By the title, you can tell that what we’ll consider in this third week of the Wesleyan Rooted worship series is that love is “more than a feeling”. And yes, be glad the newsletter spares you my attempts at singing the titular chorus of this older-than-I-am Boston song, and spare a thought for the Bible study which wasn’t so lucky.
I’ve been glad to find some inspiration in our history. Less from 70s popular music, however, and more from John Wesley’s sermons from the 1700s, and this week was no exception, spending time with the aptly named “On Love”. This is a sermon that Wesley gave considering the powerful statement of 1 Corinthians 13:3: If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
There are a handful of passages that are so powerful, profound, and so difficult, that I sometimes wonder if our familiarity with them dulls their impact. If we have somehow become too comfortable with them. 1 Corinthians 13:3 is one of these, one of the passages that should challenge many of the ideas we see tossed around in the name of God. Procedures and concepts, political and social beliefs that purport to serve a need, to move us to a greater good, but miss that whole love thing.
It’s why I found it particularly helpful in Wesley’s sermon that he expands on this short verse, digs into the context and language Paul uses to help us better understand what he’s saying. And so he offers, as he says, “the full sense of the words” of 1 Corinthians 13:3 as this:
“Though I should give all the substance of my house to feed the poor; though I should do so upon mature choice and deliberation; though I should spend my life in dealing it out to them with my own hands, yea, and that that from a principle of obedience; though I should suffer, from the same view, not only reproach and shame, not only bounds and imprisonment, and all this by my own continued act and deed, not accepting deliverance, but, moreover, death itself, – yea, death inflicted in a manner the most terrible to nature; yet all this, if I have not love (the love of God, and the love of all mankind, ‘shed abroad in my heart by the Holy Ghost given unto me’) it profiteth me nothing.”
That’s a bit harder to dull, isn’t it? Harder to miss the simple truth that there is nothing we can do without love that is serving God, others, or even ourselves in a faithful sense. We can participate in backbreaking, sacrificial, life-changing or even life-ending service, but if it doesn’t come from love… why?
Or perhaps that’s the very question – spoiler alert: it was – that Paul and Wesley and the church at Corinth were wrestling with: can we get so caught up in thinking about ends justifying means that we miss the immediate need and opportunity for love? For the love of God to be in us, to be lived out in us, and to be shared and experienced in relationships with others?
And if we are approaching it in a way that it isn’t serving God or even ourselves in faithful ways, who or what are we serving?
Why we do what we do matters, and as Paul writes to Corinth, just before our newly expanded passage from chapter 13, chapter 12 ends with a glorious invitation scripture offers to us all: greater gifts, a more excellent way, which is love.
-Ben