God’s love cannot be stopped by anything we fear: Christ is risen, God’s love is for the whole world, and we are witnesses with our love to this great news.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Resurrection of Our Lord, year B
Texts: Mark 16:1-8; Isaiah 25:6-9

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

There are electric lights in the tunnels now.

But the air is bone-chillingly damp. Deep under Rome in the Catacombs of Priscilla, you can sense how frightening it would be in such darkness with only your torch or a few oil lamps.

Step down off the tunnel into a small family tomb. In the dim light you can see three frescoes on the back wall – on the left, a young woman and man being married; on the right, the same woman with a child in her lap; in the middle, this woman standing with arms raised. These pictures are deeply moving, speaking to us from between 1,500 to 1,850 years after her death.

And she was a Christian. Look up to the ceiling at the fresco of the Good Shepherd, with a sheep over his shoulders.

Now, turn to your right in this very small space, to a fresco of three young men in flames; above them, a dove with an olive branch. And on your left, a fresco of an old man, a young boy holding a bundle of sticks on his back, and a ram. Now, turn to leave and you see it on the ceiling near the opening: a long sea-serpent, coiled and deadly, with a man partially out of its mouth.

These are the images this faithful woman’s family painted on her tomb – in the center, Jesus the Good Shepherd, surrounded by three Hebrew stories of deliverance from death – Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who should have died in the fire but were saved by God; Abraham and Isaac with wood for the sacrifice, and the ram who died instead of Isaac; and Jonah, being spit up after three days in the belly of the fish.

But they painted a great sea-serpent, not a fish. Because the Jewish translators from Hebrew into Greek didn’t use the words “great fish” as the Hebrew does. No, the Greek Old Testament has the same word in Jonah that was used in Job 3 to translate Leviathan – the great sea-monster of the deep, the symbol of chaos and destruction.

And it’s not just this faithful woman’s tomb. These images are spread throughout early Christian sites.

Jonah’s picture survives in 60 frescoes in Roman catacombs. Isaac’s redemption survives in 23, and the three young men 22 times. When these ancient Christians contemplated death, and remembered the saving power of Christ’s resurrection, they chose images of great terror where God intervened and brought life out of the mouth of death.

And that is exactly what we need. In our world, cute bunnies and duckies at Easter won’t cut it. We need to know if God can be trusted. We need to know that there is no terror, no chaos, no destruction, that can stop God’s love for us and for the world.

Because this world is filled with death, and we’re terrified.

We fear facing our own death, avoiding that it’s our future. And every day death spreads across this planet with no boundary, no limit.

Human sin has brought greater suffering and pain in the last century than we can begin to understand or deal with. Thousands die every day of hunger and hunger related disease. Thousands are killed every day in wars all over the planet. Uncountable people are touched by suffering, illness, pain, grief, loss, in every corner of the globe. Systems and structures become agents of death, crushing lives without pity.

And death’s touch infects our own lives: our hearts, our relationships, even our faith.

Isaiah today describes our world with painful accuracy: he sees a death shroud stretching over the entire planet. A burial sheet enwraps our earth in death.

But in our fear, we find companions this morning in the faithful, dear women who came upon a frightening scene in Sunday’s early hours.

When Mark tells the Easter story, he ends his Gospel there, abruptly, in fear.

Mark says that after being told Jesus was risen, the women left the tomb seized by trembling and amazement, and said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

They weren’t afraid of their own death. They were shaken and terrified by all that had happened since Thursday, and by all they now unexpectedly found: a stone rolled away, a strange person in white telling them news they couldn’t begin to process in their shock and grief and loss.

And their fear silenced them. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Now, Mark knows this didn’t last. Writing years after the Resurrection, everyone knew the women broke their silence. They found the other disciples, told them, started a morning-long run back and forth to the empty tomb.

But ending this way, Mark places us with these women in our fear. Mark says they were frozen, they couldn’t do anything out of terror. So Mark is saying to you: what’s your next step? Will you live in fear? Or can you live as witness to a God whom death cannot stop?

Go back into that family tomb beneath Rome once again.

Facing the death of a beloved mother, her family claimed God’s power to bring life out of death, claimed hope for a life to come.

But those images aren’t limited to confidence about our future after we die. They are images promising what God can do right now to bring life into a world filled with death. We need these images to help us live our lives now.

Isaiah’s proclamation about the planetary death shroud is just such an image. Because his promise is that in days to come God will destroy that sheet spread over all peoples and nations. God will swallow up death forever.

This is the God to whom you belong. A God who doesn’t supply a ram for a sacrifice, but becomes the sacrifice. A God who, in human flesh, lives divine life into this world, and serves you in love, drawing you into God’s heart, until you kill him on a cross.

But this God isn’t stopped by fiery furnaces. This God isn’t stopped by great sea-monsters or chaos. This God isn’t stopped by planet-sized death shrouds. And this God cannot be stopped even by death.

This is the marvel we celebrate this morning: the love of God that takes the path through death and explodes into new life. Christ is risen, and now you know death has no power over life, over you, over anything. So you don’t need to remain immobile in fear.

This is why Mark stands us with these beautiful Easter women.

As afraid as we are of so many things, so were they. Whether it’s our pain, or the pain of the world, we know fear, like they did. And yet, filled with God’s love and courage, they began to speak. Disciple after disciple heard the good news, and started losing their fear. Jesus himself appeared to them and breathed the Spirit into their lives and hearts.

And they began to live as God’s embodied love in this world, unafraid. Because if God can’t be stopped by furnaces or monsters or shrouds or even death on a cross, then nothing is impossible for God. Love can heal this world. Life can rise out of death and renew your heart, renew families and relationships, renew whole cities and nations and cultures. Jesus himself, risen from death, meets you in Word and Meal, giving you courage and strength for your journey of faith and life.

What would life be if you lived without fear? If you trusted in such a God, with such a love for you and for the whole world?

What would change? And what’s stopping you from joining these women and living as if Christ really is risen, and death is dead, and God’s life is healing all things?

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

This night the Son of God shows us the full shape of love, the way God envisions the whole world living and moving, the path of our life and hope.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
Maundy Thursday
Texts: John 13:1-17, 31b-35; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26

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

“Do you know what I have done to you?”

Hands still wet from washing his followers’ feet, Jesus asks his most important question ever. “Do you know what I have done to you?”

No question is more critical to life. Do you know what Jesus has done? Do you know what God is doing in Christ? Do you know what this week means for your life, your faith, for the world? All Christian theology begins and ends with Jesus’ question on the night of his betrayal.

Jesus opens up this question with two deepenings. First, he says he is setting an example. What he does, you do. This is always the center of Jesus’ message: Follow me. Do as I do. Walk where I walk.

Second, it is this night when Jesus makes his great commandment. Only in the context of the events of these painful days does he make this absolutely clear: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

“Do you know what I have done to you?” he asks. I have set you an example. I have commanded you to love as I love. Do you know what that means?

Everything Jesus does tonight leads to the answer. So watch, see, learn. And then follow.

Watch Jesus tonight: he shows you that love serves.

The Son of God, God’s Eternal Word, kneels before his followers and washes their feet. Those not preparing the meal arrived at the upper room, tired and dirty from the road, arguing an old fight over which was Jesus’ favorite. Even children know to wash for dinner, to use the basin and pitcher at the entrance. Everyone knew dirty feet needed to be cleaned before eating.

Yet the Master shows what love is. Putting aside any hierarchy, or proper order, not chiding his disciples for their neglect, Jesus simply loves them. Jesus becomes a servant, a slave, and carefully, gently, washes their feet.

Do you know what I have done to you? he asks. I have shown you the shape of love. To love as I love is to see yourself the servant of all your sisters and brothers. To love as I love is to set aside what’s right and who’s first and what you think you’re owed, and offer yourself as servant to all.

Watch Jesus tonight: he shows you that love offers itself completely.

After this washing, they moved into the meal. It was Passover, so they drank four cups of wine at the prescribed places. They passed around unleavened bread, remembering their ancestors.

But in the middle, Jesus gave them a way to understand what would happen tomorrow. The cross at this point isn’t a surprise to Jesus, but his disciples don’t know it. So, stepping away from the words of the Seder, he said “this bread is my body. Take it. Eat it.” “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, a drink of forgiveness. Drink it.”

They couldn’t have understood. Even the next day, as they saw him horribly killed, they didn’t get it. But after Easter they started to remember, and understand.

