We look to the cross and our neighbors as signs of God’s love and healing in the world. 

Vicar Andrea Bonneville
The Feast of Holy Cross 
Texts: Numbers 21: 4b-9, John 3:13-17 

They needed a sign. 

Journeying through the wilderness away from everything they knew, experiencing pain and exhaustion and grief and loss, trying to figure out how to be in community with each other, learning what it means to be God’s beloved.  

The Israelites needed a sign to show them that God was really with them and that God was going to lead them into the Promised land. They needed to know that there was a future beyond the dry dangerous desert they were living in.   

First, they needed food and then manna and quail fell from the sky. They ate their fill and continued on with their journey. A sign that God was listening to their plea. But it wasn’t enough.

Eventually they needed water so they complained to God until water poured out of a rock. It sustained them for a part of their journey but it also wasn’t enough.

And then they needed safety and healing, so they got a serpent on stick.  A visual reminder of God’s presence and protection that was with them and leading them on their journey.  But it still was wasn’t enough.

No matter what happened in the wilderness, the people of the Triune God, struggled to trust that God was really going to lead them into an abundant life. And to this day, the people of the Triune God continue to search for signs of God’s presence in our wilderness journeys.

Especially as we see and experience death and destruction and sin and suffering all around us. Looking for signs that show us what is good verses what is evil, signs that point us to rest and nourishment, signs that lead us into lives of service and love.

Just like the people who were wandering in the wilderness, we too need signs of God’s love and presence in our lives and in our world. 

So on this day, we celebrate the feast of the Holy Cross to remember and discern how Christ’s sacrificial love and transformative power on the cross is the ultimate sign of God’s enduring love, care, and presence in our world.

Christ incarnate born into our world in an unexpected place, teaching us a new way of life that puts love and grace at the center of who we are and what we do. Christ on the cross, taking on all of the sin and suffering of the world, so that we may hope and trust in abundant life, both here on earth and in heaven. 

Christ’s death on the cross is a sign of God’s self-sacrificing love showing us that oppression and injustice, suffering and illness, destruction and death went to the grave and out of the grave came abundant life and love and forgiveness and healing.

The cross is our sign that God comes to us in our pain and brokenness and transforms us into people who embody God’s love. Not because we are perfect or we’ve done all the right things, but because of who God is and the promise that God has made with all of creation.

John writes, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who trusts in him may not perish but have abundant life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:16-17).

The promise God continuously makes throughout scripture to never leave us or forsake us is shown to us through God’s love on the cross. The cross is the ultimate sign of God’s enduring and steadfast love for each and every one of us.

And God’s love doesn’t just stay on the cross. God’s love resurrects and enters into our lives and becomes woven into the DNA of who we are as God’s beloved.  Living our lives holding onto the promise God makes with us in our baptism. Taking seriously that through our baptismal waters, we embody the cross of Christ on foreheads for everyone to see.

That through us God is actively working in the world feeding and nourishing, serving and loving, caring and healing.  Each of us as the body of Christ resurrected in our communities to do what we have been created to do. To Love. To Heal. To Forgive.

So when we feel like we are perishing, struggling to discern where God is active in our lives and communities.  We look for the signs… in creation, in art, in music, in each other, in the unexpected, in the pain and suffering.  We look to see where God is entering our humanity in order to bring wholeness.

And when our seeking eyes and discerning minds our weary, we come together with open hands and open hearts to Christ’s table clinging closely to the promise of Christ. Feasting in the meal in remembrance of Christ. A sign that will nourish us and transform us and a sign that will continue lead us into abundant life here and now and with all the saints forever and forever.

Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Living in a world that is in deep need of God’s healing, we continue to discern how we can be opened to be a healing presence to all of creation through who we are and what we do. 

Vicar Andrea Bonneville
The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 23 B
Texts: James 2:1-17, Mark 7:24-37  

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

Do your actions really reflect the love of Jesus Christ?

This is what James asks us today. It’s a fair question. James wants to know if you are willing to roll up your selves and get to work so that the love of Christ may be reflected through how you are loving your neighbor.

Suggesting a life of service that puts our actions of caring for our neighbors at the center of who we are and the center of what we do. Loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.

It should be simple. It is simple. We are empathic people who know how to show love. But as Pastor Crippen shared last week, doing good in a world filled with evil systems and structures of power is really really complicated.

So complicated at times it can leave us dormant. Moving through our days doing what we need to do just to care for ourselves and our families. Turning away from the pain and suffering and disasters that uproot peoples and communities. Going from point A to point B trying to find rest and nourishment in our exhaustion. 

Doing so we turn inward. Into our own wants and needs. Into our own biased perceptions of people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, income, and wellness. Into our own patterns and expectations of success, wealth, and knowledge.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus acts in a way that suggests he is turned inward. Traveling to a new region, he stops at a house to rest and doesn’t want anyone to know that he is there. A woman who doesn’t fit the norm for various reasons comes to Jesus asking for healing for her daughter and she is met with undeniable rudeness. 

The woman experiences Jesus’ rudeness and challenges him to turn outward. Seeing her and her daughter as people in need of healing rather than the labels that society had placed on them, Jesus heals the little girl.

As he continues traveling, Jesus encounters a man who is also in need of healing. In this event, Jesus realizes that he can’t bring healing to this man alone. He turns toward the heavens, sighs, and says to the man “be opened.”   The man is healed.

And Jesus is transformed through his encounter with and the healing of the woman and the man. Moving away from the regions he had been doing ministry and into new regions with different people showed Jesus that his ministry is more expansive and more life changing than he could have ever imagined. 

And it shows us that God’s healing and love and grace is not limited by location or laws. It isn’t found only in certain places or through certain people. If anything, God’s love and healing is happening where we least expect it.

So if you are feeling dormant in this season of your life, it is time to take Jesus’ lead and be open to a new way of imagining what the Triune God can do in your life and community.

Move out of your routine and your comfort zone. Take a new way to work, shop at a different grocery store, volunteer with or donate to a new organization that sparks a passion. Listen to and share stories of love and healing and hope. Go to new areas of our cities. Speak to people you’ve never met. Be open to new ways of seeing Christ at work in your life.

Doing so will challenge the ways that we have ignored the pain around us thinking that someone else would do something about it, challenge when we have been negligent in caring for creation suggesting that the problems are out of our control, when we have put our comfort before the needs of others.

All of it is going to transform us while God works through us to transform the world.

God is healing the world through all of us. Through the way we turn our ears to hear the cries for justice. Through the way we open our hearts and show love to a neighbor we have never met. Through the way we look at the brokenness of the world and trust that even the most broken thing can be made whole through God’s love.

Seeing the Gospel embodied and proclaimed through each of you and this community, reminds me of the love and grace and healing that God is doing. So try not to let the evil and injustice of the world make you dormant, the world needs your love, your passion, your hope.

But if you are feeling dormant, water and nourishment and sunlight are all around you. And God will continue to use it to heal you.

So be opened from the healing that comes from Christ. Be opened from God’s love for you. Be opened from the transformation that is taking place in your life.

And let it guide you in love and service. 

The world needs you, your neighbor needs you, God needs you, to zealously proclaim God’s healing, God’s justice, and God’s love.

Not just through your words, but in every action.

Amen.