I have a confession to make: I did not plan to preach a sermon about love on Valentine’s Day. If I were selecting a scripture passage for today, I probably would have steered away from this passage. But through the turn of events over the last couple of weeks; through the snow and ice, this scripture called to be preached.

Valentine’s Day has been labeled by our society as a day to celebrate love. There are hearts filled with chocolate, cupids shooting their arrows into hearts, and other cutsie decorations. At first hearing, perhaps this passage from 1 Corinthians might remind you of those decorations. I’ve seen these words printed on decorative plaques and cards. This passage has been called a hymn of love. But it seems to me that when we take this segment of Paul’s letter out from the rest of it we lose some of its power.

When we hear just snippets of scripture divided up between multiple Sundays sometimes we don’t realize how it all fits together. This beautiful description of love comes right after Paul has talked about how the Spirit gives gifts to everyone and how the church is like a body. The body has many different parts but they all work together to make sure that the body functions as a whole. So Paul goes immediately from his famous description of the church as a body to describing love. The transition sentence between these two segments is: "But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way." So what is the "more excellent way"? Love.

So love is the way all these diverse members of the body are able to function in their separate ways and still build up the body. Love is the mortar or glue that holds together the church.

If you take a brief trip down the hairspray aisle at the drug store (and yes, it does take up a whole aisle), there are plenty of choices. There’s the AquaNet that is pretty much like concrete in a spray bottle. Then there are bottles that claim to contain "flexible hold." Then there are the gels that offer different levels of sculpting power. There are the ones that dry hard enough to spike up a punk rocker’s Mohawk and others that just provide enough hold to take care of any static fly-aways.

What if we were to think about love as the different types of hairspray or gels? Sometimes love holds on tight, refusing to let go – like the AquaNet. Sometimes, however, love has to be more flexible with some give and take. I guess the hardest part in the church is knowing which kind to use when.

But, as Paul claims, being without love is not an option. The most eloquent preacher can say beautiful words, but without love they fall on deaf ears. If we, as Christians, tell others about the amazing gift we have in Christ but then fail to show love to our neighbors, then our words are drowned out by our actions or lack of action. Because without love, can we really make sense out of anything that happened in Christ’s life. Without love can we make sense out of "For God so loved the world"?

Love is not another spiritual gift like speaking in tongues or healing. Instead it is the way in which we are to practice our spiritual gifts. Remember that all of us have gifts from God. They may be one of the gifts Paul mentioned earlier in his letter or they may be others, but we all have gifts. We have the choice of what we do with those gifts. We can turn our back on them and not use them at all. We can use them but just in order to show off the gift we have. Or we can use them for the common good – and through our use of them, show love to others. The more excellent way is to use our gifts in love.

You know, Paul is following his description of the church as a body with this description of love. Perhaps if we stay along that same vein we could see love as the blood of the body. I can remember from my health classes in school the drawing that depicted the circulatory system. This diagram showed the outline of a human and then showed the veins and arteries that deliver the blood from the heart to the rest of the body and back again. The thing I remember most about the chart is how there were blood vessels going everywhere. There was nowhere in the entire body that didn’t have blood running to it.

Think about it for a minute. Blood is necessary for a body to function. If we are low on blood or anemic then we feel sluggish and don’t really want to do anything. If you’ve ever given blood you know that you feel the effects of being low on blood for a while.

If blood isn’t reaching a part of the body, that part of the body begins to die. I can remember from a first aid course I took where we learned about tourniquets. The instructor was teaching about how you should never use a tourniquet unless you are willing to lose the piece of the body that you cut off circulation to. Because without blood flowing to it, parts of the body will die.

I’ve heard others talk about suffering from poor circulation. If you have poor circulation in the your hands or feet, they get cold very easily. Without the proper amount of blood flowing to your extremities, they are less able to deal with any outside conditions such as cold.

Then there are blood clots. These are very dangerous things. A blood clot can get stuck in a vein or artery and prevent blood to getting to part of the body. A blood clot can also move around and get stuck in narrow passages and cause a breakdown of the whole body.

So if we can look at love as the blood that flows through the church body we can get an idea of its importance. If we are low on love in the church then we become sluggish and less willing to go out and serve God’s people. We may not even want to serve the other parts of the body. If love isn’t reaching one part of the church then that part of the church will begin to atrophy and die off. If there is a clog in getting love to parts of the church those clogs will affect the rest of the church body. The clog and its effects can ripple throughout the rest of the church body.

In a healthy body there is just the right amount of blood that gets pumped throughout the whole body. In a healthy church, there is an abundance of love that gets pumped through all its members.

In a healthy body there is enough blood to spare to donate to others. And after the blood is donated, the body will make more. In a healthy church there is an abundance of love to share with everyone and a bottomless well from which more love can always be drawn out.

If I can push this metaphor a little farther, blood alone is not enough to make the body healthy. If there is no heart to pump the blood, the body will suffer. If we have an abundance of love in the church but don’t do anything with it – if it doesn’t flow – then it is useless. We need the heart to pump blood in the body. We need Christ to pump the love in the church. Like the heart acts as the engine for pumping blood in the body, Christ acts as the engine for pumping love in the church.

And what do we know about the love Christ pumps into the church: "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." Now that is radical love. That is the "more excellent way."

If there is no love pumping in the church, then we might as well be a social club that gets together once a week for whoever is available to come that day. If there is no love in the church, then everything we do and say will be useless actions and senseless words. If we say love but do hate then love is not pumping in our church. If we say all are welcome but do not mean it, then we are hypocrites. If we say we follow Jesus Christ as our only Lord and Savior but yet pursue other gods during the week, then we are liars.

This is not to say that we as members of the church body are able to be perfect. There will be times when we will fail, sometime in small ways, sometimes in spectacular ways. But as long as we have love – that radical love of Christ – pumping away in our church, we can strive for this more excellent way.

I was reading an essay about a person who had gone on a silent retreat. She went to an isolated retreat center and sat for many hours in silence. One of the most shocking revelations she had while on this retreat was hearing her own heart beat. When she was silent and the world around her was still, the beating of her own heart echoed inside her. She could even hear the blood coursing in her veins, keeping time with her heart.

Perhaps we too need to hear our own heart beat. Perhaps we too need to hear the sound of the blood coursing through our veins. Take your pulse. Just take your two fingers and place then on your neck. Can you feel it? Can you feel the blood expanding and contracting that artery? Can you feel the life in you? There is blood running in your veins and love running in this church. Maybe we just need to remember who is running the heart-engine.