There’s nothing like the feeling of being in love. The wonderful preoccupation you feel with the one who lives in your heart and mind all the day long. Your heart beats faster even at the thought of your beloved. You thrill at trying to figure out ways to make him or her happy with gifts or words, or with the gift of words, or with the gift of wordless silence in the presence of one who knows that even that means “I love you.”

There’s a chemistry about that kind of love that defies chemistry. It’s a spiritual thing you can hardly say rises from within you; you believe it descends upon you from above, this love. And when you know that you can thank God for it, and love God in the loving of that person rather than only stopping at the love of the person as if he or she were God, then you know there’s something truly divine going on there for sure.

It’s like Dante loving Beatrice along the journey of his soul through the inferno of hell and up the mountain of Purgatory, until at last she leads him to Paradise and the true Beloved, who is the source and goal of all love. When he is granted the beatific vision of God, he exclaims, in one of the loveliest lines of literature that conclude The Divine Comedy: High phantasy lost power and here broke off;/Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,/My will and my desire were turned by love,/The love that moves the sun and the other stars.

“God is love,” says John in his first epistle. And “love is from God,” he says. All love, I would say, not just some love.

One of the persistent problems with the church has been the slicing up of love into loves—the making of categories for love that endanger its wholeness. This always seems to omit the idea of the erotic or the aesthetic, let alone even the love of friendship. Know-it-all preachers and theologians are keen to point out the four loves in the Greek language: eros, philia, storge, and agape. Even though we call 1 Corinthians 13 “the love chapter” and use it at weddings all the time, we who know better about these things want you to know how inappropriate that really is. The love in the love chapter is really divine love. It is love that acts on willpower to be loving; it is not a feeling of love or a bond to be served. Eros is romantic love, philia brotherly, storge family devotion, and agape: well, now, agape is divine love—true love—the love that is really charity, as the King James put it. It’s the love that operates off pity for those who are unlovable because they are undeserving sinners. It’s a love, in other words, that leads to the passion of the Christ for us, a love that suffers pain in order to redeem.

Now, we’re going to get to that in a minute and show how that is a part of the one love that is love. But here’s my contention: we need more eros in our agape, not less. We need a love that moves us with passion that is more than pity. Somehow we are afraid to imagine a God who sees in us something worth loving, a God who has a chemistry with us. We are afraid to think of any passion in God that isn’t sacrificially based. But why should that be? Are we not created in the image of God? Is our sinfulness so disgusting to God that it erases all longing in God for the likeness in us that God has placed there? I don’t think so. We are sinful enough for sure, but we are nothing other than God’s creations still.

What we rightly object to is the idea that love should be easy. Eva Cassidy recorded a song called “Easy Street Dream.” [From CD “Time After Time,” song words by Steven M. Digman.] She sings: Any love that’s easy falls down like rain. Any love that’s easy goes out with a bad name. Any love that you find on Easy Street can only be a dream. Now dreams are fine and dandy, so long as we dream with eyes wide open. The thing we don’t want is any “love is blind” nonsense. Christian love, genuinely godly love—whether love of a beloved, or of a friend or a neighbor, or even of an enemy—always sees the faults of the other and deals with them honestly. When people who think they are in love bump into stubborn faults of their lover and give up or run the other way and “fall out of love,” so to speak, they are not looking far enough into the person—far enough to see that they can love God through loving that person with all the faults. True love always requires passion—both the kind that wants the beloved to love in return and the kind that is willing to suffer for the sake of that love. Love is tough and hard and patient. It never quits and never ends. It doesn’t look for excuses to give up; it looks for ways to forgive. Forgiveness is the key ingredient in love, both human and divine.

I was in Mobile this past week to speak at the Jewish–Christian dialogue there that is the longest continuous effort of its kind in America—29 years. While there, I caught up with many dear friends from the church I served 15 years ago before I came here. Sadly, I heard tales of one conflict after another that has whittled away at the spirit of the church and, alas, its membership. They are only about 50 now, less than a fourth of what they were years ago. Some of it was the insecurity of a pastor that could not tolerate anyone who disagreed with him and drove people away. Some of it was church members who never learned how to love each other enough to forgive and reconcile when things came between them. The results have been devastating. One member told me about telling another Christian in town where she went to church and the other woman said, How can you be a member there? All those people know how to do is fight with each other. Well, that isn’t true of those who are left, but it is now the reputation that the church must live down over time.

When you think of a Baptist church, which of the three spiritual virtues do you think ought to be our hallmark? Faith, hope, or love? Over the past few weeks as we have looked at “The Passion of the Christians,” we have said that in the history of Christianity you can identify the movements that have traveled the road of discipleship by types: faith, hope, and love. Protestants generally—stemming from Martin Luther and John Calvin— have focused on faith as right belief. They call themselves “believers.” Roman Catholics and others that emphasize doing the gospel embody the virtue of hope. They focus on personal sacrifice and standing up for the poor and oppressed. They look to the future and hope to please God and complete their salvation. They call themselves “the faithful.” “The eternal way of love” is the third type. Baptists use language like Brother George and Sister Kim to tip off what they think of the church. Baptist Christians are brothers and sisters. We are a fellowship, a kind of family of love. If someone says the reception will be in “fellowship hall,” you can almost bet on it being a Baptist church. Of course, if you bet on it, you probably aren’t a Baptist, don’t you know?!

Baptists need balance in the triangle of virtues, and can be strengthened by our understanding of Protestant faith and Catholics hope. We should know what we believe, and we should act upon it in hope by serving God in the world. But Baptists started as a movement of Christians who voluntarily entered into covenant relationship with one another. We resonated with St. John more than St. Paul of the Protestants or St. Peter of the Catholics. And John hammers away at the theme of loving God by loving one another. We are truest to our Baptist heritage when we elevate love above all else.

One Baptist tragedy all along is how we have failed to all get along, when the thing we say about ourselves is that love is the way that proves we are God’s people. Peter Gomes is a Baptist preacher and the University Minister at Harvard. He wrote a book in 1996 called The Good Book, in which he tried to teach people how to read and understand the Bible. It was successful enough that Gomes got poison-pen letters from people who disagreed with his interpretation of certain passages in the Bible on homosexuality. Somehow the letters all seemed to start with a phrase like, I tell you this in love. Whenever you hear that opening line in a Baptist church, run for cover because something very unloving is coming your way. Some of Gomes’s loving sisters and brothers wrote things he felt were intended to make him feel like he was the devil’s child going to straight to hell. Then they would sign off with “In Christian love.” Right?!

So what’s the problem with that? Aren’t you supposed to hate the sin and love the sinner? Well, anybody ever succeeded at that? Separating the sinner from the sin? You can only love me as I am—as an actual person with all my sin attached. If you try to love me apart from my sin, you are likely trying to love the ‘me’ you have created in your imagination, and you aren’t likely to go through the trouble of suffering in your love enough to forgive me. You think if you have pointed out my faults to me and withdrawn your affection, it will lead me to straighten myself out enough to be worthy of your love and God’s. The problem with that is not only that it doesn’t work; it also isn’t God’s way of love. God so loved us while we were sinners that God sent the Son to die for us. God loved us to death in order to bring us to life. God didn’t withhold love until we were lovable. God’s forgiveness leads the way. And so must ours with each other. Forgiveness is what makes unconditional love unconditional.

I am working on this right now myself. I subleased a Chevy Tahoe a couple of years ago to a certain couple with bad credit. I wanted relief from the lease, and they wanted someone to give them a chance. Sounds like a match made in … hell, huh? It was. About five months ago the checks started bouncing, and the people stopped returning my calls. They are already five months past due in rent, owe two years’ worth of back taxes, and are 30,000 miles over their limit. Bottom line: I have been financing their irresponsibility for a long time and a lot of money. So I go to repossess the car and find that they have moved out of the house. Empty. A realtor is showing it to someone. So I go to his place of business, with my son alongside for sympathy. He slaps a legal paper in my face to show me that the car is now protected by bankruptcy proceedings. I’ll be lucky to collect ten cents on the dollar. In the meantime they refuse to give me back the car! Unbelievable.

I confess I have not handled this too well with them. They know I am a Baptist preacher, but I’m sure they can’t tell I am a moderate Baptist, if you know what I mean. The problem is, as a follower of Jesus Christ, I do not have the option of only loving and forgiving people who have done nothing to hurt or harm me. I owe it to God to forget myself on purpose and forgive them, even if I still think they should pay their debts and stop abusing people’s good will. If Jesus can forgive his crucifying enemies and backstabbing friends, how can you or I not forgive those who hurt us? People, you can’t change people by withholding forgiveness, which is at the heart of love. But God’s love can change them through your forgiveness. It’s a question of whether you want to love that much.

Ever wonder why love is the greatest of these? It’s because faith comes to an end when we know in full. Hope ends when our hopes are fulfilled. But love, well, now, love is eternal. It never ends. You never surpass love: you only take it deeper—so deep, so deep—all the way to God. How deep is your love?