Kyle Dresback

Dear Friends,

Everyone likes the idea of love. It’s the loving itself that’s the hard part. If you’re like me, there are just so many other appealing options in the moment.

Consider the inclination to “nurse” a grudge. How satisfying it can be to protect and foster our resentments rather than love our neighbor.

Consider the temptation to “get what’s mine.” There’s an undeniable logic to it, after all, in a zero-sum world.

Consider the obsession with fairness and the accompanying outrage at the slightest annoyance or inconvenience when we are, let’s just say, in traffic.

All of these very human and very justifiable responses to our circumstances come from an assumption of scarcity in the world. If there’s not enough attention, opportunity, worth, wealth, power, and love to go around, I would be foolish not to grab what I can. Like a 19th-century land rush, the image is of settlers racing to claim limited parcels of land and then lining them with barbed wire, loading the shotgun, and hanging on for dear life. It’s easy to see how this idea of scarcity becomes self-fulfilling.

But Jesus shows a different way.

In his teachings about the kingdom and in his own life, Jesus demonstrates a posture of trust in a generous God. It is a trust that is marked by self-giving love. When Jesus has the opportunity to show contempt for an enemy, or claim status over someone, or withhold forgiveness out of resentment, he demonstrates his conviction that there is enough. This frees him, and us his body, to act out of genuine love and generosity.

It’s almost impossible for individuals to change the narrative of scarcity in a world of systems that reward taking. But if a community could shift that narrative…

In today’s epistle, Paul reminds the Corinthian Church that they are one body: unified, connected, sharing an identity and purpose. And that body must be marked first by love or the rest is the meaningless clatter of a “noisy gong” or a “clanging cymbal.”

When we partake in the body and blood of Jesus and act out of love with each other and the world, we point to a generous God that frees us to love generously.   

In Christ,

—Kyle