Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland for Sunday 30 January 2022.
• First Reading: Jeremiah 1: 4-10 (‘Before I formed you in the womb, I called you, before you were born I set you apart’)
• Psalm 71: 1-10
• Epistle: 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13 (If I do not have love, I am nothing)
• Gospel: Luke 4: 21-30 (This scripture is fulfilled in your hearing)
I must have been about 15 when a school class on sociology looked at town planning. The sense of policy allied with meeting human needs and doing it in a spatial or land-based manner somehow got my imagination and that how my occupational life led me.
For others the call into medicine or the law or engineering will have been equally personal and well-remembered. And yes, for others the direction of life may have followed the way circumstances and opportunities combined to lead into a definite way of living and working.
For Jeremiah, it was all a surprise when God called him into the work of speaking out His word. God says, I knew you all along and I chose you before you ever knew it. And Jeremiah recoiled from this call with shyness and embarrassment.
But Jeremiah was first of all called by God, and his first loyalty was to God rather than the House of Judah or even the temple cult. Yes, it was to a true and honest worship and to a true and honest observance of the law of Moses.
But it started with God and none other.
Everything else would flow from that, and nothing would take precedence or displace it.
Jeremiah would express both God’s criticism of and His love for His people. But it would start with God and only in the light of this would his words of prophecy have any meaning.
Writing to the church in Corinth, Paul had been explaining the life of the church as the Body of Christ in which all members were important even if they had different roles in and offerings to make to the church.
The Holy Spirit was indeed the power and the authority behind the gifts and the ministries of the Holy Spirit but all was clearly centred on the person and work of Jesus Christ. Take Jesus out of it and it is not as if you have a modernized and relevant church – you have nothing at all.
It is Jesus who is the life and the focus of the church, and take Him out and there is nothing left except an empty and powerless hulk.
But having said all that, there was much more to be said for love was the power and the mainspring of the life of the church. Take it away and again there is nothing.
And this is where Paul starts as he writes about love – and this is the love of God in action in the life of the Christian community. Without love all the offices and the miracles of the church are nothing. Without love then all the prophecies and self-giving by the church are nothing. All the ministries to the poor and the personal hardships are meaningless.
And this is the love of God, made visible in the life of the church. It is there to be seen as its members relate to and care for one another. It is there in the simplest of conversations and the most basic of attitudes. It is never centred on self – and anything that is, by definition, cannot be love in any Christian sense.
If love is the stripping away of self then it is also the opening of the self to the things of God, for as in Jeremiah, it places God front and centre in all aspects of life. This allows the love of God to be seen in the life of a believer and of the worshipping community.
For this is the kind of love that waits on and trusts in God. It does not make demands on God even if it does make requests of God. It will be making requests for other people but it will also open itself to the deeper and more mysterious aspects of the will of God for oneself.
More than that, it rests in the assurance of God, even when things are otherwise dark and unresponsive. It finds in God its place or rest and of abiding, of being strengthened and renewed, and it allows God to move in one’s own life when things are otherwise obscure.
Now we see in part and understand in part, but there is far more to come.
And so love never fails for love can never fail. That which is founded on God has a sure foundation and even when faced with misunderstanding, rejection, or just plain confusion, love still holds fast for that is its nature.
Last week we were comparing the excitement of the returning exiles as they heard the law of God being read out to them, and compared it with the stale and predictable life of the synagogue when presented with Jesus’ manifesto as written down by Isaiah.
It was not just that the fire of love had gone out from the synagogue but that they preferred their own comfort zones to anything that Jesus had to offer.
Love had grown cold, and become indifferent. People would make do with the political compromises that had been forced onto them by Rome and they would get by as best they could.
But Jesus was offering power instead of passivity, vision in place of greyness, hope instead discouragement, joy instead of routine, harmony instead of noise.
The excitement that was embraced and rejected equally by the people of His time is also there in ours. Dare we allow the things of God to bring us into a realm of love far beyond the self-centred emotions of today’s culture, where He who has gone before us is also there to lead us into the paths that He has marked out?
Will we allow His love to be our light, our strength and our wisdom in all things?
