Discipleship is not about our perfectionism or accomplishments; it is about God’s work in us as the spirit transforms us and equips us to proclaim the Gospel with our words and our lives.

Vicar Bristol Reading
The Third Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 13 C
Texts: Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:51-62

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

The Gospel text this morning, the “word of God, word of life,” sure contains a lot of words that are rather harsh.

On the road to Jerusalem, Jesus and his disciples enter a village of Samaritans who are not particularly receptive to Jesus. James and John, in a response that might be considered a bit of an overreaction, suggest calling down deadly fire from heaven in retribution. It is certainly a relief that Jesus refuses to smite those who don’t want to follow him. But Jesus himself has some severe words for others who do want to follow him.

Along their journey, the group encounters some individuals who express a willingness to follow Jesus, but have some concerns they want to attend to first. Now, if these people are making excuses, they’ve found pretty good ones. One wants to say goodbye to loved ones. Another wants to bury a parent. Who could object to caring for one’s home and family? Surely it’s possible to do these things, and then commit wholeheartedly to the mission? But Jesus is unwilling to wait and disinclined to sugarcoat this news. “Let the dead bury their own dead,” he says, “no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

These comments are not because Jesus is against funerals or farewells. Elsewhere in the Gospels we see Jesus attend family celebrations and grieve at the tombs of friends; he does not consider these things wrong or unimportant.

Rather, these sobering responses toward those who want to follow him are because Jesus is focused on the destination ahead.

He has “set his face” toward Jerusalem, where betrayal, arrest, trial, and execution await him. Those who say they are willing to follow him anywhere need to be willing to follow him there. To the cross. They must be prepared to lose their homes, their safety, even their lives.

Faithfulness to the Gospel is comprehensive: it cannot be relegated to one part of life and kept out of others. It is not something to be done only after all the ducks of one’s personal life have been put in a row. When commitment to other things– even important things– hinders commitment to proclaiming the Gospel, it is like someone putting their hand to the plow but their attention elsewhere. You can’t do both. Jesus words to those who want to follow him serve as a potent reminder that the Gospel is matter of life and death. His statements express the urgency and priority that Jesus understood.

James and John must have understood, too. They themselves once faced the same choice now facing these people along the road: whether or not to follow Jesus. One day they’d been hard at work, fishing as usual, when Jesus, a man they’d never met before, arrived and said, “Follow me.”

In that moment, something about Jesus’ presence so compelled them that the two dropped everything, and followed him then and there (Luke 5:1-11). They didn’t go home to attend to family or say goodbye. Actually, according to Matthew’s Gospel, they just left their father standing there in the boat, with all those nets to mend and all those fish to clean (Matthew 4:21-22).

James and John couldn’t possibly have understood what they were getting themselves into when they said yes to Jesus and got out of that boat. They couldn’t have known where this journey would take them. Their decisive choice to follow Jesus irrevocably changed the course of their lives. Commitment to the Gospel will do that… it will change things. There is risk involved in saying ‘yes’ to God’s call.

Discipleship redirects lives, reorders priorities, and restructures relationships.

This is what Paul is describing to the Galatians in the passage we heard this morning. He tells them that the way they behaved before is no longer the way they can behave now that they’ve committed to Christ. Things will change. People will change. The Spirit will transform them.

Although Paul describes this process as a liberation, a being set free, he also acknowledges that it involves the loss of some familiar habits that have no place in the Christian life. He enumerates examples, but he knows the Galatians know what kind of behaviors he means: jealousy, anger, pettiness, corruption, bickering… these things have to be left behind. They have to be put to death. So, there’s no going back to them. You can choose that way of being or you can choose the Spirit’s way of being. You can’t do both.

But when the Spirit starts to take root in the community, it’s clear. You can see the change. Joyfulness, kindness, generosity, faithfulness – these things become habitual in the lives of disciples. Those who are living in this life of the Spirit have a different pattern of relationship. They weave together as a family, siblings in Christ. They serve each other out of freedom. They love their neighbors as they love their own selves. Paul articulates such a remarkable vision of Christian life.

Of course, we know from our own lives that those old habits that we meant to leave behind sometimes turn out to be not quite dead yet.

