How to Be a Love Letter
2 Corinthians 3:1-9;
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
How to be a Love Letter
Paul mentions letters of recommendation. Apparently, it was common for preaching evangelists at the time to sell themselves and gather the trust of their prospective audience by carrying with them a type of performance report written by a popular or powerful individual from a region they previously preached in. Those of you familiar with performance reviews in the corporate world would know how senseless they are. They say more about the relationship between the person that do the report and the person it is written about than it does about the person’s actual performance. The way most people ensure a good performance review is not by performing better but by sucking up to the person that writes them. Performance reports lie. They either tend to highlight achievements and underplay failures and the role of others in the achievements or they tend to underline the failures and also downplay the role of others in that failure. It is much the same with recommendation letters.
Paul is done with letters of recommendation. He has discovered a different type of letter that simply achieves way more. Love letters. They are not one-sided judgements but two-way communications. They are not written on paper but on precious hearts. They are not written with ink but with God’s Spirit. We are the pens through whom this ink flow, but Jesus is ultimately the writer. They are not set in stone but in flesh.
You see, the letters of recommendations went on about the good things and stayed silent about the bad things. It caused a situation where the carrier hid their shortcomings and the audience idealized the them as a faultless human being. Love letters enables both parties to embrace the full package. That is what empowered Paul to be so forthright about his shortcomings and his dodgy past. I think it is also the reason why Paul’s letters are still read today and received as inspiring documents whilst the recommendation letters and the thoughts of those that carried it is nowhere to be found today.
There are a lot of ways in which we still write and adore letters of recommendations. Not only in the corporate world. Letters of recommendation comes in all kinds of different shapes nowadays. They come in the form of Facebook posts and likes. In the form of prestige awards that really says very little about the full picture of your life. They come in the forms of status and bank balances. All these things we chase down in order to feel worthy. They don’t work. In fact, they do the opposite. They make us people that feel fake and afraid to be found out. What the world needs is less letters of recommendation and more love letters. Not just the ones between a man and a woman. Today, Paul wants to teach us how to write them or at least how to be the kind of pencils God likes to write with
Get to love doing right
Deuteronomy calls the law good and accessible. Written not just on stone but in us. Jesus in the sermon on the mount again confirms that the law is good but also, very importantly that He came to fulfill the law. Paul calls what Moses brought down from the mountain something that is filled with glory. There is right and wrong in the world and everybody knows it deep inside. Indeed, the fact that nobody could really consistently deny that there is right and wrong actions and that we mostly agree on what they are is a very convincing argument for the existence of a moral Being and creator outside ourselves, God. Even though nothing that can separate us from the love of God, we do feel closer to Him when we do something, we know is right and we do feel further from Him when we do something we feel is wrong.
To deny that there is right or wrong or even just to embrace the illusion that every right and wrong is a very subjective personal matter, like in “right or wrong for me” is to get into all sorts of trouble. Effectively you declare yourself god when you do that because you deny the fact that it is Someone other and above you that is the lawgiver and judge on what is right and wrong. To accept Jesus as King means that you give Him the right and the final say in what is right and what is wrong.
Ethical consideration is love letter writing 101. The highest form of ethical thinking to think not only what is the right or best thing for me but to consider what is the best thing for us all…and for non existent future people that will come after us. It is not always clear cut what is right and what is wrong even when it is always clear cut that there is a right of a wrong. But wrestling with what is right in such times is a worthwhile journey. You and the world around you is better off when you engage with it. The fact that through the Spirit speaks God’s right and wrong into our hearts and through the community of believers equips us to be people to whom the right thing becomes a delight. We often pray that God should how us what is right. Maybe we should also pray that God will make us love to do what is right.
Get to love the truth
No letter with lies could be a good love letter. Truth is another thread that holds our world together. For one it builds trust between people. Truth sets people free. When you have lived in a prison of lies for long, coming out into the freedom of truth tends to be something that scares you rather than excites you but it is still better for you to walk out into that scary freedom. Ironically truth can also cause you to be imprisoned. Ask Paul who was thrown into prison for standing on truth. Jesus was nailed to the cross because He spoke and lived truth. Truth often makes people who cling to it suffer. But then some of the freest people that ever lived were people that suffered and were imprisoned because of the truth they clanged to. Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and Paul. It seems like truth sets people free even more when they are imprisoned for it and when they suffer for it.
To tell the truth is more than not to lie. We often lie and live lies by omission, by refusing to name what is not right, by ignoring things that shouldn’t be ignored in the hope that they would dissolve by themselves.
How the truth and what is right and wrong are presented is very important. We should speak the truth boldly but also with sensitivity. Speaking the truth in love is a fine art and something we all need God’s spirit for. It is so easy to be so sensitive that you don’t get the truth through to a person. It can sometimes be just as easy to be so courageous when you speak the truth that it closes up hearts in defense.
This brings me to the final point. Until recently there was this quest all around for objective truth. People attempted to find truths that stands timeless and contextless above all ages and places. When it comes to scientific facts, this might still be a worthwhile endeavour but its sorely lacking when it comes to other kinds of truths. It makes truth hover above people out of their reach in many cases. Nowadays truth is seen as something subjective. What is true for one person isn’t necessarily true for the next person. This approach makes for a confusing and relative life experience, so it also does not quite fly even if it gave us some insight in how people’s circumstances and experiences differ.
Jesus showed us something about truth that is better than the objective quest or the subjective approach. Jesus showed us that more than truth has timeless objectivity or personal implication that are unique, it is relational. We discover what is true at the right time in the context of relationship with God and each other. Not what is true for only me, not what is true for everybody everywhere but what is true for us tied together in bonds of love. The objective, timeless and even contextless air of the law had to be complimented by the loving, gracious and relational dimension Jesus brought. There is no short cut to truth. Truth becomes part of your identity only through the long messy and difficult path of loving people you encounter.
A commitment to truth is a commitment to learn to love the people God put in my life better and better.
Love to receive and extent grace
What makes us flee from things like what is right and true? It is the unbearable realization that we don’t always get it right. That our track record isn’t clean. When we ignore or flee from this truth we do what Adam and Eve did. Stanley Hauerwas writes:
“The distance between how we live and what we know to be true is painful and tempts us to change the truth rather than changing our lives”
If something makes me feel bad about myself I just throw it away right? If something is good and I do not manage to attain it, it is just human nature to tell myself that it is not really good for me..
And then comes the essence of what Paul and Jesus called a new covenant to save us from this destructive path. The essence is grace. There is only one of two things that can save us. A perfect track record on right and on truth or grace from someone who did attain that. And since none of us are perfect, grace to us is the only option of a life with God. Grace justifies.
Anne Lamott had this to say about Grace:
“The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals the world. To summon grace, say ‘Help’ and buckle up. Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn’t leave you where it found you. And Grace won’t look like Casper the friendly Ghost, regrettably. But the phone will ring or the mail will come and then against all odds, you will get your sense of humour about yourself back. Laughter really is carbonated holiness. It helps us breathe again and again and gives us back to ourselves, and this gives us faith in life and each other. And remember-grace always bats last!
In the Old covenant our morality or lack of it stood central, in the new covenant grace bats last and saves the day. But it also transforms us. When Ann mentions the phone ringing or the mail coming in, what is she describing? She is describing how people transformed by grace becomes agents of grace. She is describing letters of recommendation full of lies becoming love letters full of grace and truth because of Jesus. And that is way more beautiful that Casper the friendly ghost.
Close
Paul’s letters contain great theology, great moral guidance and truth. But it never has a lack of passion and love. That is why people still read them.
By grace you and I are so much more than somebodies Valentine. We are Gods love letter and the precious pens he writes with on hearts.
Who needs to carry a letter of recommendation when you can be a living love letter?
Amen