Love Demands Action

Epiphany 4

January 30, 2022

Fr. Tim Nunez

This is a great time of year. I’m not referring to the cold but to the Youth Fair. A lot of Good Shepherd kids compete in various ways. A couple of weeks ago Natalie and Corbin Merson shared with me all about the pigs they were raising. As most of you probably know, this includes all that they spent to acquire care for the pigs, including feed, medication and all they had done in terms of feeding and training them. It’s all very impressive and teaches great life lessons.

One of those lessons is that no matter what they have to take care of the pig. It doesn’t matter if it’s raining, or if it’s cold, or if the kids don’t feel well, or if they were invited to a birthday party or whatever is happening, they have to take care of the pig. Sometimes they could switch off or cover each other, but even then they are making sure the job gets done.

And that is for a livestock animal, which they will have to let go for sale. Some of the students will stay in agriculture their whole lives, but these life lessons apply regardless and they apply in increasing importance.

The stakes go up when we care for a pet. Pets have to be fed and so on too, and we bond with them usually for their entire lives. The stakes go up even higher when we care for people, be it a child, be it our own children or nieces and nephews or students. We are in the realm of love, and love demands action.

As we embrace Paul’s beautiful discourse on love, we are reminded that it is the most important thing in life, the most important thing there is. We cannot see it or touch it. We cannot hear, smell or taste it. We cannot measure it by any means – there is no love-ometer. It’s not only the most important thing, nothing else matters without it. Nothing else works without it; not eloquence, understanding, knowledge or prophecy or even faith. None of our actions or personal sacrifices have value without love.

Paul goes on to explain the effect love has on us, eliminating our negative tendencies toward irritability, boastfulness, arrogance, rudeness, stubbornness, irritability and resentment. And he directs us to where it is leading. Love, true love, not lust or indulgence or sentimentality, but true love, always and ever is leading us to God.

Young people listen up. If a relationship is not building you up – helping you get better grades, develop a vision for your life, helping your health and sort out other friendships healthfully, then it’s not true love.

Love is not meant just to help us put up with each other. It does involve endurance, yes, as Paul noted and it does “bear all things,” that all builds and shapes our character for God. Love is God’s chief means of getting us where he wants us to be. Sometimes that means comforting us when we sorry. Sometimes that means holding us accountable to true repentance for our sins. And his love most often works through our love for each other.

That’s why hanging in there with each other is so important. I don’t mean, obviously, in any sort of abusive relationships. But absent that we are to love each other so that God can shape us. That’s why we strive for families to be healthfully loving, for our church to be loving. That’s why it’s really important for us to use technology to stay together as we each manage our risk.

It’s also why we really must not let that suffice once the danger has passed. We cannot let our fellowship and education programs go, the projects and conversations where we grow closer to each other and work on life together. That starts in the nursery and works all the way though the children’s and youth ministries to everything us older folks do from grilling meat to scrambling eggs to decorating the church.

That’s why we are to be agents of His love in our community wherever we go, and why we connect with other ministries. We carry on, especially when things are hard, disappointing and discouraging. Love bears all things, hopes all things and endures all things. Look to the cross.

And where God needs us to be is like him.  Recall that John wrote in his first letter that God is love (1 John 4:7-8). Love is not merely something God feels or does, it is what God is.

Love requires engagement. Maybe that’s why we call that period between a proposal and a wedding the engagement, because it’s a test run of sorts so that people who are to marry will intensify the engagement of each other through which God will use them to shape each other.

And this is the rub in our Gospel passage this morning. Here he is, Jesus, love incarnate, love embodied, love in the flesh, the fulfillment of God’s promises in person. They don’t see it. They think they know him, but they don’t see it. They want to see signs. They want to see a show. But love is about to work on them by exposing their narrowness. They, too, were supposed to be agents of the One True God, a light to all nations. But they had gotten insular, protective, to themselves.

He reminds them of stories that they know by heart. Elijah was, after Moses, the greatest prophet of Israel and therefore the greatest one to lead them once they were in the Promised Land and coping with all the challenges that entailed.

The widow of Zarephath was in Sidon, today’s Lebanon. She was very poor and outside of Israel. During a famine Elijah asked her to bake him a little cake of oil and flour. She protested because they were nearly out and on the verge of starvation.  He stayed with her a long time but the oil and flour never gave out. Then her son got sick and died, but Elijah raised him from the dead.

Her response? “So the woman said to Elijah, ‘Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.’” (1 Kings 17:24)

Later his protégé Elisha was approached by a Syrian captain, Na’aman, who had leprosy. Elisha instructed him to bathe in the Jordan 7 times, which he did reluctantly because the Jordan isn’t, shall we say, exactly spring-fed. Na’aman was cured, and as the story goes, “Then he returned to the man of God, he and all his company; he came and stood before him and said, ‘Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel; please accept a present from your servant.’” (2 Kings 5:15)

They are just living their lives, minding their own business, more or less. When they challenge him, he confronts them.

This enrages them, which indicates he poked this small-town gathering in a very sore spot. They were supposed to be God’s light to all the nations and they just weren’t. They are ready to throw hm over a cliff. Please note how Jesus reacts to their provocations. He tells them the truth in love, never yielding on either point. Eventually he goes to the cross for them, and for us, because he loves us so. And love wins.

AMEN!