AN OUTRAGEOUS SERMON ABOUT LOVE

A Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany

 Corinthians 13:1-13 • Luke 4:21-30

Our Epistle reading for today from I Corinthians 13 is America’s most popular wedding verse. I’m sure you’ve heard it at many a wedding. And because it is so popular, you might kind of think of it as cliche and tune out when it’s read, assuming it to be the feel-good Hallmark card of the New Testament. 

But here’s the thing: this text is not about romantic love. Sorry, happy couples, this letter wasn’t written for you. No, it was sent to the early church in Corinth, a community in conflict. What’s love about? Paul says love is actually most important when people can’t stand each other. If we want to be followers of Christ, we need to learn how to love even though it’s not the fun or easy thing to do.

Just before this passage about love begins, in verse 12:31, it says the love is “a still more excellent way.” In the Greek, this phrase has even more punch. It could be translated something like “love is beyond measuring.” In this troublesome congregation, people were busy measuring their worth against each another. It was all competition and backbiting. They wanted to one-up one another with their great spiritual gifts but Paul wants them to see that they need to move past this way of relating and into a different way, a way that is not about such measurement but instead, is a steeped in love beyond measuring. 

That’s the kind of love that ought to shape our lives together as the church. If we do great things but don’t have love, Paul proclaims, we are like a clanging gong. It’s empty. We’ve missed the point. Today’s our annual meeting. We will be looking at our church business, our budget, our various ministries. Let’s keep these words in mind as we conduct our meeting. What do our building and our budget and our missional strategies matter if we don’t have love? First and foremost, we are called to be a community that lives out the love of Christ.

Okay, okay, so we’re supposed to love but what does that look like? According to this letter, it is active. Love is the subject of 16 verbs in a row here. In English it kind of sounds passive: “Love is patient. Love is kind.” Don’t start yawning yet, though, because in the original Greek it is more like: “Love shows patience. Love acts with kindness.” See the active tense of the verbs? Throughout these phrases, love is an action-filled thing, not a warm gushy feeling that we have for people who are like us. So you see, this passage isn’t so Hallmarkish after all! It’s a very difficult teaching. Love requires a lot of us.

Then, at the end of this reading, it makes the boldest claim of all: “Love never ends.” Paul names three most important values to the church: faith, hope and love. These summarize the life of the church, which is why we chose them to be in the Our Savior's Lutheran Church mission statement: “Making Christ known by inviting all to grow in faith, hope and love.” Yet, Paul reminds us that even among these three great things, love is the greatest. Love is what will remain. We are drawn into that love which is offered by God and we are reformed into people who work together despite our difference to share that love.

It is too bad that we as a society assume love feels good because the love to which we are called rarely feels good. It’s a demanding task that is set before us. And it is not a request, it’s a mandate that we love. 

I think this talk of love is still too abstract. So let’s turn to Jesus to see more clearly what it means to love. Did you check him out in today’s Gospel lesson? There he is chilling with his own peeps in his home synagogue. This is his community, the place he was raised. He’s come back now as an adult, as a rabbi, and he’s teaching the scriptures. Jesus opens the scroll and reads to the congregation from Isaiah. They are poetical words the people would have known well. They speak of God’s promise to release, redeem and heal those who have been cast off by society. And then Jesus declares that this scripture has been fulfilled in their hearing. Wonderful! They all rejoice and think highly of their hometown boy because they think it means they are the ones who are going to get released, redeemed and healed. After all, they have been living under the oppressive Roman occupation for so long and now their time of political liberation has finally come. No wonder they are excited.

Jesus, however, doesn’t mean it this way. He goes on to clarify. No, he basically tells them, when I talk about God coming to free the oppressed and bless the poor, I’m not talking about you! I’m talking about God blessing the people you don’t like, the people you don’t want to be near, the people you are afraid of, the ones you call enemies.

Just to drive the point home, Jesus recalls a couple of familiar stories from the scripture where God gave a blessing not to Israel, but to Israel’s enemies. Then suddenly the hometown crowd is no longer happy with him. In the same way they were all initially excited about Jesus’ teaching, they are now all upset with him. Upset doesn’t capture their outrage, you see, because they turn into a lynch mob and try to kill him. This is Mary and Joseph’s boy—the village kid they’ve watched grow up—but he’s made them so mad they want him dead.

Their sudden violence is hard to understand. Why do they get so furious so fast? It’s because Jesus is redefining God’s love. It’s not just for you, he reminds them. It is for everybody. Everybody. Now Jesus brought up Israel’s enemies in the stories he told, but what if he were here today in our context and he talked about our enemies? What if he said something like: 

“American People, I know you are afraid, but your persistent desire to keep people who aren’t like you away, your disdain for the poor, the addicts, those in prison, those with a different sexual orientation, your discrimination against people of color, your attempts to keep Syrian refugees and Latin American immigrants out of your country, your hatred of Muslims, your desire to build walls instead of bridges—well that’s just wrong! That’s not God’s way. That will never be God’s way. God loves all people—even dangerous people. There are no exemptions. Listen to me: God loves all people and you have to deal with that!”

This is an offensive message, right? Can you hear the offense? It is truly outrageous! That's why it sends Jesus’ congregation into a rage and they try to throw him over the cliff of Narareth. See? Love is not a sentimental thing in the way Jesus lived it. There’s no Hallmark about it. It’s actually—dare I say it—a political thing. It calls us to take a stand, to move beyond our fear and to love in word and deed without discrimination. Do they deserve love? Doesn’t matter. Love them anyway. “Love,” as Mother Theresa used to say, “until it hurts.”

Now I have been your pastor for almost 15 years and I have been preaching this message of God’s radically inclusive love but I am going to apologize to you today. I’m afraid I haven’t preached it forcefully enough. If I had preached it like Jesus did, I bet you’d have thrown me into the river by now. That's how outrageous Jesus' message is. I’m afraid you think I’m nice. Well I’ve got news for you: I am trying to un-nice myself! As your pastor, I am called to a prophetical role. I’m bound by Christ to preach his message. When I took the vow of ordination that’s what I promised to do. So I’m standing with Christ and telling you that you’re all wrong. I am too. We do not love as we ought. We are so so discriminatory and afraid and so we only love the people we already like. That’s not love. That’s not the more excellent way. That’s just a clanging gong.

But love never fails. And that’s good news, since we’ve apparently gotten an F on the love exam. God’s love overrides our failure to love. In verse 12 of this chapter of I Corinthians, it asserts that we have already been fully known. God sees right through us and knows how much we have fallen short of our calling to love all people. The Lord knows and yet loves us anyway. That means you and I, despite our earnest attempts, are saved not by our works but by grace. We must always come back to that self-understanding that we are saved by grace. That is the only hope we have of widening our hearts. If God can love me, I can love others, I must love others.

Let us pray: O come, Holy Spirit, and fill our church anew, that we may stand together and we may courageously and actively love all people with your radical, all-inclusive, never-failing, beyond-measuring love. Amen.

© 2016 Laura Gentry

DEEP WATER

A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Epiphany

Pastor Laura Gentry

Luke 5:1-11

Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

In today’s Gospel lesson, we hear the story of Jesus calling Simon Peter to become his disciple. Now this poor guy has been working all night to catch fish and he’s a professional fisherman—he’s not just doing this for fun like many of you. If he doesn’t catch fish, perhaps his family won’t eat. He is very disheartened at this point.

Then along comes Jesus. He’s already got a following and people are pressing on him to hear the word. So Jesus jumps into Simon’s boat—presumably without even asking permission. He asks him to set out a bit from the shore and then preaches from there as it it is his floating pulpit.

After this, he tells Simon Peter to put out into deep water and let his news down for a catch. Of course Simon is reluctant to do so as it seems to him like a rather dumb idea. Why would they catch fish now? They haven’t caught any all night. It must be one of those weird no-fish days. But he agrees because Jesus seems to be a person of authority.

And it is a good thing he agrees because there are immediate results! Their nets catch so many fish that they begin to break. This is an enormous amount of fish.

Archeologists recently uncovered a fishing boat from that region and era that was 26.5 feet long, 7.5 feet wide, and 4.5 feet high. In fact, my dad just saw it during his visit to the Holy Land. We must assume that this was about the size of Simon Peter’s boat. People in those days were smaller and most stood no taller than 5’5”, which made the boats extremely deep for them, with great capacity to hold fish. This story says that two boats were so filled with fish that they began to sink. Indeed, this is a phenomenal amount of fish.

It so impresses Simon Peter that he recognizes the divinity of Jesus. This is his “aha” moment—his epiphany. Immediately, he becomes afraid of Jesus’ holiness. He says: "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" Like Isaiah and Paul, whose callings we heard about in our other readings this morning, he does not feel worthy to be called by the God of the Universe. But Jesus isn’t really interested in taking no for an answer. He presses him: "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." And so Simon Peter and his friends leave their boats and everything else to answer this calling.

Perhaps it is difficult to imagine just how difficult this must have been for them. Simon and James and John leave everything and go with Jesus without so much as a good bye. Did they have wives? Children? Homes? Businesses to run? We really don’t know. But they left it all behind for the sake of following Jesus. Don’t think for a minute that this was easy for them.

And here we are in the midst of the Epiphany season, reading this text in worship. So the question is: what are we to take from this Gospel passage? How can it inform us in our journey? Well like the texts we examined last week, it asserts that God calls us all to follow. We don’t remember applying for the job but that’s no deterrent. Jesus wants us. He won’t take no for an answer. He doesn’t accept the “I’m not qualified” excuse. He wants us. And he wants us right now to follow him and to learn how to “fish for people.”

That’s really the mission of the church, isn’t it? After all, Simon Peter is the rock upon whom Jesus built the church. And from the get-go, Simon had to fish for people.

What does this calling mean for us? How are we to be fishers of people? This story reminds me of Mother Teresa. She was certainly someone who heard the call of God and dropped everything to go and serve. Many times people would approach her and talk about how they longed to move to India also, so they could work at her side in serving the poor. Many romanticized how great it would be to work in the trenches like she did. But she would tell them: “No, stay where you are. Stay right here and love the people God has given you to love. Care for people right where you are.”

This is very helpful advise because we often think that we can’t do much to “fish for people” unless we were to go do global mission or enroll in seminary or something dramatic like that. Mother Teresa, however, believed that you can bloom where you’re planted. Right here, right now, reach out to the people you are near. That’s a tip we can use.

Nevertheless, even if we don’t move to a different country or take on a new career as an evangelist, we have a tough job. Just as Jesus urged Simon Peter to move out his normal fishing spot and put out into deep water, he calls us to deep water. By this, it means we are to move out of our comfort zones, to do whatever is needed in order to share the Gospel and be “fishers of people.”

Now the expression “you are in deep water” also means that you are in a difficult circumstance. I would have to agree that Jesus probably meant that too. He calls us to go into deep water. This means we must trust God more fully, risk more wholeheartedly. And this is hard for us. We don’t like taking a new step. We don’t like the unknown. In fact, scientists who study the subconscious mind tell us that the subconscious equates the unknown with pain and therefore, it tries really hard to steer us away from doing unknown things. Of course it is scary, but no one said faith was easy. As the disciples found, it is a risk we cannot afford not to take.

So once we get past our own emotional hurdles and we are really determined to learn from Jesus how to be fishers of people, what do we do? It is quite a task. Many church evangelism strategies have been developed over the years as people have attempted to find the best formula for catching people for Jesus. I am not convinced there is a “best one” out there. It is not about having the right sales tactic or the best glossy brochures. It is about really connecting with people and conveying our enthusiasm that will win hearts and minds.

I once had a bishop tell me that the best evangelism is a two step process that can be described in two words: share and invite.

First we must share our faith with others. Think about how you would answer the following questions. What is God doing in my life? How does my faith shape me? Am I enthusiastic about it? Why?

Today we have lots of ways to get the word out besides just talking with people face to face. A new study found that kids age 8-18 are spending virtually all their free time using some form of digital device whether it’s being on the computer, listening to digital music or texting. On average, these kids are spending 7 1/2 hours a day doing this. That’s why I’m on facebook. I’m able to connect with young people and some not-so-young people as well. The pope recognizes that social networking sites are a good evangelism tool. He’s started his own website and is on facebook too and he encourages priests to get blogging. You know it’s about doing whatever it takes to share our faith.

Once we have expressed the joy that is within us as a result of our relationship with God, the second step is easy: invite. Invite others to come revel in the good news. We don’t need to hard-sell them. We just need to share and invite and trust the Holy Spirit to do the rest.

It’s not easy! We are called out into deep water the sake of the gospel. Let’s summon the courage to put out into that water and cast the nets of God’s love far and wide. Amen.