Revive your Church with the breath of love

My reflection based on last week’s Collect was on the phrase, “Fill your Church on earth with power and compassion“. This week is on the phrase, “Revive your Church with the breath of love”. In some ways it feels as though those two phrases have got mixed up somehow, and this week’s should have come first. But perhaps this one should come before any other. Which, I guess, makes it especially appropriate for this Day of Pentecost: the day, nearly two thousand years ago, that the Church was born — we think of Pentecost as the birthday of the Church because it’s when the apostles first went out among the people and began spreading Jesus’ message, thus establishing the beginning of the Church.

“It’s all about the love”, as Steve put it in a recent comment. As long as there is the breath of God’s love in our Churches, everything else will, I believe, come right in the end.

So what is the standard of love that we should be aiming for? St Paul gives us that wonderful, and famous, description of love in his first letter to the Corinthian Church:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

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. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13 (NRSV)

Is that an impossible standard for our Churches to achieve? I don’t believe it is. With us being strengthened with the gift of faith, and God breathing his love into our Churches, anything is possible.

But God’s love isn’t something we should be keeping for ourselves, whether personally or corporately. No, we need to share it with those around us. We need to become channels for that love to reach those who need it. And the truly amazing thing is, no matter how much of God’s love we give to others, it never diminishes how much we have for ourselves. Give it all away, and yet retain all of it. Because God loves each and every one of us, as if there were only us to love.

Yes, with God breathing his love into our Churches, there really can be a revival! A revival based on love.

Holy Spirit, sent by the Father,
ignite in us your holy fire;
strengthen your children with the gift of faith,
revive your Church with the breath of love,
and renew the face of the earth,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Additional Collect for The Day of Pentecost
is Copyright © The Archbishops Council