Do you know what I have done to you? he asks. I have shown you the shape of love. To love as I love is to offer yourself fully to the other, to be vulnerable, to risk everything, even death. The one you love takes in all you offer and is changed, like this bread and wine will fill you with my body and blood and life and love and forgiveness and all I do on this cross.

But also, Jesus says, do this to remember this death, to remember what love really is. “As often as you eat of this bread and drink of this cup,” Paul says, “you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” To love as I love, Jesus says, is to remember this death, and to offer yourself fully to the other, as gift, as forgiveness, as vulnerable grace.

Watch Jesus tonight: he shows you that love surrenders to God’s vision.

We leave the supper to go to Gethsemane. Here Jesus will face his betrayer, be arrested, and begin the humiliation that leads to torture and death.

Before that, he will pray to his Father. In the internal mystery of the Triune God, the Son will ask the Father if it is possible to avoid this death. The Son came as one of us to reveal God’s heart to us, to draw you into the heart of God, and the cross will be the moment of deepest revelation. But now there is this moment of hesitation.

Do you know what I have done to you? he asks. I have shown you the shape of love. Love is not unafraid, and love isn’t free of doubt. Love is often terrified of following through, wonders if there are easier ways to be.

But not my will be done, that’s what I said, Jesus tells you. Love is always shaped by God’s vision for how the world works. Not by your own real needs, or self-concerns. Love follows the path of servanthood, of vulnerability and loss, and now chooses to be shaped by God’s will.

To love as I love, Jesus says, is to trust God and follow. No matter the cost. No matter the fear. No matter that you can’t see how this will be a good thing.

“Do you know what I have done to you?”

This is the only question that matters. We long for love, for connection with others. We struggle to know if we are loveable, valued. We seek ways to fill our emptiness inside.

But here you have looked at your feet and seen the God of all time and history kneeling there in love. Here you have looked toward a cross and seen the God who made all things facing death out of love for you. Here you have watched a struggle within God’s own Triune life over living out this love, and have seen the Son of God choose to love you, even if you would kill him for it.

Here you have seen the shape of God’s love, and have found yourself forever wrapped up in it.

So, now: Jesus has set an example. Will you do as he does? Jesus has commanded you to love as he loves. Will you follow this love you have seen, this love that has changed your life and given you faith and hope?

Because when you love in this way, follow this example, you will be a witness to Christ. You will begin to understand what it is Jesus has done to you, and to the world.

And eventually, God’s deepest vision will come to pass, that the whole creation will know of God’s love and live it, for the healing of all things.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

We see the face of God in Jesus, so that means we see the depth of God’s love in the cross, and our own path to life and witness.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fifth Sunday in Lent, year B
Text: John 12:20-33 (with reference to other verses of John)

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

“We want to see Jesus.”

That’s all they asked, these Greek Jews. Finding a disciple who spoke Greek, they said to Philip, “Sir, we want to see Jesus.”

Isn’t this a beautiful opportunity for a follower of Jesus? Such a simple request. But it’s kind of complicated, isn’t it?

Jesus’ very strange response shows that. John doesn’t say he greeted or acknowledged the seekers. He starts talking about his anticipated time being upon him. He talks about a single grain of wheat that will remain a dead seed unless it is buried, planted into the earth. Only then can it live, become the beauty it was meant to be.

We want to see Jesus, like them. But we also see someone talking about dying and rising. About being lifted up. Unlike these Greeks, we know that means the cross. John, our narrator, fills us in: “he said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.”

“We want to see Jesus” is anything but a simple request.

But it’s a request the very beginning of John’s Gospel promises we’ll have answered.

John says it’s good to want to see Jesus, because to see Jesus is to see the face of God. Jesus is God’s Word, God’s Logos, God’s Blueprint, God’s Pattern for the Universe, the shape of the very nature of the creation, now among us as a human being.

John says Jesus, the Son of God, who is at the heart of God, makes the Father known to us, and Jesus, the Son of God, who comes among us, makes the Spirit known to us.

We want to see Jesus because Jesus is the face of the Triune God for us. Everything we need to see about God we see in Jesus. But we’re still stuck wondering: why does seeing Jesus mean seeing death and burial? Why is he talking about seeds dying and about being lifted up in the air?

Maybe because he knows we’ll soon see him that way.

