God’s sign of the healing of the universe is a baby: and when we understand that, we begin to learn patience, and so to find hope for all things.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The eve of the Nativity of Our Lord
Text: Luke 2:1-20; also using: James 5:7a; Romans 8:24a, 25

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

“Be patient, beloved, until the coming of the Lord,” James urges. (James 5:7a)

But who wants to be patient for this coming anymore? How much longer will this world struggle with injustice and oppression? How much more will God allow before doing something?

“Be patient,” say all those in power, all who are privileged, all who oppress, “things can’t change all at once.” But in those voices, “be patient” is just a way to stop reform, to shut down voices who cry out for justice, to hinder progress.

Tonight we celebrate that the Triune God of all time and space, the creator and lover of all things, has become human, has joined our life here, and is bringing peace, and healing, and restoration. God’s mercy is among us and God’s promises are being fulfilled. But it’s hard to see many signs of “peace on earth, good will to all” in our world. What are we to do? Be patient?

Paul says to his church in Rome: “For in hope we were saved. . . . But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” (Romans 8:24a, 25) “All earth is hopeful,” we sing, but all earth doesn’t always see that God is doing anything. Paul’s wisdom is that patience is born from such hope in the unseen. Paul says patience, one of the Spirit’s fruits, is a good thing.

Can “be patient” be words of hope for us as well?

We may not have an option to patience, given how we know God works.

Any talk of God “doing something” falls apart when we actually ask just how that would happen. Do we want God as superhero, powerfully flying in to stop whatever evil or oppression or wickedness needs stopping? We’ve never seen God do that before.

Do we want God as ruler, somehow affecting political systems, maybe even changing elections? It’s doubtful any of us believe God manipulates in that way.

And what of miracles? We pray for them, especially for healing, and sometimes God does them. Many times God doesn’t. And what miraculous fix could God do to make our society and world more at peace? Destroy all weapons from above?

The problem with our impatience is that if we want God to restore things immediately, the only options are forcibly changing this world in some way. And that’s not how we’ve known God to work, it’s not how the Scriptures say God works. Virtually no religion in the world believes that.

But let’s come back to tonight. Shepherds on a Judean hillside were told “good news of great joy”: God had come to save, to bring peace to all. But this was the sign they were given: Go look for a baby. Not a superhero or a politician or a miracle-worker. “Peace to all” starts with a baby.

This baby wasn’t part of the earliest hope of the Church.

The earliest Christian writing and records of early Christian worship focus on Easter, Christ’s humiliation and degradation and death on a cross, and rising from the dead in glory. The proclamation of God’s breaking of death’s power and making a new reality in Christ for the whole universe was central.

But at some point, believers also began to ponder where Jesus of Nazareth came from. He didn’t appear suddenly as a 30-year-old on the banks of the Jordan. And this wonder emerged: this crucified and risen Jesus, this Word of God, this eternal Christ, began his ministry on this earth not as teacher, healer, or even Savior. He began as a baby.

Of course, that’s obvious. He had to have been born. But by the time of Luke’s writing this is called Good News: the sign of God’s peace on earth, the sign of the beginning of God’s salvation and healing for all things, the only thing the shepherds were told to look for, is a baby in a manger.

And that sign can only be known and grasped with patience.

Once a baby begins inside her mother, there are nearly nine months of speculation and wonder and waiting for the arrival. There’s no rushing this. Then when the baby arrives, for weeks and weeks little happens, just small indicators of change. Then there are growing teeth; making sounds, then words; crawling, then walking. The independent mind appears, then the teen years, and the pre-frontal cortex development, and finally a grown human being. Watching and waiting for what a person will become from conception onward requires the deepest of patience.

Because a baby is all about potential. Certainly growing into something that’s new every day. But initially, and for many years, a baby is promised hope, potential energy.

This is your sign of God’s salvation, the angel sang. Look for a baby. Begun, but not yet fully realized, life.

This sign says God’s salvation of this universe is an inside job, not a rescue mission.

The groundwork of God’s coming was patiently laid for centuries before Bethlehem. And when God’s Son finally came, after nine months of gestation, there were thirty years of growing, before ever a word of proclamation was uttered. The Triune God was willing to wait a long time.

That’s patience. And then even after the resurrection and Pentecost, it became obvious this was a slow play by God. Twenty years after Pentecost, thirty, forty, Rome still ruled, people did evil, disease plagued, poverty was rampant. Maybe some of the mentions of the second coming of Christ in the New Testament came from people losing patience with the speed of God’s healing salvation. Come a second time, God, but this time as a fully grown Savior who will rule in power and do something.

But God’s sign says, look at the baby and ponder what that means. In God’s patient willingness to arrive as an infant child, we see the whole of God’s plan. All things will be healed from within the creation, one person at a time. The least important part of what Jesus did in his whole ministry was the miracles. Superpowers and miraculous force aren’t part of God’s plan. Teaching and modeling God’s love, calling people one at a time, revealing the depth and strength of God’s love at the cross, rising to bring new life, sending the Holy Spirit to keep this love spreading, that’s the plan.

God’s desire to love the creation back into the Triune life of God can only happen in this glacial, maddeningly slow way. When your heart is transformed and you start beaming out God’s radiant light, a little more each hour, each day. When that light of God’s love spreads from you and lights another, little by little, day by day. It may not look like much at first. And maybe not for a long time. But eventually love’s light will dawn over the whole creation.

You can learn a lot about patience waiting on a baby.

But remember this: in that patience, that long-suffering waiting, that watching for signs of growth and maturing and doing, there is great hope.

Because peace on earth goodwill to all is on the move. God’s healing has begun. We’ve seen signs of it growing and spreading for 2,000 years. Now it is within you, flickering around the outside of your heart, moving its way into your core. As long as it will take God to change you, that’s just a glimpse of how long it will take God to change the world.

But look at the baby. That’s your sign. Ponder, let the Spirit grow patience in you, and be of good cheer. Because there is hope, and this sign is good news of great joy for all the people. Not least of which for you yourself.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

In this multilayered visitation between Mary, Elizabeth, their sons, and the Triune God, we find guides for our lives of waiting and hoping, and promise of how we, too, might delight in God’s promised mercy.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourth Sunday of Advent, year C
Text: Luke 1:39-45 (plus 46-47)

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

We don’t hear from the boys today, and that’s a blessing.

Advent is lots of listening to John and Jesus, familiar voices, voices that sometimes disagree with each other about what God’s coming will be like. From apocalyptic warnings to threats to calls to bear fruits of repentance, so far Advent has been ringing with the voices of these two men.

Not today. Today we have the gift of sitting with two pregnant women, basking in their kindness and grace to each other. The boys are here, but they’re voiceless and hidden, in utero; they have no lines in this scene. Elizabeth and Mary radiate hope and joy, and to be in their presence is a delight.

Elizabeth and Mary are also far better companions for our Advent waiting on God. Jesus and John don’t always feel approachable, the fiery Baptist and the Savior of the world. But it’s easy to imagine sitting in a kitchen with Mary and Elizabeth, listening to the voices of these women who in more ways than one carry inside themselves hope for God’s healing of all things.

This visitation of Mary to Elizabeth is richly layered.

Newly-pregnant Mary is visiting her relative, Elizabeth, fresh off meeting Gabriel. She goes far south to Judea to be with someone who can help her sort out what she’s feeling, what she’ll do. She’s clearly not there for pregnancy support or to hide her condition: Mary leaves after three months, just when she’s beginning to show, just as Elizabeth is ready to deliver. What Mary needs is wisdom, comfort, perspective.

Elizabeth, in turn, receives great joy from her delightful cousin. Her son leaps inside her at the arrival of Mary. Mothers know the movements of their babies, and Elizabeth knew this was different than the usual kicks. This baby leapt at the coming of God’s Messiah, and his mother was filled with joy. And now she has someone to share this joy, someone who understands what it is to face such unknowing, someone with whom she can spend three blessed months together.

This is our first sign that we want to be like Elizabeth and Mary. They need each other. They both face realities they weren’t prepared for, they both need to process what God is doing in them and with them. Together, they find support, and love, and wisdom, and joy as they wait and wonder. Together, so do we.

This is also a visitation of the Triune God amongst and within these two.

Elizabeth is the first person in Luke’s Gospel and its sequel about whom we are told, “she was filled with the Holy Spirit,” and she’s not the last. For Luke, the entrance of the Holy Spirit into humanity, just as the Spirit lived and breathed in Jesus, is the promise of God’s empowering of a new creation. Before Elizabeth, in Luke, Gabriel promises to Zechariah that before John was even born, he’d be filled with the Holy Spirit, and promises to Mary that her son’s conception would be by the Holy Spirit.

