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Creatio Ex Nihilo (Google it)

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2 February, 2025Pastor John Strelan

“Where is love?” Thus sang Oliver Twist after being thrown into the cellar of a funeral parlour. (If you’re singing it in your head now, you have to elongate the ‘Wh – er – e’)

“What the world needs now is love, sweet love”. Thus warbled Hal David to a Burt Bacharach melody.

“All you need is love”. Thus sang the Beatles (although no one could hear them above the screaming of teenage girls).

“Without love I am nothing”. Thus growled Paul of Tarsus (I am imagining some Leonard Cohen whiskey and gravel)

Oliver’s question is a good one. If love is so important why is it so hard to find in our world? And if it’s so hard to find in our world, what does that say about us?

Paul pulls no punches when he writes to the church in Corinth. I suspect he would be slightly bemused to see his ‘Chapter 13’ has become a smash hit in the pop charts and on the wedding circuit.

 

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

13 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. 13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

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“Do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”

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You’d be hard pressed to find a more depressingly contemporary question in the Bible. And this from two of Jesus’ disciples!

Well, here’s a contemporary response. A poem by John Roedel . . .

I can’t make the world be peaceful

I can’t prevent children from having to hide in bunkers

I can’t silence the sound of bombs tearing neighborhoods apart

I can’t turn a guided missile into a bouquet of flowers

I can’t deflect a sniper’s bullet from turning a wife into a widow

I can’t stave off a schoolyard being reduced to ash and rubble any of that

the only thing I can do is love the next person I encounter without any conditions or strings, to love my neighbour so fearlessly that it starts a ripple that stretches from one horizon to the next

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oh, Spirit, let me be a candle of comfort in this world

let me burn with peace.

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Which is all very interesting. But, of course, what you’re really wondering is: Who is Neil?

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“To deny the Trinity is to risk our salvation. To try to explain the Trinity is to risk our sanity.”

‘Risk’ is a dirty word these days so I think this Sunday I will make sure we will avoid any risk to your salvation, or your sanity! (It’s just not worth the paperwork!) Instead, we might go in a different direction. Luther also said, “Of what help is it to you that God is God, if he is not God to you?” Perhaps that is the question for Trinity Sunday, anyway.

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