This Sunday we are finishing our Love is the Hinge series with a message called Love Completes. Over the past few weeks we have watched a door on stage move from broken and unstable to strong and whole. Each week a hinge was added, and this week the final hinge is attached, the door is fully painted, and it stands upright and restored. It is a simple picture, but it is also a powerful reminder that love is what makes the Church complete.
Our theme is this, Love is the hinge that makes us whole. Our ministry, no matter how gifted or busy, falls apart without love. Faith and hope are essential, but love is supreme. Just as a door is complete only when fully hung and painted, our lives and ministries are complete only when rooted in love. Love is what makes our faith visible and our hope accessible to others.
Our scripture comes from 1 Corinthians 13:11 to 13, where Paul speaks about growing up in love and learning to see clearly. He says we do not see everything fully yet, we see like looking into a dim mirror. That is such an honest description of life. We do not always know the whole story. We do not always understand what God is doing. We do not always have the perfect words. But Paul points us to what remains steady, faith, hope, and love. And then he says something that anchors everything, the greatest of these is love.
Love is not decoration for the Christian life, it is the hinge. Love is what makes faith meaningful in the real world. Love is what turns hope into something people can actually experience. Love is what keeps ministry from becoming a machine, and turns it back into a movement of the Holy Spirit. Without love, we can be busy and still be brittle. Without love, we can be gifted and still be divided. Without love, we can do a lot of good things and still miss the heart of Jesus.
This week I hope you will come ready to reflect on where God might be inviting you to grow up in love. Maybe love needs to complete the way we speak, choosing gentleness over sarcasm, honesty over gossip, blessing over bitterness. Maybe love needs to complete the way we think, holding our opinions with humility and remembering we do not see the full picture yet. Maybe love needs to complete the way we live, turning our faith into action and our hope into hospitality.
When the door is finally hung, it can do what it was created to do, it can open to welcome, and close to protect. That is what love does in us. Love completes what God is building, making us whole, making us steady, making us a people who can open wide to our community with grace and strength.
Join us Sunday at 11 AM at Midway UMC as we celebrate what God is completing in us, and as we ask the Spirit to keep forming us into a church held together by love. Faith will guide us. Hope will sustain us. Love will complete us.
Grace and Peace (because grace always goes before peace),
Pastor Sharon