Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on February 9, 2025
[sermon begins after two long-ish Bible readings – hand in there, they’re worth reading]
1 Corinthians 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. 2 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. 3 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.
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 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. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 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. 12 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. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
Luke 5:1-11 Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, 2 he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3 He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. 4 When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” 5 Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” 6 When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. 7 So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. 8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” 9 For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; 10 and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” 11 When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
[sermon begins]
I have seen a LOT of love over the last few days. The love of parents saying goodbye to their perfect newborn who didn’t survive pregnancy. The love of a family saying goodbye to their beloved 98-year-old matriarch. The love of a bride and groom beginning the adventure of marriage. In each of these moments, and for very different reasons, the love was overwhelming. The week was full of tears. Tears of inconsolable grief. Tears of a lifetime of memories and laughter. Tears of hopeful joy. Most of those tears belonged to other people and some of the tears were my own. My heart is broken and full.
In each of those three situations, I said that the Bible tells us that God IS love.[1] The love of a God who knows suffering personally and holds us closely when we suffer. The love of someone who helps us understand the smallest fraction of how much God must love us. And the love that fills our eyes with adoration, our bodies with awareness, and our hearts with hope. Alas, it’s terribly insufficient that we have only one word to use for this complex emotion. But in those stories that hit close to home, we can find it easier to understand love when we feel similar things in our own hearts’ experiences. It’s more difficult to hear the call of love when it’s not personal even though Jesus commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.[2] He called this the second greatest commandment after loving God. And he calls us to love enemies, too.[3] Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth launches us into what love looks like beyond family ties.
Tucked in the middle of Paul’s teaching about spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians, chapters 12 and 14, is this stunning section about love in chapter 13 – one of the most well-known parts of scripture because it’s often chosen as a reading at weddings. But Paul isn’t preaching at a wedding, he is writing to a brand-new church full of friendly strangers in a bustling cosmopolitan seaport town. This Corinthian church had been arguing among themselves about all kinds of things, setting up hierarchies of wealth, insiders and outsiders, spiritual gifts, and who’s leading whom. Paul’s letter opens in gratitude for these wayward, faithful people who were strangers to each other before following the way of Jesus. Paul unfolds a counter proposal to their hierarchies and their misbehavior around them. By nesting the love chapter within the spiritual gifts, Paul points to love as the reason for the gifts. Love is THE gift, the greatest of all. Our spiritual gifts are to illuminate love, not create barriers. To paraphrase Paul, if I sing like an angel but without love, I’m just making noise; if I can solve every mystery and have oodles of faith but no love, it amounts to nothing; and if I give everything I own away without love, nothing is gained.
Love is as counter cultural as it gets right now in the United States – especially in public. Rather than challenging each other’s ideas and arguing about best outcomes for all people, there are daily and even hourly offenses of dehumanizing hubris from public leaders and private citizens. Have you ever known shame to work as a strategy to get someone on your side? Ever? Telling people they don’t know their own minds. Calling them names. Picking apart their motives. None of that works and only further divides. As Rev. Dr. King said, “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” Paul called his church folks to practice love based on Christ’s example because what they’d been doing was taking them down the wrong road.
At the same time, love is not ‘going along to get along.’ It’s neither unity through muting differences, nor is it giving up on finding solutions to problems because it’s too hard. Love speaks up. Love shows up. Love means that each person is valuable. No one is expendable. As Black History Month reminds us, oppression dehumanizes both the targeted victims and the violent perpetrators. Chattel slavery of African people by white immigrant Americans was ended by a Civil War that was costly in human lives and in money. As recent federal accusations and the defunding of Lutheran Family Services remind us, advocacy work alongside those most deeply affected by poverty, displacement, and migration is ever present. This congregation that was founded by Swedish immigrants has long ties with Lutheran Family Services. Many of our families and friendships were formed through their adoption support and immigration support. Jesus calls us to a love that bridges across difference for the sake of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. The behavior of love that’s in person. First and foremost, in the person of Jesus on a cross. Jesus lived his life constantly expanding the circle that people use to limit who’s in and who’s out for their own personal gain.
He ate meals with unlovable people, he had public conversations with women no one spoke to, he had secret conversations with religious leaders who opposed him by day, the list of his ever-expanding circle of grace is endless. Finally, when the threat of his grace, the threat about who is included in the love of God, became too great, he was killed for it. Grace and unconditional love were too powerful, too much of a threat to the status quo. Yet, when one of Jesus’ friends tried to fight off the guards arresting him, Jesus said, “Enough!” [4] Jesus raised his hand in healing at the time of his arrest, not violence, and opened his arms on the cross to all people, even the criminal who hung next to him.[5]
We never get these ways of Jesus completely right. Faith gives us the courage to try. In faith, and by the cross, we’re given the freedom to try and fail and try again, always in the interest of loving our neighbors as ourselves.
The cross is also the place where we struggle in the darkness and the very place where God meets us. We live in this darkness in different ways – failure, addiction, confusion, doubt – our deepest darkest places that we don’t tell anyone about. Simon Peter knows a little about the deep. He was one of the fishers whom Jesus told to cast their nets into the deep. The scariest part of the sea that everyone knew held the scariest things. The nets came back full of fish. Too many too count. The nets started to break, and the boats started to sink. The abundance amazed them all. Simon Peter was so overwhelmed that “he fell down at Jesus’ knees saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’” Peter’s awe collapsed his assumptions and he and his friends left everything to follow Jesus whose abundant love is that life changing.
Love is a behavior. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love rejoices in the truth. Love bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things. Responding in love is a choice. Love takes practice. One of the things we do as Jesus followers is practice God’s love through Jesus, imitating it, reminding each other about it, and being open to the transformation it can bring. Like Simon Peter, we confess our sin, the truth of our flaws and fragility, and God’s abundant love given in return as forgiveness. We listen to scripture and the preacher’s interpretation. We welcome children and listen to them. We share peace and then we share the communion meal to which everyone is invited, even the newest visitor among us may come to Christ’s table of bread and wine. We sing in prayer and praise to God who knows us fully and has always loved us because God loves the world.
God loves us first. From God’s promise of love, we’re asked to practice God’s love with each other, our neighbors and our enemies. A patient, kind, and truthful love that bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things – the greatest of all gifts indeed. It’s courageous love that takes action alongside the least among us who have little to no power on their own.
To paraphrase Paul, speaking without love ends up being a whole lot of noise for a whole lot of nothing that ends up hurting a whole lot of people. Some of us have tasted this love that Paul is talking about. We’ve experienced the grace of the gospel in the unconditional love of Jesus that means there’s nothing we can do or not do to make God love us any more or any less. It’s deeply personal and it transforms our lives. I first heard this gospel when I was 28 years old. 12 years ago last Sunday, I was ordained as a pastor. You just never know what the gospel is going to do with you once it’s had its way transforming hearts with love that bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things.
When Jesus calls us into discipleship, to follow him as people catchers, we’re called by his love into love to also call others with love. Love is the Way through.
_________________________________-
[1] 1 John 4:16b God is love.
[2] Luke 10:25-37 Parable of the Good Samaritan
[3] Luke 6:27 [Jesus said] “But I say to you, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.”
[4] Luke 22:49-51 Jesus said, “No more of this!” And he touched his ear and healed him.
[5] Luke 23:32-34 Father, forgive them; for they know not what they are doing.