1 Cor 13, Jer 1: 4-10

He expresses however and an undeniable truth. Who has not recognized the power of love? It’s superior to knowledge, more fruitful than understanding all mysteries, above all prophecy and more powerful than the faith that can move mountains. Love makes all the difference: there’s nothing else like it. It transforms things as well as people and we celebrate it in every area of human and divine endeavour.

"Sing about love and the strength it can give, you can sing how you’re ready to face life and live, but you know as the days go by that no matter how hard you try, without Him love is not to be found". We write about love. We talk about love. We think about love. We pray about love. We "shout about love and that wars will all end, you can shout ‘we’re all brothers’ and even pretend, but you can’t cover up the past just pretending it’ll never last without Him love is not to be found." The most common prayer in churches, synagogues, mosques, temples around the world is about love. We ask God to help us to love each other, to show us love, We thank God for the love we have found. We urge God to bring about love between nations and peoples. A prayer, no matter what our faith, yet, when love actually descends upon us we are astonished by it. We turn that love aside, reject it and its possibilities.

We long for love and when we don’t feel it coming our way, we can feel unimportant and unwanted. We can feel offended by the choices others make, and want to cry out - why them? What about me? It’s an experience described in today's gospel reading. The people of Nazareth become angry with Jesus when he tells them how God loved the widow of Zarephath and cured the leper Naaman - people who were outsiders and strangers - a powerful word for us this Australia Day!

Sometimes we have another kind of experience concerning love. One that can frustrate us, and make us feel sad for someone else. You may have met someone whom you recognize as good, beautiful and kind, yet who is alone, afraid and sad. You see in them a person who needs love, a person who indeed wants more than anything to be loved, and yet they find that love hard to accept. For some reason they don't think they are loveable, or that they deserve love. They turn away all gestures of love, shutting out the very thing they need most

We all want love, need love, but can’t accept it because we think we are undeserving.

As a way of helping us think about the disbelief, resentment and astonishment we have when love is offered to us or to our neighbours, and think about our sense of who is worthy and loveable and who is not, let’s look at Jeremiah. God tells Jeremiah He loves him, that He has known and loved him since the time before he was formed in his mother's womb. Not only has God loved Jeremiah all this time, but He wants and has always wanted him to be His prophet, a man who speaks to the nations in His name, and, who by speaking the words God gives him, will uproot, tear down, destroy and overthrow that which is bad; and build and plant that which is good. God offers Jeremiah the chance to do important work, to be one of his chosen instruments, to bring good things to pass -- and what happens....?

Jeremiah tells God that he is not ready for this favour, that he is young, and that he doesn't

know how to speak well enough. In other words, Jeremiah tells the Lord that He has got it all wrong! This man whom the Scriptures show deeply yearned for God's healing presence in his life tried to reject the single most important thing God was going to do with him, for him, and through him.

Maybe there were reasons Jeremiah sought to avoid God’s call. Perhaps he didn't want to

respond to God because he was simply too busy, or maybe he thought the job he was being called to was too dangerous and unlikely to make a difference to anyone. Whatever the reason Jeremiah had for trying to turn down the God job, his resistance to that choice of God is similar to the resistance many of us have to being loved whether it be by God or by the people around us.

People say things like: - "I don't understand what they see in me" - "I'm not really worthy of their love." "They’re so good, they shouldn't waste their time with me." People question the love others have for them, and feel that somehow, for some reason they’re not good enough to be loved, they don’t deserve it, and shouldn’t have it. People turn love aside because they don't want to get hurt again, or they don’t have enough time to get involved, or believe it requires too much effort, and, in doing so, they miss love's transforming power.

What a tragedy all this is. We can miss out on so much when we think so little of ourselves, when we are so afraid, so falsely and mistakenly humble. Thank God that He doesn’t listen to our excuses. He persists in offering us His love, and the wholeness that goes with that love, despite our excuses, just as God persisted with Jeremiah, when Jeremiah insisted that he was not old enough or eloquent enough to do God's work.

None of us is perfect. As Amazing Grace suggests, we are all wretches; blind and lost. But despite this, God offers us His love. Despite all the objections we raise, God desires to have us walk with Him, and in Christ He shows us His love is real, by walking with us and sharing with us our experience of fear and loneliness and rejection.

The whole message of Scripture is that God sees who we really are; He sees us as He saw Jeremiah in his mother's womb. He finds us to be precious, important and able. Where we feel un-able, God’s promise is that He will en-able. All we have to do is accept His love, and let that Love do the rest. God loves us and accepts us. God's love transforms us, makes us even more beautiful than we are already. God knows what is He is doing, as do the people in our life who’ve told us they love us and who have persisted in loving us even when we thought we didn’t deserve or warrant their love. The noises of life, the thoughts and feelings that distract us and make us feel alone and afraid can be transformed by the power of love into songs of joy and praise to God.