Friends: Pam’s daughter Lauren married Greg Saturday, blending families and going forward in life.  I officiated the service and wanted to share the homily I wrote on love. Blessings, Bob

Spirituality Column #936

October 22, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Complete Love

By Bob Walters

“Love … always perseveres.” – The Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:7

Lauren and Greg, with her three small children and his one, were married and became a blended family last Saturday.  It was a career first for me, officiating the small, cozy ceremony among their dearest family and closest friends. I thought I’d share the homily:

Not one of us, individually, is “complete.” I believe our singular human incompleteness was and has been part of God’s plan since the Garden of Eden. We need a sure savior. We need trusted friends. We need nurturing family. We need a loving mate. It is a blessing to have loving children.  Hope resides in all these things.

The Bible says, “God is love,” but our earthly, human, temporal understanding of love we have in this life is better experienced in the context of God’s giving, sacrificing, eternal love. It is with God, and with each other, that we discover our completeness.

Consider that God – who we know as the Holy Trinity of God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit – God Himself is a community of three.  Why a community? Because love cannot exist alone, as one. 

A wise man once said that God is three because three is the smallest number of a community. God, therefore, can be – and is – love, and teaches that we are to love those whom he created in His own image … us.

It follows that the great commands of Jesus are to love God, and to love others.

The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13, verses 4-7:

“Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always perseveres.”

Notice that the things that cast light on ourselves – envy, boasting, pride, self-seeking – are warned against.  While things that express love, patience, kindness to others, and truth are recommended.

Chapter 13 of the Bible’s New Testament book of 1^st Corinthians is a staple of Christian and even not-so-Christian weddings, as we proclaim the strivings of human love. But the chapter is primarily about God’s perfect love.

Back in verse two, Paul says “if I can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”  Love is how we are completed in God’s eyes.  Our ability to see through to the eyes of God is the gift of Jesus Christ, and of those we love.

The passage also says that we must “put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). That is because we have grown and learned a greater love – a sacrificial love – for others and humility for ourselves.

Yes, in our earthly life we can have many things, talents, desires, dreams, and intentions.  But in the end, Paul says, faith, hope, and love remain; the greatest of these being love.   Love is the greatest because it invites divine relationship, and is God’s language of community, and completion.  

Greg and Lauren, may your lives and love become complete with God, with each other, and with your children, in heaven’s earthly realm. AMEN.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) obtained one of those “online ordinations” to be “legal” for the ceremony, but prior to the ceremony counseled with several personally known and trusted pastors for their blessing and imprimatur for him to officiate.  

Friends,  How dare God presume to be in charge of our really awesome human government structures on this planet? We do so well when He’s not involved …  Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #876

August 29, 2023

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

You Talkin’ to Me?

By Bob Walters

“Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities…” Romans 13:1

If First Corinthians 13 is the Bible’s “Love Chapter,” Romans 13 is its “Government Chapter.”  The Apostle Paul covered these bases well.

“Love is patient, love is kind; it does not envy, it does not boast …Love never fails” (1 Cor 13:4-8) are instructive words often spoken in wedding ceremonies.

“… For there is no authority except that which God has established” (Romans 13:1) are Lordly, commanding words virtually never heard in modern political discourse. Not in America, nor – I daresay – to my knowledge anywhere else.

While matrimony still clings – though often threadbare – to scripture, government has gone rogue.  We will “love, honor, and cherish” the prospect of a spouse, allowing God to squeeze into the ceremony if only for the day and only for lip service.  God has no such gracious invitation to, nor promotable authority in, the modern public square.

Does God actually have that authority? Yes, He does, and we’ll get to that.  Like its constant focus on God’s love, the Bible’s plenary emphasis on God’s authority colors every verse.  But where we may be willing to bargain with a spouse on mutual terms to “love, honor, and cherish” – traditional words that are civil, by the way, not biblical – assigning all authority to God just because the Bible says so is widely seen as irrational, unseemly, and unworkable.  As in, “I’m not going to let God tell me what to do!”

That is our general culture’s self-crippling, modern, behavioral posture relating to God and revealing humanity’s evil streak that brings death, not love.  And with our secularly errant, prideful, and dismissive misunderstanding of “the separation of Church and State,” no way will we accept subjection to government just because God said so.

“God has no business in government!” shrieks backwards modern Liberalism, the bureaucracy, the media, the progressives, the Woke, my atheist neighbor and, I’m sorry to say, more than a few practicing Christians who accept salvation but fight Lordship.

It is a dumb fight we cannot win.  We can resist God and ignore scripture – heck, that is Satan’s central game plan for us – but joy and order come only in submission.

Huh? Submission? We are indignant like Robert DeNiro, “Are you talkin’ to me?”

Romans 13:1-7 makes the most sense when we look at what God’s installation of civil government does for us, not against us. We may think the current U.S. government/ leadership is yucky, but it is no yuckier than the pagan Roman Empire or cruel Emperor Nero. Paul’s teaching makes perfect sense when you look at God’s perspective.

Paul is promoting a distinction between Godly obedience by Christians and the chaotic rebelliousness of the Israelites. Israel prayed for a Messiah who would kill the Romans; Jesus the true Messiah commanded us to pray for the Romans, i.e., enemies.

Paul – a Pharisee, a Roman citizen, and a Roman prisoner – understood God’s institution of human government to provide order for and protection of humans.  Chaos and anarchy are antithetical to God’s plan for humanity but natural to a sinful, fallen world.  Roman rule could be harsh but it did provide order and safety if it was obeyed. 

Our citizenship on earth, such as it is, is temporary; our eternal home is Heaven.

I imagine God sees our no-God politics and muses, “You should be talkin’ to me.”

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) cites DeNiro in the 1976 film, “Taxi Driver.”

Spirituality Column #449
June 23, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

I was a busy-with-church Episcopal kid, a virulently disinterested non-church agnostic adult, and then caught on with the evangelical Jesus thing in my late 40s.

For the most part, I haven’t missed a church service or a weekly Bible study in 14 years, or an “In Spirit” column deadline for almost nine.

What happened?  Did I lose my mind?  Get hit by holy lightning?   Jump, shout and convulse with the sudden indwelling of the Holy Spirit?  Nah … nothing like that.

I’ve told this story before, and I’ll tell it again because it’s very nearly my all-time favorite story.  One evening in August of 2001, a few days after his 8^th-grade school year started at Carmel Clay Junior High, my then-13-year-old son Eric calmly asked at the family dinner table, “Why don’t we go to church?”

Consider, Carmel has two enormous, vibrant Catholic parishes; plus a half-dozen of the largest protestant churches in Indiana are either in or very near Carmel. With tons of educated parents with money who are raising their children together, Carmel fits, and is, the broad-brush, demographic picture of a church-going community.

So of course kids on Carmel school buses chatting about life, chat about church. Encountering the topic among friends, Eric wondered why we didn’t go. So that night at dinner, he asked.  Mom and Dad, encountering a young teenager so obviously expressing an interest in church, were stuck for an answer.

As it happened, Eric’s Aunt Julie (his mom Jean’s sister) was a fervent Christian looking for a new church.  While we at that point failed to understand Julie’s faithful fervor, we nonetheless appreciated her help identifying a church.  Julie lived near Lawrence North High School, we lived in southeast Carmel, and a big church conveniently located halfway between was East 91^st Street Christian Church.

Jean did “recon” one week, and the next Sunday, Sept. 2, 2001, we took our sons Eric and John (age 9) to church.  The “E91” youth ministry downstairs was warm and inviting, and we headed to the “big service” upstairs.

Sitting near the back, I was nonplussed by the unusual (for a former Episcopalian) modern music, unstructured worship and free-form prayer.  Then a guy named Russ Blowers, that very day celebrating 50 years of ministry at E91, got up and started preaching 1 Corinthians 13 and the truth of divine love.

And I realized: this truth wasn’t about me, it was about Jesus Christ.

And surprisingly, softly, and as privately as I could, I started crying.

In a good way.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) eventually noticed something missing from both the old church and the new.  That’s next week. Btw, E91 is located where LNHS originally was going to be built.

Spirituality Column #326
February 12, 2013
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters

Spirituality Column #304
September 11, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

By Bob Walters
Author of Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary