“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or in talk but in deed and in truth.” I John 3:16-18
It takes both hands to count the number of broken church stories I’ve heard in the last year. It makes me sick and it makes me sad to hear of brothers and sisters in Christ taking up arms and warring against one another. Not over trivial things. But it leaves me asking, “Where is the love of the gospel? Doesn’t the love of the gospel offer hope for reconciliation — especially WITHIN the church?”
It’s probably because of the sadness over those stories that these words by Eugene Peterson struck me hard. He is talking about the brokenness of the community John is addressing in his epistle. He says we really shouldn’t be surprised, because the church is composed of baptized sinners learning love:
“Men and women are not admitted to the community by presenting credentials of love skills, nor do we maintain our place in the community by passing periodic peer reviews on love. We are here to be formed over our lifetimes into a community of the beloved, God’s beloved who are being formed into a people who love God and one another in the way and on the terms in which God loves us. It’s slow work. We are slow learners. And though God is unendingly patient with us, we are not very patient with one another. Outsiders, observing our embarrassingly slow and erratic progress in love, wonder why we bother. Well, we bother because God is love: he created us in love; he saved us in the act of love; he commanded us to love one another. Love is the ocean in which we swim. So what if many of us can only wade in the shallows, and others of us can barely dog paddle for short distances? We are learning and we see the possibility of one day taking long, relaxed, easy strokes into the deep.” Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places
