God so loved the cosmos, Jesus proclaims, that God came to heal, to save all things, through you and through all by the grace of the Spirit.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

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

What if the Israelites were wrong about the snakes?

A terrible plague of venomous serpents in the wilderness isn’t exactly an unexpected thing in that terrain. They’d been grousing about the bad food, saying that God and Moses led them out to die. So, they assumed God sent this plague as punishment.

They’re not the first or the last to experience tragedy and assume God was behind it. A year ago this week the world shut down for a global pandemic, and I’ve personally heard a number of people wonder if, or why, God sent COVID.

Israel’s logic falters with their healing. The attack of snakes could have been a natural event, or from God. But the healing absolutely could only come from God. Those who saw the bronze serpent God told Moses to make were healed. So, why would the same God both attack with snakes and provide healing from them?

The logic of God causing COVID also falters with the healing. Human brains, gifted with knowledge and imagination by God, have created multiple vaccines, and healing is happening, bringing hope for an end to this terrible period. Why would the same God plague the world with COVID and also inspire year-long efforts to end its effect on God’s beloved children?

We could argue both sides and never be sure we weren’t just idly speculating. If only God would come in person and answer the question definitively for us!

You know the Good News: God has actually done this.

If you struggle with what God is really about in the Bible or in the world or in your life, start with Jesus. If anyone knows what the Trinity is up to, it’s the person of the Trinity who took on human flesh among us, whom John’s Gospel says reveals to us God’s inner heart.

Today Jesus answers our very question unequivocally: the Holy and Triune God is on the side of healing, not punishment. God, living as one of us, will be lifted up on a cross to love all creation back into God’s life, raised on a pole like Moses’ serpent, but for the healing of the whole cosmos, not just a small part.

God’s love is a cosmic love, Jesus literally says, sent not to judge the creation but to save it.

This is the full gift Jesus offers in these verses, if you can learn to see it.

There’s a very restricted way to read John 3:16, and many Christians for many years have read it that way. In that interpretation, God’s love for the cosmos is to save individual people from hell and give them heaven when they die. But you have to believe in Jesus to get it, that interpretation says.

But that only misses most of God’s immense gift in coming in Christ into the world. Now, certainly in God’s cosmic love there’s life with God after death – Jesus clearly promises that he goes to prepare a place for us in that life.

But in everything Jesus says about eternal life, it’s a lot bigger, and it’s right now. Eternal life is life in God’s new age, begun in Jesus already, a whole new reality of life in God’s love, right now. Jesus calls it “abundant” life, and he came for all to know and live it.

Today Jesus uses a word we translate “save,” which means save, and it also means “heal.” There is healing in God’s Son for this world, this life, Jesus says today. Paul knows that, too, in Ephesians today. “By grace you have been saved,” or, “by grace you have been healed,” he says, and makes it clear that’s for this life, too, not just after death. Because you are healed by grace, Paul says, for the good works you can do in this world, this life.

God’s gift needs to be this massive because the healing the world needs is massive.

Seeing God’s coming in Christ as only to get people into heaven after they die means missing the abundant life God desires you to know now. But it also means God’s creation and beloved creatures of all kinds continue to suffer in chaos and destruction, against God’s will. So much evil is done by people who only care about their own status with God, and don’t grasp the cosmic love of God Jesus proclaims today.

If saving and healing means forgiveness, as Paul declares today, and if God intends to heal and save all things, as Jesus says, forgiveness can’t be just removing punishment for your sin. Forgiveness transforms you, Paul says, to do the good works that God has planned for you and for all before any of us were born. It is, Jesus says, to live in the light, doing actions that are of God, not evil. As more and more are so transformed by God’s grace, this world itself begins to heal, oppression gets broken down, justice happens.

And if saving and healing means your heart is brought into God’s, as the Scriptures say, then yes, you find peace and hope yourself, your true place in the universe. But you also become someone who spreads God’s peace and hope through your life in this world.

If saving and healing are knowing God’s abundant life now, as Jesus says, then yes, you are made whole now, alive now. But you also are changed to someone who spreads God’s abundant life to the world through your life in this world.

God so loved the cosmos, my friends. God’s healing is meant to heal the whole thing.

Because the Holy and Triune God is on the side of healing. Always. For everyone. Every thing.

We have this from Jesus himself, the face of the Trinity for us. God will clean up the mess of the world and heal the pain of the world’s creatures by transforming you, me, all, through God’s self-giving love lifted up on the cross, a love we are joined to in Christ’s resurrection life through the Holy Spirit. So that you, and I, and all, are “healed,” “saved,” our lives empowered to the same self-giving love Jesus showed God has for us, and in that self-giving love we, in turn, spread God’s love further into the cosmos God desperately wants to save. To heal. It’s a beautiful plan.

God is on the side of healing, and God wants the whole creation brought back into God’s life and justice and harmony. Trust that, Jesus says today. Trust that for you, for this life and for life after you die. And trust that as you are saved, healed, God will work through you for this healing eventually to reach all.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

You are God’s temple, the dwelling of the Holy Spirit, who changes your heart to be a person living in God’s way for your sake and the sake of the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Third Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: John 2:13-22; Exodus 20:1-17 (with ref. to 1 Corinthians 6:19)

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

“What sign can you show us for doing this?” the temple leaders asked.

“Where do you get the authority to throw out our money changers and animal sellers?” It’s a fair question – they’re the authorities in the temple, not Jesus.

But this is the sign he gives them: “destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” That’s hugely confusing, to them and to us. Jesus’ actions had to do with the actual temple, made of stones and mortar. But then (and the disciples only realized this after his death and resurrection), Jesus shifted to speaking of his own body as the temple.

Jesus claimed to be the dwelling place of God, the place where God’s Spirit lived. That was his authority to declare how the stones-and-mortar temple for God’s worship (and the pilgrims being fleeced there) should be treated.

It also opened up the imagination of the early Church after they experienced Pentecost.

Twenty years after Easter and Pentecost, the apostle Paul revealed what the early Church learned from this.

“Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” Paul asks the Corinthians (1 Cor. 6:19), as if it was a well-known truth. Jesus referred to himself as God’s temple. Now Paul reminds the Christians at Corinth that they, too, are temples of God, filled with the Holy Spirit.

And, Paul says, that means they’ll live different lives. Because they are Spirit-filled, they’ll glorify God with their bodies, their actions, their love, their faithfulness.

This is your baptismal promise, too: you are God’s temple, the Holy Spirit lives in you. We walk our journey of faith dripping wet from the waters of our baptism, reminded that we are not our own. You are not your own. God lives in you, and that will transform your heart, and your actions and life as you live bearing God’s Spirit in the world.

Because a heart filled with the Holy Spirit sees God’s way more deeply and broadly than before.

Both Martin Luther and Jesus taught us this as they considered the Ten Commandments, the covenant at Sinai we heard today.

Jesus first deepened them. You think you’ve kept the commandment “you shall not kill?” Jesus asks. Fine; but how are you handling your anger towards others, your calling them fools and idiots? That, too, violates this command. He isn’t making this commandment, or the others he deepened, harder. Jesus is saying that if your heart is filled with God’s Spirit you see that the original commandments only signal the outer boundaries of behavior. As you live into God’s way, they open up deeper and deeper ways to be faithful.

Luther broadened what Jesus deepened. In the Catechism, he taught every commandment as both forbidding things but also commanding positive things. He said “you shall not kill” also means helping and supporting neighbors in all their physical needs. So our concern for justice and ending oppression of our neighbors stems directly from our hearts shaped by the Spirit within, responding to this commandment, just as Jesus’ concern for the unjust practices of the temple came from the same place.

As you learn to listen to God’s voice moving in you, the pull of the Spirit, as you find quiet places in each day to be open to God’s presence in your life, you will be changed.

How you live and move and work in the world will be changed. It’s the sign to others that you are filled with God’s life, as it was with Jesus.

Of course, there’s a big challenge in this. If everyone runs around saying that God’s Spirit is in them and that’s the sign, the authority, for what they do, all sorts of evil can happen. (For example, just think of the many Christians who’ve used Jesus’ actions in the temple to justify violence and destruction in God’s name.)

That’s why God’s written Word is so important. God’s Word checks our behavior, makes sure we’re still on God’s path, refocuses us. Like these Ten Commandments, where we’re challenged by Jesus and Luther and the Spirit within us, to stay on the path of the life of God. Or Jesus’ summary of all the commandments, to love God and neighbor with sacrificial, vulnerable love, love as he has for us. That’s the corrective to using the Spirit as license to do whatever we want to whomever we want.

This is a lot to process, to take in.

We’re used to being the center of our own attention, having our needs, wants, and desires our focus. But Jesus is always calling you and me, sometimes gently, sometimes more strongly, to be centered on the love and life of God within us. To recognize that in our baptism we are in fact God’s temples, filled with God’s presence, and moving in the world.

Shaped by God’s Spirit living in you, you learn to see the world through God’s eyes, all the problems and unjust systems of our world that can and must be changed, just as Jesus saw the injustice in the temple practices. And with the Spirit’s grace, you can find your part in helping that change, no matter how old or how young you are.

That’s the abundant life Jesus came to invite you to know and live, and to invite all God’s children to know and live, for the sake of your healing and the healing of the world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen