1. From the book Love is the Way by Michael Curry
“Love is a firm commitment to act for the well-being of someone other than yourself. It can be personal or political, individual or communal, intimate or public. Love will not be segregated to the private, personal precincts of life. Love, as I read it in the Bible, is ubiquitous. It affects all aspects of life.”
“Love is a commitment to seek the good and to work for the good and welfare of others. It doesn’t stop at our front door or our neighborhood, our religion or race, or our state’s or your country’s border
The answer is love. Love isn’t a sentiment—it’s the only thing left to save a community divided.”
“Dr. Martin Luther King—who, besides my father and grandmother, is the human most responsible for my wearing the collar today—wisely said, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Nothing short of faith, in spite of the odds, can stay the course. Faith dares us to believe that in the end, love wins. We can’t see it, but we believe it anyway”
But while faith and hope are necessary for a full life, they’re not a guide for life. They don’t tell you what to do. That’s love’s job. Love tells you how to direct the energy of outrageous faith. If hope and faith are the wind and sails, love is the rudder. It’s God’s GPS
“God may be the source of love, but people are often the vessels. Once you understand that, you also start to understand that connecting to the Holy Spirit isn’t about what we say in our house of worship on a Sunday. It’s not even whether we’re in church on a Sunday. It’s the community of love we create for ourselves and for others. When that happens, God’s there. That’s God showing up. We’re resting in God’s hands.”
2. Sermons – The Power of Love | The Royal Wedding
“The New Testament says it this way: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; and those who love are born of God and know God. Those who do not love do not know God. Why? For God is love.” (1 JOHN 4:7–8)”
Love is not selfish and self-centered. Love can be sacrificial, and in so doing, becomes redemptive. And that way of unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive love changes lives, and it can change this world.”
Think and imagine a world where love is the way. Imagine our homes and families where love is the way. Imagine neighborhoods and communities where love is the way. Imagine governments and nations where love is the way. Imagine business and commerce where love is the way. Imagine this tired, old world where love is the way. When love is the way—unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive love—then no child will go to bed hungry in this world ever again. When love is the way, we will let justice roll down like a mighty stream and righteousness like an ever-flowing brook. When love is the way, poverty will become history. When love is the way, the earth will be a sanctuary. When love is the way, we will lay down our swords and shields, down by the riverside, to study war no more. When love is the way, there’s plenty good room—plenty good room—for all of God’s children. Because when love is the way, we treat each other, well . . . like we are actually family. When love is the way, we know that God is the source of us all, and we are brothers and sisters, children of God. My brothers and sisters, that’s a new heaven, a new earth, a new world, a new human family.”
3. Sermons – Living the Way of Love | Opening Eucharist of the 79th General Convention of the Episcopal Church
“Love is the way. Love is the only way. Those who follow in my way follow in the way of unconditional, unselfish, sacrificial love, and that kind of love can change the world.”
“on this Jesus, on his teachings, on his spirit. Abide with him, dwell with him, live in him. And when you live in him, guess what? He will start living in you.”
The key is not to turn the teachings of Jesus into a new law. The key, he says, is to throw yourself into the arms of God. Throw yourself into the hands of Jesus. And then, you might actually learn to love an enemy. Then you might pray for those who curse you. Then you know what it means to be blessed. The poor. The poor in spirit. That’s what makes them compassionate. That’s what makes them hunger for God’s justice…”
“Jesus said in Matthew’s gospel, “The scribe who is fit for the Kingdom goes into their treasure box and pulls out something old that becomes something new.” (MATTHEW 13:52) And we realized that we already have what we need in the tradition of the church going back centuries. For centuries monastic communities and religious communities and people who have gone deeper in this faith have lived by what they often call a rule of life: a set of spiritual practices that they make a commitment to live in, practices that help them open up the soul, open up the spirit, help them find their way, a way of throwing yourself into the arms of God.”
“As part of their training for nonviolent protest, Dr. King composed a set of practices, a kind of rule of life. And here’s part of what it said: Remember, the nonviolent movement seeks justice and reconciliation, not just victory. Remember, always walk and talk in a manner of love, for God is love. Remember, pray daily to be used by God. Remember, sacrifice personal wishes so that all might be free. Remember, observe with friend and foe alike, the ordinary, normal rules of courtesy. Remember, perform services for others and for the world. Remember, refrain from violence of the fist and violence of the spirit. Remember, strive to be in good bodily and spiritual health.”
4. Sermons – The Good Life | Episcopal Revival at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church
“The opposite of love is selfishness, and hatred is a derivative of selfishness.”
“You see, selfishness or self-centeredness or, as the ancient mothers and fathers used to say, hubris (that is, false pride, self-centered pride that puts me in the center of the world, and you and God and everybody else on the periphery) . . . selfishness like that is the root of all evil. It is the source of every wrong. It is behind every bigotry. It is behind every injustice. It is the root cancer of every war. It is the source of every destruction. That selfishness destroys homes. It will destroy churches. It will destroy nations. And left untethered, it will destroy creation. Selfishness.”
“There’s another word for selfishness. Believe it or not, it’s called sin. That’s why we have Lent, a season to deal with sin. But love is the cure.”
“And love is the cure. Love is the balm in Gilead. Love will heal the sin- sick soul. Love can lift us up when the gravity of selfishness will pull us down. Love can bind us together when selfishness will tear us apart.”
“He says, “Simon, son of John, do you love me? If you love me, you will overcome your self-centeredness, and another will take you by the hand, and may lead you to where you do not want to go. But it won’t be all about you anymore. It will be about following me.” And then Jesus said, “Now you can follow me.” The key to following Jesus, the key to being his disciples, the key to life is love. It’s always love.”
“The way to life is the way of love.”
5 Harvard Business Review, May-June 2019.
“But as a commitment, love means I’m seeking your self-interest as well as my own—and maybe above and beyond mine. That kind of unselfishness is actually how Jesus talked about love most of the time in the New Testament—the Greek word that’s used is agape. That’s the kind of love you see in a person who has done something selfless for you and affected your life for the good: a parent, teacher, Scout leader, or coach. Take that further and you realize that there has been no social good that’s been intentionally done apart from this kind of love. We don’t give people Nobel Peace prizes for selfishness. We recognize those people because they’ve given of themselves without counting the cost to themselves.”
6. On the Today Show – June 1, 2020 He appeared after the killing of George Floyd.
Today – “How do you help people choose love ?”
Bishop Curry “”We must still choose love. It is a decision, probably a daily decision to actually choose the way of love which is not a sentiment. The opposite of love is not hate but selfishness.”
“The Way of love is seeking the good, the welfare, and the well being of others as well as the self. And when we do that we all win. ”
7. Washington Post Op-Ed – May 31 2020
“When I think about what love looks like, I see us channeling our holy rage into concrete, productive and powerful action. In this moment, love looks like voting for leadership at the local, state, and federal level that will help us to make lasting reform. Love looks like calling on officials and demanding they fulfill their duty to protect the dignity of every child of God.
“Love looks like making the long-term commitment to racial healing, justice and truth-telling — knowing that, without intentional, ongoing intervention on the part of every person of good will, America will cling to its original, racist ways of being.
“Love looks like working with local police departments to build relationships with the community and develop mechanisms that hold officers accountable. It means ensuring that no police officer with a history of unauthorized force or racialized violence is shielded and allowed to endanger the lives of those they’ve sworn to protect and serve.
“Love looks like all of us — people of every race and religion and national origin and political affiliation — standing up and saying “Enough! We can do better than this. We can be better than this.”
“What does love look like? I believe that is what Jesus of Nazareth taught us. It looks like the biblical Good Samaritan, an outsider who spends his time and money healing somebody he doesn’t know or even like.”
8. Crazy Christians: A Call to Follow Christby Michael Curry
“As Christians, we must live our lives against the backdrop of that which is greater than ourselves. Otherwise we’ll spend our lives mired down in the constant micro-management of a mess. But when we live our lives in the greater context of God and God’s constant presence, things not only become manageable, they become transformed. Mountains you thought so incredibly high are not quite so high, and valleys you thought so low are not quite so low. Jesus understood this. And that is why he was able to summon the first disciples to do something of which they were thoroughly, utterly incapable.” ….
“If we live only in the context of the way things are, we are condemned to live according to the vagaries of the present time and the dictates of the status quo. But if we live in the context of that which is greater than ourselves, we become open to the possibility of action and transformation.” ….
“You must always be willing to give yourself for a higher cause. Our lives are part of something greater than ourselves.”
“I am convinced that God came among us in the person of Jesus to open the way and to show us the way to become more than merely an aggregation of individual self-interests, more than simply the human race or the human species. Jesus came to show us the way to become the human family of God.
Martin Luther King Jr. and a host of other people have said it: “We may have come here on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.”
“We were made to support each other and hold each other up. We’ll walk together best when we join hands and do it together.
“The truth is, as we follow Jesus with our feet, with our hands, with all “our selves, our souls and bodies,” as we come to know Jesus’ call to us and Jesus’ love for us, we will discover the reality that we are each other’s sisters and brothers in Christ and, together, heirs to God’s eternal kingdom.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote, “God sent us here to help God realize God’s dream of a new kind of society—gentle, caring, compassionate, sharing. ‘When I am lifted up from the earth, [I] will draw all people to myself.’ There are no outsiders or aliens. All, all are insiders. All belong. Black and white, rich and poor, young and old, male and female, educated, uneducated, gay, straight—all belong in this family of God, this human family, the Rainbow people of God. And God has no one but you to help God realize God’s dream.
“We need to become dreamers, just like the Josephs of old. We need to rededicate ourselves to that dream and let the dream of God be our mission. Let us live that dream and “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). Let us live that dream until every man and woman sits under his or her own vine and fig tree and lays down their swords and shields, down by the riverside, to study war no more (Micah 4:4; Isaiah 2:4). Let us live that dream until every valley is exalted, every mountain and hill made low. Let us live that dream until the crooked are made straight and the rough places become a plain. And as we do that, as we live into the dream of God, we can know that “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together” (Isaiah 40:5).
“On the mountain, God transfigures the world from the nightmare of death and destruction into God’s dream of Shalom and wholeness and life. At the heart of that worldwide transformation are men, women, and children whose lives are being changed. The biblical writer has moved from a narrow focus solely on his own tribe to…
“I notice a three-fold pattern of transformation in this text: People come. They learn. And they live differently.”
“In the sixth century a monk named Dorotheos of Gaza taught that the goal of the Christian life is to live within the love of God. He said creation is like the spokes of a wheel, with God as the center. The closer we come to the center of that wheel and to God, the closer we come to each other. And alternatively, the closer we draw to each other, the closer we come to God…
“Jesus calls us to follow him into the midst of the raging sea, to help bring about God’s plan and purpose for the world. In the story from Mark, we heard that a “great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped.” Does any of that sound familiar? Could that “wild, restless sea” be a haunting image of our world? I can see it. I can see it in conflicts in places as far away as Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, Sudan. I can see it in the incessant drumbeat of terrorism.
“I can see it in the plague of HIV/AIDS tearing apart the life of the African continent. I can see it in the dire threat of climate change. I can see it in the divisions that imperil our life as the Anglican Communion, as Christian churches, as a national and a global community. I can see it in the injustices of our immigration policy and practices. I can see it in the reports of so many people living without access to affordable health care, of so many people who lack adequate housing and education, of so many little children still living in poverty. The mission of the Church that would follow in the way of Jesus will always be headquartered at sea.”