13If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ²And 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. ³If 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.

⁴Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

⁸Love 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. ⁹For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; ¹⁰but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹When 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. ¹²For 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. ¹³And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

In his commentary in The Christian Century, Bruce Epperly of the Lancaster Theological Seminary, writes, “To acknowledge that we ‘prophesy in part’ is the first step in honest spiritual leadership and the primary antidote to religious idolatry, intolerance, and fanaticism.

This passage is so often used at weddings, that maybe we miss the closing verses.  Love is how we ought to respond to one another because we must humbly admit that we know only in part.

Epperly also writes, “In truth the other is always a mystery.”  It is a reminder that even in our closest relationships, we should remain humble.

How can you put this passage to effect in your life?

 ⁴Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, ⁵“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.” ⁶Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” ⁷But 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, ⁸Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.” ⁹Then 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. ¹⁰See, 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.”

Back in 2007 during a series on the prophet Jeremiah, I proposed a radically new reading to this passage, a gender queer or even transgender read.  Basically, based upon a series of gender transgressing images throughout Jeremiah I speculated, what if part of the issue here in Jeremiah 1 was not that Jeremiah was young, but that he was only male and that as such he did not have the experience of compassion, identified linguistically with the maternal in Hebrew, that the national situation at the time required?

I was not trying to speculate on authorial intent, but was exploring creative readings of texts which has been gaining as a hermeneutical method in recent years and is considered by proponents to be something of a return to pre-modern approaches to scripture.

 ¹⁴Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. ¹⁵He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. ¹⁶When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, ¹⁷and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

¹⁸“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, ¹⁹to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

²⁰And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. ²¹Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus’ inauguration sermon, you might say, in which he lays out his agenda, which comes through the Hebrew prophetic tradition and hearkens back to the Levitical concept of the jubilee, the year of the Lord’s favor, found in Leviticus 25:-12.

Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder taught that Jesus was proclaiming that that year was the jubilee and that from now on the economic and political realities of the jubilee were to be for all time and not just once every fifty years, that that is part of what it meant for the kingdom of God to have come.

Read about the biblical concept of jubilee here.  The Christian practice of jubilee that has developed in the tradition.  It use in international politics in the last decade. 

And for how you might connect with Jubilee USA, here.