"O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing ... pour into our hearts your greatest gift which is love ... without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you." (Collect for Epiphany 7)

Sometimes when we pray, we hedge our bets, sometimes in the official prayers of the Church, there is an sweet vagueness.

That certainly doesn't apply to the Collect for this particular Sunday. It maintains that a life lived without love is more than dysfunctional it is deranged, it is more than disordered it is a disaster, it is, in short, not life at all, it is death.

The Church is very unsentimental about love, as unsentimental as you can get, and not surprisingly. For when the Church speaks of love it is not speaking of any of love's variants - not attraction or infatuation or compulsion or obsession, not love that is exploitative or possessive or oppressive, not love that is transient or evasive or invasive, not love that is compensatory or neurotic or addictive. Not love that is silly and giddy and deliciously light-headed. I think that covers it!

When the Church talks about love, it is talking about the real thing, always and only that.

However, not unlike all human lovers in that first full flush of passion and romance, when the Church speaks of love, it seems to lose interest in all other things, not mind you uninterested, but genuinely disinterested in all of the other glorious aspects of faith and devotion, of service and sacrifice, even prayer itself. Love, and love alone is seen as essential. "Without love, whatever we do is worth nothing, without love we are accounted dead before God". Not the good kind of dead that leads to life eternal. The dead kind of dead that leads nowhere.

Today's Collect is based on and echoes St. Paul's 13th chapter to the Corinthians where Paul is even more uncompromising than the Collect, if possible. There he proclaims and insists: "if I have the faith to move mountains, if I possess all wisdom, even all hope, it is nothing, without love - nothing at all. Faith, hope, love, these three abide, but the greatest of these is love."

Next to love, compared to love, without love, wisdom, faith, even human hope at its finest is pointless - nothing.

Without love we are dead - before God, and probably in our own eyes as well. Am I loved? is not, however heart-wrenching that question, is not the final question for Christians - there is, we believe, one more serious, more important question: What if I am the one who does not love.

What if I myself do not love? Then you are nothing, and all of the rest of it is a waste of time, yours, everyone else's, God's.

You can hope for it, but probably you cannot count on being loved in this life, but you can commit yourself to loving. Regardless.

Not only can you, but you really must, if you are going to be a Christian, you must. There are few musts in the grace-filled Christian life, but the commitment to love is one of them. Love it is, we believe, the first and final intention of God. More than that - it is the very nature of God. St John, in his Epistle, is willing to say "God is love." And, "he who loves is of God." Oh, my goodness!

Love is all we have to offer, and all we need to receive, and the rest of it just doesn't matter - not that much!

You love, regardless, you offer that, irrespective or whether it will ever be mutual, equal, returned. Whether you are ever going to get anything back. Though the Gospel gives us that hope that indeed we will receive back - good measure, pressed down, running over, still that is not why we love, that may follow, but the original love itself must be unconditional - an offering, not a bargaining.

Our love was intended by God to be unconditionally offered, as was his, and then once that has taken place, once that is done and accomplished, then God permits us the luxury he never permitted himself, then we may consider what is offered to us in response what we receive back for our offer of love, what, if anything, if everything, is in it for us.

We, as Christians, believe that we have the sure and certain warrant of Scripture that this is how it is with God - once we have loved him, offered him our love, requiring no love in return, than we can properly and modestly wonder if, and how much, he loves us. And then we learn, and probably only then, that he first loved us, long ago, from the first, he loved us, and in Christ, gave himself for us, well back in the days when we thought we were the ones offering.

Most of us know that we are loved, or have been loved in the past, and may well be loved again, but some of us, some of the time, do not feel that, and so perhaps we wonder if we can love, if we can offer that which we feel we do not know, that which, occasionally, we suspect we do not feel. But the Christian assertion, from which the Church will not budge, is that regardless of how destitute of love we may feel, there is no one who is not loved at all, for at least God loves you and that's an awfully big "at least"

Granted with him, as with any person who loves, we may not have felt that love, or realized and recognized that he loved us. Whether or not we know it, feel it, conceive it, we are loved by God, with a wonderfully enticing love, so we are not unloved. Ever.

If love is intended as the measure of Christians, it can serve as the measure of every Christian act or thought, so it seems to me that the possibility exists for us to check-out everything we say or do with a brief reflection on whether what we are about to do or say expresses and extends love: We could ask ourselves: Does my intended word or deed spring out of love, and the kind of love that moves me to regard myself, and others, as God intended? Does it build up, rather than tear down, does it ennoble, rather than belittle? Does it make more obvious the love of God among us, or does it obscure that love? Am I doing what I am doing, saying what I am saying, to express love, to sustain love, to foster love?

The Church seems always to ask so much of us, when actually it is asking only one thing, that we love, regardless, as God loves, regardless. The Church asks, expects, that in every act of kindness or mercy, or conviction or concern, in everything we do for our fellows, or our Church, or our world, we do not do just because we enjoy it, or it needs to be done, but because we love. If we don't do that, the Collect of the Day tells us that whatever it is that we do, is worth nothing and are accounted as dead before God. St. John one last time: "Let us love one another, for love is of God. Or Jesus himself: "By this all men shall know that you are my disciples - if you love one another."