The Power of Love by Michael Curry

Author:Michael Curry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

II

The truth is, it’s so easy to be deceived about what makes for real life. John’s gospel noticed that Jesus wasn’t talking about biology. Biology is important. Because you’ve got to start somewhere. But that’s the basics. God wants you to have life as God intended. And the truth is, I’m convinced that love is the key to that life.

I have a theory—and I know there are some theologians in this room, so I’m going to be careful—but I’m convinced that the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is selfishness, and hatred is a derivative of selfishness. You see, selfishness or self-centeredness or, as the ancient mothers and fathers used to say, hubris (that is, false pride, self-centered pride that puts me in the center of the world, and you and God and everybody else on the periphery) . . . selfishness like that is the root of all evil. It is the source of every wrong. It is behind every bigotry. It is behind every injustice. It is the root cancer of every war. It is the source of every destruction. That selfishness destroys homes. It will destroy churches. It will destroy nations. And left untethered, it will destroy creation. Selfishness.

And love is the cure. Love is the balm in Gilead. Love will heal the sin-sick soul. Love can lift us up when the gravity of selfishness will pull us down. Love can bind us together when selfishness will tear us apart.

There’s another word for selfishness. Believe it or not, it’s called sin. That’s why we have Lent, a season to deal with sin. But love is the cure.

We’ve got a television show, and you know the one I’m talking about. It’s the television show Survivor. Now it’s just a television show, but think about it. The premise of Survivor is that you put all these people on a desert island, and the goal of their life is to find life by getting everybody else kicked off the island. That’s a parable of selfishness. Because eventually selfishness gets everybody kicked off the island, and there’s nobody left but you. And you are incredibly boring by yourself.

But love brings us together. Love heals the wounds. Love can lift us up. Love is the source of freedom, the root source of life. The truth is, the only reason we’re here is because of love. I mean stop and think about it for a moment. We Christians believe in God. We believe in one God, and yet we believe in God the Holy Trinity. Am I right about that? We have one God and yet we know this one God as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. But we don’t have three gods; we have one God. We just know this one God in multiple, magnificent ways. We’ve got ourselves a many-splendored God.

The Holy Trinity is our tradition’s way of telling us that God can embrace individuality and multiplicity all at the same time.

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