4 Epiphany C February 3, 2019
Jer. 1:4-10 Ps.71:1-6
1 Cor. 13:1-13 Luke 4:21-32
I have been preaching the lectionary now for almost 38 years. What does that mean? It means that I am given four assigned readings each Sunday, two from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Psalms, one from the Epistles and one from the Gospel. The assigned readings are supposed to fit the day and/or the season. Some associations are "no brainers" like guess what readings and topics we are assigned on Easter and Christmas and Pentecost? But in the ordinary times during the seasons of Epiphany and Pentecost, the associations don't seem so obvious. Sometimes the readings like the ones for today are like disparate pictures thrown into a collage and handed to the preacher daring us to find connections and themes to try to bring in aesthetic insights into the Scripture collage of today's appointed readings.
And what is is our collage for today? Let start with one of the greatest poetic utterances about love ever written. And this was written by Paul who is also known for his highly didactic or teaching discourse or for his reproving exhortations to his misbehaving congregations.
His poem to love follows some church discipline issues in the Corinthian church. Apparently the Corinthian church was a very spiritually gifted church, so gifted that people competed about the value and importance of their gifts. But this situation is often the condition of the world; we have the creativity to go to outer space, create the internet and build nuclear weapons to destroy the world but we don't seem to be creative enough to feed and clothe or give housing and health care to everyone in the world. So what's the problem? The problem is that we need the regulating influence of great love. Paul wrote about this great regulating influence of love. And what can love regulate? Love's influence embraced, has the power for people to check their egos at the door and rather than compete with their gifts, love inspires people to harmonize their gifts for the common good.
I have always been floored by this writing by Paul because of the startling profundity. Like when he writes, "love believes all things." What does that mean? For me, it means that love is like the sun shining on the good and evil and all of the conditions of freedom found in our world. So love is profoundly honest to the free conditions of the world. This does not mean that love accepts everything as equal in value; love is accepting the entire field of values but love is the lure for us to choose the highest values.
Since love believes in all things, it instructs to be honest about all of the contradictions within the field of freedom. The Gospel poses such contradictions, like the familiar love, familial love, hometown love that can morph into hateful jealous love and jealous love is a woeful contradiction. Jesus preached in his hometown synagogue and proclaimed that his life calling was to bring good news. How did many in his hometown respond? "Jesus, you've gotten too big for your breeches. You're just Joe and Mary's boy." What did the hometown folk full of badly skewed jealous love do? His hometown folk wanted to throw him off a cliff and kill him before his time. And isn't this what probably killed Jesus? Jealousy about the genius and profundity of his wisdom, authority and deeds. The good news of the life of Jesus became a threat to people who were jealous and threatened by such profound goodness.
There are better responses to the great love of God in Jesus Christ. Being jealous is a total waste and misuse of life energy. What is a better response? To be called by great love to find one's ministry, mission and purpose in life. The love of God calls us to find out who we really are as our destiny and when we discover our destiny we have the eternal sense that it always was supposed to be. The prophet Jeremiah and the psalmist confessed that when they discovered their calling they felt like God had known them from the womb and from the time when they were completely clueless about their destiny. When we are clueless about our purposes and destinies, we can be sure that God who is love has and knows our purpose and destiny. And we await for the epiphanies to discover our purpose and destiny. We await to say in the words of the master of malapropisms, Yogi Berra, "It's like deja vu, all over again!"
As gifted and as talented as we might be as people, the love which Paul wrote about is also very honestly humble: "Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."
According to Paul, love makes us humble relativists. In classical and many forms of modern philosophies, it is a supreme insult to be called a relativist. But St. Paul makes the profound confession of a relativist; he wrote, "now I see only in part." Paul and anyone can only see in part. Relativism is admitting to having only partial knowledge. No human being has the capacity to be all-knowing. We can only know in part; we can only be relativists. But what can we also know? We can know that our part is related to the greater whole, the greater plenitude. And so it is more honest to confess that the greater Plenitude knows us than to say that we know the fullness of Plenitude. So the love written about by St. Paul invites us to the natural humility of admitting our partial knowledge.
And if our knowledge and our gifts are partial, it does not mean that they are insignificant. Each one us is invited to an epiphany of the love Christ to discover our purpose and our destiny for being here in the congregation of fellow Christians. We are to arise and take up our gifts for the benefit of this parish and we are to look to this great love to orchestrate our gifts so our egos don't get in the way. This is how we are to grow to be more perfect in love together.
When Jesus went to his hometown, people who were jealous wanted to kill him out of their lives. Jesus comes to this place, here and now as another one of his hometowns. Let us welcome him as the Lord of Love who is with us to help us find our personal destiny and our destiny as a parish going forwards. Amen.
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