet they are no less important. These three qualities are known collectively as the theological or the cardinal virtues.

There are seven Christian virtues traditionally, though I often include an eighth virtue as a necessary form of protection. Against what? Against one of the most pervasive of the seven deadly sins. For it is said that there is one sin that can never be fully protected against because it can strike sinners and saints alike. And that is the sin of pride.

The best protection against the sin of pride is not heaping up good and virtuous habits, but to take a step back and realize that we are not always right in our assessments of a situation. We are not always correct in our attitudes or behaviors. Simply, we are not always right. And that means we have to embrace that additional virtue: humility. We need to be humble amidst all our attempts at goodness and righteousness and perfection.

No matter how good we are, we can fail to be loving of others because we are too busy loving how great we think we are. Pride therefore can become a lack of love or a lack of appreciation for the efforts of others. If you have ever gritted your teeth in the presence of someone acting holier than thou, you might have a sense for how the appearance of virtue is different than the practice of virtue.

It is fair to say that love is the basis for all Christian morality. It is how we are to deal with one another and even those we have yet to meet. It is the basis of any relationship, which requires us to be concerned for someone’s wellbeing. We are to seek to foster their continued existence and to help them thrive. We must care about them—who they are and what they seek to do in this life. And that way of looking at the world is fundamentally important because it makes all the other types of virtue possible. Without love, none of that virtue stuff works. Without love, honestly, nothing works.

Just to round out the list, I will mention the other virtues. Along with faith, hope, and love (the big three) there are four more virtues on the traditional list. Those are prudence, temperance, courage, and justice. I add humility particularly because I think that it summarizes many of the important aspects of the other four.

Prudence means being careful. Temperance means maintaining a balance. Courage means facing threats, whether threats to the mind, body, or soul. Justice means fairness. And being careful, balanced, brave, and fair to me sums up into a sense of humility. And that collection of concerns is important when we consider how faith, hope, and love play out in our lives.

“Faith, hope, and love” is the traditional order of those words following the order of Paul. It is the familiar flow in English. But I diverge from that when I talk about these three ideas because I believe they are built upon one another in a specific way. I think you cannot have hope without faith, and you cannot have faith without love. All the other seven virtues are like the rules of a game, telling you when you are out of bounds or when someone has committed a foul. But the game is truly about hope, faith, and love. Those three are why we are here.

What is hope? One definition of hope is the desire and the search for a future good, one that might be difficult but not impossible to attain. It could also be a desire coupled with an expectation. By hoping, I am anticipating something yet to be.

Compare that with faith. There are quite a few definitions for faith. A firm belief in something for which there is no proof. Belief in, trust in, and loyalty to God. Some theologians, such as Karl Barth, have tried to distinguish belief and faith. Belief in the sense of knowledge, of knowing something to be true. Compare that to faith which is less about knowing something to be true as opposed to trusting something to be true. And that is the crux of faith: trust. We have faith in God meaning that we place our trust in God.

Trust in God’s goodness. Trust in the goodness of creation itself. And trust that if we follow the expectations of God, and the teachings of Jesus, it will be for the better. Better for us of course, but also better for everyone.

Which requires us to be careful. Careful about when we make declarations about the expectations of God and the teachings of Jesus. That is where faith can break down because we place our faith in something neither of God nor Jesus. When we place our faith in the preferences and prejudices of human beings, that is something altogether different from having faith in God.

Why do we trust? Trust is about relying upon something or someone. We trust that someone will live up to their word. We trust that they will do the right thing. We trust that if we work hard and dedicate ourselves to something, that effort will be rewarded. Notice that the last one requires us to interpret both the reactions of others and their commitment to some notion of reciprocity. I help you and you help me. Trust grows out of a relationship, one that is ongoing, one that is back and forth.

And that takes us back to the idea of love. I imagine love as existing as a connection, like a bright line of light, between one person and another. That connection has a flow to it, like electricity traveling from the wall to a light bulb. This connection, this flow of love and care and concern for another person, energizes the other. It helps them in any number of ways. It offers them a sense of security that at least one person is out there watching out for us.

Love has many definitions, from the realms of romance, friendship, or parenting. Love can be about desire or about care. Love in the Christian sense is a concern for the wellbeing of others, an outward orientation fostering those connections, those energizing lines.

Love is also the feeling we should have towards God, but notice it is different. Different by necessity. Love for God is not about giving anything to God. God does not need anything.

We might think back historically to ancient times when sacrifices were made to God: goats and rams and turtledoves. Over the centuries, that began to change. Love of God was not about giving anything to God, but about giving of oneself in the world. God does not seek your burnt offerings but acts of loving kindness—that’s from the Book of Micah if you were wondering.

And that perspective about God becomes the primary focus of Jesus and his disciples. Jesus speaks repeatedly about love being the central aspect of his teachings. It is the one and only commandment in a tradition threaded through with commandments. This idea is crystalized in the short little letter of one of the disciples, the First Letter of John, in which the author simply says that God is love. God is love.

Three simple words: God is love. And if we are thoughtful about that idea, could we not take it a step further, turning it over in our heads like something beautiful catching the sunlight. If God is love, might that not also suggest that love is God. Love is God.

I do not mean to say that God is only love, that one word equates exactly with the other, full stop. No, instead, I like to think that God is likely far more than love, but also that God can be no less than love. God can be no less than love.

And if you are looking into a situation of some kind—some social dynamic, some interpersonal kerfuffle, some societal change—if you look into it and do not see something like love, then it clearly has nothing to do with God.

God is not present. God is not in the mix. God has not been included.

And that lack, that absence, that deficiency is not something that is the fault of God. That is the fault of human beings. Because human beings are called upon to love God and to love one another. Or, put another way, human beings are called upon to love loving and therefore to love one another.

This is where pride can slip in, the pride of thinking you can make rules and regulations better than the commandment to love. This is where we need humility. This is where we need prudence and temperance, courage and justice. This is where we need to be careful and to be balanced, to be brave and to be fair. Because people will try to build a world that does not look like love because they do not care if the world looks like God. And some days, it seems we are living in such a loveless and Godless world.

This centrality of love is therefore the foundation upon which all else must be built religiously. How does that work? We are loved by others and in turn learn how to love. Those bright connections are copied and repeated. Perhaps from parent to child. And from those children loved and cared for in turn to their own children. Of course, sadly that pattern does not always work out. But if we are fortunate, we will experience love and we learn to love as a result.

Which is why the most important thing we can do is to love. To love our children. To love our friends. To love our families, both those families we are born to and those we find along the way.

Love is like the good soil in which we grow. It is like the warm sun that shines upon us and the gentle rains that fall. And yes, sometimes the soil will be rocky. Sometimes the sun will be too hot and the rain too heavy. But if we are fortunate, there is a caring farmer there to tend to our growth so that we might grow and blossom. Someone is there who loves us amidst it all.

Love is never complete. Love is rarely perfect. But some love is better than no love.

When I think about hope, faith, and love, I imagine them as existing within and across time. Love is and should be active in our days, but love is also the legacy of our past. We love now because we have learned to love in the past.

Or we love now because we realized that we wanted to grow beyond the rocky soil and harsh conditions of our pasts. Love can be our heritage, or love can be our response to being without love. Love is always a choice in this sense. So, that history of love, that desire to love, is how the past shapes us in the present.

Which takes us to faith. Faith which is another way of saying trust. Having been loved, we know that love can exist. We know what it was like and what it meant to us. And even when we did not, we may have seen what love can look like, what it meant for those around us stuck in our rocky soil. That idea of love persists. That desire for love endures. And so, a sense of trust in love can grow. Trust in love or faith that love is possible.

This is the next link in the chain. Remember that God is love and so love is at the very least God. So, with trust in God, with trust in the love of God, with trust in the love within our lives, we hopefully come to exist in the present with a sense of faith or the possibility of faith. Faith as another bright connection, this time one tying the past to the present.

And faith is what makes hope possible. Hope, the desire and search for a future good. As Emily Dickinson wrote:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all 

Hope might never seem to stop for some, but it is by no means a guaranty about anything. Why then do we say, like Dickinson, that hope spring eternal? Because of faith.

Faith in God, faith in each other, faith in the world even. Each one of those is a progressively greater leap of faith. Each one is a step that might strain that bright thread of faith which is also known as trust. Because trust can only grow from a feeling of love. The love we feel for others and the love others feel for us—that is the root of faith. Love makes faith possible, and faith allows hope to be.

Remember those beginning passages: Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; [or resentful]; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

And the feelings of love we have hopefully endure. That quality of persistence is how faith comes into being. Just as love goes on, so might faith. That faith projects out into the future as the feeling of hope. Love, faith, and finally hope.

These are what can arise if we dedicate ourselves to God. For God is love and love is truly God. Amen.