Notes from the Wayside: Lenten Reflection: The Love You Had at First

The following is the second in a series of reflections on the letters to the seven churches in Revelation.

For more reflections on these letters, check out the hub page for the series.

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

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The Love You Had at First

A Reflection on the Letter to the Church in Ephesus

To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands:

I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance. I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers; you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them to be false. I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my name, and that you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent. Yet this is to your credit: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. To everyone who conquers, I will give permission to eat from the tree of life that is in the paradise of God.

Revelation 2:1-7 (NRSV)

But when I stop and see you here

I remember who all this was for

From "From Now On" by Pasek and Paul

The Christians in Ephesus have a number of good qualities going for them. Christ, in His letter to them, commends them for enduring hardship and persecution, for not putting up with wrongdoers, and for not entertaining false teachings. That said, He still has one major grievance against them: they have lost the love they once had. Scholar William Barclay suggests that maybe, for the Ephesians, love for neighbor has taken a backseat to doctrinal purity.¹

Christ instructs the Ephesians to remember the love they once had and to reclaim it by doing the things they did previously, and He warns them that, if they fail to do so, He will remove their lampstand.

I cannot read the letter to the church in Ephesus without thinking about Bethel United Methodist Church, which I attended for most of my life. As I've noted in the past, I have conflicting feelings about this church. I'm grateful that Bethel provided me a safe place to worship God after escaping the world of Christian fundamentalism, and I'm grateful that it gave me the space to cultivate my spiritual gifts. That said, I'm also somewhat bitter that Bethel was not the vibrant church it should have been. Though I grew up attending this church, I knew virtually nothing about my Methodist tradition until I joined a campus ministry in college, and I found myself turning to other churches for what my own church could not provide.

Bethel Methodist Church was planted by a handful of members of a large downtown church in 1895 to serve the residents of a mill village. Bethel was a thriving congregation in its heyday, peaking at over four hundred members in the late 1950s. Around ten years later, the mill village was demolished, and the membership of the church began to decline as the community around it changed.²

The founding of Bethel Methodist Church was an act of love - love for the God who would be worshiped in the church and love for the people who would be worshiping God there. The founders left behind their own thriving congregation to start a new church for the sake of a particular community. Over time, as that community changed, the people of Bethel lost the love for their neighbors that their founders had. I would go so far as to say that there was actually a fear of the surrounding community. In Bethel's last few years, efforts were made to reach out to the people who lived around the church. A partnership with a local homelessness ministry was even attempted, but problems within the congregation caused the partnership to fail.

Bethel lost the love it had at first, following the destructive path of the church in Ephesus, so it's light went out. The church closed its doors just a few years ago.

I wish I'd had the courage to say these things when they might have actually made a difference.

For followers of christ, love is priority one. Jesus teaches that the two most important commandments in Scripture are to love God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love one's neighbor as oneself.³ Paul eloquently writes to one church,
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.⁴
Simply put, no matter what we do, if we do not do it out of love, it is all for naught.

A church must not forget why it exists. As forementioned, Christ warns the Ephesians that, if they do not reclaim the love they once had, He will remove their lampstand. Remember that the seven lampstands represent the seven churches. Perhaps it could be said that a church that has lost its love has lost its light and its reason to exist.

According to N.T. Wright,
"Love", in the early Christian sense, is something you do, giving hospitality and practical help to those in need, particularly to other Christians who are poor, sick or hungry. That was the chief mark of the early church. No other non-ethnic group had ever behaved like this. "Love" of this kind, reflecting (they would have said) God's own self-giving love for them, was both the best expression of, and the best advertisement for, faith in this God.⁵

Christ promises that those who conquer their lovelessness will be given the opportunity to enjoy the fruit of the tree of life. At the end of the Book of Revelation, John is shown a vision of the Kingdom of God fully realized on the earth. He sees the river of life that flows from the throne of God, and, on either side of the river, he sees the tree of life. This tree produces twelve kinds of fruit throughout the year, and it's leaves are used for healing.⁶ No matter how far we have strayed from the path we're called to follow, abundant life and healing are available to us if we will only seek them. Christ says, "Let the one who is thirsty come! Let the one who wishes receive life-giving water as a gift."⁷

In this life, it is all too easy for us to forget why we do what we do. We must not lose our love, because love is what matters most, but, if we have lost our love, it is not to late to reclaim it. Love gives our lives meaning, and it heals our hearts. It is by loving our neighbors that we show the world that we worship a God who is love itself.

Questions for reflection:

Think about the things you do at work, at home, or at church. Have you ever lost sight of why you do what you do?
How are the things you do acts of love, or how could they be acts of love?
If we've lost the love we once had, how might we find it again?

Notes: