Sermon Archive

So let’s talk about “love.”

And let’s begin with some of the television reality shows that Hollywood has offered us this past week, shows that ostensibly are about “love.”

Citing just the name of the series and The New York Times caption for this week’s episode, these included: My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé, whose caption read, “Sex”; and then there was Average Joe: Hawaii, wherein “Sexy bachelors ignite a battle”; and, oh yes, let’s not forget The Bachelorette; which featured both “a three-way date” and “a group date.”

Still, God is good! For amidst all our cultural detritus, trumpeting shallow love and empty sex, God has sat millions of us television watchers down in our pews today and is saying to us, through our lectionary, “You need to read I Corinthians 13 again! You need to hear once more about a love that is pure and selfless.”

“Love—practices patience and kindness. It envies no one and boasts of nothing. It never lords it over another or behaves crudely. Love seeks no personal advantage. It keeps no score of wrongs and never yields readily to anger. Further, love rejoices in truth, not in wrongdoing. And love can face anything. Its faith, its hope, its endurance know no limit. Yes, love never ends.”

Now, that’s the love that’s meant to be! And since “God is love” (I Jn 4:16) that’s the kind of love our Creator is, and that’s the kind of love that “Love, our Creator” has revealed to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—who is Love’s perfect image.

Yes, God is Love, and we have been created in God’s image so that our lives can express this love described by Paul and embodied by Jesus. And having been given birth by Love, our Creator, we are now called to become Jesus’s disciples so that we can draw on the strength of his example and on the abiding grace of his sacraments, to the end that we may come daily to embody God’s image of love.

Throughout Jesus’s ministry, he offered us, in both word and deed, countless vivid images of the kind of love that God is. And he began doing that in the very first sermon he preached, spoken to his hometown congregation, in Nazareth of Galilee.

Those of you who were here last Sunday will recall that the first part of Luke’s report of Jesus’s inaugural sermon in Nazareth was last week’s gospel lesson and the focus of my own sermon.

For those of you who weren’t here, let me “play Hollywood.” Let me offer you one of those 75-second recaps of the most exciting parts you missed! So, ready, get set, go! “In last week’s episode:” at a sabbath service in his hometown, Jesus reads to the congregation a portion from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, a portion describing a prophetic figure who will be anointed by God’s Spirit to the vocation of announcing a season of Jubilee, a time for bringing good news to the poor, for proclaiming release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and for letting the oppressed go free!

And after reading that passage from Isaiah, Jesus sits down and begins to preach his sermon, saying: “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

In other words, Jesus is telling his fellow Nazarenes: “I am the one who has been anointed by God’s Spirit, at the time of my baptism, to inaugurate the fulfillment of this vocation. I am the Messiah of Love and Justice, of the time of Jubilee, of the time for launching the deliverance and liberation of all who are in bondage—the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed. I am the one who is setting in motion the process of bringing God’s love and justice to those whom others consider ‘marginal,’ or even ‘expendable.’”

(Did I get that recapped in 75 seconds? Yes!)

Now, in today’s episode from the Gospel of Luke, we’re told that initially the congregation’s responses to Jesus’s words about this vocation are quite enthusiastic. They rejoice that one of their own, this “son of Joseph,” has been anointed by God’s Spirit to be their Messiah.

But the congregation’s enthusiasm for Jesus’s message proves to be short-lived when, in continuing this dialogue-sermon of his, Jesus asks them to expand their horizons and to start thinking and acting “outside the box.” Their enthusiasm proves short-lived when Jesus asks them to think “outside the box” about the nature of the Messiah’s vocation and, after that, about the nature of their own vocation as followers of the Messiah.

You see, Jesus goes on to tell them that the love that God is, and the love to which God is calling them, is a love that envies no one and boasts of nothing, that never lords it over another or seeks personal advantage, that knows no limit and never ends. And a love like this must be practiced regardless of earthly boundaries, beyond our usually narrow limits, outside such traditional boxes as ethnicity, religion, and geography, beyond the borders of Jews, Judaism, and Roman Palestine. But when Jesus tells the congregation this, they revolt, for they don’t want to think and act outside the box. And their original enthusiasm turns into angry rejection.

Now, the box outside of which Jesus is calling his followers to think and act is the box of privilege.

First, Jesus tells his fellow townspeople, his fellow Nazarenes, that, contrary to what they are apparently expecting, they as Jesus’s long-time friends and neighbors have no privileged claim at all either on God’s love or on the benefits of Jesus’s Messianic ministry. As a matter of fact, Jesus foresees that they will soon be choosing wrongly to fulfill that old saying, that old proverb, “No prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown” (vs. 24), so Jesus foresees that because of their impending rejection of him they will be receiving fewer benefits than will those who are total outsiders.

I repeat, the box outside of which Jesus is calling his followers to think and act is the box of privilege.

