Blog – Page 179

Seeing Joy

August 15, 2021 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

Mary sees it; Isaiah sees it; Jesus sees it. God wants to overturn the world and bring about a new creation. This causes Mary to rejoice. What will it do to you?

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The feast of St. Mary, Mother of Our Lord
Texts: Isaiah 61:7-11; Luke 1:46-55

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

Some of us have a problem of self-deception. We praise people while living in opposition to what we praise.

We honor Martin Luther King, Jr., even have a federal holiday to remember him. His vision of a just society where all are treated with dignity and respect and have equality is a beautiful thing. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, we muse, if his vision was reality? But we keep living in ways that make it impossible to exist.

We say we follow Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the living God. His call to love of God and neighbor, to be non-violent peacemakers, to live lives of reconciliation and forgiveness, is a beautiful thing. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, we muse, if Jesus’ vision was reality? But we keep living in ways that make it impossible to exist.

Each year, Mount Olive celebrates Eucharist on August 15, remembering Jesus’ mother, Mary, on her feast day, and we sing her Magnificat. We delight to sing of God scattering the proud, filling the hungry, sending the rich away empty, bringing down the powerful. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, we muse, if Mary’s beautiful vision really happened? But we cling to our lives of comfort and ease, deny our power over so many who suffer, forget we’re the rich who keep others from eating, protect our place on the top of the very pile Mary says God is going to overturn.

One of the ways we fool ourselves is by claiming what they taught was unique, far beyond what the average person can think or do.

Church fathers have long praised Mary for her theological wisdom in Magnificat, that she had this brilliant insight into God. Well, Mary was amazing. Her courage to say yes to God, her willingness to be a part of God’s turning the world upside down, is admirable and wondrous.

But she wasn’t a theological genius. She just knew her Bible. She heard the prophets, knew the law of Moses. Mary simply took God seriously, and when this invitation to bear a child for God came, she realized this was part of what God had long promised. Everything Mary sings is self-evident to anyone who actually reads the Bible.

And she isn’t alone. Her son didn’t invent a new way. Jesus lived what his Hebrew forebears had heard from God, modeled, taught, embodied. Today we heard Isaiah rejoice at the same kind of overturning justice of God that Mary proclaims, and Jesus himself claims as his mission. Mary wasn’t even the first mother to sing something like this. Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, sings a nearly identical song to Magnificat as she rejoices in her coming child and God’s work through him.

But if it’s so obviously God’s dream in Scripture, why do we avoid it?

Is it because some of us have more to lose? Mary was Jewish in a Roman-controlled province, female in a patriarchal culture, poor in a world that always honors the wealthy. Ethnically, biologically, economically, she was in the back row, the bottom of society’s pile.

From that place, as she listened to God’s prophets, heard the stories of God’s acts for her people, she believed them. God does liberate, make gardens in the desert, bring justice, desire peace. God does care for the widows and orphans, those who are oppressed, those who are pushed to the margins. This was good news for Mary and most of the folks she knew.

But if you have power and wealth, if you build an institution like the Church, or even a congregation like Mount Olive, if your society protects you and benefits you, if armies and police forces kill to keep you safe, if you are rewarded for your gender identity, maybe you don’t want to hear God’s priorities.

If we treat Scripture’s consistent witness as a nice but unrealistic dream, maybe it’s because we’re afraid of what’ll happen if God’s priorities actually come to pass.

If Isaiah’s right and God is about freeing captives and setting oppressed free, about loving justice, we who have none of those problems are at risk of losing something. If Mary’s right and God intends taking down the powerful and sending the rich away empty, feeding the hungry and scattering the proud, to the degree you or I are powerful or rich or proud, we’re going to be affected.

So we put Mary’s vision, and the clear witnesses of Scripture, into beautiful cases to admire and adore, where they can’t actually affect my daily life, or your choices. We limit following Jesus to just ensuring life after death, not seeking God’s transformation of the world into God’s new creation.

But then what’s the point of our faith? Why admire Mary and Jesus and all these others but actively live against what they dreamed and lived and called for? How long can we persist in praising those who call us to align with God’s priorities while resisting that alignment, and still deceive ourselves that we’re being faithful?

Here’s a possible hope: Mary didn’t fear what God wants to do. She rejoiced in it.

My spirit rejoices in God who heals, she sings. I will greatly rejoice in God, Isaiah sings. This overturning, this radical change of society – all things we know need to happen, but fear – Mary and Isaiah saw as a reason for joy.

Joy overcomes fear of change, fear of losing status, fear of unsettling realities. When we can see God’s way as Mary sees it, we can stop fearing what we’ll lose and see the joy of God’s world as God intends it.

A world where all systems we’ve built that crush and oppress are broken apart. Where we stop dividing and harming people based on skin color or gender or whatever arbitrary categories we invent. Where peace between peoples exists alongside justice between them, where we solve our problems without violence or power over others. Where all cultures and languages and viewpoints and ethnic songs and heritage and story and faith aren’t melted together in a homogenous pot, but woven together in a colorful, joyful quilt of God’s humanity.

What if, instead of holding this vision at arm’s length, framed in a beautiful case so we can’t touch it, we embraced it fully into our hearts, no matter the cost?

That’s what God’s been calling us to through Scripture for over 3,000 years. Mary knew it. Jesus knew it. Isaiah knew it. Hannah knew it. Martin knew it. Paul knew it. And all rejoiced at this new creation God wants to make in humanity.

Because it sounds pretty wonderful. It sounds like the answer to all the problems we care about and want changed in our world.

My spirit rejoices in the God who heals me and all people, Mary sang. Your spirit could rejoice, too. Let Mary help you find that joy and set aside your fear and actually live into this new way God is making.

In the name of Jesus. Amen

Worship, August 15, 2021

August 13, 2021 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

The feast of St. Mary, Mother of Our Lord

Mary heard God’s promises in Scripture, believed them, and rejoiced that through her God’s overturning of the world into a new creation would come. In our worship, we ask to be filled with Mary’s joy so we join in the same overturning.

Download worship folder for Sunday, August 15, 2021.

Presiding and preaching: Pr. Joseph Crippen

Readings and prayers: Peggy Hoeft, lector; Vicar Andrea Bonneville DeNaples, 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, 8/11/21

August 10, 2021 By office

Click here to read the current issue of The Olive Branch.

For the Journey

August 8, 2021 By Vicar at Mount Olive

We are nourished through Christ to be nourishment for others as we journey together.

Vicar Andrea Bonneville
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 19 B
Text: 1 Kings 19:4-8

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

Don’t grieve over who the Holy Spirit has created you to be.

Listening to voices that say that you are too young or too old, or don’t have enough skills or experience or training to engage in the tasks ahead. Being so overwhelmed or filled with fear and anxiety that it stuns you. Having a sense that no matter what you do, it is not going to be good enough or have a big enough impact.

Perhaps these are the voices and messages that got into Elijah’s head. The voices that drove him restlessly into the wilderness and that caused him to have no choice but to lay down and rest, suggesting that continuing the journey was going to be too much for him.

Elijah has a justifiable reason for his overwhelming exhaustion and yet it is easy to look at his situation and think that he is just being a little over dramatic.

But Elijah gets to a point in his life that resembles what we call burn out. Feeling so exhausted that he’d rather give up than continue to do what he has been called to do. It’s incredible he went a day’s journey into the wilderness to begin with.

The way I see it is that Elijah had two options. He could run away from the call the Triune God had placed on his life and go live a more comfortable life someplace else or he could run into the wilderness of the sin and suffering of the world and learn how to find rest there.

One instinct is to look at Elijah and just say, come on, get up, we have work to do. That’s what our society would tell us to do. To ignore our need to care for ourselves so we can produce more and do more.

But another instinct is to have compassion and empathy for Elijah and just say, it’s okay to rest, here have some nourishment. The angel in the story today does the opposite of what the pressures of world teach. The angel sees Elijah under the tree and tells him to eat and rest.

The need to rest and find nourishment in the midst of chaos in the middle of the wilderness is what the prophet Elijah teaches us today.

Elijah figures out how to go into the wilderness and find rest, not through what he does, but through what he finds on the journey. Not because he alone has all the strength that he needs but because he realized that he can’t go on the journey alone.

We are the people called by God to go into the wilderness to proclaim a message of hope, a message that Christ is the bread of life and light of the world. A message that we proclaim to each other and to our community. It is a lifelong task and if we don’t find places to rest and nourish ourselves on the journey, we are going to burn out.

So if today you are feeling tired, or overwhelmed, or lonely, or anxious, or afraid. Worn down from the sin and suffering of the world. There is a place for you to rest, even in the midst of chaos, even on this wilderness journey.

Following God’s call will lead us to find places where we can release the burdens the world has forced us to carry. Release the anger, fear, all the things that hold us back.

We may not always know what rest will look like for us and so we are challenged to find places to rest even as the world challenges us to keep moving and to keep doing. Finding a way to even rest in the unknown of what is next.

God isn’t going to lead us to places where we are going to fail. God isn’t going to leave us alone in the wilderness. This is the purpose of the angel and the tree and it is the purpose of each of us.

To be the presence of God, filled with love, forgiveness, and passion for caring for all of God’s creation. Peeling back layers of exhaustion so that the light of Christ continues to shine from our hearts and nourishes all around us.

But we can only be nourishment if we are nourished.

Nourished by being in community with each other and seeing and being with people embodying God’s love and forgiveness.

Nourished from having a sense of routine and enjoying spiritual practices, such as meditation, music, gardening, whatever helps us to express who God calls us to be. Finding ways to use our bodies, our voices, and our minds to care for and advocate for our neighbors and all of God’s creation.

Nourished by being who the Holy Spirit has called us to be. Living out our vocations at work, or in school, or during retirement. Joyfully loving who we love. And finding meaning and happiness in all of the unique things that make each of us who we are as God’s beloved.

Nourished by believing that our worth is not assessed by our performances and our work, but solely for being who we are and trusting that we are worthy of the love and the calling the Holy Spirit has placed in our hearts and sealed on our forehead.

It is simple and profoundly complex at the same time. But the more we know and trust that we are loved and the embodiment of Christ’s love in the world. The more beauty, and life, and love, and nourishment we will give and receive.

When we continually lean into the person the Holy Spirit created us to be, we find rest and find nourishment that can only come from God who truly is our bread of life.

At the very least my hope is that this place, this community is a place where you find rest. Taking what you learn about yourself, about God, about love, grace, and justice here. Taking in the nourishment you receive from Christ’s table and finding places in which this table extends into our daily lives.

Where all can find love and forgiveness.
Where all can find rest and nourishment for the journey

Get up and eat, feast on the bread of life, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.

Amen.