But Elizabeth is the first of many to come whose moment of being filled with the Holy Spirit is actually told. She also carries her Spirit-filled unborn son within her. And Mary carries the child begun by the Spirit. This little Judean house, on these seats by the hearth, glows with the light of God’s coming, the fire of the Spirit’s breath, as if it were the Day of Pentecost itself.

This is our second sign that Elizabeth and Mary are our guides. Beautiful, ordinary women, they are the first to reveal the joy and blessing of when the Holy Spirit of God comes into us. They show us what God’s Spirit looks like in us.

Here’s another layer to this visitation: together they see God better.

Both have questions about their own suitability. Mary asks Gabriel, “how can this be, that I would carry God’s Son?” Elizabeth says, “why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord has come?” Apart, they aren’t sure they’re worthy of this.

But together they witness to each other, confirm that God has come, that the other is honored. Elizabeth sees Mary, feels John leap, and declares Mary blessed among all women, the mother of God. How reassuring that must have been for Mary, full of questions, to hear!

And Mary’s coming also confirms Elizabeth’s place in God’s blessing. As her own child leapt, Elizabeth is filled with confidence that God indeed is working in her.

This is our third sign that we want to walk with Mary and Elizabeth: alone, we can’t always see God moving in us, we can’t often believe we’re worth something to God, or useful. But together, as the Spirit fills us, we witness to the presence of God we see in each other, we declare each other’s worth in God’s eyes, we leap for joy at the blessings we see God doing in each other.

Hear the voices of these women God has visited, and know God’s visitation yourself.

Elizabeth says: “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

Listen to her, listen to Mary, their wisdom is for you, to help you believe. Watch, and do what they do: visit each other, love each other, find delight in what God is doing in each other. Elizabeth and Mary stand before you as signs of what God has done, and what God is doing. The world will be turned upside down, they sing[1], those who are hungry will be filled with good things, those who are poor will find all they need, those who are lowly will be lifted up and honored. Power will be turned on its head. God’s promise of mercy for this broken world will come to pass.

This is the song these women sing as witness. And they sing this song for you. So you also might share their delight and joy, their comfort and hope in God’s healing coming to all things. Blessed are you to believe that God will fulfill what God has promised to do in you, in the body of Christ, in the world.

In the name of Jesus. Amen

[1] Some ancient Latin versions of Luke give the Magnificat to Elizabeth instead of Mary. Perhaps they sang this grace together!

 

Turning our lives toward the warmth and light of God’s gut-level love is joy and hope and in this turning the Spirit creates fruits in us that spread this dawning love.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Third Sunday of Advent, year C
Texts: Luke 3:7-18; Philippians 4:4-7; Zephaniah 3:14-20

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

What do you think these people expected as they came down to the river?

Were they looking for spectacle, a wild prophet from the desert? Did they hope to hear from God, as with prophets of old? Did they think they would be changed?

John’s baptism was for repentance. It was repeatable, it symbolized cleansing, and it showed a desire to return to God’s path, to repent.

John’s preaching about this leaves something to be desired, though. These people willingly come to hear him, to be baptized, even confess, and he calls them a family of snakes. If you really want to turn someone around, insults don’t usually do it. They either raise defenses or crush with shame.

But his point is valid: if you’ve come to the Jordan to be baptized, washed ritually clean, as a sign of your turning toward God and away from your sin, there should be something different in you.

You’re going to be dry in a couple hours, John basically says. After that, will there be any other signs of what happened to you in the river today that people can see? Any visible fruits of this turning around?

What’s lovely about Luke’s telling is here the people ask for help with this.

Three times someone asks, “What should we do?” They’re willing to be changed. They want to live in God’s ways.

Last week Zechariah promised that God’s dawn will break on the world, a dawn of the gut-level mercy and love of the Triune God. John would prepare people for that. So, the people said, “John, give us some ideas. How can we walk in this new way, prepared for the dawn of God’s love? What will we look like?”

What would happen if every morning you awoke and asked yourself the same question? “What can I do today as a visible sign that God walks with me, that I’m seeking God’s path?” How would your life change if that was your morning routine along with bathing?

Here’s another lovely thing: John’s answer isn’t fiery or harsh.

It’s beautifully simple. To the crowds, John says, “Look, if you’ve got two coats, can you wear both? No? Give one to someone who doesn’t have one. And if you’re storing up food, please stop. Share what you can’t eat with those who are hungry.”

To the tax collectors, hated collaborators with the Romans, John doesn’t tell them to quit. He says, “If you want to show fruits of repentance, how about you stop cheating people when you collect the emperor’s taxes? Just collect what’s due.”

To the soldiers, ever-present signs of oppression, John doesn’t offer rebuke or tell them to leave Israel. He says, “How about you stop knocking people over the head to get money? If you want to show fruits of repentance, stop extorting. Maybe stop making up charges against innocent people. Oh, and quit whining about your pay.”

These aren’t earth-shattering acts. He’s just saying, “could you be kind, share what you have, be gracious to people? Be decent people.” Jesus would later say, “Love God and love neighbor.” Simple. Easy to remember.

And even though such fruits seem simple, they will change the world. God is counting on it.

But there are two questions you and I still need to answer.

First, do you want to change?

Can you even consider asking every morning, “What can I do to visibly walk in God’s way today?”

We long for God’s grace and love, and last week we heard that repentance is turning into the warmth and light of God’s gut-level love for us and the cosmos. But John reminds, such a turning away from sin into God’s way means changes.

Some are general changes, that apply to most of us. This fall, we heard much from Jesus about letting go of everything. John’s call to the whole crowd to give one of your two coats away and share your food is more general wisdom like that. It’s for all of us, we who hoard so much, who cling to our wealth and possessions, this exhortation to let go of things we don’t need.

But some of these changes will be concrete and specific, different for you perhaps than for me. Like these two specific professions John speaks to, we each will have our own specific fruits to show, actions that reveal we are turning toward God.

But the question is, do you want to change?

And second, if you are willing to be changed, how on earth can you do this?

That’s the grace John’s preaching reaches in the end. He says One is coming after him – the One we know as Christ Jesus – with a different baptism, of water and the Holy Spirit, and fire.

Fire, because there is chaff and waste on the kernel of goodness God has made in us. As you turn, there are things in your life and heart that aren’t compatible with bearing God’s gut-level love in the world. God will gladly burn those away. It will sting; but it will clean.

The Holy Spirit is the other gift. The premise of Luke’s Gospel is simple. Jesus, as God’s Son, is obviously filled with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit moves in the Son even as he lives as a human being. Luke claims this empowers Jesus to bring good news to those who are poor, healing to those in pain, freedom to those captive.

But in Luke’s sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, Luke promises the same gift of the Holy Spirit to you and me. What the Spirit empowers in Jesus, the Spirit we received in baptism empowers in us. Your fruits, the writers of the New Testament also joyfully proclaim, flow out of the life of the Spirit in you. Luke also takes the time to remind us that with the Spirit it’s not all about axes on fruitless trees. Jesus told a parable about this, Luke says in chapter 13. The owner wants to cut down a fruitless tree, just as John said would happen, and the gardener says, no, let me dig around it and manure it for a few years and see what I can nurture. That’s the Spirit’s work: digging in your heart, putting in the manure that will feed your soul and bring out visible fruits that show you’re turned toward God. If you want to turn to God, the Spirit will gladly make the changes happen in you.

And that’s the source of all the joy this Third Sunday of Advent always sings about.

Luke concludes today with, “So, with many other exhortations, John proclaimed the good news to the people.” That’s what these fruits are, this life of the Spirit in you. Good news. They aren’t complicated: be kind, be generous, be gracious, share, love. But Luke’s right: this dawning of God’s love in you is Good News. Gospel. Salvation itself, for you and the world.

And Zephaniah today, with Paul, urges you to rejoice and exult in this healing and salvation. But did you hear? The prophet says that God, too, rejoices and exults in you! When you turn from sin into God’s love, and the Spirit bears fruit in you of that gut-level love, flowing that love into the world, it not only heals the world. It brings God joy and delight!

So rejoice. God is with you. What love of God does the Spirit empower you to show in your life today to bring you joy? And what kind of joy will you give the Triune God by doing that?

In the name of Jesus.  Amen