John says he wrote his Gospel so all could see Jesus for themselves, and believe he is the Son of God, the Christ, and in believing, have life in his name. (20:31) From the beginning of his book, John gives us signs to help us see Jesus.

And from the beginning the greatest sign is the cross. Unlike the other Gospels, John foreshadows the cross very early. He says the Son shows us the Father’s heart in chapter 1. In chapter 3, as we heard last week, he says that God’s heart is love for the whole cosmos, so the Son came to heal, not to judge. But already there Jesus says that love will be seen when he is lifted up, like the snake Moses put on a stick in the wilderness to heal the people.

Now again today, Jesus promises he’ll be lifted up.

So seeing Jesus is going to be relatively easy. He’ll be up on a hill, raised higher than everyone and everything else. Zacchaeus won’t need to climb a tree. People won’t have to tear a hole in a roof and lower a friend down. Judas won’t need to give a secret signal in the dark. Everyone will see Jesus very soon. Hanging in pain and suffering, dying on a cross.

To see Jesus is to see the truth of the seed that dies only to live.

Mary of Bethany saw this. Just before today’s Gospel is Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem with palms, and just before that, Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, took extravagantly expensive perfume and anointed Jesus’ feet, wiped them with her hair. Some of the disciples criticized the wastefulness. (12:1-8)

But Jesus knew. He knew that after he entered Jerusalem in triumph the next day, even his disciples would see a ruling king. Maybe even some foreigners, Greek Jews would be impressed enough to come looking for him. But he also knew that his hour was coming.

So did Mary. She saw the face of God in Jesus. She saw that the love of God Jesus revealed to her and the others was leading him to death. Rather than waiting to anoint him after his death, Mary prepared him for it. She saw clearly.

For the rest, for you, for me, Jesus has to tell the mystery of a seed dying to live. Maybe we haven’t sat at his feet long enough like Mary to see through our own fears and doubts, or our beliefs about how God should be.

But now Jesus’ strange reply about the seed makes sense: you need to see me like Mary sees, he says. You need to see that the outcome of my love is you’ll have me killed. Faithful to the heart of God, Jesus loves us enough to be willing to lose everything.

If you want to see Jesus, look up. Look at the cross.

When we see Jesus as Jesus really is, we not only see the depth of God’s love, though. We see the path to our life.

Remember, Jesus is the Logos, the Blueprint, the Word, the Pattern of God for the universe in our human flesh. The seed that dies only to live is the pattern of life that really is life.

Seeing Jesus face death, and rise from the dead in love and grace, the believers realized that his path of dying to live really was a true path of life. They understood why, when speaking of his own dying, he invited them to lose their life to find it as well. To embody God’s heart, too, and live as that heart the way Jesus did.

It’s your invitation, too, you heard Jesus today. Lose your life to keep it. Let go of everything that keeps you from being filled with God’s love. Maybe it’s a sense of not being of any value. Or anxiety about life and the future. Maybe it’s selfishness and pride. Or guilt and shame. Maybe it’s a need to control life and others. Or a sense of being out of control and helpless. There are many more possibilities.

We’re all seeds, wrapped in what is killing us. But when with the Spirit’s help we let go, die to those things, bury them and us, like the old self Luther said needs to die every day, then we’ll discover what it is to live. We find winning by losing. Gain by letting go. Life by dying.

“I came that you might have life and have it abundantly,” Jesus said. (John 10:10) This is how you find it.

Now you see what Jesus meant that in being lifted up, he’d draw all people to himself.

On the cross, Jesus not only made it possible for the whole world to see God’s love. Being lifted up on the cross, Jesus also draws all people’s attention to what our love, true love really looks like. What God’s pattern for abundant life in this world really is.

Not power or strength or control or domination. Not hoarding or saving or securing. Not taking care of yourself before and excluding all others. Not dismissing or hating yourself.

No, abundant life is found when we love the same love, vulnerable, giving, sacrificial. When we die to what is in us that is not of that love. Jesus, lifted up on the cross, shows us all how we find life that is rich and real.

“We want to see Jesus.” You do, don’t you? Well, look up. Sit at Jesus’ feet for awhile until you see. And wonder, ponder, dwell in what you see. Until you begin to look like Jesus, too.

Until all people can see, all are drawn to God’s love. And the world is healed, as God has so long desired.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen