Jesus Creed
“Whenever someone says, I hope you hear this ‘in Christian love’ get ready to be hated on.”-Jon Acuff
“Everyone loves the idea of forgiveness…until they have something to forgive.” –C.S. Lewis
In Christian Love: Love Hurts
A few years ago, I read about an anthropologist who lived for a while among the Hopi tribe. The anthropologist noticed that so much of their art and music was centered around the topic of rain, and so he asked a Hopi tribal leader why they sang about rain so much. The Hopi replied that it was because water is so scarce in the land where they live.
Then the Hopi asked the anthropologist: “Is that why so many of your songs in the West are about love?”
We live in a world that loves “love.” We love to talk about it, tell stories about it, we make songs and movies describing it, we fight for everyone to have a chance to find it, and yet I’m becoming more and more convinced that we don’t have a clear idea of what it is we are actually looking for.
For the next few weeks I want to write here about Christian Love, specifically what it feels like being inside of “Christian love” and how that’s different than what you might think and (in my experience) much more difficult than you would expect.
And yet why it’s more important than ever.
Because, in my experience, we love love…until we are called to love someone we don’t like, someone who is different than us, who doesn’t share our same belief system, or to the same degree, or with the same application. We love “love” as long as we are talking primarily about emotions, affection and ideas, and not about real, actual people.
I’ve done over 100 weddings, and about 30% of the time I’ve been asked to read 1 Corinthians 13. If you’re familiar with the Bible, you know that this is Paul’s famous chapter about love. (If you’re not familiar with the Bible, you’ll know it as that part of Scripture that they read in the movie Wedding Crashers.) I get why a wedding is a great place to read that, but an even better context for it is the one it was actually written for: a heated church meeting.
In 1st Corinthians 13 Paul is making a larger argument toward people who are using their spiritual gifts to look more spiritual than other people in their church, people who were using their “piety to undermine the Christian community, and make themselves look better than the other Christians around them.
Because that’s something people used to do, back in the day before we evolved so much emotionally, religious people used to treat each other in a way that dismissed another person while simultaneously making ourselves look more devout.
Paul begins 1st Corinthians by responding to the common argument: One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.”
Did you catch that? “Sill another, “Well, I follow Christ.” That is this first recorded incident we have of the Jesus Juke!
I can just imagine them saying things like “I just needed to find a church with teaching where I could be fed.” or “I used to believe that too, until the LORD started revealing the truth to me.”
You know ancient stuff like that.
But, and here’s where Paul messes with me, those smug religious people who come to mind when I write this, the ones who say those kinds of things, are part of the very people I’m called to love. Not just those people, but I certainly can’t escape the call to love the people I want to love the least.
That’s the point of 1st Corinthians 13.
It was written to an actual situation, with actual real live people, and Paul has the nerve to say these things…things like “Love always trusts, always hopes, always protects” not as some kind of poetic ideal, but as a way of actually living and organizing your life around being with precisely the kind of people who we might be very tempted to be just avoid.
I once heard Richard Beck say it this way, “Watch out for anyone who says I love God more than man, because that person is about to hurt someone.”
I’ve come to believe that sums up the law and the prophets, because at the heart of following Jesus is the realization that the best way to love God is by loving the person right in front of us.
The problem is what happens when we merge this understanding of the Christian faith with our individualistic society.
Today, I don’t think very many of my peers disagree with the idea that loving God involves loving the person right in front of us, I think my generation (I’m a millennial) believes this wholeheartedly, the problem is that we’ve learned to just keep changing who that person is standing in front of us.
Brene Brown calls it “the betrayal of disengagement” After years of research in her work as a sociologist, Brown says our checking out of painful relationships actually causes more pain than anything:
“The most hurt and the deepest hurt I saw, over and over, was when people would talk about relationships— whether it was with a friend, a parent, with adult children—where people had just stopped trying. Where at some point, they threw their hands in the air and said, “it’s not supposed to be this much work or this hard.” Our capacity for wholeheartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be brokenhearted; again, it goes back to the idea that we are so afraid of feeling pain and feeling loss that we opt to live disappointed rather than to feel disappointed.
This is why I believe, not just in the local church, but in staying in the same local church, with the same people, not despite the fact that they frustrate you and get on your everlasting nerves, but because they will.
It seems like what Paul is hinting at is that the way God wants to help us grow more like Him is by inviting us into deeper relationships with the very people who take work to love.
But that’s not going to be easy, because love, at least the Christian kind of love involves hurt.
*This is not a post arguing for people to stay in communities of spiritual/physical abuse, if that’s your circumstance grace upon grace.
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