By Your Love

But now that Timothy has come to us from you, and has brought us the good news of your faith and love and reported that you always remember us kindly and long to see us, as we long to see you—for this reason, brothers, in all our distress and affliction we have been comforted about you through your faith. For now we live, if you are standing fast in the Lord. For what thanksgiving can we return to God for you, for all the joy that we feel for your sake before our God, as we pray most earnestly night and day that we may see you face to face and supply what is lacking in your faith? Now may our God and Father himself, and our Lord Jesus, direct our way to you, and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, as we do for you, so that he may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints. (1 Thessalonians 3:6-13 ESV). Paul makes reference to a report brought to him by Timothy concerning the the actions of the church in Thessalonica. It is a good report, outlining their actions of faith and love toward one another and the community. It might sound trivial; however, it was very difficult to be a Christian in the hostile environment in which they lived. Coming to this passage I began to ponder whether people know I’m a Christian without my telling them. One of the characteristics that made the early Christians stand out was their love, expressed through actions like caring for each other’s physical and economic needs. The mutual love of Christians was radical too, in that it was expressed by people of drastically different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. One’s status in the wider culture didn’t translate into a higher or lower status in the church. Instead believers were united in their new identity in Christ. They had their conflicts too, but these were bearable because of the love they shared, love modeled to them by Paul and others, and ultimately by Christ himself. Some years ago there was a popular chorus, “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love,” often sung as a benediction to worship. Peter Scholtes, who was born in Evanston, Illinois and grew up in Oak Park, where he attended Ascension School and Fenwick High School before studying at Quigley and St. Mary of the Lake-Mundelein seminaries, wrote the hymn while he was a parish priest at St. Brendan's on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s. At the time, he was leading a youth choir out of the church basement and was looking for an appropriate song for a series of ecumenical, interracial events. When he couldn't find such a song, he wrote the now-famous hymn in a single day. I pause and reflect on whether I live in such a loving way that strangers can actually know that about me. I’m saddened when I hear people say their impression of Christians is that they are judgmental and exclusive. I wonder, what would it look like to reach out in radical love to people who have felt rejected by us? Surely Christ’s love, which is wide and long and high and deep, seeks to embrace all who feel cast out. And surely Christ’s love has the power to turn all of us, no matter how broken or bitter we feel, into instruments of God’s love.