The Triune God is a God who transforms, gives you and me a new birth as God’s gift and blessing for the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 22 B
Texts: Mark 7:1-23; James 1:17-27; Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Being good is really complicated these days.

For most of human history, if you were kind to your family, good to your neighbors, decent to those you lived by, you were a good person. Evil and unkindness, sin and wrongdoing – you knew them when you saw them.

But we know now this whole planet is interconnected. Systems and structures have power beyond any individual action or belief, and actions have consequences far beyond us. Buy an apple and give it to a child. Is that good? Well, were pesticides that harm the environment or the eater used? What’s the carbon footprint of that apple – how much gas was burned to carry it to you? Were those who picked it fairly paid? Is the company distributing it involved in unsavory things? It’s not easy.

You and I recognize that we have embedded racial prejudices, and are trying to change our minds and hearts. But even good decisions we make are intertwined with systems that promote racial discrimination, without our wanting it, and we benefit from them. You and I deeply want all people to earn fair wages and get out of poverty. But systems that help our pensions and IRAs, support our medical benefits, help us in many ways, are often unfairly built and cause harm to people we want to help. So: are we doing evil or not?

When we look at the problems in our society and world, and the problems in our own personal lives, we want to be good people, to live as Christ, make a difference.

It’s just really, really complicated.

And God’s Word doesn’t make it any easier.

Now when we open the Gospels, Jesus’ teachings seem ever more challenging and unsettling. If being good is more than just simple acts we do every day, and all are interconnected, everything Jesus says is harder today than it felt years ago.

Jesus’ evils of the heart in today’s Gospel feel much more about us than they used to. Murder is mentioned. We used to be able to say we didn’t do that. But if we’re part of a society that causes the death of our neighbor, a society we support and benefit from, aren’t we complicit? Jesus mentions theft and avarice and wickedness. If people do such things on our behalf, are we also doing it?

The Hebrew Scriptures are just as challenging. The prophets’ demands for God’s justice and peace, the ending of poverty and oppression, the restoring of God’s reign where all live with full stomachs under sheltering roofs without fear of others harming them, seem to point directly at us now in ways they might not have before.

It makes it hard to hear Scripture in worship. Every week seems to address these complicated, painful things and include you and me among those who need to listen and turn our lives to God.

So you might want to find some empathy for the Pharisees today.

Moses wants the people to flourish and urges them today to keep all of God’s law. So the Pharisees, trying to faithfully obey God, built all sorts of rules and rituals around God’s law in Scripture, so that they and the people could be good. Do the right thing.

Jesus’ criticism is exactly what the prophets said, what James says: if your rituals and rules don’t result in behavior that is good and just, visibly loving your neighbor and witnessing to your love of God, they don’t have much point. Here, the Pharisees’ attempts to honor their pledges to God led them to break the Fourth Commandment of loving and caring for their parents. That makes no sense.

But you can see why they tried. If being good, doing God’s way, is your goal, maybe a system of rules could help. But the problem, Jesus said, wasn’t that they needed an outer system. What they needed was an inner transformation.

And that’s where you find your hope from God in these days.

It’s true that James strongly declares that the only faith worth having is one visible in loving actions. Doing God’s love for those who are poor and oppressed is far more important than having a doctrine of God’s love for those who are poor and oppressed.

But look at the promise James makes today: James says every generous act ever done, every good gift, is actually from God, the Father of lights. Because, James says, God’s Word gives birth in you and me and all people to a new kind of person who does those generous acts and good things.

The Triune God is a transforming God who, through the Word, creates a clean and new heart in you and me and all people. So all those evils that can come from inside us are driven out by the fruit of the Spirit of God that Paul proclaimed, and Jesus proclaimed, and James delights in today. That’s your hope.

Now it’s not a question of how to be good or not. It’s a question of letting God’s Spirit work in you to make you good.

To transform you from the inside out, bearing in you love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, as Paul taught us. To transform your heart into completed love of God and love of neighbor, as Jesus promised you.

This is the new thing Jesus brought in the Incarnation. He taught what God’s prophets had long taught. But he came as God-with-us, filled with the Spirit, and said, “This is the plan of God for all God’s children, to give birth in the Spirit to new beings living God’s gifts in the world.”

That’s how God will heal the world. By healing you, and me, and all God’s children. One at a time, and everything will become new.

For today and tomorrow, then, what if this was your focus and your hope from God?

Not despairing at the complexity of our world and dreading you can do nothing, but praying for and seeking God’s transformation of you, a new birth into what is good and holy and of Christ. Yes, the world is challenging and overwhelming. Yes, your life and mine can be struggles and we can often feel we’re lost. Yes, it’s hard to know what the right thing is at any given time.

But God’s transforming new birth is happening right now in you. Rejoice in that. Seek to see it more clearly. Ask God to clear out those things that come from you that Jesus speaks of and replace them with God’s fruits.

God is good. And is making you good. And that will change the world. There’s nothing complicated about that at all.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

Mary sees it; Isaiah sees it; Jesus sees it. God wants to overturn the world and bring about a new creation. This causes Mary to rejoice. What will it do to you?

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The feast of St. Mary, Mother of Our Lord
Texts: Isaiah 61:7-11; Luke 1:46-55

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Some of us have a problem of self-deception. We praise people while living in opposition to what we praise.

We honor Martin Luther King, Jr., even have a federal holiday to remember him. His vision of a just society where all are treated with dignity and respect and have equality is a beautiful thing. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, we muse, if his vision was reality? But we keep living in ways that make it impossible to exist.

We say we follow Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the living God. His call to love of God and neighbor, to be non-violent peacemakers, to live lives of reconciliation and forgiveness, is a beautiful thing. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, we muse, if Jesus’ vision was reality? But we keep living in ways that make it impossible to exist.

Each year, Mount Olive celebrates Eucharist on August 15, remembering Jesus’ mother, Mary, on her feast day, and we sing her Magnificat. We delight to sing of God scattering the proud, filling the hungry, sending the rich away empty, bringing down the powerful. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, we muse, if Mary’s beautiful vision really happened? But we cling to our lives of comfort and ease, deny our power over so many who suffer, forget we’re the rich who keep others from eating, protect our place on the top of the very pile Mary says God is going to overturn.

One of the ways we fool ourselves is by claiming what they taught was unique, far beyond what the average person can think or do.

Church fathers have long praised Mary for her theological wisdom in Magnificat, that she had this brilliant insight into God. Well, Mary was amazing. Her courage to say yes to God, her willingness to be a part of God’s turning the world upside down, is admirable and wondrous.

But she wasn’t a theological genius. She just knew her Bible. She heard the prophets, knew the law of Moses. Mary simply took God seriously, and when this invitation to bear a child for God came, she realized this was part of what God had long promised. Everything Mary sings is self-evident to anyone who actually reads the Bible.

And she isn’t alone. Her son didn’t invent a new way. Jesus lived what his Hebrew forebears had heard from God, modeled, taught, embodied. Today we heard Isaiah rejoice at the same kind of overturning justice of God that Mary proclaims, and Jesus himself claims as his mission. Mary wasn’t even the first mother to sing something like this. Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, sings a nearly identical song to Magnificat as she rejoices in her coming child and God’s work through him.

But if it’s so obviously God’s dream in Scripture, why do we avoid it?

Is it because some of us have more to lose? Mary was Jewish in a Roman-controlled province, female in a patriarchal culture, poor in a world that always honors the wealthy. Ethnically, biologically, economically, she was in the back row, the bottom of society’s pile.

From that place, as she listened to God’s prophets, heard the stories of God’s acts for her people, she believed them. God does liberate, make gardens in the desert, bring justice, desire peace. God does care for the widows and orphans, those who are oppressed, those who are pushed to the margins. This was good news for Mary and most of the folks she knew.

But if you have power and wealth, if you build an institution like the Church, or even a congregation like Mount Olive, if your society protects you and benefits you, if armies and police forces kill to keep you safe, if you are rewarded for your gender identity, maybe you don’t want to hear God’s priorities.

If we treat Scripture’s consistent witness as a nice but unrealistic dream, maybe it’s because we’re afraid of what’ll happen if God’s priorities actually come to pass.

If Isaiah’s right and God is about freeing captives and setting oppressed free, about loving justice, we who have none of those problems are at risk of losing something. If Mary’s right and God intends taking down the powerful and sending the rich away empty, feeding the hungry and scattering the proud, to the degree you or I are powerful or rich or proud, we’re going to be affected.

So we put Mary’s vision, and the clear witnesses of Scripture, into beautiful cases to admire and adore, where they can’t actually affect my daily life, or your choices. We limit following Jesus to just ensuring life after death, not seeking God’s transformation of the world into God’s new creation.

But then what’s the point of our faith? Why admire Mary and Jesus and all these others but actively live against what they dreamed and lived and called for? How long can we persist in praising those who call us to align with God’s priorities while resisting that alignment, and still deceive ourselves that we’re being faithful?

Here’s a possible hope: Mary didn’t fear what God wants to do. She rejoiced in it.

My spirit rejoices in God who heals, she sings. I will greatly rejoice in God, Isaiah sings. This overturning, this radical change of society – all things we know need to happen, but fear – Mary and Isaiah saw as a reason for joy.

Joy overcomes fear of change, fear of losing status, fear of unsettling realities. When we can see God’s way as Mary sees it, we can stop fearing what we’ll lose and see the joy of God’s world as God intends it.

A world where all systems we’ve built that crush and oppress are broken apart. Where we stop dividing and harming people based on skin color or gender or whatever arbitrary categories we invent. Where peace between peoples exists alongside justice between them, where we solve our problems without violence or power over others. Where all cultures and languages and viewpoints and ethnic songs and heritage and story and faith aren’t melted together in a homogenous pot, but woven together in a colorful, joyful quilt of God’s humanity.

What if, instead of holding this vision at arm’s length, framed in a beautiful case so we can’t touch it, we embraced it fully into our hearts, no matter the cost?

That’s what God’s been calling us to through Scripture for over 3,000 years. Mary knew it. Jesus knew it. Isaiah knew it. Hannah knew it. Martin knew it. Paul knew it. And all rejoiced at this new creation God wants to make in humanity.

Because it sounds pretty wonderful. It sounds like the answer to all the problems we care about and want changed in our world.

My spirit rejoices in the God who heals me and all people, Mary sang. Your spirit could rejoice, too. Let Mary help you find that joy and set aside your fear and actually live into this new way God is making.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen