The Greatest is Love
Preached "at" Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, June 21, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Note - Due to the extremely busy week with the Interfaith Pride Service and Columbus Pride, the Blue Ocean Columbus board allowed me to make this a “recorded service” so that I could travel and have some downtime.
Friends, listen for a word from God in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the 13th chapter.
If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 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. 3 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 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Now, listen up close, pull your chair a bit near, I’ve got something important I want you to hear. It comes from a letter; old Paul, pen in hand, who wrote to some folks in a far-away land. He said: If you speak in the tongues of the sky, if your words hit the ceiling and go way up high, if you’ve got every language from angels and birds, but haven’t got love, well, they’re just noise, not words. If you’ve got prophecy, knowledge, and faith by the ton, if you could move every mountain from under the sun, if you give all you have to the cold and the poor, but haven’t got love, you’ve got nothing. No more. So, what is this love? Well, I’ll tell you what’s true: It’s patient and kind and it sees the best in you. It doesn’t get jealous or boast of its worth, it doesn’t strut proud or get rude here on earth. It doesn’t insist that it always must win, it doesn’t keep score of your failures and sin. It doesn’t rejoice when the wrong wins the day — but when truth speaks up, love will cheer and will say: “Yes! That’s it! That’s the thing! That’s the way!” It bears every burden, believes every good, it hopes for the best in each neighbor and hood. It endures through the ache and the long, weary night, love endures. Love stays. Love keeps holding on tight. Now, gifts — they’ll all fade like the morning-time dew. The tongues, they will cease. And the knowledge we knew? It’s partial, it’s patchy, it’s here and then gone, like a child who grows up and grows old and moves on. For now, we see dimly through glass, through a haze, like we’re squinting at God through a thick morning glaze. But then — oh, but then! — we’ll see face and face clear, We’ll be known as we’re known by the One who is near. So, faith, hope, and love, these three wonders remain. They weather the cold, they outlast every rain. Faith holds in the dark when your candle goes out. Hope leans toward the morning when you’re full of doubt. But the greatest, oh friends, don’t you dare walk away, the greatest of all of them is love, Paul would say. Not love that is sappy or sweet like a song, but love that stays patient when everything's wrong. Not love that is earned by the things that you do, but love that was first, love that started with you. Love that said yes before you could say no. Love that won’t leave. Love that won’t let you go. Here is the secret that Paul wants you to know: the love he describes is the love in which we grow. It isn’t a task list. It isn’t a test. It isn’t a ladder from the worst to the best. It’s a name for the ground underneath every foot, It’s the root of the tree before blossom or soot. Before you were useful. Before you were great. Before you were early or even too late. You are loved. Full stop. That’s the whole thing. The end. The love of the Holy One, close as a friend, the love that made cosmos and quarks and the seas, the love that makes room, yes, for each one of these, for the doubters, the drifters, the Queer and the strange, for the ones who’ve been told they are out of love’s range, for the tired, the grieving, the lost and the found. Love says: You belong here. This is your ground. So, we go from this place, from this screen, from this space, not to earn any love, but to live in its grace. We love ‘cause we’ve been loved from the very first start, and that love is the pump that keeps pumping the heart. Be patient with someone who’s taking too long. Be kind to the one who is trying to stay strong. Bear someone’s burden. Believe the best things. Hope hard. Endure. See what that kind of love brings. For faith, hope, and love, these three beauties remain. But the greatest of all of them? Love. Is. The. Greatest.
I. A Shift
Friends, I want to set down the rhymes for a moment.
We’ve been playing and I mean that sincerely. Children learn though play and the more neurodivergent among us act out whole worlds of conversations and interactions so that we get them right when they happen. Sometimes play’s how we touch the truest things. But now I want to sit with you in the weight of the day. Not because the joy isn’t real, but because it’s June 21st, and I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t name where we actually are.
It’s Pride Month.
And just like at Stonewall in 1969, this year, Pride Month is not just a parade and celebration, though those still matter so much to the LGBTQIA+ community and all of our fierce allies. In 2026, Pride has, in the truest meaning of the word, returned to being a protest. It’s a defiant act. It’s a prophetic moment. It’s a community gathering itself in the middle of a sustained, organized, and political effort to make us smaller, to make us invisible, to make us afraid.
As a Queer man, I can’t name Pride as anything else. As a pastor, I can’t morally paint a picture for you which isn’t true.
II. What Love Looks Like Right Now
Paul wrote that love bears all things. Believes all things. Hopes all things. Endures all things.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to endure. Not in the passive sense, not gritting your teeth and waiting for it to be over. Endurance, a word we have largely divorced from its other form “endure,” in Paul’s usage, is active. It’s the runner who doesn’t stop when pain and fatigue tell them to sit down and rest. It’s the root system that holds when the wind ferociously grows.
Queer people, particularly Trans people, know something about that kind of endurance. We’ve been enduring for a long time. We’ve been told our love is less than, our lives are wrong, our bodies are mistakes, and our families don’t count. The church — and let’s be honest about this — the church said all those things. Many churches still do.
And yet. Here we are.
Still loving. Still building community. Still showing up for each other. Still insisting that we are exactly who God made us to be, and that who God made us to be is good.
III. The World We’re In
It’s June 21st, 2026. It’s the beginning of the last full week in Pride Month (how did that happen?). We’re in a moment when LGBTQIA+ people, particularly Trans people, and particularly Trans children, are facing legislative assault in state after state and at the federal level. When the language of protection is being weaponized as erasure. When some of our siblings are asking whether there’s room for them in this country, in the church, and in this world.
There is room. There has always been room. The Kin-dom of God is not a place of managed inclusion where we tolerate difference from a safe distance. The Kin-dom of God is a table that keeps getting longer and wider. It’s a love that keeps refusing to be diminished.
Paul says love doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. Here’s the truth: we are loved. Here’s the truth: our love is real. Here’s the truth: no legislation, no court decision, no culture war talking point reaches all the way down to the ground of being where God has already said yes to us.
No one can’t get there. That ground is not up for a vote.
IV. Celebration as Resistance
So, we celebrate. Not in spite of the difficulty; because of it. Pride was born as a riot. It was born from people who had their backs against the wall and chose to fight back and say: no further. The Stonewall uprising wasn’t a party that became political. It was an act of survival that became a party because joy is itself a form of resistance.
When we gather, across screens, across distances, in this strange and scattered way that Blue Ocean is doing church today, and we say together that love is the greatest thing, we’re not just reciting a nice passage from Scripture. We’re making a claim about reality. We’re planting a flag.
Love is the greatest thing. Not fear. Not power. Not the voices that want to define us by what we’re against.
Love is patient. Love is kind. Love endures.
And so do we.
V. You Are Not Alone
I want to close by speaking directly to anyone in our community, anyone who joins us online, anyone watching this video as their first introduction to Blue Ocean Columbus, anyone at all who is tired. Who has been fighting for a long time and feels the weight of it today. Who opened their phone this week and saw news that made them feel smaller, less safe, less certain about the future.
You’re not alone. We feel it too. The whole community feels it.
But here’s what I know: you were loved before the fight started. You’ll be loved when it’s over. The love at the center of this universe, the love Paul is straining to describe in these magnificent, impossible sentences, that love has your name in it. It always has.
We see dimly now. We know in part. But what we know is enough to keep going. What we know is enough to celebrate. What we know is enough to show up for each other, and bear each other’s burdens, and believe the best, and hope without apology.
Friends, it’s Pride Month. We’re still here. We love and we are loved.
Amen.