Ah, my first godblog post. *marks milestone*
So I've been thinking some about love lately. No, not the romantic lovey-dovey kind of love that we all talk about ad nauseum. And no, not the love that I have for Minnesota sports teams either (thus proving how similar love is to insanity). I'm talking about real love--expressed love. Call it beyond-compassionate love, irregardless love--true Christian love. The type of love that is shown to a total stranger, for no reason outside of a called duty and desire to serve others without regard for self. The love shown by a young man who volunteers at a local homeless shelter or soup kitchen. The type of love exhibited by a woman volunteering at an AIDS clinic. The type of love that leads a Catholic nun to set up shop in Calcutta, treating those who are shunned and cast out. The type of love that occurs when we go past compassionate feelings, and turn them into action. The type of love that can change the world, if it is true.
We Christians talk a lot about love. And we should. Loving others should be one of the main tenets of our faith. In the early days, it was clearly so--the book of Acts recalls the early days of the church, which added numbers and thrived, largely in part due to the way they put their love for God into action by loving others--sharing food, caring for widows and others in need, spending time together in joy. Jesus said that loving others is second only to loving God, and that showing people love through our actions is the same as loving him. James picks up on this idea and confirms that our Christian faith should be shown through our actions--without action, faith is useless. The apostle John says tells Christians that we should be known by our love.
How are Christians known now? Is it by our love? Are we known by that type of selfless love of which Jesus and the apostles spoke? Do we love, regardless? Or is our love sadly conditional? Is it based not on a person's inherent worth as a child of God, but on that person's worth as we perceive it? Do we use our love as we would currency, giving it to those who we feel deserve it, but withholding it from others? Is our love a commodity?
I do think that Christians do not love as we should, or as we are commanded to. Of course, it is inappropriate to paint an entire community as one, and there are certainly many exceptions. But on the whole, we have de-emphasized the idea of love. In general, I think Christians do a wonderful job of feeling compassionate for others--"those poor dears"--and we confuse that for actual, genuine love (for some people, depending on our personal view of that person's acts and behavior, we forego even the compassion--"they deserve what they got"). But compassionate love is simply not good enough. James is right--just as faith without works is dead, so is love without loving action. We need to do a better job. We need to get beyond the idea that just because a person appears unworthy of love
to us, that somehow that makes them unworthy of our love. We are called to something higher than that. A person's race does not matter, their income level does not matter, their politics does not matter, their beliefs do not matter. The only thing that matters is that they are loved by God, and therefore they must be loved by us. The early church understood this, and largely as a result of this unconditional love, they changed the world.
Sadly, I am just as guilty of this as other Christians. My whole life is marked with occasions where I chose not to love another person--or chose to feel compassion, but not put that love to work. Historically, this is because I am either too lazy or too prideful or too selfish to take the time to love, and in that, I have been dead wrong. Perhaps even sinful. I am learning, and it is hard. I recognize the problem within me, however, and I suppose that is a first step. Just as I need to change my way of thinking and put my love into action, so do many other Christians. We are not known by our love anymore, and that is a tragedy. Not only because it marginalizes our message of Jesus as the way to a true relationship with God, but also because it shows how unlike Jesus we are acting. This needs to change. For my part, I need to change. I must love as Jesus would.
