Blog – Page 164

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 11 B

In the midst of the storms of this world and our lives, all God’s creatures cry out to God. Today in our worship, God shows up, as to Job and the disciples, and brings peace and stillness, is present in all suffering. Nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ.

Download worship folder for Sunday, June 20, 2021.

Presiding and preaching: Pr. Joseph Crippen

Readings and prayers: Amy Thompson, lector; David Anderson, Assisting Minister

Organist: Cantor David Cherwien

Download next Sunday’s readings for the Tuesday noon Bible study.

Click here for previous livestreamed liturgies from Mount Olive (archived on the Mount Olive YouTube channel.)

The Olive Branch, 6/16/21

June 15, 2021 By office

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Living Shade

June 13, 2021 By Vicar at Mount Olive

Created in God’s image, we grow to be people who produce shade for all of God’s creation. A place where all can rest and experience the sheltering and protecting love of the Triune God.

Vicar Andrea Bonneville
The Third Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 11 B
Text: Mark 4:26-34

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

We have an apple tree in our front yard.

It was planted in a less than ideal location and now its roots are running out of room to spread and its branches are becoming heavy. Half of its branches are no longer bearing leaves while the other half is growing apples. It’s lopsided, its leaves are few and its branches are bent in uneven directions. It’s not a typical beautifully pruned tree and its apples are quite small, even though they’re delicious.

We inherited this apple tree when we moved into our home, but it is clear that its time is coming to an end. At the beginning of spring, I figured I would leave it to bear fruit for one more season, so that way we could enjoy its apples again.

Bearing fruit is good. We as humans are created to bear fruit through our love and service to our neighbor. We give our resources and extend ourselves. We know that part of our purpose is to bear fruit, fruit that will last. And we also know that bearing fruit takes a significant amount of energy and can be overwhelming at times. So much of who we are is assessed by what we produce, how much we produce, and the quality of what we produce.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus shares two parables to help us glimpse into what the reign of God looks like in the here and now. The first parable focuses on the mystery of planting, growing, and producing a harvest. A miracle and mystery that continues to amaze so many.

Yet the second parable doesn’t focus on what the seed will produce, the focus is on what the seed will become. Jesus says, “[the reign of God] is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

This is who we strive to be, a community of people living out the identity of who God has created us to be, not solely focusing on what we can produce, but focusing on how our very presence can be an invitation for someone to experience the sheltering and protecting love of the Triune God.

We become a living shade that provides comfort, shelter, and rest so that people, like every winged creature, can build their nests and find a home within us. Opening ourselves to how God is working through us and holding within ourselves the capacity to be a shelter for any one of God’s beloved, not knowing who is going to build a nest in our shade.

We are a living shade as we provide and create a listening presence to neighbors as they share stories of their lived experience, as we provide hospitality so that someone feels they have a place to belong, as we see each other for who we are and not solely for what we can produce.

How can we, not only bear fruit, but also be shade for all to feel safe, secure AND nourished under our branches?

We don’t exactly know how and perhaps there is comfort in that. But what we do know is that there is going to be growing involved and that God is going to do it.

And if we are being honest with ourselves there is probably going to have to be some trimming as we unlearn patterns and messages that kept people from making their home in our branches. Replacing them with new patterns of inclusivity and radical hospitality in which we are invited to change and grow by that impact others have on us. Only making our branches stronger and roots deeper.

We know that there are going to be growing pains. At times, we may feel like a small, uneven apple tree. The one with little fruit to share and a small patch of shade. But with God’s love and grace, we are sharing what we have with the rest of creation.

As small as it is, birds’ dwell in our apple tree all day long and while it was blooming bees were buzzing at every flower. Yet as often as we do, I only saw what the apple tree could produce for me and not the impact it has on all the other creatures that find a home within it.

Even when we’re tired and we’ve bore all the fruit we can in one season of our life, we know that the structure, the presence, of who we are will be a place where people can find shade, a place where people experience God’s love and see the ways that God dwells within us.

We are this presence because we have been created out of and rooted in the nutritious soil of God’s love and grace, watered with the waters of baptism, fed at Christ’s table, and sent out in community to grow branches and be who God has created us to be.

For we never know who will build a nest in our shade.

Amen.

Worship, June 13, 2021

June 10, 2021 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

Third Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 11 B

The mustard seed becomes a great shrub that shelters the birds, recalling ancient images of the tree of life. We’d expect a cedar (as in Ezekiel’s prophecy from this morning), but Jesus finds the power of God better imaged in a tiny, no-account seed. It’s not the way we expect divine activity to look. Yet the tree of life is here, into which we are grafted through baptism. It may not appear all that impressive, but while nobody’s looking it grows with a power beyond our understanding.

Download worship folder for June 13, 2021.

Presiding: Pr. Joseph Crippen

Preaching: Vicar Andrea Bonneville

Readings and prayers: Peggy Hoeft, lector; Steve Berg, Assisting Minister

Organist: Cantor David Cherwien

Download next Sunday’s readings for the Tuesday noon Bible study.

Click here for previous livestreamed liturgies from Mount Olive (archived on the Mount Olive YouTube channel.)

Clothing Love

June 6, 2021 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

Do not lose heart: you are embraced in God’s clothing of love which removes all shame, and you are God’s beloved, no matter what.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 10 B
Texts: Genesis 3:8-15; 2 Corinthians 4:13 – 5:1

“Who told you that you were naked?”

It’s a ridiculous question. As Sunday School children for centuries have accurately and insistently pointed out, these two obviously knew they were naked. They didn’t have clothes on. Who needed to tell them that?

That means God’s asking something different. God’s asking, “Who told you that you should be ashamed of yourselves?” You’re hiding from me, embarrassed to see me; you’ve never done that before.

Our Hebrew forebears had amazing insight into our truth as human beings before God. This whole story is as true for us as it was for the first to tell it.

The Hebrews spoke of the creation in several ways, to show the full truth of God revealed to them.

Genesis 1 tells of a powerful God declaring a creation into existence, an explosion from chaos and nothingness into gradually increasing order and beauty, planets and stars formed, then life on planets.

But these people told a second truth of God’s creation in the next chapters: God is intimate with this creation, too, they said, building relationships, on hands and knees making plants and creatures. This God, named I Am Who I Am, a name that, when spoken in Hebrew, sounds like breathing, breathed life and love into the creation personally. And the two people in this story don’t have proper names, because they stand for all people. The man is called adam – soil, dirt – and the woman is called chavah – life. Our forebears tell this story because it’s your story, and my story, the story of all children made by God’s hands out of dirt and life.

And there’s a tremendous problem in this intimate story of God we heard today. Your problem. My problem. The problem of all humans, the Hebrews believed.

Who told you that you were naked? God asks. Who told you to be ashamed?

Human creatures, whom God declared “good” when they were made, learned to be ashamed of who they are, and taught each other to be ashamed.

But God’s Word isn’t about shaming. For centuries we’ve piled shame onto our reading of Scripture, piled it on to others, piled it on ourselves. We created a teaching called original sin that’s simply not found in the Bible and taught ourselves and each other that we can only approach God out of our shame, our utter wretchedness.

But these Hebrews onto whose faith we are grafted in Christ saw it differently, and so did Christ Jesus, by the way: God’s view of you and me, born of adam and chavah, dirt and life, is that you are beloved. I am beloved. All God’s creatures are beloved.

It’s not a question of right and wrong.

God’s Word is clear: God cares about right and wrong. About justice and ending oppression. About the sins you and I do that we know, and the sins you and I do that we are unaware of, including our implicit biases and prejudices that shape our lives and our culture, and the ways we participate in systems that crush others. God’s Word calls you and me to God’s way of righteousness and justice, the way of love of God and love of neighbor.

God’s Word is also clear about God’s unconditional love for all of us, for you, when you fail to live as God calls you, the forgiveness that flows from God’s love, leads to the cross, and bursts out in the resurrection life the Spirit pours into you. A life that brings God’s justice and peace to the world in you and in me.

But living as Christ, following God’s way has nothing to do with shame. There’s no place for shame in the love of God we know in Christ, the love of God the Scriptures proclaim.

It’s clear in this story from the way the Hebrews ended it.

In this second creation account, God goes looking in the garden, still seeking intimacy and relationship. God finds them when they hide, and is sad when they’re ashamed of who they are.

And in the end of this story, not in today’s reading, God does an amazing thing. While God would prefer that they didn’t have the knowledge that made them ashamed of being who God made them to be, God realizes that it’s going to take time for them to re-learn they are beloved, created good. So God gives them clothes.

God clothes them so they don’t have to hide, don’t have to be embarrassed. God gives them ways to cope with their unnecessary shame, until they can let go of it.

And God clothes you, too.

God would rather you weren’t ashamed of yourself, that you saw yourself as the beloved one God sees in you. But the Hebrews say that God knows it may take most of your life to unlearn what you need to. So God gives you ways to cope with whatever shame you feel.

God tells you repeatedly in Scripture that you are beloved. God offers unconditional forgiveness when you sin, when you are not Christ, and dies for you – not because you are a shameful pile of refuse but because God loves you.

On the cross, God’s Son hung naked in front of a city of thousands, and wasn’t ashamed of himself or of you. Out of love for the whole universe, for you, for all, Jesus allowed himself to be unclothed in the most public and humiliating way and to be killed. To finally convince the world, to convince me, to convince you, how much God loves you, loves me, loves the world.

Who told you that you were naked? God says they’re a liar.

So even when you hide from God, God still looks for you and invites you to be found. To let go of any shame or self-dislike and rejoice that you are God’s beloved child born of dirt and life.

And God clothes you with love that will never be ashamed of you, so even while you still struggle with shame, you are covered in your belovedness. So clothed in God’s love, the Spirit can heal the world through you, and me, and all God’s children. So, as Paul says today, grace extends to more and more people, and eventually to all.

So do not lose heart, Paul says. You are clothed in God’s love now and always, so that even you might one day believe how beloved you are.

In the name of Jesus. Amen