Sometimes, for instance, the most dedicated disciples, the ones willing to leave everything behind for the sake of the Gospel, threaten to burn an entire village in vengeance. Doesn’t really show a lot of patience, gentleness, or self-control. Yet, those were the kind of people that Jesus recruited to his ministry. Those committed-but-imperfect followers of Christ were the kind of people tasked with proclaiming the Gospel in all its life-or-death importance.

It turns out that committed-but-imperfect followers of Christ are still the kind of people being tasked with proclaiming the Gospel. Discipleship is not about the work we can accomplish in the world. It is about the work God can accomplish through us.

This frees us, on the one hand, from any sense of perfectionism. No one does it all, and no one does it alone. On the other hand, it undermines any protests we might make that we’re not the right people to bear the Gospel. We are, each of us, called and equipped to do so – through what we say and how we live.

Sometimes we fail to keep our faces set always toward the cross. Sometimes we make excuses and choose priorities other than Christ. Sometimes we want to call down the fires of heaven on people who frustrate us. Sometimes we look back and see that the furrows in our fields have come out crooked, and we ask, “How can God grow anything here?”

But we trust that God’s Spirit can bring about change in us and around us in ways we would never think possible.

The process of being transformed by the Spirit is lifelong. We go through fruitful seasons and fallow seasons, but we are always being made new.

Indeed, we heard some harsh words from scripture this morning, but we also heard one particularly important word from the mouth of Christ to anyone who would desire to be a disciple. Jesus said, “As for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

Amen.

Paul’s miraculous claims are too often not our reality, but God in the Spirit is making it happen; pray that it happen for you, for us, and then go, tell others about it.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 12 C
Texts: Galatians 3:23-29; 1 Kings 19:1-15a; Luke 8:26-39

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

Here’s what’s not startling today: how people reacted to demonic or evil powers.

The king and queen of the northern kingdom, Israel, want Elijah dead. They’ve been systematically killing God’s prophets, and Elijah’s target number one. So he runs away. The Gerasenes have this strong man who is possessed and violently lashes out. So they chain him up, guard him. Running away from evil or locking it up, that makes sense to us.

What is startling is how people react to God’s evident power over demonic and evil forces. Ahab and Jezebel have just seen the God of Israel’s power on Mount Carmel. Fire from heaven consumed Elijah’s waterlogged sacrifice, even the wet wood and stones. All the people there acclaim the God of Israel is the true God, not Baal. But the king and queen would rather kill Elijah than acknowledge the true God. The Gerasenes witness their neighbor freed from his possession, fully clothed, in his right mind, and they beg Jesus to leave. How do these responses make sense?

But given the history of the Church, what the Church looks like today, we shouldn’t be startled by this. They’re not much different from us.

Paul’s proclamation today of God’s miraculous action makes this clear.

These words from Galatians are breath-taking words of inspiration to believers for two millennia. Paul claims that God in Christ has broken through all human barriers and divisions and created one Body from these diverse parts.

Paul’s communities include people of different cultures, people who are both enslaved and free, people of all genders. These communities thrive with the conviction that they have a deeper unity in Christ that transcends all divisions. There are still slaves and free people. But it’s not their core identity in Christ, Christ is. Men and women are still men and women. But their deeper truth is their oneness in Christ. Greeks don’t need to be circumcised or eat special foods, and Jews are free to practice their Jewish rituals and traditions, because the thing that joins them is not their cultures but the love of God in Christ.

And unlike Elijah’s miraculous heavenly fire, or the healing of the demoniac, Paul’s miracle is not only repeatable, it’s expected. This is God’s new reality. We’re supposed to expect this among us in the Body of Christ.

But look at our response to this marvel God has done: Two thousand years later these are still pretty words. But meaningless, too, judging from our reality.

Paul didn’t advocate the end of the institution of slavery. But his claim that within the community of Christ, the slave and the free person were equal and one together planted seeds that even bore fruit in Paul’s life. He called his friend Philemon to recognize his runaway slave Onesimus as a freed brother in Christ and welcome him as such. Yet it took over 1,800 years for the Church to take that insight and begin serious opposition to slavery.

Paul shared Jesus’ radical view of women as equals. He had female co-workers, leaders of communities, missionaries. But by the end of the first century the Church embraced the old standard of patriarchy, and pretty much eliminated women in leadership. It took 1,920 years for even a fraction of the Church to restore what Paul and Jesus did at the beginning. And we’re still a significant minority: maybe a couple hundred million among the world’s 2.2 billion Christians have women in leadership. It was easier for the Church to agree on ending slavery than equality among genders.

Paul’s cross-cultural unity is astonishing. Paul assumed multiple cultures could co-exist and thrive in congregations, find their oneness in Christ while still living with their diversity. But the vast majority of Christian history has been Christians siloing into their own cultural reality and claiming that’s the true Christianity. Ethnic and cultural groups promoting their way of being, speaking, dressing, doing worship as the only true way, that’s been the norm for most of the Church’s life.

In truth, Paul’s proclamation never became the norm and still barely exists 2,000 years later. We’ve rejected God’s healing oneness.

Paul says today that before we learned to trust God in Christ, we were imprisoned, locked up in fear of the law, in fear of the other, in fear of everything. The tragic thing is, Paul thought this was a past problem.

But we still live in the same fear. It took 1,900 years to agree that Christians were opposed to slavery because we were too afraid of the economic and social impact of freedom. We’re still rooted in patriarchy in the Church because we’re locked in our assumptions and thoughts and won’t envision a new way of being Christ together.

And the cultural divide, whether it’s black-white, rich-poor, north-south, Lutheran-Pentecostal, Christian-Muslim, will never be crossed if we’re the ones to cross it. It’s just too frightening to let go of the way we think things should be and admit others have equally legitimate ways of thinking, being, doing.

We may not be possessed by demons, but the chains that bind us, the prison we’re stuck in, can only be opened by God.

And good news: that’s what God offers.

God says today you need not be captive to your fear. God can break any chains that bind you or others, knock down any dividing walls, even the ones you secretly want to reinforce. The Triune God has come to the world in Christ Jesus, and shown the power of the Spirit to break through all these barriers and create a new reality. A body of Christ, a community of God, that transcends all our divisions.

Yes, it’s frightening to think of losing some of your security blankets. But with security in God’s love, and in the embrace of billions of siblings in Christ, who needs blankets? Yes, it’s frightening to feel the ground shaking as the wall protecting you from others starts to crumble. But if you let God break through that wall, you’ll find a loving family across this planet.

Paul’s words are the only reality worth living. A reality where there’s neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus. A reality that reveals a path to the healing of all nations. God is already doing this. But as Luther reminds you, you want to ask that God do this in you.

Because then you find your true place in these stories.

Once you are freed from these chains of fear, you’re sent back out into the darkness, into the brokenness, into the pain, to witness to what God has done. God told Elijah he couldn’t stay hiding in his cave, he needed to go back, face the evil, keep telling what God was about. The healed man wanted to stay with Jesus, the one who gave him life. But Jesus sent him back to his frightened neighbors, who wanted to be rid of him, to tell them what God had done.

That’s where you come in. As Paul’s new reality becomes your truth above all others, you’re sent out. To go into the world of fear and chains and walls and declare in your body and life what God has done.

But first, like Elijah, have a bite to eat. Let God refresh you in this meal that is prepared for you. Be graced by God’s forgiveness in Christ, be fed by God’s meal of life. As the angel said to Elijah, it’s going to be a tough journey. Eat up, so it’s not too much for you.

Then go, and tell others what God has done. For you. For the world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

We know God because God has come to us, invited us into the life of the Trinity, to be changed into the radiant love that we find there.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Holy Trinity, year C
Text: Romans 5:1-5

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

Look closely at the picture. There’s a place for you.

Nearly 600 years ago the Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev wrote an icon depicting the visit of three heavenly strangers to Abraham and Sarah. The Bible claims this was a visit of God, that they actually spoke to God in these beings.

In time, the Church wondered if this was somehow a vision of the Trinity. So this icon, printed on our service folder, is often called “The Holy Trinity,” as well as “The Hospitality of Abraham.”

But look closely. The figure on the right, representing the Holy Spirit, holds her hand out toward the open space, inviting a guest to the meal. You. The one looking at the picture. Some believe a mirror was originally attached where that square is on the front of the table.

Isn’t that lovely? Looking at this visitation of God, you see yourself invited to join God’s presence.

This is the only way you can know God.

