It is only through our weakness and “thorns in our flesh” that God will heal the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 14 B
Texts: 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13

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

Do we miss the point of the cross of Christ because of how we look at it?

We make that scene outside Jerusalem into something to behold, an epic tableau for our creative skill. Massive movies, paintings in all media and sizes, deeply moving music, sculptures of marble and gold, countless novels and stories, there’s no limit to our imagination of that day.

The cross is for us the turning point in history, when the God of all time and space endured humiliation and death. We’ve pondered and argued and fought for two thousand years over the theological meaning of this moment on that Judean hillside. This image is the center of our faith.

But that makes it really hard to understand individually what we’re to be doing when Jesus calls us to take up our crosses and follow him. It’s more than just that none of us will ever be hung on a cross. Our dramatizing and idolizing this moment makes it exceedingly difficult to grasp what a cross would look like for you. For me. What does it mean to walk the path of the cross, when “the cross” is such an enormous image for us?

But there’s hope.

When the cross is seen in the eyes of Jesus himself, or of the apostle Paul, and they speak of our lives following that path, all the grandeur and spectacle fades out, and the real truth about the cross remains clear. You can see what you are called to be and do. What your cross might look like.

Christ says today: “My grace is sufficient for you. For my power is made complete in weakness.” That’s your path.

The experiences of Jesus and Paul today reveal this truth.

Jesus is riding a wave of popularity. He’s healing, drawing crowds, teaching with wisdom and authority no one heard from the official teachers. And then he goes home. And it’s a disaster. All they can see is Mary and Joseph’s kid who grew up there. They’re amazed, but they discount him, they’re offended by him. And astonishingly, Jesus can’t do any works of power there. He is literally weakened by their unbelief.

We think of Paul as the Church’s greatest apostle. But this second letter to Corinth is riddled with his anxiety and insecurity. His own churches have criticized him, accused him of deceiving them. Other more impressive apostles have come to Corinth. They dress well, speak beautifully, let the Corinthians pay for them. By contrast, Paul was awkward, paid his own way, didn’t speak terribly well, didn’t dress nicely. So now they’re rejecting him.

But in Paul’s pain and sadness he finds the opportunity to remind his people that this is always the way of Christ. We are clay jars, flawed, he says. I get it, I’m not impressive. But it’s God’s power working in my weakness that’s the grace you need.

Now, Paul did ask God to stop his pain. He wanted this “thorn in his side” removed. Maybe it was his lack of impressive speaking skills, or how easily his people seemed to turn on him. But what Paul learned instead is what Jesus learned in Nazareth: God’s power is only complete in weakness.

It’s impossible to overstate how important this is.

After Jesus’ disgrace in Nazareth, remarkably then he sends out his disciples. Not exactly when they’d feel most confident in their ability to serve God as Jesus served, right after he fell on his face in failure. Yet he sends them. Right then. On top of it, he sends them without support, no food, no bag, no money. Nothing but God’s good news and their weakness.

And so he sends you, like them, because that’s the whole message. God’s power will only be known in weakness, not strength. In failure, not success.

Following Jesus is an exercise in accepted humility, as disciples realize their flaws and weaknesses, as they look at the enormous, daunting tasks of healing needed in this world with dismay. That’s precisely when disciples, when you, are able to see God at work.

That’s the point of the cross. God’s mission in the world only happens at the point of brokenness and loss. In everyday weakness God will heal all things.

These weaknesses, these thorns in your side, are the true sign of God’s grace at work.

Is your thorn self-doubt? You don’t have skills to make a difference for God in your life? There are so many more powerful people, more talented people? God can’t use you with your flaws? My power is made complete in weakness, God says. I can work with your doubt.

Is your thorn pride? Are you horrified to think of following Christ in a way that makes people laugh at you, think less of you? Are you unable to love and forgive some because you don’t want to be seen backing down? My power is made complete in weakness, God says. I can work with your pride.

Is your thorn fear? Are you afraid to love as Christ loves? To reach out to your neighbor in pain because you don’t know how it will be received? To speak up in that coffee shop or workplace when someone is mistreated, because you don’t want to get in trouble? Do you fear what would happen to your comfortable life if you took seriously Jesus’ commands to love, to give away your wealth, to put your neighbor’s needs first? My power is made complete in weakness, God says. I can work with your fear.

Weakness and failure aren’t something we might experience. They’re the whole point of Christ’s path. Look at how the first disciples were sent out. True love for the other always loses, always lets go, always gives away. It is out of his weakness and shame that Paul found the cross’s deepest promise and gives it to us, the best we could ever have as flawed people who desperately want to follow Jesus but don’t know how: “My grace is sufficient for you,” Paul heard and shared with us. “My power is completed in your weakness.”

This is God’s way and it works. Even if the Church often misses the point.

The Church typically thinks the way to be faithful is to run the world. Control the kingdom, or the democracy, have the armies, get the power. We did that for centuries and look what we made: crusades, inquisitions, oppression, suffering, killing.

This is never Christ’s way. Yes, as citizens we should vote, absolutely. Get engaged politically: we need to start fixing things. Christians of skill and talent should serve in public office. But control’s not our main strategy. Or God’s.

The strategy is that every day, every hour, followers of Christ love as Christ loves. Through weaknesses displayed for everyone to see. Vulnerable to mocking or distrust, to attack and hatred. You have some place today that needs you to be God’s love. Even in your flaws, your weakness. Every healing God has done in Christ in the world, every change Christians have made in society happened when they followed Christ in weakness and vulnerability and God worked through that to bring life.

Maybe the paintings and sculptures and movies were always the problem.

Don’t get me wrong, Michelangelo’s Pieta is one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen. But if we spent less time idolizing the scene at Calvary and more time understanding the failure at Nazareth foreshadowing the cross, we’d be less confused about our own paths.

So go, be Christ as you are called. As you’ve been baptized to do. What love-mischief can you and God be up to today for the healing of the world?

But make no mistake, it will happen in your weakness and failings, in what you lack, more than anything else. That’s when Christ’s disciples really start looking like their Master. And that’s when the world really starts knowing the truth about God’s healing and transforming love.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

We walk by faith, not by sight. But God is bringing the harvest. So we do not lose heart.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 11 B
Texts: 2 Corinthians 5:6-17 (with reference to other parts of this section, before and after); Mark 4:26-34; 1 Samuel 15:34 – 16:13

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

“So we do not lose heart.”

We’ve heard this encouragement in the past weeks as we’ve heard Paul write to the Christians of Corinth. You might feel fragile, not strong, like jars made of clay, Paul said two weeks ago. But you do this ministry by God’s mercy, he said, and you carry the extraordinary power of God’s love in that fragile, clay jar. So don’t lose heart.

You might feel the weight of your mortality, or the struggle of this life, Paul said last week. But God is preparing a life for you beyond death. So don’t lose heart.

Paul doesn’t deny our experience of how challenging it is to follow Christ. He understands you worry about what you can’t do for the world, on how impossible it is that all the problems the world faces can be helped. I don’t need to list them again, we know them well, we talk about them with each other all the time. As people of God we see so much in our world, our society, our city that needs God’s healing and grace, and we know we’re called to be a part of that.

But if you’re like me, or like Paul, some days you despair, and wonder what you could possibly do to make a difference. Today Paul gives an astonishing answer: always be confident, for you are a new creation, and God will accomplish much through you.

You are the person God is making new to be a part of God’s healing.

That is to say: you are God’s new creation. You are exactly the child of God needed for where you are in your life in this world. You not only carry God’s love within you to witness and live in the world. God is making you new, healing your fragility, strengthening your weakness, until you are God’s creative force for healing in the world around you. Everything old is passed away in Christ’s death, Paul says. All is made new in the life of Christ’s resurrection. And in the verses following today’s reading, he says it’s all for God’s reconciliation of all things.

But, Paul says, we walk by faith, not by sight. So don’t be surprised if you don’t look in a mirror every morning and see this new creation.

