Practice Love
Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 3, 2023
Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 3, 2023
Homily for Sunday, September 3, 2023
The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost
If 1 Corinthians 13 is the “king” of St. Paul’s passages about love – (1 Corinthians 13 is the famous passage that begins, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude…”) – [if 1Corinthians 13 is the “king” of St. Paul’s passages about love,] Romans 12 –from which we heard this morning – is the “queen.” “Let love be genuine,” Paul writes:
…hate what is evil,hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection… Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.
Perhaps the biggest difference between these two passages is that (unlike in 1 Corinthians) in this morning’s passage from Romans, “love” is not something we have. Here is from 1 Corinthians:
“If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love,” Paul writes, “I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries… but do not have love, I am nothing.”
Love may be something we can have, but in this morning’s reading from Romans, 12 Paul makes it clear that love is something that requires practice. Paul offers multiple ways to practice love: “Rejoice in hope,” he writes:
· Be patient in suffering
· Persevere in prayer
· Contribute to the needs of the saints
· Extend hospitality to strangers
· Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them
· Rejoice with those who rejoice
· Weep with those who weep
· Live in harmony with one another
· Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly
· Do not repay anyone evil for evil
· If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
Love may be something we can have, but love is something that also requires practice.
I wonder if, in the coming week, we might take sometime to pray with Romans 12 and to ask Jesus for the grace to practice love, maybe doing any one or perhaps more than one of what Paul wrote in Romans chapter 12, to:
· Rejoice in hope
· Be patient in suffering
· Persevere in prayer
· Contribute to the needs of the saints
· Extend hospitality to strangers
· Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them
· Rejoice with those who rejoice
· Weep with those who weep
· Live in harmony with one another
· Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly
· Do not repay anyone evil for evil
· If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
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