We now have 1,600 years of theological reflection since the Nicene Creed on how God is One God, yet Three Persons. None of that reflection actually lets you know God.

It’s God’s invitation to come, enter God’s life, that lets you know God’s truth, God’s reality, God’s essence. You can only really know another person by having a relationship with them, talking with them, loving them, and you can only know God that way.

In fact, our whole idea of the Trinity began with the invitation of the Incarnate One, Jesus, not with theological constructs. Jesus showed us in person the face of God, the heart of God. In Jesus, God came to you, to the world, and said, “Come, let’s know each other better.”

This is where the Church first met God’s deepest truth. It’s where you will.

Today Paul says we have access to God through Christ Jesus. Jesus welcomes you into the life of God.

Look first to Jesus, then. Hear his teachings, listen to his voice proclaiming God’s unlimited forgiveness and love for you and for all creatures, for the whole creation. Eat his meal of grace and life for you and for all. Wonder at the signs of utter welcome, the crossing of human boundaries of law and exclusion, the breaking of taboos of culture and religion, that you see in God’s Son.

And stand in awe at the inexpressible mystery of God’s love on the cross, dying to bring you and the cosmos back into God’s life. Rejoice, as we have this past Easter season, in God’s destruction of death and hatred and evil.

Jesus is the face of the Triune God for you, so you know God is good, God is loving, God is for you. Paul says today you have been declared righteous by God in Christ. God looks at you in person in Jesus and sees good, and holy, and blessed. And always says, “Welcome, beloved one. Come, know me.”

Meeting the Trinity first in Jesus then leads to a deeper joy.

You’ve heard for weeks Jesus’ promise that the Spirit of God would come to you, fill you. So, you are not alone, Jesus says, God is in you. You need not be confused or lost, God’s Spirit will guide you. And Paul says today, God’s love is poured out into you through the Holy Spirit.

Jesus, the Incarnate One, sends you God’s Spirit to make you filled with God, too. To make you an Incarnate One. To intertwine your life into the life of God forever.

How many times has Jesus said in these weeks that he and the One he called Father were one, united, and that in the Spirit of God you would be united with God yourself? Coming to this world in human flesh was the first step in God’s plan to bring you, and me, and all creation into the heart of God’s life.

So listen for the voice of the Spirit in you. As Jesus promises today, the Spirit will teach you what you need to know when you’re ready to know it, just as the Spirit teaches the Church in the same way.

This is the grace of the Holy Trinity: you are welcomed to join the Triune God’s life forever, to take your place in the circle, and the Spirit makes that happen.

That means a couple wonders, Paul says today.

First, you now have peace with God.

When humans try to imagine God it’s usually a distant, powerful, often judging god. At least in the patriarchal cultures in which we’ve spent the past 3,000 years. So when suffering and pain and evil happen, it’s easy to blame this imaginary god we’ve created, or fear this god is our enemy.

But you know God intimately now, you are filled with God’s Spirit. So you can be at peace with God. When you face suffering, you know God has suffered, too, and knows your pain. Because God’s Spirit is in you, you know that God is with you always, no matter what. And as Paul says, that’s where your hope comes from. Not that all suffering ends, but that when you grow closer and closer to God, filled with God’s Spirit, you have God’s love and strength to face it and thrive.

And as the Spirit fills us all, we together can even face the great suffering and pain of others, bringing God’s hope and love ourselves, trusting that God is working in us to bring life, even if we can only seemingly take tiny steps at a time. We are one body in Christ, across this planet. So we trust that God, working in all the body of Christ, is moving this world toward justice and mercy and peace.

And, Paul says, you also share in the glory of God.

Freed from following a god made in your own image, now that you see you have a place in the Triune God’s life, Paul says you also will share in God’s glory. In the radiance, the brightness of the life of God. In the beginning, God said, “Let us make humanity in our own image.” And now, in Christ, as you take your place in God’s life and heart, that promise begins to be fulfilled in you.

You start to look like God in your love and grace. Your heart begins to beat as God’s, in compassion and love for all who struggle. Your hands become creative like God’s, embracing like God’s. And together, as Christ’s body, we bring God’s life to this whole world.

