You are God’s temple, the dwelling of the Holy Spirit, who changes your heart to be a person living in God’s way for your sake and the sake of the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Third Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: John 2:13-22; Exodus 20:1-17 (with ref. to 1 Corinthians 6:19)

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

“What sign can you show us for doing this?” the temple leaders asked.

“Where do you get the authority to throw out our money changers and animal sellers?” It’s a fair question – they’re the authorities in the temple, not Jesus.

But this is the sign he gives them: “destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” That’s hugely confusing, to them and to us. Jesus’ actions had to do with the actual temple, made of stones and mortar. But then (and the disciples only realized this after his death and resurrection), Jesus shifted to speaking of his own body as the temple.

Jesus claimed to be the dwelling place of God, the place where God’s Spirit lived. That was his authority to declare how the stones-and-mortar temple for God’s worship (and the pilgrims being fleeced there) should be treated.

It also opened up the imagination of the early Church after they experienced Pentecost.

Twenty years after Easter and Pentecost, the apostle Paul revealed what the early Church learned from this.

“Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” Paul asks the Corinthians (1 Cor. 6:19), as if it was a well-known truth. Jesus referred to himself as God’s temple. Now Paul reminds the Christians at Corinth that they, too, are temples of God, filled with the Holy Spirit.

And, Paul says, that means they’ll live different lives. Because they are Spirit-filled, they’ll glorify God with their bodies, their actions, their love, their faithfulness.

This is your baptismal promise, too: you are God’s temple, the Holy Spirit lives in you. We walk our journey of faith dripping wet from the waters of our baptism, reminded that we are not our own. You are not your own. God lives in you, and that will transform your heart, and your actions and life as you live bearing God’s Spirit in the world.

Because a heart filled with the Holy Spirit sees God’s way more deeply and broadly than before.

Both Martin Luther and Jesus taught us this as they considered the Ten Commandments, the covenant at Sinai we heard today.

Jesus first deepened them. You think you’ve kept the commandment “you shall not kill?” Jesus asks. Fine; but how are you handling your anger towards others, your calling them fools and idiots? That, too, violates this command. He isn’t making this commandment, or the others he deepened, harder. Jesus is saying that if your heart is filled with God’s Spirit you see that the original commandments only signal the outer boundaries of behavior. As you live into God’s way, they open up deeper and deeper ways to be faithful.

Luther broadened what Jesus deepened. In the Catechism, he taught every commandment as both forbidding things but also commanding positive things. He said “you shall not kill” also means helping and supporting neighbors in all their physical needs. So our concern for justice and ending oppression of our neighbors stems directly from our hearts shaped by the Spirit within, responding to this commandment, just as Jesus’ concern for the unjust practices of the temple came from the same place.

As you learn to listen to God’s voice moving in you, the pull of the Spirit, as you find quiet places in each day to be open to God’s presence in your life, you will be changed.

How you live and move and work in the world will be changed. It’s the sign to others that you are filled with God’s life, as it was with Jesus.

Of course, there’s a big challenge in this. If everyone runs around saying that God’s Spirit is in them and that’s the sign, the authority, for what they do, all sorts of evil can happen. (For example, just think of the many Christians who’ve used Jesus’ actions in the temple to justify violence and destruction in God’s name.)

That’s why God’s written Word is so important. God’s Word checks our behavior, makes sure we’re still on God’s path, refocuses us. Like these Ten Commandments, where we’re challenged by Jesus and Luther and the Spirit within us, to stay on the path of the life of God. Or Jesus’ summary of all the commandments, to love God and neighbor with sacrificial, vulnerable love, love as he has for us. That’s the corrective to using the Spirit as license to do whatever we want to whomever we want.

This is a lot to process, to take in.

We’re used to being the center of our own attention, having our needs, wants, and desires our focus. But Jesus is always calling you and me, sometimes gently, sometimes more strongly, to be centered on the love and life of God within us. To recognize that in our baptism we are in fact God’s temples, filled with God’s presence, and moving in the world.

Shaped by God’s Spirit living in you, you learn to see the world through God’s eyes, all the problems and unjust systems of our world that can and must be changed, just as Jesus saw the injustice in the temple practices. And with the Spirit’s grace, you can find your part in helping that change, no matter how old or how young you are.

That’s the abundant life Jesus came to invite you to know and live, and to invite all God’s children to know and live, for the sake of your healing and the healing of the world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

God promises everlasting love and graciousness, even knowing that we will betray such trust, because such cross-shaped love God has can save you and all creation.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: Mark 8:31-38; Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 (with references to other readings from the Hebrew Scriptures assigned to this year’s Lenten lectionary)

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

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

Most of us have heard and perhaps even said that common aphorism. We don’t like to be tricked, let down, betrayed. It makes us feel foolish to have trusted. We know it happens, but this little saying tells us that if we let the same person do it more than once, we only have ourselves to blame for our humiliation.

So what does it mean that the Scriptures say that the Holy and Triune God not only keeps trusting after even two times of betrayal, rejection, abandonment, but into the millions and billions of times?

According to the Bible, God apparently has no limit to the amount of trust God puts in you, in me, in all people, and apparently no limit to the amount of times God will endure our inconstancy and failure, our betrayal and trickery.

This Lent we’ll see God’s relentless trust five times.

Each week we hear a covenant God makes with humans, a solemn promise to love and care for them, and each promise God makes is everlasting, forever. Last week it was God’s covenant with Noah; this week, a covenant with Abraham and Sarah; the next two weeks the covenant with God’s people at Sinai, and on the Fifth Sunday in Lent the new covenant God promises in Jeremiah 31.

You’d think that any recipient of such a covenant with God would gratefully live up to it, faithfully serve and follow God’s ways, joyfully try to be worthy of God’s trust.

You’d be wrong.

Every single covenant God makes with humans, they abandon, break, avoid, discard.

Noah hears God’s promise never to destroy the earth again, and this good man immediately gets drunk on new wine and exposes himself to his adult children. Abraham is repeatedly promised that he will receive land, many descendants through his wife Sarah, and will bless the world. But this good man twice passed his wife off as his sister when he felt threatened by a ruler, in hopes that the ruler would sleep with her without having Abraham killed as her husband.

We heard God’s covenant with David this past Advent season. David, Israel’s greatest king, is promised that his line will rule over Israel forever. Does David, in gratitude for such blessing, live a holy and pure life? No, he wickedly rapes his neighbor, gets her pregnant, and has her husband killed in battle.

The covenant with God’s people at Sinai is given by the God who just rescued them from centuries of slavery and now has graciously given them a law to guide their lives and keep them whole. So they faithfully and gratefully serve God, right? No, they complain about the food and drink in the desert, about God’s chosen leader, about God’s care for them. They worship a golden calf!

Seriously, doesn’t God ever get embarrassed at making covenants with unworthy people who betray and abandon them all the time?

Even the new covenant God promises through Jeremiah is one we trample.

Explicitly given because humans have broken every previous covenant God made with them, this one will be written on our hearts, a covenant of God’s forgiveness and forgetting. This is fulfilled in God’s coming in person in Jesus to write God’s love on our hearts and call us to love of God and neighbor.

Surely humanity would respond to such trust, such love, by welcoming God’s Son with open arms, repenting of our sinfulness, and following God’s ways?

Of course not. We humiliated God’s Son with a public torture and execution, and even more hurtfully, with betrayal and rejection by his close friends. We continue the humiliation to this day in our embarrassed unwillingness to follow his way of love.

But, you say, doesn’t Jesus finally say “Enough!” in today’s Gospel?

“If you’re ashamed of me and my words,” he says, “I’ll be ashamed of you when I come in the glory of God with all the angels.” Maybe Jesus – the face of the Triune God for us and the creation – reveals here that God has finally had enough of our untrustworthiness.

Maybe . . . if Jesus’ actions matched his words. They do not. Only weeks later Peter forgets the harsh rebuke he received today and abandons Jesus in his time of need. Whatever motivated Peter, fear or shame, his denial of Jesus – which Jesus himself witnessed – is precisely what Jesus says he will repay by being ashamed of anyone who does what Peter did.

But what Jesus actually does is go to the cross and bear, as God-with-us, all the humiliation humanity could dump on God, all the pain, rejection, betrayal. Christ brought God’s life into the deepest, degrading shame possible, and died. Then he rose from the dead, and that very day he sought out Peter and the others in forgiveness and love. Jesus wasn’t ashamed of them in retaliation. Jesus welcomed them back.

That’s the shameless love God has for you, for all people, and for the creation.

There’s no limit to the humiliation and rejection and betrayal God will endure for the sake of bringing all creation back into God’s life. Covenant after covenant God makes, covenant after covenant people break, and still God comes back for more.

Even for you. After all, in Baptism, God made one of God’s classic everlasting covenants of love and grace with you, with no point where God says you’ve failed one too many times, been untrustworthy once too often.

That’s the cross the Triune God is willing to bear again and again in hopes of bringing the creation back into harmony and justice and love, as God intended.

Because that kind of love empowers you and all it touches to love in the same way.

To take up the same cross. Call it self-giving, sacrificial, vulnerable, shameless, but as the reality that God’s love for you is such love sinks into you, it transforms you into someone who can love shamelessly, sacrificially, vulnerably, selflessly. And as more and more are so transformed, the whole creation starts healing.

Don’t think you can do it? Worried that you’ll let God down? You’re probably right. But God’s used to it. That’s why God always adds the words “forever” to God’s promises. So you know they are always yours, no matter what. And so you can realize that God’s shameless love is always transforming you into someone worthy of God’s everlasting trust.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen