4 Epiphany 2007  Luke 4:21-30 January 28, 2007

We have before us this morning the beloved Love Chapter: 1^st Corinthians 13.  It reminds me of our wedding where a little ensemble from Cal Lutheran University sang these powerful words.  They can also sound heavy a little heavy to a young couple on their wedding day. “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”  What might that mean! And it goes on, “Love doesn’t insist on its own way, is never jealous, never boastful, never rude.”  What a challenge! 

I actually prefer 1^st Corinthians for funerals.  Love never ends. Now we know only in part.  Then we will know fully even as we have been fully known.”  Wonderful words to hear at the completion of a life.  But the best thing about 1^st Corinthians 13, I think, is that St. Paul makes clear that this love he writes about is a gift.  “Earnestly desire the higher gifts,” he writes at the end of chapter 12.  He calls it a gift. 

Elsewhere Paul adds love to his list of fruits of the Spirit. The call isn’t to make ourselves loving, but to earnestly desire it as a gift; as a fruit that would naturally bloom from a spiritually attentive life.  The best way to grow in love is to so desire it that we ask for God’s help in allowing it be nurtured in us through the Spirit.  Love is God’s work in us.

But when you pray for this love, watch out!  Watch out because God’s love isn’t just about going to See’s Candy to get a box of chocolates (although their Victoria Toffee is awfully nice).  Today’s Gospel makes it clear that love that comes from the Spirit isn’t Hollywood love.  Love oozed out of Jesus and the crowds wanted to hurl him off a cliff.  

Jesus is the news that God’s love takes the shape of what people really need, even though they may fight against it with passion.  Jesus looked at the real needs of the neighbor. When he saw people were like sheep without a shepherd he introduced them to the Good Shepherd. He taught them to address God as Abba, Daddy – a term of endearment.  He taught them to value of worship, reading Scripture, and being in community. 

He taught them to go away to a quiet place – not just for recreation, but to be with the one to whom they prayed.  Retreating can also happen without going away.  Centering Prayer every Tuesday offers a treat every week right here.  New people are always welcome.  It takes an hour, but gives far more than an hour in return.   

Jesus also saw children and women, the sick and the poor out on the margins of life.  They had no rights and were judged for being sick or poor.  And when Jesus healed them and told them – not to stay and worship him, but to go home and tell others.  He connected them not to him, but to God who would go with them into mission to others. 

But that kind of real love is what got Jesus into trouble in his home town of Nazareth .  At first, all spoke well of him.  They were amazed at his gracious words.  But Jesus slipped off that pedestal before they got him on it.  He didn’t come to be idolized.  He didn’t want them worshipping him.  He wanted them to understand the breathed of God’s love.

He pointed out how at the time of Elijah, when there was a three and a half year drought, Elijah wasn’t sent by God to his home town.  Elijah was sent, by God, to a foreigner in Sidon – a widow who would have been considered living on the wrong side of the tracks. 

Perhaps the people that day in the Nazareth synagogue wondered if Jesus was trying to make a point they weren’t grasping.  Maybe his next story would shed better light on his point.  If they listened better maybe they would understand rather than just be confused.

But the next story Jesus told was just like the first, only instead of Elijah, its Elisha and how he wasn’t sent by God to cure the lepers in Israel , but to cure Naaman, the Syrian.  That would be like passing by Chico and going to Iraq or some other place the masses would see as deserving correction, not care.  

And that did it!  They had heard enough from Jesus and his so called love.  They didn’t miss-hear him.  He meant what he said.  He pointed to the historical precedence of God reaching out to the enemy; caring for those the world would rather reject.  Today’s story is like the Prodigal Son story.  The runaway gets the fatted calf – not the obedient son.     

The synagogue that day in Nazareth was filled with good people.  They worshiped God and thought they understood the lay of the land. It could be easy for us to point a finger at those Nazareans, except that the story is so close to home. 

Last year at the Ecumenical Good Friday Service, Father Mike Newman, recently retired from the Newman Center , was the preacher.  He suggested that the most deadly sin is the sin of jealousy – not just 2000 years ago, but also today.  Jealousy happens to good people because we forget that God is not a God of scarcity, but a God of abundance.  God always has more abundance to give, but God won’t give that abundance only to us.  We want grace, but surely God doesn’t need to be so gracious to those who fail us. 

The Gospel is the good news of God’s abundant love for everyone of every type and flavor and shape and opinion.  The Gospel is also based in love that refuses to take away our responsibility – and joy.  Jesus lays the responsibility of carrying out the good news in our laps.  It’s not God’s work to do, or Jesus’, or the pastors’, or the Church Council’s or Staff’s, but all of ours.  Jesus reminded the Nazareth synagogue that Elijah and Elisha were sent by God. God didn’t go alone, but sent others into mission by the Spirit’s power.

Jesus has told the same to us: “Go, into all nations, baptizing and teaching all that I have commanded you.”  Like Elijah and Elisha we too are sent to witness to the inclusive abundant passion of God for all the world. 

And so how right it was that Christians here in Chico were among those who went this last Thursday outside of their regular routines to help with the state-wide count of the homeless!  That census-taking was needed so that grants can respond to their needs. And how right it is that we not only have local benevolence, but also global line items on our budget – as with our companionship with Rwanda ! 

And how right it is that we study issues like we do in the FACE Adult Christian Education classes at 9:30 each Sunday so we can be stretched and grow!   How right it is that we are working to identify the needs of those to whom God sends us. We are first looking at our gifts and assets. What is it we have to offer people who have no community with whom to learn to pray or read the Bible or receive God’s gifts of grace or to reflect on with about the meaning of their lives and their purpose in the world? 

Now, we should not be surprised if there is some opposition to reaching out to the margins of society as the Jesus lifts up as normative by pointing to Elijah and Elisha.  Biblical scholar Craddock, writes that Jesus doesn’t go elsewhere because he is rejected.  Instead, he is rejected because he goes elsewhere.  Not everyone likes Jesus’ expansive focus.  It can be a hard pill to swallow that God’s love is inclusively outreaching.  But it is our baptismal calling to trust that abundant love.  

Today as little Janelle is baptized, I told her parents that if she fusses or cries during the baptism – not to worry.  God can do God’s work whatever her mood.  But if she fusses perhaps we might think that she is glimpsing what it means to have a cross marked on her forehead forever.  She is being called to follow Jesus – which someday will include her being called to give outside herself in costly ways. 

That call comes to all of us.  And it is costly.  It calls us to forgive, which means we have to let go of getting even.  It calls us to look not only to our needs, but also to the needs of others.  It calls us to love, as I Corinthians 13 says, with unrelenting hope.  Love keeps carrying on as Jesus did, even in the face of threat. He kept on because he knew he was called by a God of abundance.  And so are we.  And so are we!

Amen.

+Pastor Peg Schultz-Akerson, to the glory of God
Faith Lutheran Church, Chico, California