Archives for August 2019
Set Free
All of us are bound tightly by whatever we call them – spirits, passions, vices – and God in Christ has come to set us free.
Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 21 C
Text: Luke 13:10-17
Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
This poor woman suffered for 18 years, bent over double.
But she didn’t come to the synagogue for healing. That was Jesus’ idea, unlike many of his healings. He called her over and said she was set free from her ailment.
After 18 years, this woman probably didn’t ever expect or hope to be better. She just thought, “this is how I will always be, hurting, struggling to breathe, to move.” Today would be just like every other day.
But this day, she was set free. For the first time in two decades, her Sabbath was restful, peaceful, joy.
This physical healing was her great gift. But not for us.
In Jesus’ wonderful healings we don’t really know where we fit in the story. When we, or others we love, are ill, suffering, we pray for healing. We hope for healing. We even demand it at times.
But we also know it’s not as simple as that. Sometimes God has healed loved ones of physical and mental disease. Sometimes the healing given isn’t what we asked for. So centering our worship with these stories, as the Gospel of the Day, is a practical problem. How do they apply to us?
But this story is different. Because Jesus uses language in this episode that opens a door for us to enter this healing. Oddly enough, it’s language we sometimes are too sophisticated and modern to take seriously.
Ancient people often attributed illness to evil spirits, and Jesus’ day did, too.
This woman has painful scoliosis, caused by who knows what. But Luke says she had a “spirit of disease” for 18 years, that’s why she was bent over double. And Jesus goes with this. He doesn’t say, “Be healed.” He says, “you are set free.” The same word describing freeing a prisoner from a cell, or freeing someone from crushing debt.
When the synagogue leader protests this Sabbath healing, Jesus keeps the image. He defeats his fellow rabbi in a classic Jewish debate, declaring that if the lesser thing – untying an ox on the Sabbath for water (one who had only been tied up over night) – is permitted in Torah, then clearly the greater thing – setting free a woman kept in bondage by Satan (one who had been tied up for 18 years) – is also permitted. The rabbi lost, and he and his friends know it. They’re “put to shame,” Luke says. The crowd of common folk hoot and holler at Jesus’ Jewish wisdom and skill.
But here’s your open door: Jesus, God’s Son, has the compassion and power to set free God’s children who are bound. What Jesus did, even if it uses the language of evil spirits, that’s the hope. Because if you can be set free of something you’ve come to believe will always bind you, wouldn’t that be life?
What ties you up, holds your life, and has done for so long you really believe this is the way you will always be?
The ancient Christian desert fathers and mothers shared the same belief in the presence of evil spirits. But they also had a wisdom that could be a great blessing to us.
They developed an understanding of nine spirits of temptation that afflicted people. They believed these spirits could bind us, hold us in their grasp. A few centuries later, Pope Gregory I codified a list of seven of them, unfortunately mislabelling them deadly sins. But the wisdom isn’t about sin that needs punishing. The wisdom is recognizing forces that trap us and shape us.
The list varied, but mostly it was anger, pride, deceit, envy, avarice, fear, gluttony, lust, and disengagement (sometimes called sloth.) Any of us at any time can be bound up by these evils, our forebears taught. They can hold our hearts and minds, affect our behavior, cripple our spirits, break our will.
Now, some of us in this room, in our community, have physical and mental ailments they’d like to be freed from, but not all of us. But everyone in this room, in our community, has at least one of these spirits.
And today Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, can set you free.
If “evil spirits” sounds a bit superstitious, think of them as controlling passions.
Is anger always lurking behind your heart, resentment at hand, ready to burst out and make a mess of your life, or to hurt others?
Are you trapped by needing to think pridefully of yourself, ready to manipulate things so you come out on top?
Does your vanity bind you, so you lie not only to others but even to yourself, to make yourself look better?
Does the melancholy you feel about your life lead you to envy what others have and who they are?
Is your need for security such that you cling tightly to things, unable to share, greedy for more?
Are you so afraid of life, so anxious, that you live a life of doubt, sometimes unable to move?
Or is something of a good thing never enough, you never feel fulfilled, needing more and more and more?
Do you see others as objects, trying to control them and the world, finding yourself using others?
Or is the world so fractured, so complex, you see no point in acting, no point in engaging, but fall into the boredom of being and doing nothing?
These are the passions that can bind us all, and everyone finds themselves trapped somewhere in these. That’s the wisdom of our forebears.
But God has come in Christ to set you free. Whether you ever thought it possible or not. Whether you came here looking for it or not. Just because God loves you.
That’s your hope: you don’t have to be bound by these.
Naming what binds you, watching for it, so that you know how and what to pray, that’s a good beginning. Once you know your captor’s name, you can learn new ways of thinking and being that lead to wholeness and life, not the bondage of these afflictive passions.
But beginning, middle, and end of it all is asking your God to free you in Christ. Recognizing you have no more power over the passion that binds you than over physical disease, ask God to set you free. To lead you to serenity instead of anger, humility instead of pride, truthfulness instead of deceit, emotional health instead of envy, non-attachment instead of greed, courage instead of fear, sobriety instead of gluttony, vulnerability instead of dominance, and action instead of disengagement.
The Triune God has sent you the Holy Spirit to live in you and give you life, to break any chains that bind you, trap you, block you from the abundant life God intends you to know. Nothing can separate you from God’s love in Christ, not even that thing that has held you so long.
That’s the joy the leader missed seeing.
Keeping Sabbath pales in comparison to God freeing someone from what binds and holds them. Rather than being indignant, he could have rejoiced with this woman, with the crowds, that God had done such a glorious thing.
And so can you. You can not only ask God to set you free, every day. You can also be one who sets others free, rather than binding them. Give an ox a drink, or a cup of water to someone thirsty. Call an old woman over to love her in Christ. Look out for the ones who are bound and find a way to give them hope, or, if you can, untie them. You can bear God’s freeing grace in your actions, your words, your love, and your witness to what it’s like to be freed.
Unlike this woman, being set free from these things takes a lot of time. A lifetime. We’re all in the state of being freed, and all in the business of helping others find the freeing touch of God in Christ. Until all, oxen and humans, are set free: to live, and drink water, and stand up straight, and praise God’s goodness together.
In the name of Jesus. Amen
Courage
Following Christ is painful and hard, but it’s the path to life, and Jesus and the saints surround and encourage you every step of the way, filling your life with abundance even in the challenge.
Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 20 C
Texts: Luke 12:49-56 (adding back in 39-48); Hebrews 11:29 – 12:2
Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
“Are you telling this parable for us or for everyone?”
Peter has a hopeful thought. Maybe last week’s parable about alert servants doing their absent master’s work is meant for other people. Others might not be alertly doing God’s work, but surely not our faithful little inside group?
We read the verses between last week’s Gospel and today’s because Peter’s question and Jesus’ blistering reply help explain Jesus’ words today. Peter seems to want a free pass from being ready at all times, and because Jesus is nearing his death, and anxious the disciples aren’t understanding, Jesus blurts out a horrible story of drunken slaves beating others and being terribly punished.
Yes, Peter, it’s for you, Jesus says. You’re all the insiders. And to whom much is given, much is required.
Which gets us to today’s Gospel. We’ve heard a series of lessons and parables about God’s reign for some weeks. Now Jesus, the Prince of Peace, says division and family infighting among those who wish to follow him are inevitable results of living in God’s reign.
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?” Jesus says.
“No, I bring division! From now on even families will be divided.” We so wish we could skip these words.
But we can’t. We pretend he was this innocuous, easy-going person, but Jesus was killed for what he taught and lived. The reason he’s so anxious and even angry in this episode is that he’s under tremendous stress, knowing he’s heading toward his death, something that will be brutal and horrifying, something he wishes could be over and done with.
Don’t make fun of Peter. We also hope that maybe Jesus is talking about someone else, not you, not me. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
That’s because we’re called to follow Jesus, and we know where he went.
Jesus will be killed for what he embodied and taught. He asks us to follow him in the same vulnerable, self-giving love, embodying God’s love and grace for the world, risking whatever we need to to share that love in our own bodies and lives.
The letter to the Hebrews says the same. In this amazing laundry list of heroes of the faith, the hardships that the faithful endured for serving God are astonishing. They witness to the challenge of following Christ.
Gideon, on the Hebrews list, was a hero of mine as a child, but there’s a part of the story we often forget. Right after he’s called by God to lead the Israelites against the oppression of the Midianites, the first thing he’s asked to do is tear down his father’s public altar to Baal, and the sacred pole next to it, using his father’s second best ox. Then he’s to chop up the altar and the pole, and burn that second best ox on the wood as a purifying sacrifice to God.
The townspeople are predictably enraged, and though his father defended him, how do you think Gideon initially felt about that request? To follow God is to potentially stand against even your closest family.
So, what are we supposed to do?
First, realize Jesus didn’t come intending to cause division.
Jesus’ very presence, the Good News he proclaims and embodies, is what will split his followers apart from each other, and from those who don’t follow. Following the way of Christ is not only hard, individually and collectively, it can lead to divisions, pain, and suffering. The history of the Church, the history of our own lives, is riddled with divisions caused by people seeking faithfully to serve Christ, and suffering incurred by people following faithfully.
Today’s witnesses tell us if we’re making our decisions in hopes that no one is offended, or acting only when it doesn’t inconvenience us or hurt us, we’re not being faithful servants of Christ. Unity and comfort are not the goal of faithfulness.
Faithfulness is to follow where our discernment tells us God is leading, regardless of consequences.
We can’t let our fear of division or setback or even suffering keep us from doing what we believe our Lord and Master is calling us to do.
This means we need to learn how to faithfully discern the calling of the Triune God. Learn to understand when we are at a crossroads, where to look for guidance and advice, how to listen to other believers and to each other and to the Church, and to how Christ speaks to us.
But when we’ve done that to the best of our ability, and when we feel we know where the Spirit is leading, we’d best do what we know is our path, no matter how hard. Whether it’s speaking out on our nation’s abuse and destruction of families at the border, to risking your own well-being to help someone in poverty, or standing up to violence and hatred with resistant, persistent love, this path of Christ isn’t easy. But it’s also the path of God’s life.
That’s the gift Hebrews reveals today.
Division and pain aren’t the goal or the end, there’s something more. We are “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” Hebrews writes, “let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.”
These faithful ones of the last two millennia stand in the stadium around you, encouraging you in your fear and worry, cheering you on in your faithful discipleship. All the saints of old and those you knew are your models in discipleship. They witness that ordinary people like you can be faithful, even in the face of threats and suffering. They tell you, “all will be well.”
All will be well, because Jesus is ahead of you on the journey, even facing death to bring you life. Your cloud of witnesses surrounds you in joy, pointing your eyes to the One who has faced worse than you will, and who loves you beyond life itself.
And all will be well because the cross-shaped path is the one where true abundant life is found, true love, true grace, true wholeness. As Jesus modeled and taught, losing for the sake of unconditional love is actually winning, and the costs are nothing compared to the peace of a life centered in Christ.
Elsewhere, Jesus says to the disciples, “Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.”
That is your word of hope, and ours together, as we seek to be faithful followers. We will need courage, and the one who overcame the world will give that. Courage to follow Christ’s call honestly and openly, without dodging or ignoring, without seeking an easy way around.
It won’t be easy. It never is. But you are always with Christ in all this cross-shaped journey of God’s abundant life, and you have these witnesses at your side. You are never alone.
Yes, it’s for you, Jesus says. It’s for me. It’s for all. Thank God for that.
In the name of Jesus. Amen
Proclaim
Mary faithfully and joyfully proclaims the justice of God’s reign as a reality, despite the conditions of the world around her and the complexities of her own life, because she knows and trusts God.
Vicar Bristol Reading
The Feast of Mary, Mother of Our Lord
Text: Luke 1:46-55
Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
I’m so grateful we don’t have to wait until December to hear this Gospel text, which we read every year in Advent, because we need to hear it now.
These days, the world feels heavy with injustice. We awake daily to news of more gun violence, more political conflict, more racial fear-mongering, more accounts of abuse, more people in desperate need. In the midst of all this, Mary’s pronouncement that God’s strength is on the side of the vulnerable shines like a beacon in darkness.
In God’s reign, the powers of the world are turned upside down.
The rich and proud, who seemed untouchable and unshakable, are brought down low. Their authority and money cannot protect them. It is the lowly, the poor, the forgotten people on the margins who are lifted up. Those who have gone wanting will find more than enough at the table of God’s banquet. This is the promise of an ever-faithful God that Mary declares.
