I was preaching from 1 Corinthians 13 on Sunday. That passage oft read at weddings despite having nothing to do with marriage at all. Nor, despite its evident emphasis on love, is it really defining love. Paul, in the bit that looks a bit like a definition, mainly says ‘love is not…’ over and over again. Which is an odd way to do a definition because love is not loads of things (I love lamp, anyone?) But it isn’t supposed to be the dictionary entry for love; he is highlighting all the terrible behaviour in Corinth and saying, ‘You know all that stuff you’re doing to each other – not very loving, is it?’ Which is what makes it the really odd choice for a wedding reading!

One of the tempting things to do when you preach 1 Corinthians – in fact, when you preach any passage of scripture – is to try and really challenge the church with the passage. Here’s a load of stuff the Corinthians are doing. Are we just like them? Perhaps you do X or Y. Don’t copy that. We should be more like A or B. I don’t think this is always, or even often, wrong. Passages do challenge us and we sometimes want to challenge. Perhaps I am saying more about my preaching style than anything else here!

But sometimes it is good to look at your church and highlight, actually, I think we do this pretty well. No doubt imperfectly. Not doubt not as well as we ought. But pretty well in the grand scheme of things. Pretty well relative to other churches we might have been part of. Maybe this bit of scripture that could be a challenge is actually a matter on which our particular church doesn’t need challenging to do better or take a hard look at itself, but needs encouraging that we’re actually doing okay on this one.

I suspect the fact that I’m British makes that sort of encouragement difficult sometimes (after all, we’re not American!) The fact that we’re Northern makes it even more difficult. The fact I come from a working class background makes it harder still. British, Northern working class people just don’t do these things. We want the Word straight, we don’t want to give anyone a big head and, more often than not, we know we’re a bit rubbish and we need a kick up the backside to do a bit better. And, if that all sounds a bit rough, we can theologically couch it in terms of total depravity, striving for holiness and seeking to glorify God. What is more, it’s not always wrong – such things can be genuinely helpful in our Christian walk and some preaching is massively improved when it has a dose of this.

But the point is, not all of it. Certainly not all the time. If we’re all stick, all the time, the stick loses its value. Eventually, we just turn off when the noise starts, we learn to take the beating, we just wait for it to be over and then get on with our life with it making no impact. I’m reminded of the story of the donkey owner who just kept beating his donkey to go faster until it just gave up and lay down! It isn’t effective all or most the time.

What is more, it makes us untruthful. Every church has strengths and weaknesses. Every church is good at some stuff and perhaps less good at others. Reality is, if all we do is challenge our church and berate them to be better, we will necessarily be ignoring the stuff that we do reasonably well. Unless your church is uniquely bad at everything all the time, there must be some room for some encouragement somewhere. A failure to highlight it at all makes liars of us.

So, it was quite nice on Sunday to be able to look at this passage on love and, not challenge the church, but encourage them. I am grateful to God for a loving church where I see the love of God, manifest in the love his people for one another, on display is real and tangible ways. It would have been a lie to say anything else.