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

God’s true essence is vulnerable love, that binds the Trinity together and opens to invite the whole creation into that love.

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

Ruth revealed God’s true nature to me this past week.

On Tuesday, when the governor called for a state-wide time of silence at 1:00 p.m. to remember George Floyd, those of us in the church building sat in the nave with lighted candles. I sat in my favorite place in the nave: outside aisle, lectern side, so I could see Ruth in the south gallery, my favorite window in our building.

As I sat in silence, thinking about George Floyd, and that day, and our world, and looking at Ruth, I remembered Ruth was also marginalized, oppressed, even threatened because of who she was biologically and ethnically. As a widow with no sons, she shared Naomi’s destitution and desperation in a patriarchal society where women’s only value came from men in their lives. She and Naomi were also both outsiders, foreigners in each other’s country. As I prayed and thought about our own siblings and neighbors who are marginalized and oppressed, I realized Ruth and Naomi understood the plight of George Floyd and people of color in our society far better than I do.

But these two women saw family in each other. Formed a bond of love that became inseparable. A love so strong Ruth left her place of familiarity, where she might have found a husband from her people, and willingly became a foreigner and outsider to be with Naomi.

And Boaz, the respectable Bethlehem farmer and citizen, also saw these two outsiders and saw them as family. Brought them into his family in love, marrying Ruth and ensuring that Naomi wouldn’t starve to death. They belonged.

It’s the Sunday of the Holy Trinity, and this wasn’t in our readings.

But it’s all you need to know about the Triune God. Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz lived with the love that God created in them, the love that is God. They crossed borders, saw kinship with people who were not like them, and made a family. They lived the only reality of God that matters. That is, if you care what Jesus thinks and teaches and models and lives.

Jesus didn’t explain the mystery of God’s internal make-up. He revealed the heart of God. He spoke of the Father and he being one in each other, one in love. He spoke of sending the Spirit who is also one with the others. A few centuries later, believers came up with the idea of the Trinity as a way of doing justice to these revelations of Jesus, and to Paul’s proclamation. Driven by political realities and anxiety over varying teachings, shaped by Greek philosophical terms, the formal doctrine of the Trinity was developed.

It’s just not something Jesus seemed to think we needed to have clear. What Jesus wanted clear about God, what the early Church wrote repeatedly in the New Testament, is God’s true nature is love.

God’s primary essence, God’s reality in the universe, is self-giving love.

God’s self-giving love is a cosmic love, Jesus says today. Out of love for the cosmos, the Trinity sent the eternal Word out of the inner dance of God’s life to become a human being. To risk everything, even being lifted up on a cross, to bring the creation back into God’s life.

God’s self-giving love is a birthing love, Jesus says today. In love, the Trinity sends the Spirit from the inner dance of God’s life to give new birth to all people, to enliven and renew the whole world with the essence of God’s love.

The love that Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz knew and lived for each other and their world. You can’t write that love into a doctrine.

The only thing you need to know about the Trinity, then, is that God is held together by the bonds of self-giving love.

As Jesus revealed it and New Testament writers proclaimed it, the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit, is abiding love that offers itself and receives itself again and again.

You don’t need to be able to do the math on the Trinity. Just trust that the heart of God revealed when the Son came in person and when the Spirit gives birth to life within you, that the heart of God for you and the cosmos is this vulnerable love.

What more would you ever need to know about God?

And living in the way of the Trinity is living in the same way of love as God.

If God’s heart for you and all creatures and the cosmos is this self-giving, transformative love, then you are, as Paul says, all of us are, children of God. Heirs of God through the Spirit, joint heirs with Christ.

You don’t need to write a dissertation on ethics to know how to live. Just trust that you are in God’s heart and in God’s family, and the way that binds that family together is love. The way that family lives is love. Love that gives of itself. Love that crosses borders. Love that sees all people as beloved of God and will not rest until they are treated that way in our society and world. Love that both embraces your heart so you know you are beloved but also gives you the courage to be love in a world of prejudice and oppression and violence. So you can follow the family way and be the change God wants to see in the world.

What more would you ever need to know about how to live in God’s family?

This divine love is costly, though.

It cost Jesus his life. It cost the Trinity so much in centuries of suffering love over the destruction of the creation and the hatred that the beloved creatures inflict on each other. Paul says being an heir to God’s family also means being an heir to God’s suffering. So living in the family way of God’s beloved ones might mean suffering for you. Jesus always said it could.

But you are in the family of God, a family that is bound together in the Triune God’s love that creates universes, breaks death, knows the smallest sparrow’s falling, even the hairs on your head. Any suffering you might come to as you live in the family way of the Triune God is embraced and healed and held in the love that made you and called you and treasured you in the first place.

Ruth lived God’s love. Millions have. So can you.

The living and Triune God has opened up the dance of love that makes up God’s true essence and life and invited the whole creation into it. So that the whole creation, and even you, will be bound together and shaped and inspired and renewed and given life by this love, the only thing about God that really matters.

And the best part is, when you find yourself loving as God loves, you’ll realize you are truly home, truly alive, truly loved. You’ll know all you need to know. And you are Ruth and Naomi and Boaz to someone else. Who might even find they are beloved of God, too.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen