We live as people of the day, children of light, even if the time looks like it’s still night; so Paul invites us to act as if it is day right now, live as if it is Isaiah’s “days to come” right now.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, First Sunday of Advent, year A; texts: Romans 13:11-14; Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 24:36-44

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

The middle of the night is a mysterious time, but far stranger are the wee hours of the morning, those hours before the sun rises, the time that isn’t quite night but isn’t quite day, either.  I’m blessed to be able to sleep well most nights, but every once in awhile I’ll wake up a bit early, in those strange hours.

If it’s a big day ahead, with lots to do or many things to attend, I find myself dreading the possibility, as I turn my alarm clock around to see the time, that it actually might be time to wake up.  To see that it’s 3:15 a.m. and I can sleep some more is a gift of grace.  I don’t have to get up yet; I don’t have to start a day that will be full of whatever it’s full of.  To be able to close my eyes and sleep some more, this is a good thing.  But if I look, and it’s only 15 minutes to the time I need to wake up, there’s really no point in going back to sleep.  It’s day already, for all intents and purposes, even if it’s dark.  Best to get up and get at what needs doing.

That time when it’s not quite night and not yet day, that is the time of our lives in this world as disciples of Christ Jesus.  Images of light and darkness, night and day pervade God’s word.  They thread throughout the words of witness believers have spoken and written for 2,000 years, that we live as people of the day in a world threatened by night, that we follow a risen Christ in a world where death seems to have immense power.

Yet a preeminent witness among those witnesses, the apostle Paul, suggests that things might be closer to dawn than we tend to imagine.  “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers;” he says, “the night is far gone, the day is near.”  Paul tells us that it’s more like 15 minutes to wake-up time, rather than three hours.  Which suggests that our response needs to be accordingly different.

One of the challenges we have living in the 21st century is that it is the 21st century, nearly 2,000 years since the resurrection of Christ Jesus and the birth of the Church.  Paul’s sense that the time of fulfillment was near at hand has been muted by two millennia of waiting.  We’ve become so accustomed to waiting we’ve developed a centuries-long practice of having a special season, Advent, devoted to teaching us the art of waiting, the practice of patience.  We have come to live our lives with the spiritual expectation that it’s always still a few hours from dawn, not a few minutes.

That’s something I think Paul would have us correct, even now, twenty centuries removed from his writing these words to the Roman church.  To a God in whom, as Peter writes, a thousand years is like a day, time is relative, and 2,000 years is nothing.  Paul, I think, understands this, and his words, still read in our worship, still carried in our Bibles these many years later, still speak to us as a truth we need to hear.  An alarm we do not want to shut off.
 
When we see what Isaiah says the morning, the day of the LORD will bring, our hearts sing with hope.

The prophet tells us a promise of what the LORD will do in the new creation.  It’s a beautiful vision.

It’s a vision of hope, of all peoples coming to God.  “In those days, says the LORD, all peoples will gather together at the mountain of the LORD.”  They will gather in peace, to learn from God.  To learn God’s ways, that we might walk in God’s paths, that’s why all will gather.

It’s a vision of peace, of God’s people laying aside hatreds and weapons.  But it’s a vision of peace that is one of peace with justice.  Where all our weapons are transformed into tools that feed, nourish and sustain God’s people.

There are moments, sometimes painfully brief, where it seems that might be the way the world is moving.  Many swords have been destroyed.  Peace has been made in places where it was long absent.

And there are far more times when we realize bitterly, “not yet.”  Many swords continue to be made and sold, while millions of children starve for lack of plows to till soil and raise food.  We still look to our ways to solve our problems, not learning God’s ways and living them.

This promise of God’s is still just that: a promise.  We still wait for the LORD to come and restore the world.

So when we consider what Paul says, that this restoration is near, at hand, it makes little sense to what our perception of reality tells us.

We know we must hear what he says, because that’s exactly what our Lord tells us as well.  It’s not yet dawn, Paul says, but we’re past the darkest hours.  Today Jesus tells us it could happen at any time.  The hope of all Christians is that Jesus will return soon, to restore all things, and today we’re told he will.

But it’s been a long time, and we’re still waiting.  What are we supposed to do with that?  If waiting for Jesus’ return is like waiting for morning, well, it’s sure a long night.  Wars, famines, plagues, hatreds, all these things still torment our world.

And sometimes if the wait for something is too long, we stop waiting, stop believing anything will come.  And that leads us to inaction, for a couple reasons.

We begin to live as if we’ve got hours to sleep, and that lulls us into inaction.  What’s the rush to act, when it will be far ahead in the future that all this will happen, if ever?

Or we live as if night could never be stopped by day, as if it is all-powerful, and that cows us into inaction.  What can we do, just a few flashes of light in a dark world?

Regardless of what our reality seems to be, we can’t escape one simple thing: our Lord Jesus Christ tells us, and Paul affirms for us, that we are to live our lives at the ready.  Always.  Thinking we know when the time will be is foolish, but Jesus doesn’t tell us to do that.  Acting as if it will never come is also foolish.

So Jesus says again and again, “just live lives at the ready, at all times.”  “The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”  That’s why Paul’s urgency is simple: it’s time, he says, to start waking up.  Start being ready.

And since we do seem to struggle with long waits, it’s a good thing that Paul gives us an answer to how we might stay awake, how we might be ready for our Lord’s return.

Live honorably as if it were already day, he says.  Live honorably as if it were already day!

If it truly is just before dawn, Paul says, then get up, get out of bed, get dressed.  Even if it looks like night.  There’s not enough time to go back to sleep.  We need to take off the works of darkness, he says – put them aside – and start removing from our lives that which is a sign of the darkness.

Put aside our swords and spears: that is, our hatred, our indifference, our pride, our love of violence.  Put aside our self-centeredness and our ignorance of the pain of others.  Put aside our sin and wrongdoing, actions which Paul frequently compares to things of the darkness.

Get rid of them, he says.  You know what time it is: time to put those things away.

And then get dressed with “the armor of light,” he says, start living as if it were already God’s day.  Using plows and pruning hooks, to borrow Isaiah’s words, that is, caring for the world God made so that all may live.  Living honorably.

In fact Paul then seems to say “let’s keep it simple”: just put on the Lord Jesus Christ, get dressed in Jesus.  Cover ourselves with his way of life, his love, his grace, by living our lives as he did, loving and caring for the world and being a sign of God’s love.  Being in our very bodies and lives a preview of the new creation yet to come.

And isn’t this exactly what Isaiah says? “Come, let us walk in the light of the LORD.”  Because when we do, we learn that God’s kingdom has already begun and the day is breaking: first in Jesus, and now in each of us.  Swords and spears do turn into plows and pruners as God transforms our hearts in love.

Second, we also learn what it is to live in the light, to live as light, even when we are surrounded by darkness.  This is the other reason for our inaction, that we fear the work of darkness is too strong, so we won’t be able to make any impact or dent in the night.

Paul addresses this more fully in the verses preceding our reading today.  This whole section of his letter to the Romans, from chapter 12 up to today’s reading, is Paul’s great “nevertheless”: nevertheless, he says, live that way anyway.

Let your love be genuine, rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, Paul says in chapter 12 (12:9, 12).  This is not life in full daylight, but it is light-filled life to be lived in a world where there is darkness and hate and pain, because the light of this love can make a difference.

And if people aren’t going to be responding in peace or love, so be it, he says.  “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all,” Paul says (12:9).  There may be many swords wielded, many weapons fired.  But Paul says, why does that mean you and I shouldn’t start making plowshares with ours?  That’s how the kingdom starts.  We go first.

And the same Jesus who tells us to be ready at all times also tells us parables of mustard seeds and yeast, tiny things that look to have no value but which grow and transform their environment.  Just because the night seems too powerful and evil too strong doesn’t mean we’re not a little seed of hope and light and grace, and that we can’t have any effect.  That’s the gift of the Master whom we serve, the one who is coming but who in the meantime needs us to be about our work. 

Friends, the time is now.  “It is now the moment for [us] to wake from sleep.”

It’s almost day.  It’s time to get up, get dressed, and start walking in the light of the Lord.  There are plenty of things that make us want to roll over and close our eyes, but the light of the Lord is already upon us.

So, . . . let’s wake up!  Let’s ask God to keep us ever watchful, ever ready and prepared with lives of love and service, lives that will transform this world in tiny but powerful ways.  When Christ returns there will be a reign of justice and joy and peace, that we know.  But in the meantime, we prepare for that return by living in justice and joy and peace in this broken world, by being a tiny fleck of light in a world of darkness, and so being a sign of the rising sun that is to come.

And that’s all Christ needs of us, that we live the light-filled life as a sign in the darkness to others and as a beginning of the dawn of God.  And since the day is almost upon us, let’s be at it.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

Christ, our true bread, meets our deepest needs and longing by bringing us true life: relationship with the Triune God. 

Vicar Emily Beckering; Day of Thanksgiving, year C; text: John 6:25-35

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Some followed him across the Sea of Galilee because they had heard of what he and done: of the people he had healed and fed. Others had actually seen him feed 5,000 people, and were eager to eat again. They were all attracted to Jesus because of his “signs,” but their faith went no deeper.

“Show us a sign!” they say, “Moses gave our ancestors manna in the wilderness. What can you do?”

They want signs, but they are not really interested in what the sign actually tells them about who Jesus is: the Messiah, the One whom they have been waiting for, the Son of God, who brings the very light and life of God.

All they know is that they are hungry. And so they follow the whispers and the stories about him. They follow Jesus perhaps in attempt to witness the next great miracle, to hear the next great speaker, to eat the magic bread that they have heard so much about.

But Jesus tells them that they are following him for the wrong reasons. They are looking for meaning and hope in the wrong places. The crowds are following him for entertainment, for a good story to share with the people back home, for a piece of bread.

But all of this is temporary. Their wandering in the wilderness will only bring short-term gain. They are hungry, but they are seeking experiences that will not satisfy their longing and food that will not fill them.

The crowd in this story reveals truths about ourselves: we too are hungry and too often, we like the crowds find ourselves wandering through our lives attempting to find happiness and fulfillment and meaning in ways—in so many ways—other than in God.

How often we seek life in our relationships, expecting—even demanding—our families and friends to meet all of our needs.

Or, we seek fulfillment in our work, in our hobbies, in our careers: convinced that if we just earn one more promotion or award of recognition or A on a term paper, then we will finally have arrived.

We try to fill our longing with things, with comforts, or experiences: certain that if we can just move to the bigger, better apartment, or finish the new edition on our home, or buy the newest model phone or car, or see the new opera, or visit that country that we have been waiting to see—then we will finally be happy.

We fill our days with events and projects to accomplish, our nights with parties or TV in order to fight off our loneliness, to distract us from the disappointment that we feel with ourselves or others, to escape reality.

We numb ourselves by ignoring and shoving our feelings down within us so that we don’t have to feel any pain, any hurt, any fear, but we are left feeling nothing at all.

And when these tactics don’t deliver—when we don’t find the happiness that we thought we would—we try again and make more to-do lists to mark down our accomplishments, keep purchasing the new models as advertised, and store up more things in search of something—anything—that will give us a purpose, meaning, life again.

But the truth is that none of this is ultimately satisfying. None of this is the answer to our problem. And none if it will ease the pain or the fear or the emptiness that we feel. Instead, we are left feeling lonely, dissatisfied with our relationships, disconnected from those who we want to care about, frustrated with ourselves, purposeless, and indifferent to the world. This kind of living leaves us exhausted and finally, empty.

In John’s gospel for today, we are told that this kind of life is no life at all: and it is certainly not the life that our God hopes for us. Jesus came so that we might have life and have it abundantly. Abundant life, true life, is life that only comes from God.

This is what Jesus is telling the crowds who have come to see his miracles: They came to hear a great speaker, someone to impress them with his words. They need true words. True words are those from God, words that Jesus the Son speaks.

They came to see signs, but they need true signs that will point them to God. True signs are given so that they might believe that Jesus is the Son of God.

They came seeking bread, what they need is true bread. True bread brings eternal life, and it is a life that only God can give. The true bread that Jesus is offering them is himself, for he alone can bring them this eternal life, he alone can fill their emptiness and satisfy their longing.

He alone is the bread of life, the living water, the light of the world.

Bread. Water. Light. These are all things that humans need to live, and yet, Jesus says that these things are not enough. All the bread and water and light in the world will not satisfy their deepest longings. What the people in the crowd really yearn for—what they have been created for—is true life, real life, abundant life and this can only come from God. And this is exactly what Jesus offers! God’s will according to the gospel of John is that no one may be lost, but everyone who sees Jesus will believe in him and have this eternal life.

Life after death, yes, but if we were to read ahead in to chapter 17 and listen in on Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, we would hear what eternal life really is: it is knowing God the Father and Jesus Christ whom he sent. God is concerned not only with life in the future but with true life now—abundant life is life lived in the joy of relationship with God.

This relationship is what the crowd hungers for and what they most need—this relationship is what we most need.

So when Jesus speaks to the crowds and tells them not to seek bread that perishes but the bread that gives life, he is speaking to us, calling us back from the empty ways that we have been living. Calling us to come back from our wilderness and our wandering, to come back from our restlessness and our loneliness and our longing. We don’t have to live those ways anymore because Jesus is giving us exactly what we need: himself.

Christ—our true bread—is the only one who can fill the emptiness that we carry, the only One who can bring lasting healing, the only One who can satisfy our deepest hunger. We have been hungering and searching for this relationship because it is for this that we have been created. And now, we need look no further, for thanks be to God on this day that this is precisely what we are given! Real life, true life: life filled with joy and abundance because it is life with our God.

And this life is eternal because God will never let us go, because Christ our bread will give himself to us bite by bite week after week. As God provided manna in the wilderness for the Israelites morning by morning, so too does God bring us life by drawing us into the very life of the Triune God here at this table week after week to remind us that what we need at our core—we already have—and we can stop searching for this relationship with God is given freely. In this lifelong relationship, we need not be hungry or thirsty because God will continually give us what we need: God’s own self.

But this relationship is not offered to us alone. We live in a hungry, tired world, a world that also hungers for this life, for this joy of living in relationship with God. And so our work does not end here at this table. From this table, from Christ our true bread, we are sent out to share how this God of love and light and life offers true life—his life—to all.

This is why we give thanks today because our God meets the needs of the whole world and calls us all back from our wandering and our loneliness to this table where no one leaves hungry or thirsty.

The vision of the other crucified convict is the vision we need to see God’s work in the world: to look at the dying Jesus of Nazareth and see the Christ, ruler of all things and the image of the invisible God.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, Christ the King, Lectionary 34, year C; texts: Luke 23:33-43; Colossians 1:11-20

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

The sign was, in the end, unnecessary.  Everybody knew who the man in the middle was.  Still, it was the custom to hang a sign over each crucifixion, naming the convict and the charges against him.  So Pilate, the governor and judge of this case, had one made for Jesus.  “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”  John tells us that the religious authorities protested that the charge should be “he claimed to be the King of the Jews.”  But all four evangelists agree that the crime, the charge laid against Jesus by the Romans, was that he was actually the King of the Jews.  A little bit of gallows humor, with the added bonus to the oppressor that the oppressed are offended by it.

But everyone knew who he was.  Jesus of Nazareth.  An itinerant rabbi from Galilee who’d been drawing big crowds for a couple years.  Rumors of healings and miracles were breathed, but most of his work was in the north country, where you can get hicks to believe anything, even that water can be changed into wine.  Those in the city, the sophisticates, likely doubted he was anything real.  But they knew of him.  Everybody did.  Every generation it seemed there was someone stirring up the people and raising hopes for freedom and restoration to Israel.  At the very least, he was the latest news.  And here he was, ending the way the rest of them always ended, on a Roman cross.

The title “king” was never really in question, except as a Roman joke, not to the crowds.  Even to those who might have heard him teach, might even have found hope in some of his words, this execution, this death was probably not a surprise.  No one really thought that he was a king of anything.  And who ever could be king in a world ruled by Caesar?

Except there is this: one man, strangely enough one hanging on a cross next to him, with his own name and crime above his head, one man looked at this dying teacher, this failed hope, and saw a king.  A real King, one who was somehow yet to inherit his kingdom, his reign.  Dying himself, this convict asked only one thing, to be remembered when this King entered his kingdom.

Look, everybody knew he was Jesus of Nazareth.  Everybody knew that the title King was either a big joke or an offense.

So answer this: how in the world did this convict see the Christ, the ruler of all things, when he looked at the dying Jesus?

That is the truth we must grasp, above everything else in this world, because until we see how this convict sees, we understand nothing about God.

In some ways we have made a wall of separation between what we know and think happened at the cross and what we consider about God in our world today.

There’s no question we believe that Jesus, the Son of God, died on the cross, and was raised.  We debate about how this saves us, what needed to be made right that only Jesus’ death could do.  But we know that he died and he rose.

Yet, when we consider what the Triune God is doing in the world today, when we seek signs of God’s hand, of God’s will, somehow we separate this death of Jesus from that.  We ask where God is in suffering and death.  We ask what God wants of us and of the world.  We blame God for things we ourselves have caused, we abandon faith when challenges come.

We believe that Jesus died and rose, but we have segregated that event to having something to do only with what happens after we die.  We don’t consider that it might have something to do with everything in this world.

But the apostle Paul sees with the convict’s eyes.  He looks at the cross, at the dying Jesus, and sees Christ.  He looks at the cross and sees God’s ongoing action in the world.

This paean of praise at the entrance to Colossians is majestic in its beauty.  Paul claims that Christ is the “image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation;” “in him all things in heaven and on earth were created,” through him and for him.  And on top of it all, Christ is “before all things and in him all things hold together.”

This is a cosmic view of the lordship of Christ Jesus, the eternal Son of God, the ruler of all things.  But that’s only part of the hymn.  Paul also claims that in Christ “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”  Not only the image of the invisible God, Christ Jesus is the fullness of God, fully God.  Now we are into Trinitarian lands, speaking of whom we know as the Second Person of the Trinity, very God of very God.

But then Paul adds: “through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.”  Thump.  This exalted Christ, God from God, Light from Light, bled on a cross?  This fullness of God, this image of the invisible God, ruler of all, bled on a cross?  And through that bleeding, reconciliation with all things in heaven and on earth happened?  Peace with God happened?

This is the vision of the convict: to look at the bleeding, dying Jesus and see the eternal Christ and believe that he is, in dying, acting his kingship, beginning his reign.  This is a death and resurrection that is not for a single moment segregated from the rest of our theology, held in reserve for our hope in life after death.

This is not an image of a superhero disguised in rags who sheds them at the last moment and reveals his power and glory: this Son of God wears the rags into death.  This is a Christ ruling over the universe through his bleeding and dying, a Christ who is only recognizable to the world in that dying rabbi from Nazareth.  A Christ who cannot be understood or known apart from this death on the cross.

What the convict sees is that this is how God answers human evil and how God will continue to answer human evil: by entering it and dying to it in order to rule over all things.

We know from what Paul says here and elsewhere that the center of all of this is to see that this death is God’s way of bringing reconciliation to all things.  “Reconciling” is the key word, isn’t it?  Somehow, by the Son of God, existing with the Father and the Spirit before all time and now living in our flesh, somehow by God entering suffering and death, God breaks through our evil and hate.

We do not love God with our whole lives and our neighbors as ourselves.  God, since the Flood, has committed not to use power against us when we sin like that.  So the Triune God sets aside all power and lets us kill the Incarnate Son.  And somehow that reconciles all things, that God is willing to be killed by us.

This is mystery, but this is the truth that the Triune God shows us consistently throughout the Scriptures: the only way to win is to lose all; the only way to be free is to be a slave; the only way to live is to die.  The Son of God, in dying, shows forever God’s answer to the brokenness and pain of the world.

If we can look at the dying Jesus and see the Christ, the ruler of all, and say “remember me when you come into your kingdom,” only then will the world begin to make sense.

This is the path we find when we see like this and follow our Lord Christ: a path through death into life.

Looking for ways in the world for us to protect our rights, secure our safety, ensure our sense that we are right and others not, to find gain at whatever expense, this is not a path of Christ.

If we think that Jesus’ death and resurrection are only important because they get us to heaven we deny that they are in fact the path we are all called to walk.

God’s biggest problem with humanity wasn’t that we die.  God could stop that with a word.  The Son of God didn’t need to die and rise to stop death.  God’s biggest problem with humanity wasn’t that we sin and need forgiveness.  God could forgive us with a word – look at what Jesus says about those who crucify him.  The Son of God didn’t need to die and rise to forgive us.

The witness of Scripture is that the Son of God needed to die and rise because he was willing to make himself completely vulnerable to us, to reveal God’s love by setting aside all power.  Even if we killed him.  And he did this, he said, to show us the path to real life, the path God needs us to walk, the way he invited his disciples to walk.  That’s how we’re reconciled to God: we return to our created path.

Forgiven, yes.  Given eternal life, yes.  But the important thing was that God needed to die to show us the way to life.  True life, Jesus’ death tells us, is found in letting go of our need to control, of our need to win, of our need to be the center of our lives, of our need to grasp for power.

We will love God with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength when we let go of putting ourselves in the center of our hearts and lives.  We will love our neighbor as ourselves when we put our neighbor before us, before our needs.

We will find God’s answer to suffering in this world to continue to be in the suffering and death of Jesus as we take it on ourselves; in other words, God’s answer is that we enter the suffering of others and hold them in it, taking it on ourselves.  That we learn to suffer so others might find life, that we stand firmly in love in a world of evil and hold on to the good and the gracious, even if it costs us everything.

Our willingness to be Christ means our willingness to lose like Jesus of Nazareth.  That’s the fulfilling of the reconciliation God works on the cross: in our lives, our voices, our bodies, our hearts, laid out in the world.  In our willingness to lose ourselves, like Jesus, that we might be found in the heart of God and in the resurrection life God makes happen only in death.
 
To see the eternal Christ the way the convict sees is to see the life God is making in the death of this world, and the path we are invited to walk.

It means becoming comfortable with paradox and mystery.  That power is truly exercised when it is released and let go.  That weakness is the true strength.  That death – daily death – is the gateway to life.  This was not only true of Jesus, the Son.  It is the path he holds out before us now.

And in repeating the words of that convict, we are committing ourselves to walk that path with our Lord Christ, seeking only the grace of his remembering us, that he might turn to us and strengthen our hearts and our faith, and transform us in our dying and losing, that we, and all things in heaven and on earth, might faithfully walk this path which ultimately ends in life.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen