Love. All you need is love; love is all you need. I have
decided to stick with love; hate is too great a burden to bear. Keep love in
your heart: a life without it is like a sunless garden where the flowers are
dead. Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the
beginning of love. A new commandment I give you: love one another as I have
loved you. Where there is love, there is life. When people love each other,
they don’t look at each other… they look in the same direction. We are most
alive when we are in love. There’s no substitute for a great love who says, “No
matter what’s wrong with you, you’re welcome at this table.” And in the end the
love you make is the love you take.
And then from the first letter to the Corinthians, the
Epistle reading for this Sunday (Jan. 31): Love is patient; love is kind; love
is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own
way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but
rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all
things, endures all things. Love never ends.
With gratitude for the
above to: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and The Beatles; Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr.; Mother Teresa; Oscar Wilde; Mahatma Ghandi; singer Etta James; actor Tom
Hanks; dancer Ginger Rogers; St. Paul the Apostle; and Jesus the Christ.
With so much hatred in the world these days, this reading
from First Corinthians could not come at a better time. And neither could the
beautiful texts that we will sing in worship this Sunday:
Ubi caritar et amor, Deus ibi est.
Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor.
Exsultemus et in ipso jucundemur.
Timeamus et amemus Deum vivium.
Et ex corde diligamus nos sincero.
Where there is
charity and love, God is there.
The love of Christ
has gathered us together.
Let us rejoice and
be glad in it.
Let us revere and
love the living God.
And from a sincere
heart let us love one another.
Spread, O spread,
thou mighty word, spread the kingdom of the Lord,
that to earth’s
remotest bound all may heed the joyful sound;
word of how the
Savior’s love earth’s sore burden doth remove;
how forever, in its
need, through his death the world is freed.
Arthur William Farlander (1898-1952)
We’d give ourselves,
like rays of light
created to dispel the night,
God’s love this day
reflecting.
For God in us
himself would show his light on all the world below,
his truth through us
projecting.
Arno Pötzsch (1900-1956), children’s
educator, pastor and hymnist
Gracious Lord,
thyself impart!
Light of Light, from
God proceeding,
open thou our ears
and heart,
help us by thy
Spirit’s pleading.
Hear the cry thy
Church upraises;
hear, and bless our
prayers and praises.
Tobias Clausnitzer (1619-1684)
God the Omnipotent!
King, who ordainest
thunder thy clarion,
the lightening thy sword;
show forth thy pity
on high where thou reignest:
give to us peace in
our time, O Lord.
Henry Fothergill Chorley (1808-1872)
So, come to church
this Sunday, prepared to hear and sing of love and to pray for peace.