**Please note this service is based on the format of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church of Canada. Unless otherwise indicated, all prayers come from
Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW). Hymns and other prayers have been sourced
to give appropriate credit.
**NRSV translation used for the readings, unless otherwise stated.
Introduction to the Day
The glory of God is often revealed when and where it is least expected. God uses our lips to declare that glory, inexperienced and hesitant though they may be. God uses our love to demonstrate that glory and so urges us to exercise it. God uses Jesus of Nazareth, water and the word, bread and wine, to reveal God’s glory where and when God chooses. Take heed, lest the glory of God slip through our midst unnoticed.
Thanksgiving for Baptism
Blessed be the holy Trinity, ☩ one God, the fountain of living water, the rock who gave us birth, our light and our salvation.
Amen.
Joined to Christ in the waters of baptism, we are clothed with God’s
mercy and forgiveness. Let us give thanks for the gift of baptism.
We give you thanks, O God,
for in the beginning your Spirit moved over the waters
and by your Word you created the world,
calling forth life in which you took delight.
Through the waters of the flood, you delivered Noah and his family.
Through the sea you led your people Israel from slavery into freedom.
At the river your Son was baptized by John and anointed with the Holy
Spirit.
By water and your Word, you claim us as daughters and sons,
making us heirs of your promise and servants of all.
We praise you for the gift of water that sustains life,
and above all we praise you for the gift of new life in Jesus Christ.
Shower us with your Spirit,
and renew our lives with your forgiveness, grace, and love.
To you be given honour and praise
through Jesus Christ our Lord
in the unity of the Holy Spirit, now and forever.
Amen.
Gathering Song – By Our Love by For King & Country
Greeting
The grace of our
Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God,
and the communion
of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
And also with you.
Kyrie – Kyrie Eleison
Canticle of Praise
– Glory to God
Prayer of the Day
The Lord be with you.
And also with you.
Let us pray.
Almighty and ever-living God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope,
and love; and that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you
command, through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Saviour and Lord.
Amen.
Readings
A reading from the Book of Jeremiah 1:4-10
Now the word of the Lord came to me
saying,
“Before I formed you
in the womb I knew you,
and before you were
born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a
prophet to the nations.”
Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do
not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” But the Lord said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am
only a boy’;
for you shall go to
all to whom I send you,
and you shall speak
whatever I command you.
Do not be afraid of
them,
for I am with you to
deliver you,
says the Lord.”
Then the Lord put out his hand and
touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me,
“Now I have put my
words in your mouth.
See, today I appoint
you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to
pull down,
to destroy and to
overthrow,
to build and to
plant.”
The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Psalm 71:1-6
In you, O Lord, I take refuge;
let
me never be put to shame.
In your righteousness
deliver me and rescue me;
incline your ear to me and save me.
Be to me a rock of refuge,
a
strong fortress, to save me,
for
you are my rock and my fortress.
Rescue me, O my God,
from the hand of the wicked,
from the grasp of the unjust and cruel.
For you, O Lord, are my hope,
my
trust, O Lord, from my youth.
Upon you I have
leaned from my birth;
it was you who took me from my mother’s
womb.
My praise is continually of you.
A reading from the First Letter from Paul to the Corinthians 13:1-13
If I speak in the tongues of mortals
and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am
nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that
I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is
not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but
rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all
things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies,
they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it
will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part;
but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a
child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child;
when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a
mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then
I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and
love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Gospel Acclamation – Alleluia
The Holy Gospel according to Luke 4:21-30
Glory to you, O Lord.
Then he began to say to them, “Today
this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and
were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not
this Joseph’s son?” He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this
proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your
hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” And he said,
“Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the
truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the
heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine
over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at
Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the
prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” When
they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove
him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town
was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the
midst of them and went on his way.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, O
Christ.
Sermon
May only truth be spoken and truth heard.
What is love?
That is a question that people have been trying to answer for millennia.
Poets, musicians, even parents have all been trying to define and explain and put to words what love means.
Even in the dictionary, there are many definitions of love. Here are just a few:
• strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties
• attraction based on sexual desire: affection and tenderness felt by lovers
• affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests
• warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion
And, of course, in tennis love means zero. Which I have always found interesting, but that is an unnecessary tangent for today.
Randomly stuck in between chapters 12 and 14 that talk about spiritual gifts, Paul wrote in chapter 13 one of the most beautiful odes to love.
