Day of Prayer 2025, A Theological Reflection: Love is like fire
On The Leprosy Mission’s annual Day of Prayer on 7 May 2025, we are praying for God’s justice in this world.
Amidst a worldwide context in which we have seen cuts to government development spending and attacks on inclusion programmes that benefit persons with disabilities, we are taking time to lament these negative trends. We will dwell in this frustration alongside God and then respond with a call for God's righteous justice.
In this short theological reflection, we hear from the Bishop of Tonbridge in the UK about the Christian call to spread love like fire across all countries.
Love is like fire
US Vice President JD Vance gave probably the highest profile sermon of the year recently in an interview with Fox News. Speaking of our moral duties, he said:
‘You love your family, and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world’.
I don’t want to venture much into a debate that clearly had pointed political undertones to it, except to say: we learn to love first through our families, and we have such influence within them that it is right we do this as well as we can. And from this nurturing source we are called to love our neighbour. It is not always obvious who our neighbour is, and in a world shrunken by travel, trade and communication, that neighbour may live further away from us than we imagine.
The parable of the good Samaritan is Jesus’ way of saying we have lots of biases that stop us from loving our neighbour if they are different from us, and we have to overcome these if we are to be true to him. We need spiritual intuition to figure out our daily commitments, not least because one of the deepest ways we show our love is by praying for people, as The Leprosy Mission is doing on this Day of Prayer.
Love like this is to be shared. That’s probably where JD Vance mis-sold love. Love does not diminish the further out from us it goes. Love is like fire. We light fire from fire, and when people spread fire, it moves rapidly, like lit candles at a Christingle. So even the last person has as much fire as the first. Withdrawing development funding means withdrawing that Christ-like love and keeping that flame to ourselves.
Our world has many hidden and not so hidden needs and they blow a cooling breeze over human souls. But breezes also fan flames, and the chill wind makes people long for a source of heat. You have that fire, and it cannot be quenched.