Biography
Rev. Julie Pennington-Russell is Senior Pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Waco, Texas. Julie is former pastor of the 19th Street Baptist Church in San Francisco and is active in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. She is a gifted preacher, a wife, and the mother of two young children.

"The Greatest of These"
Earl Weaver, who for years was manager of the Baltimore Orioles, was a notorious umpire baiter—he could harass an ump with the best of them. He was especially known for one particular taunt. Whenever Earl disagreed with a call, he'd typically run out of the dugout, charge into the umpire's face and scream at him: "Are you gonna get any better, or is this it?"

As a believer in Christ, I find myself often asking that very question about the world, about the church, about myself: "Are we going to get any better?" I look at a world full of violence and despair, greed, hunger. And I look at the church, often half asleep in the sanctuary or bashing each other's brains out over doctrinal differences.

And then I look at my own self-orbiting, narcissistic life, and the older I get the more convinced I become that what the world needs most, what the church needs most, and definitely what my life needs most urgently—more than discipline, more than knowledge, more than zeal—is love. Turns out the Beatles were right: all we need is love! And I'm convinced that nothing will distinguish us as Christ-followers more clearly in this world than a genuine commitment to love, more radically, more earnestly, more deeply.

So let's consider what this might mean, but first let's go ahead and put one confession on the table: love's not the easiest subject in the world to get a handle on. I mean, is there any single topic in this world about which we have spoken, or written or sung, more than love? And is there any subject more difficult to articulate?

We talk about love in such funny ways. We talk of "falling in it" as if it were a hole. We use the same word when talking about a favorite dessert that we use about a cherished individual. "I love my husband. I love pecan pie. I love humanity. I love my minivan. I love God." How do we take hold of this word? I think Eliza Doolittle has the right idea. In My Fair Lady she cries out in a frustrated voice: "Words, words, words! I'm so tired of words! Don't talk to me of love, don't talk to me of June, don't talk to me of anything at all, just show me."

Well, at the end of chapter twelve in I Corinthians, that's exactly what Paul says he'll do when he writes: "I will show you. I will show you a still more excellent way." Then he shows us how to recognize genuine love, by what it is and by what it isn't.

I have a friend, Roger, who's a pastor in Austin, TX. Roger tells of how, years ago, he tried to learn how to whittle. He went to a man named Joe McMordie who was an accomplished wood carver. Roger describes himself as a pretty pathetic student, but he remembers one piece of wisdom that Joe gave to him.

One day they were carving a little dog and Roger, all frustrated, asked, "How do you do this? What's the secret of carving?"

Joe looked at him thoughtfully for a moment and said, "That's easy. You pick up a piece of wood and just cut off everything that doesn't look like a dog."

I like that! This is where Paul begins in this Corinthian love song, begins with what doesn't look like love. And so we listen in order to understand what needs to be cut away from us in order to allow genuine love to take root in our living.

And so Paul lays it out: First, love is not envious. Frederick Buechner defines envy as "the consuming desire for everyone else to be as unsuccessful as you are." And love is not boastful or arrogant. It's so exhausting to go through the day determined that others are going to be impressed by me or are going to think well of me. And neither is love rude, which is to say it's not intent upon saying or doing anything that in any way diminishes someone else. And then love doesn't insist on its own way, isn't always "me first." Love doesn't elbow its way to the head of the line. Nor is love easily provoked; real love doesn't fly off the handle.

And love isn't resentful; doesn't keep score. Do you know what that's like? To have a memory of how someone has injured you and to nourish that memory, maybe even feed it a little something now and then just to keep it warm and alive. Score-keeping kills love every time. Finally, Paul says love doesn't rejoice in wrongdoing; that is, it finds no reason to celebrate the downfall of other people.

So there are some things love is not. How did you do with this little inventory? I didn't do so well. It's hard to preach these words, because they embarrass me personally. Did you find yourself a little embarrassed by them too? I think there's probably a little something on this list for everybody.

So what about the things love is? Paul says love is patient; never gives up. And love is kind. Love takes pleasure in what's right and true. Love bears all things; puts up with anything and love believes all things; trusts God always. Love hopes all things; always looks for the best. And love endures all things; keeps going till the end.

That's a pretty tall order. How do we even hope to love that way when no one we know down here loves this way all the time? Are you ready for some good news? There is someone who did love like this—who does love like this—in fact, whose very nature, whose very being is pure love.

See, if you take Christianity and cook it down to the essence—boil away all of the peripheral concerns—you find that one thing remains. What remains is not a doctrine, is not a set of rules, is not a creed, not a confession. You boil the Christian faith down to the essence, and what remains is a face, and it's the face of absolute, unambiguous, undiluted love. And if we're wise, we'll take the advice of the writer of Hebrews and fix our eyes on that face—the face of Jesus, the Christ.

When Jesus was here among us, he showed us one thing more about love that is indispensable: love is always something you do. And this is what, every time, distinguishes love from sentimental feelings or mere good intentions. Love, in the end, is always something you do.

I love the story about a woman who was an associate pastor of a large Presbyterian church in southern California. This woman loved to go to Nordstrom department store in Bel Air during the Christmas season, mostly just to enjoy the ambiance and the live Christmas music on all five floors.

On one of her visits, the minister was on the top floor of the store looking at some of the finest dresses in the world, when the elevator doors opened and out stepped a very disheveled looking woman. Her clothes were dirty and torn, her hair was matted, her stockings were rolled down to her ankles. She just stood there holding a very full and very dirty gym bag in her hand and it was obvious that she probably wasn't going to buy anything—all the dresses were all in the multi thousand-dollar category.

The minister half-expected a security guard to come and show the woman out. But instead of a security guard, a stately saleswoman came over to the woman with the gym bag and asked, "May I help you, madam?"

The woman said, "Yeah! I wanna buy a dress!"

"Any particular kind of dress?" the saleswoman asked in a very kind and dignified manner.

"A party dress!" the woman answered.

"Well you've come to the right place," said the saleswoman. "Follow me. I think we have some of the finest party dresses in the world."

The saleswoman then spent more than fifteen minutes matching the dresses with the woman's skin color and eye color, trying to help her find just the right match. After selecting three dresses, the saleswoman said, "Shall we go and try them on?" They headed into the dressing room. The minister hurried into the adjoining dressing room and put her ear up to the wall. She had to hear what would happen next.

The woman with the gym bag tried on the dresses with the saleswoman's help. But then, after about ten minutes, the woman said very abruptly, "I've changed my mind. I'm not going to buy a dress today!" The minister in the adjoining cubicle held her breath and heard the saleswoman say, "That's all right." And then, in a gentle voice she said, "But here's my card. Should you come back to Nordstrom, I do hope that you'll ask for me. I would consider it such a privilege to wait on you again." And don't you just get the feeling that that's exactly what Jesus would do—if Jesus were a saleswoman at Nordstrom? That saleswoman knew that love is something you do.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be known by that kind of love? In the end, it's the one thing that will make us recognizable to the world as those who've put on Christ and who are wearing his name and walking in his way.

Interview with Julie Pennington-Russell
Interviewed by Floyd Brown

Floyd Brown: Floyd Brown: Julie, I really enjoyed your message. It was challenging to me in that being a true Christian is a work in progress. And there is a lot of work left to be done with me! One of the things I have difficulty with is the expression that we should "love everybody." You hear people say this. It's difficult for me to say that I love everybody. How does one work towards this?

Julie Pennington-Russell: Floyd, you are not alone. I can't love everybody all the time either. I think that's really where we need Christ. I think that's where we join our lives to Christ and then the spirit of Christ enables us to do things that we never thought we could do.

Brown: Many of the things that you pointed out give me the feeling that love is more an action than a feeling. Am I right in that assumption?

Pennington-Russell: I think so. I think that if you look at the life of Christ, he was the best at demonstrating this. You see Christ moving through the Gospels and he never stopped to say "I love you" by just waving at someone. He said, "May I feed you? May I touch you?" For Jesus, love was something you do.

Brown: You quoted the Beatles in your message: "All we need is love." I thought that was a marvelous analogy, but is that really all we need for those of us who are not quite perfect or not quite there in our march to our true Christianity? Does it answer all things?

Pennington-Russell: Well, I think that is a very simplified expression, I'm sure. The big danger in that is not understanding that all we need is real love, not what passes for love, not counterfeit love, and there is plenty of that to go around. I believe that the nature of God is love and so that permeates everything we do. It's the ground on which we stand. So in a sense, I think, yes, all we need is love, but it needs to be genuine love.

Brown: There have been great experiences in my life and wonderful things that people have done for me that I remember to this day. Do you have a special story of an act of love that is outstanding and has stayed with you for a long time?

Pennington-Russell: I tend to live in the now. I think that one of the most outstanding examples for me in my present life of what love is comes from my twelve-year-old son, Taylor, who is almost a teenager. Twelve times every hour he will stop what he is doing—he may be at the computer typing away—and he'll stop for a minute and say, "I love you, Mom" I love that! I think we learn from children what love really is. I think as we get older our hearts become a little more jaded and cold, but children teach us so much about what it is to love. That is certainly very present in my life with my son.

Brown: You are a minister and you obviously taught your children about love. Share the feelings that you have tried to impart. How did you teach love to your children, by example or by dialogue?

Pennington-Russell: We in our family try to convey to our kids that home is a very safe place to express love. My husband and I say it often to our children. We are very demonstrative with hugs and affection. So they are learning to express that with each other. Not to say that there's not blood on the carpet sometimes at our house! But they are learning to express love with one another.

Brown: I think that's true love when you can accept the imperfections and the "blood on the carpet" and still love one another. Thank you so much.