The Greatest of These is Love

Happy Valentine’s Day!

It’s interesting, we don’t know a lot about the actual Saint Valentine. We only know that he was a priest or a bishop who was known to have cared for persecuted Christians and that he was eventually himself martyred somewhere around the year 250. That’s about the extent of it.

Well, I should add that we also know that from the late middle ages, his Feast Day, which is today, has been associated with love. And that he also happens to be the patron saint of epilepsy. Not real sure about the connection there…

But if it’s true about Saint Valentine, his love of Christ which led him to serve selflessly and ultimately to give his life for his faith, then the focus is appropriate. And it is especially appropriate for us as this is type of love that has long defined the Christian life.

The Apostle Paul writing to a very contentious church put it this way:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

And then, Paul adds these beautiful words:

 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. 

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

The great pastor and author William Sloane Coffin once wrote, “While Abraham lived to be a ripe old age, Jesus died young. “But didn’t both show us that it is by its content rather than by its duration that a lifetime is measured? Love and you are a success, whether or not the world thinks so. The highest purpose of Christianity… is to love.”

Let us pray: Holy God, We remember today, that you so loved the world that you gave your only son. We rejoice in your love for us – a love that walked this earth, that touched and felt human pain, that finally shattered the power of sin and death. We respond by loving you and by loving our neighbors; through Jesus Christ. Amen.