The Love Supreme

And now, these three remain: faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.

-1 Corinthians 13:13

I had a funeral this morning, I've got a wedding on Saturday and I've got a sermon on Sunday, and all three of them center somehow or other around love.  That could not be a coincidence, even if there was such a thing.  The wedding is pretty obvious, even if you're not using 1 Corinthians 13, you are still going to end up talking about love some way or another, but the other two came rather as a surprise.  As I was talking about the resurrection, the thought occurred to me: why do we have to go through this?  If we're really, truly destined for eternity, why bother with the whole mortality angle in the first place?  Ecclesiastes 3: 11 says: "God has put eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what God has done from the beginning to the end."  Quoheleth looks at the whole idea of eternity as a sort of cruel joke, a "burden" that God has placed on our hearts.  Indeed our awareness of time and mortality does prescribe some limits to our lives and our ambitions.

Can you imagine if we had limitless time?  Some fiction writers have spooled out the consequences for us, and usually it's not a pretty picture.  That's why Paul says: "The mortal cannot inherit immortality..." The two things just don't jive; a temporary body, subject to age and decay would be rather a curse if there was no way out.  I'm pretty sure I don't want to hang around this place forever, but I do have this craving, this sense of wanting to be somewhere, to be something, and that's eternity in my heart.

But eternity is not good in any a priori sense.  For eternity to be heavenly and not hellish, love is required.  Love that forgives sin, love that conquers death, love that makes the journey and even eternity worthwhile.  Love is the reason God said, "let there be light," and it is also the reason why there is darkness.  It is the reason that we care deeply for one another and the reason why we hurt so much when people we care about go away.

It's easy to get our wires crossed when it comes to God.  Judging by behavior, you might think that the primary goal of people trying to know God is so that they can somehow get into the eternal party, but that's getting it all wrong.  The reason we should get to know God is because of love, because of God's love for us, because of the fact that if we orient ourselves towards loving God, everything else falls into place rather more pleasantly.  Faith and hope, which both make life more bearable and meaningful, are really just feeder streams to the river of divine love.

You can't force it, you can't grab a hold of it, it is something inherent in the fiber of the universe, it's what we're made for.

Love makes eternity bearable.

Love sparks our beginnings.

Love binds our lives together.

Love greets us at our end.

Love is for weddings, funerals and random Sundays.  John says to the early church, "God is love," and that is really all you need.  All you need is love, dah dah dah da dah.