“Come in,” the Trinity says to you, “come join us in our life. There is room for you in our dance.” So come. Enter into the life of God and be changed, be healed, be made new.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

This is the great surprise of Pentecost: the Spirit is in you, in me, making us the body of Christ, to do the ministry of Christ in the world. It’s us now.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Day of Pentecost, year C
Texts: John 14:8-17, 25-26; Acts 2:1-21

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

I think the Holy Spirit was a great big surprise for the disciples.

Not just what happened on Pentecost, though that must have been quite the eye-opener. And not what they saw in Jesus, either. In his first sermon in his hometown, Jesus declared the Holy Spirit was within him.

But on the night before his death, Jesus promised to send them the Holy Spirit, that God’s very Spirit that was in Jesus, would be in them. Would teach them, remind them of Jesus’ teachings, too.

I doubt they were expecting that at all. We forget, we read the Scriptures after the fact, and through the narrator’s eyes. We know from Acts that the Spirit who filled Jesus filled the disciples, sent the Church out into the world. The disciples couldn’t know all that. Nothing prepared them for the idea that the Holy Spirit would be God’s gift to them.

What those women and men did up till this was pretty common. They followed a teacher who spoke truth.

This was normal. A teacher would attract disciples by their teaching, and show them a way of living, reveal insights, help them understand their lives, and often God. Jesus drew these disciples to believe and follow. He showed God to them. So they focused their lives, their faith, their hopes, their dreams, on Jesus. When he was crucified and raised, they found new understandings, believed more than ever he was God as well as human.

What they didn’t realize was that Jesus was just the start. God’s plan now was to send the Spirit into them. God’s plan now was that they would do Jesus’ ministry. Be what Jesus was. Pentecost was the first evidence of this promise being fulfilled. It just exploded from there.

We, at least, should expect this. Today Jesus says something we’ve heard often: that we will, in our faith, and with the Spirit in us, do greater things than even Jesus did.

Let’s be clear, though. Jesus is talking about more than miracles.

We turn Jesus’ promise into an endless loop of conversation with little insight, talking about whether we can do healings like Jesus, and if we can’t, how can he promise greater things? We realize miracles happen every day in hospitals and clinics, that we see great things even our grandparents would call miraculous.

But if Jesus is only talking about miracles, how is it possible that we could do greater things than he? Even if we count modern medicine, even if we have stories of prayer ending someone’s disease, that’s not greater than Jesus, it’s exactly the same. Something else is promised here.

But what can we do that’s greater than Jesus himself?

Well, this surprising gift of the Spirit has made us into the body of Christ ourselves. Made you Christ. God’s anointed. Me, too. And billions more, all one body of Christ. Christ is no longer just one person who lived 2,000 years ago. Since God’s Spirit is poured out into you and me, into the world, Christ’s body is infinitely greater than just Jesus.

That means God can reach more people than Jesus did on earth, through the billions of Christs the Spirit has birthed over these 2,000 years. God can directly love more people in the flesh than Jesus did on earth, touch their lives, embrace them, feed them, heal them.

That means this body of Christ, born of the Spirit across this planet, can offer its life to the world with the same sacrificial, vulnerable love that God showed on the cross, and transform the world. This body, in such love, can dismantle systems of oppression and hatred, break down destructive patterns of racism and sexism, lead peaceful revolutions, alter the course of history, effect change that lets all God’s children live with the same rights and privileges, in peace and justice, well-fed and educated, productive and happy.

There’s nothing small about feeding thousands with two fish and five loaves. But what God can do in us, the body of Christ in the world, is so much greater, so much more transformative, so much more planetary, you can understand why Jesus says what he does.

Maybe we don’t expect this Spirit gift, either.

We can fall into a pattern of worshipping Christ Jesus and praying and focusing all our energy on what Jesus did long ago, and miss the very point of this Pentecost we now celebrate.

But the Spirit is wise, and patient, and has been working in you and in me all along, planting calls to serve, giving insights, making us into Christ’s body. You are being born into a new creation, ever more visibly a child of God, to be a part of these greater things God will do in this Body.

If Pentecost reveals anything, it’s that you are needed, you are anointed, and God’s Spirit is in you, giving birth to this Christ that we are called to be together in the world.

So don’t be surprised. Expect this. Be open to the Spirit’s moving. That’s when great things, amazing things, really start to happen.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen