“Love Acts”
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
Jeremiah 1:4-10 and 1 Corinthians 13
February 2, 2025
Rev. Amy P. McCullough, PhD
Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious, or boastful or arrogant or rude. …It does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in truth. . . . Love never ends.”
The preacher listened as these words were read at the wedding, smiled to the beaming couple, noticed the teary-eyed parents, the fidgeting flower girl, and then stepped up to preach. “It is a sacred journey to make one’s way to the altar, to find a person with whom one is ready to covenant to share life. It is a holy thing to feel seen, heard, and cherished in ways not experienced before,” she began. “Much attention is paid to the path of finding “the one, but what happens when months, years later, the glow is gone, the hard work comes, and you think one day, ‘what if this partner of mine is the wrong one?’”
The intent of this particular wedding sermon was not to douse doubt upon the wedding celebration or to hint that this particular union was a mistake. No, the point of the sermon was to move the emphasis from finding the perfect person to growing together to be the right, loving partners for one another. Love, after all, is less a feeling than an action. Love is those daily decisions to act with kindness, to practice to patience, to curb one’s envy and ego, to believe in the very best of another and support each other into becoming that person. This is the work of love.
Paul writes his grand testament to love not for a wedding but for a church. He speaks of love as an action, a daily activity, an essential ingredient to the faithful life. He writes of love to a body of Christ that is fractured by their feuding, boasting, and resentments with one another. He desires, as he states when he begins, “to show them a more excellent way.” The Corinthian church is filled with promise. It boasts talented members, many with resources to share. It is situated in a bustling city in need of the gospel’s good news. The Spirit’s presence is obvious, evidenced by gifts of healing, teaching, and even miracles among them. But the church is floundering because the ingredient necessary to turn a self-promoting skill into a gift benefiting the whole is lacking. The life-generating, community-building love is lacking. Without love, you are nothing.
What is the love Paul seeks here? Paul speaks not of a spouse’s love for their partner; good and holy as that is. Paul isn’t referring to friendships, those enlivening, encouraging, life-sustaining connections of neighbors, co-workers, family members or friends. No. Paul speaks here of the love coming God; love known in Greek as agape. “Agape,” writes Joseph Wolf, “is the love that made you and me. It is the love of the Creator for the creation, the love of our Maker who made us. It is the creative love of God that surrounded us before we were even formed in our mother’s womb; it is this love that remains with you now to deliver you.” It is in this love that we stand; and it is this, God’s love, that will never end. Love is an action. Practice love.
Actions lacking in love have always been a part of human history. Paul is chiding well-to-do members of the Corinthian church for their disrespect to those lacking wealth or social status. Within our denomination, women were barred from ordination for roughly the first century and a half. Our churches have endorsed racist separations, and our gay and lesbian brothers only felt the fullest welcome last April. We have not always practiced love. What does it look like to love our country right now? What is the strong, loving response when career civil servants are fired, global aid that saves lives is dismantled, along with program to aid newly arriving, legal immigrant? How do we practice love to the transgender child wonder where to go and the family afraid as diversity, equity and inclusion commitments are rolled away? These actions divide rather than build up, they inflict harm rather than care. They widen the fractures already rippling across communities. Practice love, preaches Paul. In the winding road that is the disciple’s journey, how do we discern the contours of our loving actions for this time and place?
Love is patient, kind. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing; it seeks to tell the truth. Love reminds us we see through a mirror dimly – much of life and God may be a mystery still – but that one day all will be known, just as we are fully known by Christ.
Each act of mercy, kindness, or forgiveness, truth-telling, and welcoming in is itself a witness to the God who is love. Each effort to be charitable rather than boastful, generous rather than envious, hospitable rather than fearful, is a witness to the God who is love. Every time we tap into the presence of God, we gain another measure of God’s power, which is greater, stronger, and more enduring than anything else in all creation. May the love that animates the universe give you strength, wisdom, faith, and hope for the living of these days. Amen.