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 Corinthians 13.4-8a]

This wonderful reading has often been hamstrung by the context of the marriage ceremony. People gather, their hearts excited about the love about to be promised between two people, and the larger (uncomfortable?) story to which Paul is attesting, slips by, unnoticed.

Last week’s reading, from the previous chapter in Corinthians, identifies the diverse gifts which are ideally present in the community of faith. Not simply about prophecy and teaching, speaking in tongues and miracles, but about the frailty and strength of different people at different times in the life of our community.

Paul articulates the challenge of living in community, one of which is that there are some people who are up front, leading us on and there are others who require greater care.

“On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable,and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect …” [I Cor. 12.22-23]

This is not the way our wider community currently appears to function. We have community members, commentators and politicians calling for punishment towards those “who do not fit”.

The church slides easily into this trap; we are uncomfortable with people who don’t believe what we believe, or behave the way we’d like them to. We have a “church mission plan”, and we are intolerant of waiting for people to catch up.

Which is precisely why Paul has written this chapter of love immediately following the chapter on membership and gifts. This is not about the heart beating faster as we make our wedding vows, this is about the behaviour of the church as we love each other and our wider community.

This is the foundation for all our actions in our Congregation, and the guidelines by which we make decisions. We start, not with expediency, but asking how we serve each other and those who are most in need, who live their lives in the margins of our Congregation, or our community.

This sounds too much, I know. Paul also knows this.

That’s why this is discipleship, not arrival. We can see “in a mirror, dimly” as we find our way. We are asked for faithfulness, hope and love, and that is our GPS. And from these gifts, all the others arise, and are more a reflection of Christ.

Let us continue to pray for our Congregation, that we will continue to grow, to seek forgiveness from each other, to serve those in greatest need of service, and to love each person, as Christ loves them – and us!

Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within.
Haunted by tribal memories, I know
This little now, this accidental present
Is not the all of me, whose long making
Is so much of the past.

Tonight here in suburbia as I sit
In easy chair before electric heater,
Warmed by the red glow, I fall into dream:
I am away
At the camp fire in the bush, among
My own people, sitting on the ground,
No walls around me,
The stars over me,
The tall surrounding trees that stir in the wind
Making their own music,
Soft cries of the night coming to us, there
Where we are one with all old Nature’s lives
Known and unknown,
In scenes where we belong but have now forsaken.
Deep chair and electric radiator
Are but since yesterday,
But a thousand camp fires in the forest
Are in my blood.
Let none tell me the past is wholly gone.
Now is so small a part of time, so small a part
Of all the race years that have moulded me.