Read: 1 Corinthians 13:4-5 NRSV
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
You’ve probably heard this passage read at every wedding you’ve attended. It works well as a benediction to a relationship, and most newlyweds are too full of excitement to ever imagine being impatient, unkind, and all of those nasty things that are NOT love. Yes, you can probably imagine the brother-in-law of the groom or someone similarly close to the wedding party standing up and tripping his way through the full passage of 1 Corinthians, somewhere after the processional music but before the sermon.
In fact, the passage might be so associated with weddings in our minds that we forget that it isn’t exclusively about marriage at all. It comes from a letter of exhortation to the church in Corinth, in which the apostle Paul writes that any life lived without love is worthless. He’s not even talking specifically about mutual affection between two people, but rather the individual charge that each one of us is given in any interaction we have with all other people. We must continuously ask ourselves: am I speaking in love? Am I thinking in love? Am I acting in love? As fallen beings, we will naturally act with boastfulness and arrogance and rudeness, but as Christians, we must train ourselves (through prayer and fellowship with each other) to recognize when we are not acting in love.
The great advantage of ceremony and tradition is our repeated exposure to good sense and wisdom. Yes, every wedding follows the same essential formula, but that’s because the components that accompany such a life-altering step offer the dignity and solemnity that bless the union. The words in 1 Corinthians could benefit every one of us if our brothers-in-law read them aloud to us at the beginning of each day to remind us how to live with love.