So Jesus goes on to tell his fellow Jews, his fellow inheritors of God’s covenant with Abraham, his fellow residents of Roman Palestine, that, contrary to what they are apparently expecting, they who share Jesus’s ethnicity and religion and homeland, they who are his own people, have no privileged claim at all either on God’s love or on the benefits of Jesus’s Messianic ministry. And, to make his point, Jesus cites two stories concerning prophets of ancient Israel—a story about Elijah (cf. I Kings 17:1, 8–16; 18:1), and another about Elisha (cf. II Kings 5:1–14).

Jesus recounts that, amidst a three-and-a-half-year-long famine, the prophet Elijah had extended God’s mercy of food not to the widows in Israel, but only to a widow in the foreign land of Sidon. And this woman was a Gentile, not a Jew.

Jesus also recounts that among the numerous lepers encountered by the prophet Elisha, only one had been healed, only Naaman the Syrian, and he, too, was a Gentile.

So Jesus’s message to his hometown congregation is clear: God has anointed him to inaugurate a ministry of love and justice, of deliverance and liberation, and this vocation of Jesus will extend God’s ministry of love and justice to all who are oppressed and marginalized, not just to Jews. For not even Jesus’s own people has a privileged claim on God’s love.

Yes, the box outside of which Jesus is calling his followers to think and act is the box of privilege. But Jesus’s attempt to push outward the narrow limits of his people’s concepts about who could benefit from the ministry of the Messiah, about who could receive the gift of God’s loving deliverance and liberation—Jesus’s attempt to push outward these narrow limits does not just offend the townspeople; it enrages them.

As Luke tells it, the hometown crowd rises up and drives Jesus out of the synagogue—indeed, out of the town—toward the brow of a hill from which they can hurl him to his death; but Jesus escapes during this commotion by coolly passing through the middle of them, and he then travels onward a day’s journey to the more hospitable city of Capernaum.

So anger and violence are the final responses of the Nazarenes to Jesus, when he confronts them over their desire to confine God’s love and Jesus’s embodiment of it to the narrow box of their own privilege. Thus, they reject the God who is universal love and who through Jesus is calling them to the kind of love that envies no one and boasts of nothing, that never lords it over another or seeks personal advantage, that knows no limit and never ends.

Now sadly, these folk in Nazareth are by no means the last persons to have rejected Jesus’s call for a love that has no limits and knows no bounds. Indeed, there are all too many Christians today, some of us among them, who reject his teaching and seek instead to impose limits on the extent and scope of God’s love and concern, and on the extent and scope of our own love and concern.

Today marks the beginning of Black History Month, a time for us to remember just how many of us followers of Jesus declined, or refused outright, to work on behalf of love and justice for those outside the box of our own privilege of race or class. During Black History Month it is imperative for us who are not black to ask ourselves what we were doing during the bad old Jim Crow days of the 1940s and 50s, what we were doing during the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, what we were doing about the sharp decline in the quality of urban public education during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and what we are doing today, during the 2000s, to combat the increasing gap between rich and poor and to provide to all genuinely equal opportunities. Have we truly been following Jesus by implementing love and justice outside the box of our own privilege?

You see, it is imperative for us who claim the name of Christ to pledge ourselves anew to following the teaching and example of Jesus, the Liberator, by removing all limits to our Christian love.

This past Friday night, several of us from Rutgers Church attended the reading, here in this sanctuary, of a new musical entitled “Love According to Luc.” This work, which is to run off-Broadway for three weeks in June, explores the struggles of a young woman called by God to professional ministry in the Presbyterian Church—her struggles as she comes to acknowledge that she is a lesbian and that she is therefore really an “outsider” barred from ordination in her own denomination, really “a stranger in her own home.” Throughout much of the performance, I kept asking myself, “Even though my history on this issue is long and my credits are many, have I really done enough to move outside the box of my own ‘straight white male’ privilege in order to extend the love and justice of Christ to all the GLBT persons who have been so wounded and so hurt by our denomination’s angry rejection of Jesus’s command to love without limit?”

You see, it is imperative for us who claim the name of Christ to pledge ourselves anew to following the teaching and example of Jesus, the Liberator, by removing all limits to our Christian love.

And as a final exercise in reflection today, we need as Americans to hear again that Jesus is calling us to think and love outside the box of our national privilege. Pondering once more the words of Paul in our First Lesson, it should become immediately clear to us that we Americans fall short of Paul’s vision of love in many ways. As a nation, we are not good at patience. We are prone to boasting and to lording it over others. We often behave crudely and seek out advantages for our nation. We do keep score of wrongs, and we do yield easily to anger. And many a time we rejoice in another’s wrongdoing. Further, I am quite persuaded that were our foreign and domestic policies to be based on the kind of love that God is and that Jesus embodied, these policies would look far, far different from those our federal government is currently pursuing and instituting.

Yes, the essential nature of our infinite God is infinite love, love that knows no limits or bounds.

So, to love “outside the box” of privilege, to love in ways that push limits outward and transcend human boundaries, to love all persons with a pure and selfless love, to embody each and every day God’s image of love—that’s the task to which this first and best of Jesus’s sermons is summoning us today.

Let us pray: