.

.

But the greatest of these is love.

Yet we seem to love sin more than love itself.  The Original Sin.  The real authentic DNA sin we cannot give up, will not give up, fight each other when challenged to give up sin.  We love sin too much to give it up.  Without sin what are we?  Without sin we are The Lost.  Without need for salvation.  Without need for The Cross.  Without need for all that is Christian.  Sin no more is to be without need for God.

Sin no more.

Yet we refuse to sin no more.  Sin is our lifeblood.  Sin is our heritage.  Sin is our legacy.  We are Adam.  We are Eve.  The bible says it’s so.  We are born to sin.  We have no choice.  We cannot escape it.  We are slaves to sin whilst we serve a God of Love.  A God who loved us even before we were born.  A God who knows every hair on our head.  Or ears and eyebrows and nostrils of the seniors amongst us.  A God who cannot help but love without condition.

The greatest of these is.

Love.  Love.  And Love.  Not a mention of sin.  Might be a mention of lust without Love here and there.  A mention that thinking of is as good as (or bad as) the doing of.  A written down challenge that what was written down before might just be due a Loving spin.  A great big “but I say” – which just had to be written down as well – but which ratcheted up the Love quotient beyond any Law and/or Commandment.  Love.  Love.  And Love.  Without a mention of sin.

Let whoever is without sin.

And not one was left to lob a rock.  All the big-wigs, the good and gracious, the high and mighty … not one was without sin.  Except the accused.  She was left but she had no need to stone herself.  Nor had Jesus.  Yet those churched and saved were with sin.  Those biblically (in)correct and correctly churched could not be without their sin.  Sin was their DNA because the bible says so.

You have seen it written but I say.

Is The Garden fact?  Is The Garden Imagery?  Like the Tooth Fairy.  Like Santa.  Like “wait till your dad gets home.”  Like “because I said so”.  Like “I hate you”.  Like “I love you but we can’t go on like this”.  Like “I know we said until death do us part but I feel like our love has already died”.  Like “what happened to us”.  Like “I need to be free to be me again”.  Like all the stuff we believe will be forever but isn’t.  Because …

The greatest of these is.

Not sin.  Not sin.  And not sin.  But Love.  Love.  And Love.  L.O.V.E. is written into our DNA.  Not sin.  Not a tree or a serpent or one of our five a day.  That is all written down.  But was not meant to be forever.  Just as one Garden Adam and one Garden Eve did not procreate the billions of us procreating today.  Nor even a very small Ark-load to start the whole global re-population all over again.  So why do we prefer our imagery as fact?

Sin no more.

Comes imagery free.  Perhaps that’s why we reject it.  The greatest of these the same.  No imagery.  And The Stable and The Cross.  Imagery?  So we made them fact.  We weave imagery as biblical correctness and no imagery as biblical incorrectness.  And name both correct fact belief.  So we are the church of God.  We name-drop as validation of our correctness.  We are of God.  All are welcome.

The unchurched do not sin.  They really sin no more.  The lost have no transaction reason to love yet still love.  They really are the greatest of these.  And yes, all hurt.  All suffer.  All are lost (from time to time).  We are each living changing growing dying beings.  Why should it be any other way physically?  But within each we carry something spiritual.  Something living changing growing eternal connected universal called Love.

And, I know, that until we cast out sin – sin no more becomes fact – we have no sin DNA – we really are sin free … then we will always emasculate the greatest of these – make Love conditional – make Love complex and divisive … and that is neither biblically or scripturally correct.  Because despite the fact “the bible says” …

I know someone who still says:

“But I say … “

.

.