Click here to read the latest issue of The Olive Branch.
Regular weekly publication resumes next week, with the September 5 issue.
By office
Click here to read the latest issue of The Olive Branch.
Regular weekly publication resumes next week, with the September 5 issue.
Is Jesus too hard to accept, or is Jesus offering abundant life like nothing you’ve ever known?
Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 21 B
Text: John 6:56-69
Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
Two questions rise above the Gospel today as turning points for all who hear.
Each is paired with a statement. The first begins with a statement of fact: “This teaching is difficult.” Then the question: “Who can accept it?”
The second begins with the question: “Lord, to whom can we go?” Then the statement of fact: “You have the words of eternal life.”
From these two points Jesus’ disciples divide. Those who ask the first question leave. Those who ask the second stay. And they’re all disciples, John says. We’re not hearing the hungry crowds anymore.
We face both these signposts. It’s important we realize this, since when we answer as the first group we don’t do their honest thing and leave. We stick around, acting as if we’re on board with Christ’s path. While inwardly, there are places we won’t let the Spirit lead.
And it isn’t just Jesus’ teachings on flesh and blood that are difficult.
In our path of discipleship, we resist or reject Jesus more than we realize.
Maybe it is this incarnational teaching we’ve focused on for over a month. It isn’t easy to accept that you take in your body the body and blood of God’s Son, and are changed. You can spiritualize Holy Communion all you want, but Jesus will insist on saying it will completely transform you from within.
Maybe Jesus’ insistence on losing your attachment to your possessions is your sticking point. St. Francis may have given away everything and followed, but you’re not so sure. Financial security, protecting your house, voting for things that keep your stock accounts growing, not thinking of those who suffer as a result, maybe this is Jesus’ hard teaching.
It could be sacrificial love. The cross-shaped path Jesus invites you to follow is a challenging path. To let go of your pride in service to another, to genuinely forgive for no reason other than love, to offer yourself, no matter how inconvenient, to help someone, these are hard to accept. We’re conditioned to look out for ourselves.
And what of Jesus’ teaching that all are loved and welcomed in God, all are valuable and precious? Can you look at your innate racism and prejudice (because most of us have it), and let the Spirit really clear that out? Are you ready for Jesus to challenge your inmost assumptions?
This teaching is hard; who can accept it?
Pay attention to this crisis point for so many of Jesus’ disciples, and ask if you feel the same. It doesn’t mean that you don’t find hope and joy somewhere in all of Jesus’ teaching. Those who left had loved Jesus’ teaching enough to become disciples. But when Jesus insists on following completely, as he always does, do you hesitate?
Yes, I’ll give some of my wealth to charity, to my church. But Jesus says, can you lose all your attachment to material things? Yes, I’ll try to be kinder to those who aren’t like me. But Jesus says, can you be honest about your participation in unjust systems that perpetuate racism or sexism, your complicity that makes kindness not seem nearly enough?
Jesus is a hard teacher, no question. It’s all or nothing: all your heart, soul, strength, and mind in love of God. All your life in love to neighbor. All of yourself on Christ’s path. Don’t start to plow, Jesus says, and quit part way.
But wait before despairing. Before you walk, hear Peter today.
He asks the question you need to ask: “Master, where else can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
This is the other corner in this Gospel. You follow Jesus, you come here to worship the Triune God whose face Jesus reveals in person. You seek life in Christ because something in you knows you’ve never heard anything like what Christ offers anywhere else.
“Eternal life” is in your words, Jesus, Peter says. Remember, this is before Jesus’ death and resurrection. They aren’t following Jesus so they’ll live in heaven after they die. They have no idea what’s coming. Easter is a surprise and a joyful one.
But eternal life – this they sense in Jesus right now. “Life of the ages” it could translate. Abundant life, Jesus calls it. A life of meaning and purpose. Filled with hope and trust. Where peace fills one’s heart in the midst of the worst chaos. A life shaped by knowing you are forgiven and loved forever. A life, as Jesus keeps saying, lived in the heart of God’s life.
That’s what Peter is starting to sense. Hard as Jesus is to understand and harder yet as he is to follow, something Peter can witness to firsthand, Jesus is life. To hear him, to be with him, is to hear God, to be with God. To follow him is to learn a way of living that is unlike anything you’ve ever known.
These are the points of turning.
Many of Jesus’ disciples leave. They haven’t even seen the cross, faced the worst of doubt and fear. But they know they can’t do this teaching, or be shaped by it.
The others, more than just twelve, stay. They will be traumatized by what is to come, and astounded by what comes after that trauma. They will experience being filled by the very Spirit of God and changed dramatically. They will witness with their lives, some with their deaths, to the eternal love of God that is life right now. And because of Easter, they will also proclaim that bonus joy, that there is life after we die, too.
But right now, all they can say is, “We have nowhere else we’ve ever found such life.” They stay, because in Jesus’ difficult words they hear truth and forgiveness and hope and love and life.
So how will you answer?
Before you do, though, remember one more question and answer from God’s Word. The flawed King David, whose family story we’ve followed all summer, once sang a question and answer you need to sing now: “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139)
And his answer was, I can’t. If I turn away because your teaching is too hard, and lie down in death’s darkness, you’re still there. If I turn to you in hope because I find life in your words, ascend to heaven, you are also there.
Whichever disciple in this Gospel reading you imitate, there is One who will never turn away from you. Those who walked away from Jesus, well, Jesus never walked away from them. If you turn away, God will still be there, will still surround you, watch over you, and never take away the love that is yours.
Jesus’ teachings are hard. So hard that Jesus let himself be executed to live them out. But that unimaginable love, God poured out in death to draw all people, all people, even those who turn away, back into God’s life, that’s the answer to the only question that matters.
And if you realize you’ve never found any life like the life you’ve found in God through Christ, then rejoice. Because that life of the ages, the abundant life God dreams for all God’s children, will fill you until you, too, understand and follow even the most difficult of God’s teachings. Until you are in God and God in you, and all together with the whole creation in eternal love and life.
In the name of Jesus. Amen
God-in-the-flesh is God in the messiness of our animal bodies and lives, and in this Incarnation God will save and restore all things.
Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 20 B
Text: John 6:51-58
Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.”
There’s something shocking about hearing Jesus say this. Not because it’s a new idea. Every week at Eucharist I retell the story of the meal. Jesus said, “Take and eat, this is my body.” “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” But maybe we’ve heard that formula so often it doesn’t strike us as strongly as Jesus’ words here.
Because Jesus here isn’t just shocking. He’s almost disgusting. It’s even more so in Greek. Instead of using one of two very common, very frequently used words for eating, three times here John uses a third word, a word that’s only found once in the New Testament outside of John. Instead of “eat,” a better translation is “gnaw, chew, devour.” It usually describes how animals eat. So Jesus really says, “Those who gnaw my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.”
What kind of decent God talks about faith and life like that?
Well, in Scripture, God gets into far greater indecency.
On Christmas Eve in the late 1970s a friend of mine read the Christmas Gospel from Today’s English Version, a new translation speaking in everyday language. He read aloud that Mary was “pregnant.” After the service, a furious parishioner made it clear that sort of language didn’t ever belong in church.
Hold back from laughing too quickly. When did you last consider that the manger scene was full of blood and water, sweat and smells? That’s what happens when a baby is born. God-with-us in the middle of lots of things decent people don’t talk about publicly.
And what of the crucifixion? Do you ever envision what it really was like? The smell of bodies transfixed in fear, covered in sweat. People who are executed often soil themselves as they die. Blood is everywhere. This is where you see the Son of God.
Incarnation isn’t a polite theology. God-in-the-flesh means God in the mess, bodily fluids, smells, human life. Flesh and blood for real. Jesus evacuated his bowels and bladder every day. There wasn’t a portable shower following him around. This is what God Incarnate means.
What kind of decent God would permit this? What kind of decent pastor would preach about this?
It’s not just God. Our culture is squeamish about the reality and mess of our own animal bodies.
Funerals have changed from families carefully washing and preparing their loved ones to professionals sweeping them out of our sight. Anything that happens behind the bathroom door with the fan on is off limits to talk about. We won’t admit that we age, embarrassed to say we need hearing aids, or to be seen with a cane. What would people think?
Polite conversation is fine. Talking about our smells and fluids and dying bodies isn’t conducive to a dinner conversation. But if we’re so squeamish about the very real bodies we have, we’re separated from the gift of God our lives can be, the gift to us of God’s Incarnation. And our lives are deeply diminished.
That’s because intimacy and love live in the reality and mess of our bodies.
The one who has to deal with flesh and blood, with bodily fluids and smells of another, is the one most intimate to them. You like holding someone else’s baby because someone else has to change the diaper.
But when a child is sick in the night, has found a way to vomit between the mattresses and in other impossible places, the one who loves that child, who has already smelled and wiped that child countless times, is the one who washes sheets at two a.m., finds clean pajamas, wipes the walls, tucks the child in.
Near the end of my beloved uncle’s life, several times I needed to help him with some very intimate issues, something neither he nor I ever imagined would happen. Most of us dread the time when someone has to do this for us in our aging. But in those moments I realized the holiness of our broken, messy, fluid-producing bodies, how in these moments of truth we really understand what love can be.
Flesh and blood, all those things decent people don’t talk about: they’re where we experience true love. And where the Holy and Triune God enters into our bodies.
God’s Word took on our human flesh, not a sanitized version of humanity.
The Word became flesh and lived among us. Mary, a real woman, experienced the Son of God sitting on her bladder during her ninth month and making her very uncomfortable. God’s Word had all our aches and pains and smells and fluids and embarrassing noises. Was truly human.
Becoming one of us, God says, “Did you not believe me in Genesis 1 when I declared all this – everything about your fleshliness – good? Did you not believe that I still thought it good when in John 1 you learned that I took this flesh on myself, for your life? Did you not hear what Peter was told in Acts, that you may not call something unclean that I have called clean?”
God takes on every aspect of our humanity, and redeems it all as decent, good. Even the parts we call ugly. And now we can hear what Jesus says that means for the whole creation.
Jesus says that if God can enter our human reality, God can enter the very stuff of creation.
Flesh and blood are no different from bread and wine. Gnaw on that bread. Guzzle that wine. Take it in you and understand, but don’t try too hard to reason this out, Jesus says. Just chew. Drink. Feel how this is God’s life for you.
Saying that the eternal and Triune God can be present in such basic things as bread and wine is just as shocking as the rest of what Jesus says today. We try to deflect that shock with doctrine. We mumble things like “transubstantiation; consubstantiation; real presence; in, with, and under.” As if we can explain this.
But if we simply trust Jesus’ word while we gnaw on the bread, and drink the wine, trust that God is not only in Jesus’ messy body but in these lovely, tasty things, a new truth begins to emerge.
That God can also be in you, and me.
If God can be present in Jesus’ human, unsanitary body, and if Jesus says God is also present in simple bread and wine, then God can be in you.
Not a sanitized version of you. You after a shower, with your favorite clothes on and your hair the way you like it. As if you don’t own a toilet, don’t ever soil your clothes. As if you’ve never had a bad thought, or guilt and shame in your heart.
No. You are Christ, God is incarnate in you as you are, messy, smelly, broken, foolish inside and out.
No decent God would ever want to be embodied in you or in me. But who said God was decent?
And now God sends you out as witness in your body.
You go out with God in you, messy and flawed, and witness by your very body, your vulnerability, that God is in all things and in you. That love is incarnate. So that those who meet you might also find this wonder for themselves.
You have gifts, too. Blessings. Strengths you are uniquely prepared to offer the world as Christ. But today remember that all the things you’re not thrilled about seeing in yourself are holy gift, too. I give you my flesh and blood, messy as that is, for your eternal life, Jesus says. I give you as my flesh and blood, messy as you are, for the life of the world.
Do you see why you are so needed? God’s love can only be known in the flesh. Not through books or institutions. Through the flesh and blood and life of a child of God witnessing by their messy presence to the love of the eternal God for the whole creation.
Do you understand how this can change the world?
It’s indecent, really, how joyfully God enters into the depths of creation, into you and me. But this is a holy indecency that will save all things.
In the name of Jesus. Amen
In the midst of oppression, Mary proclaims that God’s reign will transform the world through the way of Love.
Vicar Matta Ghaly, CSJC.
The feast of Mary, Mother of Our Lord
Text: Luke 1:46-55
My beloved friends in Christ, Grace and peace to you on this blessed feast day of Mary, mother of our Lord, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
In today’s gospel reading, we listen to a canticle sung by Mary, a poor, vulnerable and young Galilean woman living in first-century occupied Palestine, living under the brutal and humiliating tyranny of Roman rule. Mary lived in a divided nation, a nation in crisis with quarreling political parties and unholy allegiances, violent revolts and bloody massacres. The majority of her people lived in unbearable poverty; most resources were plundered by the rich, funding palaces and military expeditions while they lived in destitution. A whole people condemned to oppression, they were waiting and waiting for that one their ancestors spoke of, to come and snatch them from the grip of a death-dealing world.
Mary too was witnessing, with an eye of mercy, the pain of her nation, waiting and praying for the promised savior of Israel. From among all her people, God chose her to birth the Messiah, the Son of God, whose coming in the flesh commenced the long-awaited kingdom of God.
In Mary, God defies so much of our “impossible” to make a new world possible through Christ.
Earlier in the chapter from which we read, Mary visits Elizabeth who is pregnant with John, the forerunner of Christ. We can perhaps see the image of two pregnant women filled with the Holy Spirit, in love with God, full of awe and gratitude for God’s grace, standing together, rubbing each other’s hands, blessing one another, and remembering the kind of love that transformed their life through the impossible.
So in this moment of awe and intimacy, Mary sings this canticle to set the stage for the entire gospel of Luke, testifying to God’s love and redemptive work in the world. In the midst of so much turmoil and injustice, this young woman – a 14 year old single mother – stands with a full belly and prophetically sings that the world is about to turn – not with the rise of a new political party, or a violent uprising or a coup d’état, no – she sings of the world turning with the power of God’s love, a love that looks favorably on the lowly rather than the mighty, a love that admires humility rather than pride, a love that overthrows the powerful of this world to lift up the oppressed, a love that fills the hungry and thirsty, and sends away empty the secure, self-relying and wealthy, a love not dependent on transactions or an exchange of favors but that gives abundantly of one’s self and one’s possessions, a love that from generation to generation, pours loving-kindness and overflowing mercy, a love that turns the world upside down and makes a way out of no-way for those who have no other way but love, a co-suffering and healing love that is incarnate in the child Mary gives birth to, our beloved savior Jesus Christ.
God has seen our humiliation, God has heard our sighs, God is present in our tears, and God now reigns – Mary sings – and God’s reign reaches with love into our reality, into our very hearts, to till the soil of our being with grace, and transform the world with the call of a living and working faith, a call to return to God’s heart with our bodies, with our minds and with our souls.
What might be the impact of such a love, one might ask?
Friends, the author of Luke understands that the socio-economic, political and cultural realities of a people are inseparable from their spiritual reality and the condition of their heart. As Jesus himself says in the gospel of Luke “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” And so through love, God deeply enters with a transformative grace into the heart of our blessed mother Mary to transform who she is, how she walks and what she does in the world. And her faithful love in response to God – her love for her own child – makes known the Way of a divine kingdom; a kingdom in which the last will be first, and the first will be last; a kingdom in which the undesired find home and belonging, and the powerful are displaced; a kingdom that is good news to the poor, release for the captives, freedom for the oppressed and healing for those whose backs were bent by despair and despondency.
God’s reign does not perpetuate the violence and might of Rome to establish yet another brutal but fragile kingdom. It does not use force or shame as a way out of complicity. Instead, God reigns through love; God reigns in the resiliency of forgiveness, patience and long-suffering. God reigns when we love our neighbors and enemies alike, when we name and confess our sin and prejudice, and ask for absolution and forgiveness, when we seek to be in right relationship, when aggression and violence are met with an offer of peace, when our anxieties are surrendered and like children, we trust that we are loved enough to be fed, to be dressed better than the lilies of the field.
God reigns when an Israelite and a gentile are both equally heard and healed, God reigns when a chief tax-collector like Zacchaeus gives away half of his possession to the poor and is saved, God reigns when more than five thousand are fed with just five loaves of bread and two fish.
In all of these instances throughout the gospel of Luke, God enters the heart with a love so genuine; an invitation to belong so potent, that it transforms an individual’s whole being and drives them to act out of faith according to grace. It’s a love so contagious; it magnifies, multiples, and causes the world to turn with justice, mercy and loving-kindness.
And in as much as this canticle reveals to us the immensity of God’s love, it testifies to Mary’s profound love for God, an intimate and vast love that says yes when the Word is proclaimed, that trusts the holy Spirit is at work, that responds with “Here I am… let it be with me according to your word,” especially in the face of the impossible.
Truly, as Elizabeth proclaims; “blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” And blessed are we when we follow in her path and believe God’s promise.
Given Mary’s weakness and powerlessness before the grandiose power of an empire, this canticle of liberating love would be deemed foolishness to a culture of dominance, greed and power, for in the eyes of such a culture, this kind of love is meaningless and produces no change in our reality. It’s a culture that expects a Mary to choose between violence and despair.
Yet here we are friends, the Church of God, one generation after another, boldly singing with Mary a canticle of faith and hope in God’s reign, unashamedly proclaiming the foolishness of the Way of Love, trusting that God will overthrow whatever power of this world that deceives, consumes, destroys and leaves us unfulfilled, without real meaning or purpose. Through the wisdom of our Mother Mary, in the model of her co-suffering love with the world, we are being called as accomplices for the kingdom of God – with our hearts, with our hands and feet, with our all for the sake of Love.
If you wish to dream into reality a different world, remember first that you been made a child of the most high, and you belong to God’s family by which this Way of Love – the gospel – is made known and put into practice. Find in your heart a tender closeness and intimacy with God, water it and nurture it with your siblings in Christ. If you can’t find it, then fervently ask Christ to show you the way, for he passionately desires you as his own beloved.
Trust that God is constantly reaching out to you, calling you to enter deeper into the mystery of Love with unceasing prayer, through the means of grace – the sacraments, in watchfulness over what enters your heart and resides in it, and by pure love and service towards neighbor and enemy alike. Like Mother Mary, your sacred love affair with God will become contagious; it will change you, transform those around you, and surely send you as good news for many who are hungry for love and for bread – to God be the glory forever and ever. Amen
By office
MOUNT OLIVE LUTHERAN CHURCH
3045 Chicago Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55407
612-827-5919
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