The poetic vision of the chapter divides neatly into four sections.
In the first section, verses 1-3, a triplet of symmetrical conditions balances a series of “what if” extravagant possibilities with a conclusion about their essential empty reality if love is not the active agent.
The second section, verses 4-7, consists of an almost relentless rehearsal of the dynamic actions and qualities of love.
The opening “love never fails” of the third section, verses 8-12, turns reflection on “love” to consideration of the contrast between that which is “perfect” or “complete” and that which is only “partial” or “incomplete”.
The concluding verse of the poem is both a climax and an important turn, which I will touch on a bit later.
It is the second section where we find Paul’s definition of love, and where I want to spend our time today.
According to Paul, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
In these verses, Paul describes what love must do or not do rather than what love is. He does not romanticize it with abstract language. Rather, love is a concrete action that comes with all action verbs.
Seven out of the fifteen action-verbs have to do with what love must do: “To be patient,” “to be kind,” “to rejoice in the truth,” “to bear all things,” “to believe all things,” “to hope all things,” and “to endure all things.”
Then, the rest has to do with what love should not do: “Not to envy,” “not to boast,” “not to be arrogant,” “not to be rude,” “not to seek its own way,” “not to be irritable,” “not to be resentful,” and “not to rejoice in wrongdoing.”
You will notice that in our English translations, love is described by some rather static adjectives, and with a whole lot of the word “is”.
But Paul wants the Corinthians to know, and anyone reading this chapter to know, that love is an action word, it is a verb.
Love isn’t patient, it shows patience.
Love isn’t kind, it acts with kindness.
Love is a busy, active thing that never ceases to work. It is always finding ways to express itself for the good of others.
The point is not a flowery description of what love “is” in some abstract and theoretical sense, but of what love does, and especially what love does to one’s sibling in the church.
If the Corinthians are led by the Spirit and informed by the Lord, they can follow examples of love as shown by Christ and participate in his work, rejoicing in the truth.
Furthermore, the Spirit helps them to bear all things, to believe all things, to hope in all things, and to endure all things.
At the same time, love means that they should not envy, not boast, not be arrogant or rude, not seek their own way, not be irritable, not be resentful, and not rejoice in wrongdoing.
In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will.
When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as easily produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze.
On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone.
Thus, in Jesus' terms, we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them.
In fact, liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends.
So maybe we need to change the way we think about love. After millennia of human history, if there were some secret to tapping into the love within us, surely we would've found it by now.
It certainly isn't for lack of wanting or trying to generate love between us. Maybe we're looking for love in the wrong place.
Maybe, just maybe, we are not the source of love. Maybe it doesn't come from within us. Maybe it comes from something outside of us. That would explain why, when no matter how hard we try to force some sense of love from within us, it's just not there.
That brings us to the closing verse of chapter 13, “And now faith, hope, and love abide,
these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
Once again, it seems our English translation has lost some of the nuance of the words Paul was saying to the Corinthians.
Try reading it this way, “But now as the case is faith, hope, and love are a present ongoing reality.”
The phrase imitates the same assertion of the reality of God’s action in 12:18 of last Sunday’s reading.
The triad of faith, hope, and love are an important unspoken reminder of the Trinity and that all of this grand conception belongs to the Spirit’s gifts, to the one body in a caring community of mutual responsibility.
Paul does not say that love is the only important thing; rather, he says that “now faith, hope, and love abide.” This means that the Corinthians must have all these three.
But they should remember that love is the basis for and the goal of their works and life. That is why he says: “And the greatest of these is love.”
Indeed, this last verse refers to the beginning verses of 13:1-3 where Paul says: “I gain nothing if there is no love.”
And Paul never says that such love feels good. Because of our assumptions about what love actually is, we often act as though the mission of the church is to gather like-minded and likeable people together.
We think that in such a community it will be easy for us to love or, more honestly, to “feel the love.”
True love is not measured by how good it makes us feel. In the context of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, it would be better to say that the measure of love is its capacity for tension and disagreement without division.
Someone wrote that “love gives meaning to an otherwise unintelligible world”. There is, in fact, an intelligibility proper to love.
It is not enough to stick to principles or to know who was wrong and who was right on a divisive issue. When it comes to life in the Church, those who love will find the right answers, correct behavior and actions which best correspond to what can help a community to grow.
Love is also a way to keep a community together. Today, on my last day as the incumbent for St Michael’s Anglican, I want to remind them of the love that exists in their community.
