Christ Jesus is the new Temple, where we meet God, and at the cross reveals the uncontrollable, unstoppable nature of the true God’s love: a scandal, foolish, but when we find this healing, it becomes life and wisdom.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Third Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: John 2:13-22; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

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

Religious leaders, people like me, often try to put God in a box.

For thousands of years, human beings have called out people from their midst to speak to and of God in the community, to help the rest explore and face the mysteries of God.

But such religious leaders often create ways to control this. We build boxes – temples, churches – and say they’re the only places to meet God. Once God is well-boxed, we make theology about what God says and does, controlling God for the people.

We typically try to control the people, too. To decide who gets in and who doesn’t, who’s beloved of God and who isn’t, who’s worthy of notice and who can be ignored.

We religious leaders, and, let’s be honest, many religious people in general, can be fiercely protective of our God-boxes, of our right to have the final say about God, to control access. It’s a huge temptation, and we don’t like being challenged about it.

The Temple in Jerusalem was just such a box, like all made by peoples throughout history. Its leaders controlled the God-message, and access to God, and taught that in this place alone the true God was found.

Enter Jesus of Nazareth. Being the Son of God, a conflict with this box’s leaders was probably inevitable.

So Jesus challenges the way they’ve cared for this God-box.

They’ve made a market out of a holy place, he says. Necessary things for sacrifice in the Temple are bought and sold within. Lambs sold for sacrifice, money changed from Gentile currency to Hebrew, and folks are making a profit. And the Son of God will have none of it. This isn’t what the house of God is for, he says.

This challenge to their authority, the driving out of animals, spilling of coins, and unmistakable rebuke is – no surprise – not well received. We religious people don’t like that.

But Jesus was only getting started. If it was scandalous to criticize how the Temple was run, the real scandal was coming.

Jesus declares that the time of God-boxes has passed, and the Temple is now found in his body.

Hardly anyone, disciples included, understood him at the time. But it was profound. If Israel met God at the Temple, the true Holy Place, with the Holy of Holies, now Jesus claims that he is the new Holy Place.

Jesus is the intersection between God and humanity, the house of God. God is now with us, in human flesh, able to be loved, touched, embraced. God’s Love is embodied in Jesus.

This moves God out of protective custody, breaks human control over what God says or does. This means Jesus is the face of the Triune God for us, how we know God.

This threatens religious institutions. If our business is to control God and access to God, Jesus just shut us down.

But he’s not done with scandal.

Jesus declares that this Temple, his body, will be destroyed, and on the third day be raised up.

If Jesus is now the Temple, the Holy Place, where all God’s people meet God, surely the first order of business would be to protect himself. Keep safe, so God can continue to be with us in this personal, intimate way.

But that’s not the plan. The plan for God-with-us, Jesus, is to love us back to God in person. Even if that love threatens our need to control and box up God, until finally someone with enough authority kills God-with-us.

This is the deep foolishness, the scandal Paul is talking about. God’s unstoppable, eternal love for the creation and all creatures, embodied in Jesus, will not stop loving. Power, glory, strength, winning, all these proper “divine” things, none of that is how God will act in human flesh.

Paul’s right, whatever your religion or ethnicity, this is a problem.

It’s a stumbling block if you want to control God. In Christ’s death on the cross we realize we don’t control God. No boxes, no altars, no dogmas can contain such a God who isn’t threatened even by our violence and rejection.

It’s a stumbling block if you want to control other people’s access to God. If God’s love is able to face death on a cross and rise to new life, if God’s love – a love John says embraces the whole cosmos – is so pure and constant it’s not tempted to use power and might against us, no one can control such love.

Scandal, stumbling block, foolishness, that’s what this looks like, Paul says. Unless you’ve found healing in this love.

But for those who are being healed, Paul says, it’s all different. Once we release the need to control God, or decide for God what’s going on, we find ourselves open to the astonishing Good News that if in Christ Jesus all people have access to God, so do we. That if in Christ Jesus all people are loved, so are we. That if in Christ Jesus life and healing are for the whole cosmos, they’re for us, too.

When we find such healing in God’s love in Christ, such grace from the cross and resurrection, we see everything differently. We look at weakness, and see its power to heal all things. We look at rejection and suffering, and see the beauty of such true love for all. We look at foolishness, and see a wisdom that makes all things clear. We look at death, and see life that cannot be controlled or limited.

This is our deep mystery and joy: once we stop trying to control God, trying to tell God what to do and whom to love, trying to decide which people God can reach, we find our own inclusion and healing and love and life.

There is one more scandal left.

Once the Holy Spirit started flowing into the believers at Pentecost, those who followed this Holy Place of God, this risen Temple, suddenly realized they, too, were Holy Places. Intersections between God and humanity. Temples of the Spirit of the Living God. They were sent, on God’s behalf, into the whole world. So are we.

But remember: because we follow Christ, we know from him that to be God’s Temple in the world is to risk everything for the sake of those whom God loves. To walk Christ’s path, to sacrifice with our love, our lives, our hearts, our hands. Even to die, if it comes to that.

So we gather together in this box, this place of worship, this place that we don’t control that is filled with the life of a God we also don’t control, for no other reason than that here we’ve found this life, here we’ve been healed by this love, here we’ve been fed to our depths with this grace, here we have met this God.

And from here, we are sent with this Good News, so that all might also find this healing and life, might find that God is with them, too.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

The way of the cross is what Jesus wants us to look at and follow, and it’s the way of divine love, self-giving, love that will heal the world once we also follow in that way.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday in Lent, year B
Text: Mark 8:31-38

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

“You’re not setting your mind on divine things, but on human things.”

These are the words of Jesus we need to focus on. Jesus’ other words to Peter are harsh words, yes. But our more pressing problem is that we’re setting our mind on human things, not divine things.

Something Jesus says points us to this. Throughout Mark’s Gospel Jesus often tells people to keep silent about signs and wonders they’ve seen him do. Even demons, who recognized Jesus’ authority and divine origin, are silenced by Jesus. Coming off the mountain of Transfiguration, as we heard a couple weeks ago, Jesus told the witnesses not to speak of it. It’s like Jesus wants to keep his Messiahship a secret.

But someone in our Tuesday noon Bible study noticed something important. Mark says that when Jesus spoke about his suffering, rejection, and death he “said all this quite openly.”

Do you see? Jesus insists on people keeping quiet about the very things that most impressed the disciples and the crowds. And us, to be honest. But when he spoke of his suffering and death, he spoke openly. He didn’t mind people hearing about that. Human things and divine things? Jesus thinks the divine thing is the truth about the cross.

Being focused on things of glory and power is a common human mistake.

God gave us the power of mind and body and spirit to be creative, to make things. We naturally like to use power, to make the world as we want it. We admire power and success in our world.

But if we think that’s what God is really about, if we focus on glory, impressive displays of miracles, splashy shows of glowing wardrobe on mountaintops, we’re looking the wrong way.

So the Son of God comes to turn us the other way. To call us to repent, to see the world as God sees the world. To be drawn into God’s life and God’s heart. And Jesus says we do this by looking at and understanding the cross.

But when we listen carefully to Jesus today, we see the cross might mean something different than we thought.

Much of Western Christian teaching has seen the cross of Christ not as Jesus spoke of it but as we thought it should work. Coming to power and strength under Roman law and justice, the Church saw God in the same system.

Many of us grew up on this. We were given the image of a courtroom, an angry God as judge, ready to sentence us to death. Then the Son bursts in and substitutes himself for our sentence. Or we were told that God the Father is so angry at our sin, forgiveness alone isn’t enough. God needs to be compensated for our sinfulness. So the Son dies on the cross to satisfy the Father’s need for the scales to be balanced.

These teachings make no sense if we listen to Jesus. If Jesus is meant to substitute for our punishment, or if Jesus’ death is meant to satisfy the blood-lust of the First Person of the Trinity, then the original cross should be enough.

Why, then, does Jesus ask us to take up our cross as well? What possible reason is there for me to take the path of the cross? Whom am I supposed to satisfy with my sacrificial love? Am I, are you, supposed to substitute ourselves for the punishment of another? If the Church’s theories are right shouldn’t Jesus have done all this already?

Jesus is absolutely clear: he must go to the cross, suffer, and die, and all who wish to follow him must do the same thing. Therefore, the divine view of the cross must be different than what we’ve learned. It needs to comprehend why not only Jesus walks the way of the cross, but why we are called to walk it, too.

Not surprisingly, we see the answer throughout Jesus’ teaching.

Jesus never says he goes to the cross to substitute for our punishment, or to satisfy his Father’s need for blood.

But he constantly calls us to a life of self-giving love, to follow his model. Everything he teaches about how we deal with each other, face our enemies, use money, deal with anxiety and fear, involves our letting go of our control, our need to be in power, and our need to do things our way.

If humanity is in love with power and glory, and that’s led to oppression and war and murder and violence and poverty and homelessness, and all the things that grieve the heart of God, the only way out of that is if we turn our minds toward God’s way. To divine things.

Now the cross makes sense. God-with-us, Jesus the Christ, comes with utter, complete, unstoppable love for the whole creation, and calls people to follow him in the same love. Because that’s a complete reversal of how we like to do things, of course at some point his love threatened people who could do something about it, and he was killed.

Jesus says this is always a possible outcome of loving as God loves. We probably won’t be crucified. But he wants us to realize how risky this radically different direction is for us.

This is why Jesus talked openly about dying, and downplayed miracles.

He needs us to see how deep and broad and high God’s love is, to quote Paul and the hymn, so far beyond human thought and fantasy that we couldn’t have imagined it on our own.

We couldn’t envision God loving us so much to suffer and die for our sake. There’s no sense in that. But when we keep our eyes on the cross, we see a truth about God’s love that drives us to our knees in awe.

And seeing the cross as the revelation of true, divine love, shows us why we’re called to the same path. It’s the whole point. It always was. God needs to turn us away from our lust for power and strength and winning, because when our minds are set on such human things, people die. People suffer. People are broken under our feet.

But when we see what the cross reveals about the love of God, and actually set our hearts and minds on this divine truth, we change. We begin to love as God loves, willing to lose everything. But in loving this way, we find everything. Healing, and life, and hope bloom all over this world.

If you want to know what God’s about, look at the cross. Jesus told us this quite openly. So did Luther.

And thanks be to God for the divine love we see there, poured out for the creation.

Turning around isn’t going to be easy. We’re going to need the Spirit’s help. We might stumble along the way, and, like Peter, find ourselves in opposition to Christ.

But Peter’s rebuke wasn’t the end of the story for Peter, was it? The love we see at the cross is such a pouring out of divine grace and goodness that forgiveness washes over the whole creation in God’s self-giving. We’re renewed and blessed and healed through this cross-shaped love. Like Peter, when we turn from our sin and mistakes we find the loving face of Jesus once more calling us to love, to feed his lambs, to follow.

Now that we know what to set our minds on, that’s exactly what we want to do.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

Going through temptation, learning the hard task of repentance (turning toward God), this is how we come to find the Good News of God Jesus found.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The First Sunday in Lent, year B
Text: Mark 1:9-15

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

It’s a rough entry into ministry for Jesus.

Wet from the water of baptism, the heady words from the Creator, whom Jesus calls Father, still warming his heart, “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased”, now Jesus is pushed out by the third Person of the Trinity. “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness,” Mark says.

No gathering disciples, not yet. No preaching to the crowds, not yet. No signs and wonders, not yet. The Spirit says to the Son, “Get out there, into the bleak Judean desert.” Forty days without food. Temptation by the Great Accuser. Wild beasts all around.

But Jesus comes out of it, goes up to Galilee and it begins. He preaches: “The time is fulfilled, the reign of God has come near; repent, and believe in the Good News.”

Whatever happened in the temptation, the hunger and heat in the wilderness, Jesus comes out of it saying, “I’ve got good news for you to believe.”

Except there’s a little word that comes before believing: Repent.

That’s Jesus’ signature line, what the Gospels say he began with, and said throughout Galilee. It’s what drew followers to him, including the twelve. Repent, and believe in the Good News.

Turn your mind around. Turn your heart around. Turn your life around. That’s what he means. You can’t keep walking on the path you’re walking if you want to find the good news, Jesus says. Finding good news, believing good news, starts with repentance.

We don’t talk much about repentance with each other. Maybe it sounds too negative. Maybe it’s church-talk that we don’t really know what it means for our life anymore. But it was a cornerstone for Jesus’ preaching, the beginning to everything. Jesus comes and says “you’re going the wrong way! Turn around! Then you can believe in good news.”

There’s tremendous good news from God that Jesus brings. But Jesus had to go through the temptation in the wilderness to find it.

Temptation’s another word we’ve put aside. We usually draw it out only for our obsession and shaming around food. When did you last think of temptation in any context other than eating another doughnut or cupcake? When did you last have a serious discussion with someone about your struggles with real temptation?

Temptation of the order Jesus faced is real for us, and is tied to repentance. Temptation is the pull we have to take a path other than the path of Christ in our journey of faith. When Jesus calls us to turn our minds, hearts, and lives around, he’s revealing the temptation we face to keep our minds, hearts, and lives going the way we like.

We’ll only find God’s Good News if we go into the wilderness ourselves, like Jesus, and face our temptation.

Temptation as Jesus faced, as we face, is the challenge between what is easy and what is hard, between what is truth and what is lie.

Mark doesn’t include Jesus’ specific temptations. But let’s consider as an example the first one in Matthew and Luke. Jesus is fasting, really hungry, and is tempted to turn stones into bread. But he says no. You don’t live by bread alone.

Think about that. A famished Jesus says there are worse things than being hungry. For him, it’s using his power, his privilege, to benefit himself. So when he’s arrested and facing the cross, he has already learned here there are also worse things than dying. He sets aside his power.

So many things tempt us toward the lie, toward the easy. All the problems that plague our society – racism, poverty, oppression, systemic violence, climate change, and on and on – all these things can be changed by people taking difficult paths turned toward God’s way. The temptation is always to take the path that’s easy, the path that takes away our pain, the path that everyone else says is logical. To avoid changes in our way of life, to believe the lie that we’re not really able to make a difference. And the good news can’t be found.

We face these challenges every day. How often do we take the path of repentance, the turning toward God?

In the wake of the Florida school shooting, everyone is saying the same things they always do. We’re shocked, saddened, angry. We rage about impotent leaders who do nothing. People post on social media, shout with their friends. Of course, the leaders are also saying and doing nothing different. But that’s not who Jesus is interested in. He wonders about us.

Because ranting and being saddened and talking to our friends is little different from politicians offering “thoughts and prayers.” All of our anger has done nothing. Something like 80% of Americans want significant gun control. How don’t we have it?

Well, are we doing anything other than ranting? Are we pressuring our elected officials? Organizing with others for effective campaigns? Joining existing ones and putting our money, our letters, our votes where our mouth is?

This is the way temptation works: we’re always offered the easy way out. Turn these stones into bread. Rant about the idiots in Washington. But Jesus’ real path was setting power aside and letting us kill him. Our real path is getting off our high horses and actually working to make something change. If 80% of Americans finally rose up and said, “No more,” no gun lobby, no paid-off politicians could stand in the face of that. And the good news could be found.

This is our Lenten learning as we see Jesus come out of the wilderness with good news.

We learn that repentance, turning to God, is facing all the temptation we have to stay the same, to take the easy way, to live as we’ve always lived. We could think of hundreds more examples than just this one.

But we also learn from Jesus that through the trials and testing of temptation we find God’s good news. God’s time is fulfilled, Jesus says. God has come to rule and reign in our hearts and in the world. When we struggle with our temptations, and resist with God’s help, God’s love breaks out in our lives and heals the world. Change happens, hope happens, grace happens. Jesus dies, but rises from the dead and destroys death forever. We lose, we sacrifice, but life and hope come out on the other side.

Jesus’ resistance in the desert only looks easy because we read about it after the fact. In reality, it was 40 days of suffering and pain and challenge that he needed to learn the truth. We shouldn’t expect an easier path ourselves.

We can learn this Lent to embrace being in the wilderness, struggling to be faithful, dealing with temptation. It’s only through these challenges that we’ll find the good news. Only through learning what it is to lose ourselves for the sake of others will we find the joy of loving, true connection with others. Only through learning the pain of sacrificial love will we find the heartwarming truth of real, vulnerable, gracious love with others.

“Repent, and believe the Good News.”

That’s our path: to struggle through whatever is before us in order to turn our minds, our hearts, our lives toward God’s path of life and love and hope.

But Christ put us on this path together. Let’s risk telling each other of our temptations and challenges and fears. There’s so much more wisdom among us than any one of us can have alone, so let’s share it with each other. There’s so much more encouragement among us than any one of us can have alone, so let’s lift each other up.

And because God’s Spirit is in each of us, we are the angels Mark says ministered to Jesus during his trials. We are the love of God for each other as we learn what it is to turn around. We are the blessing of God for each other as we each face our particular temptations and struggles. God lives in and through us, so none of us are ever alone.

The time is fulfilled, Jesus says. God’s reign is now. Let’s walk this desert together, and find the good news that God will bring.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

We are mortal, our life is limited. But our life is bound up in God’s love and life, so we are free to boldly seek to become Christ, shaped to look like the one who loves the whole world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
Ash Wednesday
Texts: Isaiah 58:1-12; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

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

You’re going to die. You know that, right? So am I.

Once a year, on this day, we remind ourselves of our mortality, we face this truth: none of us is living through this.

You’d think we’d know by now, given how much death we see. But as this past weekend once again reminded us, we’re still shocked and surprised when someone we love dies. We don’t seem to learn. What we know in our heads doesn’t convince our hearts and our hopes.

So today we tell the truth: you’re going to die. I’m going to die. We can’t change that. I’ve had the juxtaposition of putting ashes on a 95 year old head, reminding that sister that she will die, and moving to the two month old in his mother’s arms next to her, and telling him for the first time, ashes on that brand-new face with no cares or wrinkles, that he, too, will die. That’s the truth.

This day is about honesty: honesty about our sinfulness. Honesty about our mortality. As we begin our Lenten journey, we begin with the truth. And that’s because, as Jesus said, the truth will free us. Free us to live a life worth living in the time we have left.

People who know they are about to die often find freedom to live.

With nothing to lose, with only the months or days the doctor has given, people let go of lots of baggage they’ve carried most of their lives. Grudges long held. Anxiety over the future. Frustration with failed attempts to improve. All can be dropped. When you know you’re in the final stretch, that truth frees.

So, if we know we’re going to die, what do we have to lose? How do we want to live? By clinging to possessions, to habits, to sinful ways of being that hurt us and others? By lugging around fears and worries? Today’s honesty is a gift: now we know we’re on a countdown, we can focus.

This is a brilliant way to start our Lenten journey. Not to be reminded of our mortality as a scare tactic. To be reminded of our mortality as a life tactic: how do you want to live the remainder of your days? That’s what our Lenten discipline helps us learn.

The discipline of Lent is the discipline of a freed life. We’re shaped into something new and different.

Consider a flowering vine you’d like to cover an arbor in your garden. When you plant it, you gently tie the stems to the structure. As it grows, you keep connecting it to the pattern. One day you’ve got a green, flowering, beautiful gate into your backyard. In one of our houses Mary trained a rose bush over an archway; it was amazing when it finally got there.

Christ is our pattern, the frame, the trellis. Our Lenten discipline is the discipline of life shaping us to that pattern. Disciples are those trained into a new shape for a new purpose. Through this discipline, our wayward vines and stray flowers, our feelers and outgrowths, are nurtured and connected to Christ our frame, and eventually we become a beautiful thing. We look like Christ.

Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount provide the Church with the shape of Lenten discipline: sacrificial giving and works of love, prayer, fasting. And repentance, the turning around of our hearts and lives into God’s way. These are the tools that will shape us into beautiful growths of God in the world.

And that’s the point of our discipline. Not so others will notice or appreciate it.

Isaiah’s people have a huge complaint: God doesn’t appreciate all the fasting and liturgy they’re doing.

What’s the point, God, if you’re not giving us any credit? they say. We’re fasting, and you don’t see. We’re acting humble and praying, and you don’t notice.

This isn’t a wise approach. Because God says through Isaiah: “Let me talk to you about fasting. The fasting I want is freeing the oppressed, sharing your bread with the hungry. How about doing that? The worship I want is bringing the homeless into your house, and giving clothes to the naked. But you serve your own interests when you worship, you leave prayer and get into fights, your lives oppress other people.”

God’s righteous outburst reveals why we do what we do, and joins Jesus’ words today. We don’t do liturgy to draw attention to ourselves. We don’t practice Christian discipline to get credit from God or from others. If our ritual and liturgy and worship and prayer don’t train us into Christ, shape our lives into people who bear God’s love in the world, there is no point to them.

So what if our Christian discipline is unnoticed, unpraised, unappreciated? That’s not the point.

We’re all going to die. That’s the point. And Christ is what we want to look like in the time we have left.

We don’t give sacrificially, give alms as Jesus says, to get God’s notice or impress people. That attention is worthless. We give of our selves, our lives, our wealth, for the sake of others. So those who are hungry are filled, those who lack shelter are brought in from the cold. But also so we are shaped into Christ, whose love for the least and lost and forgotten is eternal. That’s the reward: looking and loving more and more like Christ.

We don’t pray so others can praise our words and our piety. There’s no value in that. We pray so that we might be connected to the Giver of Life, the Spirit who moves in us and shapes us into Christ. We pray that we might have eyes and hearts opened to the needs of those whom God loves and cares for. That’s the reward: living intimately with the Triune God.

We don’t fast, or put on ashes, so others can think we’re great Christians. There’s no reward in that. We fast, remember our mortality, turn our lives back toward God, to learn the discipline of letting go and losing for the sake of others. We let go of things for certain times to learn what it is to let go of things for our whole lives, baggage that drags us down and keeps us from being Christ. That’s the reward: living a life free of the brambles and weeds that would choke out our hope and our love.

Look, we’re all going to die. We might as well face that truth.

But we literally have nothing to lose because our lives and our deaths are bound up in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus. When we all die, we will be brought into life we only glimpse in pieces in this life.

So: we’ve only got so much time here. We know what awaits us when our time here ends. So let’s make the most of what we have, risk a little, that we might look on our outside, in our lives and words and actions, what God already sees on our inside: beloved children of God, embodied witnesses of God’s eternal love. That’s a life worthy of the time we have left.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen