All you need is love...

Stanley Hauerwas has taken the progressive church to task on more than one occasion for emphasizing the "all you need is love" approach. He says that in a modern liberal context a "love ethic"offers no clarity and guidance when it comes to making hard ethical decisions - especially if modern believers confuse Christian justice with the way of the state. What is needed, he argues, is training. Discipleship. Practice with thinking and living in a different way from the status quo. (for a good overview, please see Nathan Clendenin's essay at: http://web.archive.org/web/20030705135542/http://itw.sewanee.edu/philosophy/Capstone/2000/clendenin.html

Now more often than I am comfortable with I tend to agree with Hauerwas: the challenge of the church has always been equipping the saints with the tools to think and live like Christ. This training begins with worship - it includes the experience of forgiveness, baptism and eucharist - and then goes on to embrace and document what servanthood and acts of compassion in Christ's spirit look like. And yet...

And yet... without constantly revisiting the love ethic as made wonderfully clear by Paul in I Corinthians 13 our local churches often descend into nests of triviality and habit hiding under the guise of "tradition." Don't get me wrong, like Tevye, I love tradition - but not when it becomes idolatry. "All that love talk by Paul - and his morality catalogues, too," said my wife last night,"are essential to keeping us in the local church on the right track." How quickly we forget...

If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.

Love cares more for others than for self.

Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.

Love doesn't strut,

Doesn't have a swelled head,

Doesn't force itself on others,

Isn't always "me first,"

Doesn't fly off the handle,

Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,

Doesn't revel when others grovel,

Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,

Puts up with anything,

Trusts God always,

Always looks for the best,

Never looks back,

But keeps going to the end.
Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled. When I was an infant at my mother's breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant.

When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good. We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.

Such love keeps me from saying mean or overtly stupid things to another. Such love shows me what my best self looks like. It gives me a path through the wilderness, too. So I am all for discipleship training, but I would have to say that it BEGINS with a love that looks a lot like this...

What do you think?