Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany (C), January 31, 2016 - Jeremiah 1:4-10 and 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

For a poem specifically on the gospel passage, Luke 4:21-30, please see my poem from 2013 at: http://lectionarypoems.blogspot.com/2013/02/fourth-sunday-after-epiphany-2013-luke.html

Marc Chagall: Jeremiah (1980)

How to Tell the Difference

You'll never know when you'll be called
To do a job that might appall
You otherwise, some other day, 
Without some prod into the fray.

How do you know, though, if it's real,
A call? - or just some clanging spiel
You'd love to make? Perhaps, just take
A look to see whence comes the ache.

Is it your need that you be heard?
Or is it love calls forth some word
Of truth which is yet hard to say,
Though God would have you find a way?

Scott L. Barton

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.”

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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.