I set foot on the grounds of St Michael’s for the first time on July 1, 2019, and from that first moment, I could see and feel the love that exists there.
A small community in the eyes of the larger church, their love for one another keeps them vibrant. It allows them the capacity to look after each other in times of need and to accept anyone who walks through their door as a friend in God.
It has been my honor and privilege to have had my beginnings in such a loving and welcoming community.
St Michael’s is a living example of Paul’s declaration of what love does to a community.
And we are not left to our own capacity for this love. We can love because God has already fully known us and loved us anyway, and is working to make our lives and our communities look more and more like this busy, active, tireless love.
To quote Steve Bell from his song “Love is Our Way”,
“Love is patient, love is kind
Love pays ill no never mind
Love refines the finest gold:
The charity of saintly souls
The only thing left for us to do is love
If this alone be done it is enough
And as we love the other, God abides in us
God unseen
Seen in love”
Let us pray.
God who is love, may your love find us new each day. Open our eyes that we may see your love more clearly. And as imperfect as we are, may we reflect your love to each other and the world around us. Through Christ our Light, Amen.
Hymn of the Day – Love is Our Way by Steve Bell
Creed
Let us confess the faith of our baptism, as we
say the Apostles’ Creed:
I
believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator
of heaven and earth.
I
believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord,
who
was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born
of the virgin Mary,
suffered
under Pontius Pilate,
was
crucified, died, and was buried;
he
descended to the dead.*
On
the third day he rose again;
he
ascended into heaven,
he
is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and
he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I
believe in the Holy Spirit,
the
holy catholic church,
the
communion of saints,
the
forgiveness of sins,
the
resurrection of the body,
and
the life everlasting. Amen.
Prayers of Intercession
The Spirit of the Lord is poured out upon us in abundance; so we are
bold to pray for the church, the world, and all that God has made.
Silence
Guide your church in the ways of faith, hope, and love. Cultivate
ministries and communities of compassion that bear witness to your enduring
presence among us.
God of grace,
Hear our prayer.
Teach us to live in humility on the earth. Curb arrogance that leads to
destruction of natural resources and disregard for future generations. Inspire
the work of scientists who urge us to live in harmony with your creation.
God of grace,
Hear our prayer.
You are the refuge of all who seek hope and freedom. Accompany
immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers who cross borders to find safety and
opportunity. Embolden leaders to draft compassionate policies on behalf of
migrants and those who assist them.
God of grace,
Hear our prayer.
Love bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things. Comfort with your
love all who are lonely, fearful, or broken-hearted. Sustain the hope of all
those who suffer in body or spirit.
God of grace,
Hear our prayer.
Your grace falls upon young and old alike. Bless the gifts of children
in this congregation and in this community. Give us humble hearts to follow
their leadership. Inspire us with their laughter, their insight, and their
curiosity.
God of grace,
Hear our prayer.
Please take time to offer your own intercessions or pray in silence.
We praise you for those who have gone before us and now see you face to
face. Abide with us in this mortal life until we rest in the arms of your never-ending
love.
God of grace,
Hear our prayer.
Since we have such great hope in your promises, O God, we lift these and
all of our prayers to you in confidence and faith; through Jesus Christ our
Saviour.
Amen.
Peace
The peace of Christ be with you always.
And also with you.
Hymn
of Thanksgiving – You Are Holy (ELW #525)
**Although
not physically at our church buildings to share our offering together I would
encourage you to set your offering of money aside so that it can be dropped off
or placed in the church once services resume, to mail your offering to the
church, or to make donations online. Please remember ministry is still taking
place.
Thanksgiving for the Word
Let us pray.
O God of justice and love, we give thanks to you that you illumine our
way through life with the words of your Son. Give us the light we need, awaken
us to the needs of others, and at the end bring all the world to your feast;
through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy
Spirit, be honor and glory forever.
Amen.
Lord’s Prayer
Gathered into one by the Holy Spirit, let us pray as Jesus taught us.
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our
daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those
who sin against us.
Save us from the time
of trial
and deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the
power,
and the glory are yours,
now and forever. Amen.
Blessing
God, who leads you in pathways of
righteousness, who rejoices over you, and who calls you by name, ☩
bless your going out and your coming in, today and forever.
Amen.
Sending Song – God Be with You
Till We Meet Again (ELW #536)
Dismissal
Go with Christ into a weary world. Share the good news.
Thanks be to God.