And yet, the same heaviness of the world that makes me so eager to hear this message now is also what makes it difficult to trust that promise.
The reality we see around us doesn’t match the vision that Mary describes. We feel overwhelmed, exhausted, doubtful that justice will come. We cry out: When will God’s might tear the tyrants from their thrones? When will God’s strong arm scatter the proud of heart? When will God’s goodness satisfy the hungry? Our context can convince us that these things are impossible.
But if we think that Mary’s context made it any easier to believe in God’s world-changing justice, then we are underestimating the reality she faced.
In the words of this Gospel passage, we hear the voice of a young woman speaking to us across centuries and continents. We cannot know much about what her life was like. But we do know that she was not a person of great wealth or means. She would have held little power in her culture, and when she found herself pregnant, but unmarried, her options would have become even more limited.
Why did she claim so confidently that God was paying attention to the people society ignored? How did a woman whose future looked so bleak declare such a bold vision of God’s righteous power in the world?
She experienced it personally.
Mary might have been marginal and unimportant according to the world’s standards, but not according to God’s.
Her situation may have endangered her future in her community, but not her favor in God’s sight. God noticed her. God knew her. Loved her. Chose her. It is she who will be the one to bear the incarnate presence of God among humanity. Can you imagine? Not a woman who is royal, or wealthy, or famous… but Mary, a Jew from a small town in the corner of the Roman occupation.
Mary’s very body bears witness to God’s regard for the those whom the world undervalues. She knows that God is with her and that God is for her, as God is for any who are vulnerable. She trusts that God’s spirit is transforming her and transforming the world.
And for that, she rejoices.
When she hears the news of her unexpected and inexplicable pregnancy, Mary holds fast to her faith and accepts the life that comes to her. Despite the complexity of her circumstances, she is overjoyed.
And she expects that everyone else will be, too. Mary seems completely unconcerned with what other people might think of her situation. She confidently declares that people for generations and generations to come will see that this pregnancy, this thing that has happened to her – is a complete blessing.
God is coming into the world.
And Mary just cannot keep that to herself. Her soul is bursting with this good news; she cannot contain it!
Mary doesn’t just share a word of God’s goodness – she proclaims it!
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior!” No wonder her words are so well set to music – she is singing with wonder at this event that is not only about her, but about all people. God’s righteousness is for all humanity.
None of this is theoretical or contingent for Mary – it’s already a reality. She doesn’t say God might fill the hungry with good things, or God will eventually, someday lift up the lowly. She says God has done this. That is proclamation.
Of course, Mary’s pregnancy doesn’t suddenly solve all the suffering and injustice of the world. It doesn’t even solve her own struggles. She’s still a Jewish woman living under Roman occupation. Her life as the mother of Jesus will not be easy, and she will be at foot of the cross when her son, the Light of the world, dies as a criminal.
The complete fulfillment of God’s kingdom is beyond Mary’s lifetime, as it is beyond the lives of all the saints who came after her.
The spirit of God who is at work in Mary’s life was at work in the world long before Jesus was born and will be at work in the world long after Jesus dies. Mary doesn’t know how everything will work out, and yet she proclaims God’s justice as a reality. Because she knows who God is. She knows God is faithful, merciful, and intimately present with her in the midst of her life’s joy and pain. We know that God, too, the same God that Mary, the mother of our Lord, our ancestor in faith, trusted with all her heart, with all her life.
From Mary, we learn to be attentive to where God’s spirit is moving in a hurting world.
We learn to respond with joy and gratitude when we experience God’s blessing in our lives, and to have faith that God still sees us, still knows us, still loves us when we experience suffering.
We, like Mary, can say ‘yes’ to participating in God’s reign on earth in all its compassionate justice, knowing that God is working even through us, knowing that we cannot grow weary of doing good, even when the fruits of our labor are beyond our lifetimes. When we look at the world and feel overwhelmed by pain and need and violence, we still trust in the God we know because that is an act of strong, subversive faith.
And we don’t keep it to ourselves. We proclaim the good news that never stops being an astounding message of hope: God is coming into the world!
Amen.