Reflection - "What's Love Got to Do with It?" - October 18, 2026 Col. 3:1-17

“What’s love got to do with it?”

It sounds like a question from a pop song, but Paul answers it very differently. We tend to think of love as a feeling. Paul talks about love as a decision, a discipline, and a way of life. And let's be honest, loving people is easy…until we actually have to be around people, or live with them. It's easy to love humanity. Humanity is wonderful. People, however? We can be challenging.

We can love our neighbor in theory. Then our neighbor parks in front of our driveway for the third time, and suddenly our prayer life gets very specific. Colossians 3 tells us that loving like the Holy loves us isn't tested when we're surrounded by people who agree with us. Love is tested when we're surrounded by people who irritate us, disappoint us, misunderstand us, and sometimes hurt us.

So, where do we begin to love like Infinite LOVE loves us? Paul begins by telling the church in Colossae to put certain things to death. He writes, “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature…” Then he gets even more practical, writing, “You must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language…” What the Spirit is essentially teaching us is, “If we're going to follow Jesus, there are some clothes we can't keep wearing.”

Imagine showing up to church wearing clean clothes on the outside, but underneath what we are wearing we've got, anger, resentment, jealousy, gossip, pride, bitterness, and unforgiveness. We might say, “I don't have an anger problem.” We just have a people problem. And somehow our people problem follows us everywhere. The way of Infinite LOVE tells us to, “Take it off.”

Some of us have closets full of clothes we haven't worn in years. And spiritually, some of us have closets full of attitudes we haven't worn in years either, but we keep them around just in case. “I don't really use bitterness anymore, but I'm keeping it. You never know, and it still fits.” Paul writes, “Get rid of it.” Love begins with letting go of the things that prevent us from loving.

Love has to do with what we put on. The Spirit of LOVE doesn't simply tell us what to take off. She says, “Therefore, as followers of the Divine, (and calls us), holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” Notice something important. Paul doesn't say, “Try harder to be nice.” Paul tells the people, “Clothe yourselves.” In other words, every day we make a choice about what we're going to wear spiritually. Will we put on, Compassion? Kindness? Humility? Gentleness? Patience? Or will we clothe our hearts and minds with, “Don't talk to me before coffee”? Some of us need to put on patience before we put on our shoes.

This is where Dietrich Bonhoeffer gives us a powerful example. Bonhoeffer lived in one of the darkest periods of modern history. He watched Nazi Germany manipulate nationalism, hatred, fear, and eventually violence. All we need to do is to read the news and see this kind of dictatorship is still very much alive. Dietrich could have concluded that Christianity was primarily about holding the right beliefs. Instead, he insisted that following Christ meant living into the costly footsteps of Jesus. In his book Life Together, Bonhoeffer emphasized that Christian community isn't built around our idealized picture of other people. It is built on the ways of Jesus. That's important because we often love people best in our imagination. We imagine, “I love my church.” Then someone says something we don't like. “I love my church…except for her – or him, when they do this or that.” We love the idea of a Christ-like community until the Spirit blows up our idea of how we want something to look and feel like by saying, “Bear with each other and forgive one another…” This is not theoretical living into the ways of Jesus. This is Monday-morning our interior mirroring of the heart of Christ. What does this mean? This means loving the person even while they sit and have coffee on our last nerve. Love has to do with forgiveness. Paul writes, “Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” That's a staggering standard, because our minds often think, “Yeah, I’ve needed forgiveness, BUT not THAT KIND…Woah!”

Folks, the Spirit doesn't say, “Forgive when they deserve it or forgive when they apologize properly. Sophia, the Spirit of wisdom says, “Forgive as the Holy forgave you.” This changes everything because the measure of our forgiveness isn't what they did to us. The measure is what the Holy continually does for us.

This connects beautifully with Bonhoeffer's famous distinction between cheap grace and costly grace. Cheap grace says, “God forgives me, so nothing really has to change.” Costly grace says, “Infinite LOVE gives everything for me, therefore I give my life to follow the heart and hands of Infinite LOVE.” Love is costly. Forgiveness can be costly. Reconciliation can be costly. Serving others can be costly. Sometimes loving someone means the cost of swallowing our pride, or saying, “I'm sorry” or “I forgive you.” Sometimes it means establishing healthy boundaries while refusing to hate the person. And sometimes love means praying for someone who has absolutely no idea you're praying for them. Friends, LOVE is the seen and unseen substance that holds everything together.

The Spirit gives us the clincher in Paul’s words when he says, “And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”First of all, “perfect unity” … give me a break. We can’t even get everyone to give a 100%, “YES, go for the logo!” This is the centerpiece of my reflection:

The Spirit calls us – the ways of Jesus and Infinite LOVE call us to:

Put on compassion.

Put on kindness.

Put on humility.

Put on gentleness.

Put on patience.

Put on forgiveness.

But over all these pieces – these virtues of spiritual clothing, we are to PUT ON LOVE. Love is the container that holds the whole outfit together. Without love, kindness becomes politeness. Truth becomes a weapon. Discipline becomes legalism. Conviction becomes condemnation. And church becomes a gathering of people who happen to occupy the same building. Love binds who we are and why we open our hearts and hands and serve one another and Lake Country. Some want us to believe that loving like Jesus is weakness, but the truth is just the opposite…Love is not weakness. And this is where Bonhoeffer's story becomes especially powerful. Dietrich’s love for Christ did not make him passive in the face of evil. He resisted Hitler and the Nazi regime. He participated in resistance efforts and was imprisoned and executed at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945, shortly before the end of World War II. His story reminds us that loving like Jesus isn't weakness.

Love can be courageous and stand up to the empire of Dictatorships, Congresses, and University cultures who fan the flame of boys will be boys, even when gang rape is revealed. Even when the President is indicted and found guilty of rape. In all these realities and more, LOVE can say, “This is wrong.” I am Jane Doe and I will stand with the vulnerable. Love can confront evil. Love can sacrifice. Love can suffer.

Folks, LOVE doesn't mean agreeing with everybody. LOVE means seeking the highest good of all while remaining faithful to the ways of Jesus. Bonhoeffer understood that living into the ways of Jesus wasn't simply about admiring Jesus. It was about following his ways—even when it costs us something.

So, what do we do when it gets to be too much? Even as we stand in protest against the greed filled platforms in our world, in Lake Country, we can still surrender to the ways of the Spirit and, “Let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts…” Notice the word rule. It's a picture of an umpire or referee making the call. When conflict comes, we are free to let the Spirit make the call. When somebody hurts us, we are free to allow the ways of Christ to make the call. When we are tempted to retaliate with words or actions, we are free to allow the ways of Jesus to wash over us and clothe our souls. When our pride says, “This person…what this person did to me, or to him or her, or to a country, or to our world, certainly don’t deserve forgiveness,” we are free to allow the Spirit to make the call on how we will respond even while doing everything in our power to seek justice, which is not retaliation. And what is the call of the Spirit? Love. Love is how we become a family community, a church community, a political community, and an educational community…LOVE is how we become every kind of human community who desire the highest good for others. Paul writes, “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly…” RICHLY.  Not merely in you and me. Among you and me. Among us.

When Christianity began in the late 1^st and early 2^nd Century in a movement in the Second Temple Judaism which included non-Jewish converts – Gentiles and then gradually separated from mainstream Jewish traditions, this way of being in community was never intended to be a solo journey. We need one another. We teach one another. We encourage one another. We forgive one another. We carry one another. We sing together. We pray together. As we follow the guidance of the Spirit, we change directions together. We rethink, reimagine, and remodel the ways of LOVE together. And yes, because of all our human togetherness, we sometimes annoy one another. And somehow, by LOVE's grace, we still belong to one another. That's the miracle of the church. You belong to me and I belong to you because we are not our own, we belong to God.

So, what's love got to go with it? Everything. Love has everything to do with it because, Love is what we put on. Love is what holds us together. Love is what forgiveness looks like. Love is what makes our community of Lake Country United Church possible. Love is what gives us courage to stand against evil…to stand with Jane Doe and all who are raped of their dignity and oppressed by social systemic entitlement. And ultimately, it is the Love in Jesus pouring himself out that lead to his execution. The greatest demonstration of the LOVE of the Creator, Sustainer and Holder of the Universe wasn’t a feeling on Good Friday. It was an action. Jesus didn't simply say He loved humanity. Jesus poured himself out for humanity and made a mockery out of the empires of our world. So, when the Spirit, through the pen of Paul says, “Put on love,” She's really saying, “Put on the character of Christ.

When we walk out of here today, our question for this week isn’t, “Do I feel loving?” The question each of us need to answer every day, and sometimes several times during our day is, “What am I going to put on?” Will I put on patience, forgiveness, humility, compassion, kindness? Will I put on Christ? Because what's love got to do with it?

Everything.

May it be so, amen.

Traci Hubbard