That’s what Jesus says in these parables about seeds.

In one parable, there is planned, cultivated sowing of seeds: agriculture. In the other, wild, random seeds, cast into the world by wind and birds. Both are mystery.

The farmer, who knows which seeds to plant and when to plant them, doesn’t know exactly how they grow. The seeds are sown, and faith takes over. Work is done in the meantime, of course, tilling, tending. But the harvest is mystery.

The lowly mustard seed, growing in a ditch with no one to plan for it or tend it, likewise grows to its potential, a bush big enough to make shade. No one knows how. Even today we can explain the growth of seeds scientifically, but the mystery of their spark of life eludes us.

Jesus says that’s what God’s reign is like. A new creation. But it starts very small, and grows to be a blessing. Whether planned or seemingly random, growth happens. Some days it’ll look like nothing is happening. But we walk by faith, not by sight. So we don’t lose heart.

Which brings us to the young shepherd, David.

Despite our writer’s adoration, who says David was ruddy, handsome, and had really pretty eyes, the truth of this story is David is overlooked. Whether Jesse knew why the great judge and prophet Samuel wanted to see his sons one by one isn’t clear. What is clear is that his response was to bring seven of his sons. Not the kid out back watching the sheep.

God takes this opportunity to remind Samuel that God ignores outward appearances and looks into the heart for the truth of a person. Something in David drew God. David, forgotten by his own father, becomes Israel’s greatest king. And yes, he’s flawed. He does horrible things along with the good. But at this point, David is the mustard seed. Not seen to have much value.

But we walk by faith, not by sight. So we don’t lose heart.

We can trust God with this mystery. We’ve seen this often.

Long before there was a statue of him on the National Mall, Martin Luther King, Jr. was just a pastor in the city of Montgomery. When Rosa Parks was arrested, he was the one local leaders chose to lead the boycott. A local minister, just trying to be faithful to Christ in his city.

Rosa herself wasn’t always a hero. She was a hardworking African-American woman asked to do what she did, to stand up to the oppressive Jim Crow laws. A regular person, just trying to make a difference in her own city.

Long before she became Mother Teresa, beloved international symbol of Christian life and ministry, Teresa was simply a nun from Albania who saw a need in one of the most desperate places in the world and went to Calcutta to be of help. Just a servant of God, trying to be faithful to Christ.

And a rich Italian playboy of the thirteenth century would have been unnoticed by history or anyone else except that he had a spiritual awakening and decided to follow the path of Jesus. Now there are statues of St. Francis of Assisi all over the world, and the movement of teachers and servants he founded has done wonderful ministry. But he was just an ordinary person, trying to be faithful to Christ.

These are beloved saints to us, people we admire and respect. The harvest of their lives is magnificent, and continues to have a great impact. But we’re looking back, from the harvest. The seed planted for their new creation was just as small as any of us to start.

We walk by faith, not by sight. So we do not lose heart.

It’s not likely we’ll produce such a famous harvest.

Those are remarkable people who somehow connected with their times and found a bigger stage. We probably won’t be remembered beyond our lives here except by those closest to us.

But that’s not the point. You are a new creation. The seed of God’s grace and love has been planted in you. You are growing into a force for God’s healing in your world, and if you’d look back at your path right now, you’d see that growth.

Like the farmer, you don’t know how it happens. But like Martin, and Rosa, and Francis, and Teresa, and millions of others, the fact that you’re just one person in a complicated, broken world, means nothing. God’s mystery is that you are needed, and you will be able to do what is needed.

We walk by faith, not by sight. So we do not lose heart.

You are a new creation. The seed is planted.

And you don’t have to wait for the harvest to hope, Jesus says. First the shoot breaks through the earth. Then there’s a stalk, then a head, then the full grain in the head. There might be long periods of time you can’t see growth, hope, promise. But watch: there will be signs.

And the promise will be fulfilled. There will be a harvest one day, feeding the world, breaking down walls of hatred and violence, healing all people. At some point the farmer sees the harvest is ready and gets the sickle. At some point there’s enough shade under the mustard bush that some birds decide to nest there. At some point the kid caring for the sheep becomes God’s leader for the people. At some point the person who saw a need in their own neighborhood changes something for the better. The harvest will come.

How, that’s a mystery. That’s in God’s hands.

But it will come: we walk by faith, and not by sight. So do not lose heart.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

Sometimes it might even seem to us that Christ is out of his mind in what he asks of us: but the love we are called to live is the love we have already received. So we follow.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Third Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 10 B
Texts: Mark 3:20-35; 1 Samuel 8:4-20

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

Some people thought Jesus was out of his mind.

Isn’t that stunning? Sure, lots were following him. Many brought loved ones for healing, others came to listen. But at home in Nazareth, crushed by the crowds, some folks thought he’d lost it.

So his family tried to restrain him. “You’re embarrassing us in front of our neighbors,” perhaps they wanted to say.

But are we sure of what we think of Jesus? This story, along with Israel’s demand for a king, places us firmly at the intersection of our faith and doubt. What do you really think about Jesus anyway? How much does what your neighbor thinks about you matter?

Some would say our faith in Christ is a sign of we’re out of our minds.

Plenty in our modern world look at us, people who hold belief in an unseen God, as separated from reality. By their measurements, we don’t fit. It’s a matter of point of view.

In 17th c. Salem, Massachusetts, the communal belief about witchcraft led to an hysteric period of trials and executions of people we today might call misguided, even mischievous teens, and others caught in the web. The community decided what was normal.

We gather in this space, collectively go on our knees to pray to a God we can’t see, and sing to this God, and listen to words from this God. This seems strange to many. But is there any sign apart from this that we’re not sane?

Not really. We’re flawed. We make mistakes, or in our faith language, we sin. But we’re mostly rational, functional human beings, we contribute to our communities, do good, care for our families, we’re normal people. We’re likely not out of our minds.

But consider the strangeness of what we hear about Jesus, and about faith.

In today’s Gospel Jesus casts out demons. Today we see signs in many of these exorcism stories of actual disease. Some look like epilepsy, others like serious mental illness. Whatever Jesus actually did, we sometimes understand it differently than back then.

For two millennia people of faith have had visions of God that taught us, inspired us. People who were perhaps transported out of their mind to see the love of God on an intense level, to understand creation and the divine will. But today, wouldn’t these people be sent to a psychiatrist, and medicated? Today’s world understands visions very differently.

Yet those stories of exorcism witness to God’s power to enter our lives and bring wholeness. We are blessed by them. Those visions over the centuries open to us the truth about God’s love and grace. We are also blessed by them. Who says they’re not normal?

Each group and culture decides what’s within the pale and what isn’t. But what if we’ve got a problem with Jesus ourselves?

It’s possible that we sometimes think Jesus is out of his mind.

At this point in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus has cast out a lot of demons. He’s done many healings. But he’s also offered forgiveness, as if he had God’s authority. He’s claimed authority over God’s Sabbath command. He’s spent time with publicly outcast people. Tax collectors. “Sinners,” as if that’s a title.

People likely weren’t bothered by the healing or exorcising demons. But declaring God’s forgiveness and grace, spending time with so-called “bad” people, interpreting God’s law as intended to bless, these were problems. They’ll only get more so. Wait till he starts talking about taking up crosses and following him to the cross.

But are you also embarrassed by Jesus? Do you wish you could restrain him when he calls you to vulnerable and sacrificial love? Are you willing to forgive utterly as God forgives? To welcome into your company people you find objectionable?

It does seem that, like Jesus’ family, sometimes we’d like to get him to stop talking and come inside, before the neighbors think we’re crazy like he is.

It’s a question of who we want as our true authority.

The Israelites were tired of the era of the judges. When things got bad, God raised judges to lead the people. But Samuel, a good judge, named his sons judges, and the people didn’t like them. So they asked for a king, like their neighbors had. An authority who was in control. Trusting God to guide them, following God’s ways, that wasn’t what they wanted. Even with the very dark side of having a authoritarian ruler that Samuel laid out for them, they rejected following God as ruler.

We prefer ourselves as our final authority. “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul,” the poet has said.[1] We don’t want an authoritarian ruler. But we’d rather have ourselves as the final verdict in how our lives are run. Like Israel, this is a rejection of God.

Jesus’ radical view of servant love, shaped by the cross, is often more than we want to do. So we sometimes think, “he’s a little over the top, let’s do it our way.” We restrain Jesus from annoying the neighbors, or making them think we’re strange.

But Jesus says his true family doesn’t restrain him, they follow.

Loving as he loves. Forgiving as he forgives. Hanging out with all people, all kinds. Not crushing people with God’s law. Loving God completely, and loving neighbors. Jesus’ family follows God’s path of love as authority.

It’s not an easy path. Why do you think we’ve tried to restrain Jesus so often? But Jesus longs that we realize this path of Godly, Christ-like love enables our lives to make sense, provides far more blessing and joy than it costs, makes our hearts and lives whole and well. You know this: you’ve met this astonishing Love of God in your bodies and lives, in Word and Sacrament, in each other. You know the love God took to the cross is the only thing that gives peace and hope. Walking in that path is the only thing that makes sense, too.

Others might think you’re out of your mind, but they already thought that with you coming here every week. What difference does it make to take it the whole way, and follow God fully, not yourself?

And what do you care what the neighbors think? Just love them and care for them in Christ’s name and you won’t have to worry about the rest.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

[1] “Invictus,” William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)

 

We listen for what God wants, what Jesus, God’s Son, says is compassion and love; in our listening we have God’s gift of Elis who help us hear.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 9 B
Texts: Mark 2:23 – 3:6; 1 Samuel 3:1-20; Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

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

What do you hear when you listen for God?

What insight or guidance comes? Do you hear God’s compassion for the creation, God’s undying love for all? Do you hear God’s judgment and wrath on others, on you?

There is no question in human history that has caused more destruction and suffering than “What does God want?” Bitter wars have endlessly been fought between different faiths and within the same faith. Hatred and violence and abuse and oppression and evil beyond comprehension have been done by humans to humans, to other creatures, and to the creation, because someone claimed, “this is what God wants.”

The story of Samuel begins, “The word of the LORD was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” It was long since the last judge, and no one was hearing God speak and telling the people. But now God calls this little boy – how old we don’t know – to be a prophet. God speaks to Samuel, who will declare to the people what God is thinking, what God wants. But right now this boy, our writer says, “did not yet know the LORD.” Samuel had never heard God speak. The word of God was rare.

What about you? Have you heard? What do you hear when you listen for God? And how do you know you’re listening to God, and not someone or something else?

This is the dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees today.

The Pharisees aren’t bad guys here. Like Samuel, like Jesus, they listen to God, and teach what God is saying. So they know God’s Sabbath commandment is central, one of the Ten. They’ve faithfully created rules to help the people keep this law, do what God wants.

When Jesus lets his hungry disciples work on the Sabbath – picking grain was work – they rightfully say this violates their understanding of Sabbath law. When Jesus heals a withered hand, again, they declare him in violation.

But this rabbi Jesus, the Son of God, hears God differently. They don’t recognize him as God’s Son, of course, only as a teacher. But this rabbi declares that the Sabbath commandment was designed to be a blessing to humanity. A gift from God. Something Orthodox Jews today would completely agree with. So, Jesus reasons, if Sabbath is gift, letting someone go hungry, or delaying someone’s healing, violates that gift. As he asks, do you think it’s lawful to do good on the Sabbath, to save life?

This is just a normal dispute between Jewish rabbis over following God faithfully, though it ends with ominous foreshadowing. So as we witness this, wondering what God wants, who’s got it right?

Well, we who are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection and filled with the Spirit of God find that’s an easy answer.

We believe Jesus is the face of the Triune God, who reveals the Father’s heart and gives us the Holy Spirit for new birth. If Jesus, God’s Son, says that compassion and love is how to interpret God’s commandment on Sabbath-keeping, that’s our final answer. Jesus is the living Word of God, God’s desire, God’s intent, in our flesh. We read the written Word of God through Jesus: his take on Scripture and God’s will is our norm.

Yet this doesn’t answer “what do you hear when you listen for God?” Because believers in Jesus have led the killing and destruction over God’s will for the world. We’ve killed millions: each other, and people who weren’t Christian. We’ve permitted the destruction of the environment, and either quietly or openly supported oppression and prejudice and hatred, all in the name of the Christ who wouldn’t let a man wait a single day more to have his hand healed.

In our nation alone, an outside observer of Christians would conclude that there are serious, nearly unsolvable disagreements between Christians over what God wants. When we hear what some Christians say about the poor, immigrants, war, race, gender, really just about everything, we wonder if they’re even Christian at all. And they say the same of us.

Maybe Eli can be of some help.

Samuel may not have heard God before. God’s Word might have been rare then. But Eli had heard God. Eli had been faithful. He was flawed, yes. His sons were evil and destructive, and God said this was partly Eli’s fault.

But this story is about Samuel. And Eli is God’s gift. When Samuel hears a voice, Eli realizes who is calling. Eli helps Samuel recognize what he has no experience with: knowing when God is speaking to him.

Carrying this wisdom, Samuel now hears God speak, and begins his path to be one of God’s greatest prophets. One who, our writer says, never let a single word of God “fall to the ground.” Eli made it possible for Samuel to find this faithful path of listening to God, holding on to God’s words, and carrying them to the people.

Eli still works today. That’s God’s gift.

When you struggle to hear God, to know what God wants and desires, look around. Find an Eli to help you sort out what’s going on.

Think: who has served as Eli to you in your life? Who has said, “I think that’s God leading you,” or sent you to a place in Scripture, or to worship, or to a community of faith, where you could hear God more clearly?

In this place we gather to worship when we could easily each pray at home, because here we meet God in Word and Sacrament. God speaks to us through Scripture, and through the actual presence of Christ in this place. We find the heart of God’s love in the Meal of grace we share that gives us forgiveness and life.

But we also have each other as a means of God’s grace, as Elis. You have others here who are also listening for God, trying to understand God’s desire. These Elis help you listen. And in the mystery of God’s Spirit, you are also Eli, to others here, and even in the world.

As we help each other listen, we hear God’s desire clearly from Jesus today. Love and compassion for all. A desire to heal and not destroy. A love that God will unmistakeably prove in dying on a cross and rising to new life. It may even be with the Spirit’s grace we can serve as Eli to other Christians who don’t hear this love, don’t offer it to others.

Thanks be to God, our times aren’t like when Samuel was called.

God’s Word, alive in the risen Christ and in our hearts through the Spirit, is with us constantly. It’s not rare. And we have the written Word to shape our listening and discerning. We have each other as Eli, opening our ears.

So always keep listening. How God’s compassion and love are to unfold in this broken world will need your best mind, your keenest ears.

And as Eli says, your first step is always to say, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

We are born in the Spirit into the very life of God, part of the family of the Triune God, and are no longer “I” but “we,” living each day with God.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Holy Trinity, year B
Texts: John 3:1-20; Romans 8:12-17

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

To be in a family is to belong. To be connected. To be a “we,” not an “I.”

In a family, everything is more complicated. Your own needs and wants are counted among everyone else’s, so meeting them is always a conversation, a give and take, a sharing of life.

But what a glorious thing, to be a “we” instead of simply an “I.” There is life and joy and hope and love in “we”.

The Trinity shouldn’t be so hard for us to grasp, then, should it? God is also a “we,” not an “I”. That’s always how God comes to us. Whatever we understand about the Triune God, the relationship of family, community between Spirit, Son, and Father is probably the easiest and most helpful for us to imagine. God belongs to God – one God, yet three Persons – living together in love and dance and joy. A divine “we” creating all things.

Consider what this means for us, created in the image of God.

As I wrote in this week’s Olive Branch, God’s creating word in Genesis 1 is deeply significant: “Let us make humankind in our own image.” If the Triune God is an “us” not an “I,” and this communal God created humanity in God’s image, then this is our deepest reality. We are God’s image when we are connected to each other, to all humanity.

God created a beautiful diversity of genders, languages, colors, and shapes in humanity, and all this, says the Triune God, all this, is God’s image.  This rich diversity is the way God expresses the breadth and depth of the truth about God.

So without every child of God, every person, included, we can’t see or be the whole image of God. You were made to be complete in connection with all God’s children. I cannot be who I am made to be apart from you. There is only “we.”

In this community of faith here we learn how blessed this is, and are taught to be family in a way we can take beyond here to our whole world. Each of you is necessary to this family gathered here, whether it’s your first time in this room for worship or your fiftieth year. Here in this community we glimpse the grace of being a “we” not an “I” and our eyes learn to see how being connected to all God’s children of all kinds is our true identity.

This alone is wonder and joy enough for us today. But then we hear the astonishing words of John, chapter 3.

Father, Son, and Spirit are all here, but we tend to focus most on the first two. We repeat John 3:16 and the love of the Father, print it on signs and posters and bumper stickers. We focus our faith on the grace of the Son being lifted up on the cross, as Jesus says here, for our healing and life.

But the greeting with which I begin each Eucharist, Paul’s greeting in 2 Corinthians 13, speaks not only of the grace of Jesus Christ, and not only of the love of the Father. There is also this wonder: the fellowship, the koinonia, the sharing in the Holy Spirit, as Paul literally says.

And that’s in John 3, also. Perhaps, like Nicodemus, we’re so confused by the idea of a new birth from above we skim right past it. Clearly Jesus isn’t talking about a new physical birth. And not a “born again” moment once and for all when we each, as individuals, somehow find a depth of faith.

Jesus simply says: You are born of water and the Spirit. The Spirit mothers you into new life. And if you are born of the Spirit – and Jesus will repeat this often – you are born into the life of God. The Spirit gives you birth into the “we” that is God.

Paul says today we are joined into God’s family. Heirs of God. Jesus says the Spirit is our mother, giving us birth, and, as Jesus promised last week, walking alongside us, our Advocate, our guide, and she delivers us into the family life of the Triune God.

So you are never apart from God, born into God’s internal, eternal family life.

And that changes even how you view yourself individually. The 14th century Sufi Muslim poet Hafiz describes it this way. He says he used to wake in the morning saying “What am ‘I’ going to do?” But a seed cracked open inside him, he says, and now he is certain that he is not the only one “housed in this body.” There are two of us, he says. Two “doing the shopping together in the market and tickling each other while fixing the evening’s food.”

“Now when I awake,” he writes, “all the internal instruments play the same music: ‘God, what love-mischief can ‘We’ do for the world today?” [1]

Can you imagine such joy? To dream not “what will I do today,” but “what will we – God and me, living together – do?” The Spirit of God is within you, your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, Paul says, so you are no longer only an “I.” You are a “we.” God and you, as one, walking in the world, loving your neighbor, joined to all humanity.

This is our true reality: “we” with each other as the image of God, and “we” within the Triune God in every breath we take.

You might not feel either kind of “we” deeply right away. Whenever you join any family, there’s time needed to live into that family’s life, learn what the family feels like. If you’ve never even thought about God within you as a “we”, or all people together as the completed image of God, it will be new. But it will be beautiful. And in our life together as a community, as a “we,” we help each other. As a friend of mine said, our calling is to be the midwife of the Holy Spirit. She gives birth to all; we help that birth along in each other and in the creation.

As you awaken to the Spirit within you, mothering you in the family of the Triune God, showing you your life with all people, knowing it is true is a good start. From there you live into the reality, until you also find yourself waking up each day and saying, “God, what love-mischief can ‘we’ do for the world today?”

What indeed.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

[1] From The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master, translated by Daniel Lodinsky; Penguin Compass, 1999.