"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal."1 Corinthians 13
According to Dictionary.com, the definition of "poetry" is 'the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts.'
Generations both young and old have appreciated the poetry of those who possess a gifted ability to connect words and seize the power and beauty of language. There is almost endless potential in the way language can capture the senses and stir emotions.
There may be many gifted poets who appreciate the art of language and its use to the fullest, but honestly most of us are not only blind to that, but in fact misuse language in a way that is detrimental to our expression and communication to each other. Unfortunately, our expression and communication to God is not immune to our tainting and watering down of language either.
During college I once had a conversation with an older gentleman in a cafe. He was a retired professor who was a practicing Buddhist and explained how he had been diving into the study of language. He asked me a question that I find is appropriate for our whole generation. "What do we even mean with the words we say?"
If somebody were to ask you, "what do you want with your life?" a typical response would be, "I want to enjoy life and be happy." Now stop and think about that answer. What does that even mean? What do you really mean when you say that you want to be happy? What does the word happy even mean?!
Lately I feel like the Spirit has been bombarding me with the message of love, and how that single word could quite possibly be the most powerful word and/or thing period. So what about love? What does love even mean? I love the Celtics. I love hot dogs. I love Facebook. I love you. I love God. I love vacations. Now when I see the slew of ways that the word love can be used in any sentence, I stop to think, could we be misusing one of the most precious words in any human language? Have we as people, and even further, we as the church got it all wrong? To put it bluntly, I find it sad that one can use the same word to describe their feelings about the Almighty Creator with their feelings of a sports team or processed meat topped with a red condiment.
1 Corinthians 13 is probably the most famous passage in the Bible about love. Of course we've seen the descriptions of love on everyone's facebook profile, and its probably something that you've written in a letter or card to a friend sometime in your life. You know you've done it before. So much attention is brought to the description love in the middle of the passage by both congregation and preacher a like, but I find the opening verses are of up-most importance. If we miss these verses, then we've missed it all. In verses 1-3 Paul writes of how we are nothing without love. We may have the greatest gifts and talents this world could possibly see, and we may have the strongest faith, but without love we are absolutely nothing.
Churches today spend so much time trying to figure out whether babies should be baptized at birth and if there will ever be a solution to the freewill versus predestination debate. My humble call to the church is this. If we haven't gotten step 1 right yet, why move on to step 10...23...500?
In Matthew 22:37 (Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind), Christ Himself says that the GREATEST commandment is to love. There is so much power and mystery to the word love, this agape love that Paul writes about and that Jesus speaks about. But could it be that our misuse of the word and our lack of "poetry" plays a larger role in our misunderstanding of its depth, power and truth?
Does the church of Christ in the year 2009 understand what it means to love? Or are we all just a bunch of clanging cymbals? Trying to wrap my head around understanding God and our role as His creation actually just leaves me more confused than I started off. Will we really ever understand love? Maybe. Maybe not. So for now my prayer is like the song says, that in the light of Christ all the things of this world would grow strangely dim...even hot dogs.
