Don’t claim Jesus as Messiah if you’re not willing to follow the Messiah path – a path of vulnerable, self-giving love that leads to abundant life for the creation.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 24 B
Text: Mark 8:27-38

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

“Do as I say, not as I do.”

When has that ever worked as an exhortation by a parent? It’s a cliché because it’s all too often our truth. We say things are important to us, valued by us, we say there are behaviors we expect in others. But when we don’t live like any of this, our words are hollow, our actions empty.

“Don’t tell anyone that I’m the Messiah,” Jesus “sternly” orders today. The crowds might think Jesus is Elijah or one of the prophets, or even John the Baptist, come back to life. But Peter and the disciples know the truth. Jesus is God’s Anointed One.

But Jesus doesn’t want them to tell anyone this until they understand what it means to follow the kind of Messiah Jesus is. If they don’t know what it means for their lives as well, he doesn’t want them proclaiming him Messiah and implying they are faithful followers.

Would that the Church had heeded this command more frequently over the millennia.

Far too often the Church has loudly proclaimed Jesus as the Christ while living in opposition to that very title.

The Church began as a movement from the underside of society. Jesus’ proclamation of God’s love for all, inclusivity of all peoples and genders, love of enemies, nonviolence, peacemaking, drew all sorts of people who didn’t have power or social status. Jesus’ Gospel was a liberating word of Good News for all, from those who were poor to those who were wealthy, from those who were outcast to those who were insider.

Once the Church became the dominant political force in the Roman Empire, the life of Christ, the path of self-giving love, the way of God Jesus came to teach and invite us to follow, went by the wayside. Jesus’ teachings were used to protect power and support social structures and order. Christians went from people who wouldn’t participate in war to an established Church using armies to advance its power. The cross, the sign of divine sacrificial love, became a military talisman painted on shields.

And so the Church did the Crusades, the Inquisition, countless heresy trials and executions and wars and massacres. It grew more powerful than emperors, with more armies and castles and wealth than kings dreamed of.

Don’t tell anyone I’m the Messiah, Jesus sternly ordered his disciples. Because this is what he feared would happen. Peter’s opposition to a Messiah who would willingly face death would flourish into a Church responsible for more death and destruction than almost any other institution.

“Who do you say that I am?” is more than an information question.

Jesus says that your answer to his question determines your path. If you say he is Messiah, you admit that God’s Christ went to Jerusalem, was arrested, and was brutally executed on a cross. And you claim that path for yourself.

“Don’t say who I am,” Jesus says today. “Do who I am. Live who I am.” That’s the frightening thing about today’s Gospel. If you say that Jesus is God’s Messiah, you have only one option for following, to live and love as he lives and loves. Following Jesus is denying yourself. Following Jesus is losing your life. Following Jesus is taking up a cross.

How did we ever think this was optional? There are no other paths. So, Jesus says, if you don’t want to follow me, please, please don’t tell people I’m the Messiah, lest they think you’re my followers.

Jesus’ dying on the cross isn’t an accident that Easter erases. It’s God’s path for the healing of the world.

On Friday, Holy Cross Day, we heard Paul’s claim that the cross is foolishness to the world but it is God’s deepest wisdom. God’s wisdom that this universe is created and sustained by self giving love, beginning with God’s own self-giving love in creating all things. But the cross is God’s deepest self-revelation.

The love the Triune God poured out for the world on the cross is the only love that can and will heal all things. Only self-giving, vulnerable love, given from one creature to another, brings life. Jesus’ path today isn’t a theory, it’s Jesus’ absolutely clear proclamation of how God will heal all things. Beginning with Jesus and continuing with us.

This path of losing goes against everything we think we want.

To lose our life for Jesus’ sake, as his followers, means losing things we’d rather keep close to us, protect.

Losing your life means letting go of respectability, of being well thought of, for the sake of bringing love wherever it is needed. The vulnerability of not worrying what we look like.

Losing your life means letting go of being right, of having all the answers, for the sake of being love with God’s other children. That kind of vulnerability is really hard when you’re used to winning arguments and proving others wrong.

Losing your life means letting go of being perfect, when forgiveness and grace is the only way to healing relationships. That kind of vulnerability – to admit you fail, to be willing to forgive others who fail you, no strings attached – is really frightening.

But this losing, Jesus says, is for the sake of the Good News. It leads to life.

That’s what we forget. In God’s creation, life is only found in love that gives itself away completely. The only path for a follower of Jesus is a path that is shaped like a cross. But it’s also the only path to life.

And we know because we’ve seen it. Alongside the record of the Church’s grasping for power and doing great wickedness we also have centuries, millennia of stories of followers of Christ who proclaimed the Messiah by their cross-shaped lives, their sacrificial love for others. We can’t deny the sins of the Church, but we also mustn’t forget the grace and healing that people who took the losing path for the sake of the Good News brought into the world.

They also witnessed to us the peace of mind, the gentleness of spirit, the joy of life that is only found on such a path. Think of those who have modeled this path of sacrificial love for you, who had a serenity and hope and trust that the other paths in the world can’t even dream of. These saints in our lives, and the saints the whole Church recognizes, are bright stars on this Christ path, singing to us of the abundant life we will find when we follow.

“Do as I say, not as I do” just doesn’t work for Christ people.

Jesus would tell you that it would be better not to claim who he is at all, if you don’t want to follow his path.

But if you do see that he is God’s Anointed, if you have come to know the undying love of God through Jesus’ words and grace and sacrifice, if you’ve found hope in his teaching, wisdom in his dying, and joy in his living, then take a leap, like Peter, and say, “You are the Messiah.”

And then follow on the only path where this Messiah is found. It will look a lot like losing. It will mean the death of things you may not be ready to let go of. It will feel terrifyingly vulnerable.

But trust Jesus. He’s the Messiah, after all. And this path, this cross-shaped Christ path, will bring you and all people to abundant life, and the restoring of the whole creation.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

You can’t enter into God’s wisdom until you are able to see God’s foolishness. Then you will see your life and the whole world transform in God’s love.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The feast of the Holy Cross
Texts: 1 Corinthians 1:18-24; John 3:13-17

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

You can’t enter into God’s wisdom until you can see God’s foolishness.

That’s our paradox as we gather to honor the cross of Christ by worshiping the Triune God and celebrating with Word and Sacrament this symbol of our faith.

The feast day itself is part of the problem. From the fourth century, when St. Helena supposedly discovered the true cross as her son Constantine was building a basilica, venerating the cross has been part of the Church’s liturgical life, often centered on the relic itself or parts of it, or in our case, the symbol. By the end of that century, St. Egeria reports that the cross – encased in a silver container – would be taken out of that container on Good Friday and deacons had to guard it so that pilgrims wouldn’t bite off pieces to take away when they kissed it. Within a few centuries festivals celebrating the cross had emerged and persist to today.

This is a lot of adoration – of a relic, of a symbol. Jesus’ death on a cross placed into a beautiful box to be admired. And what of us? When we reverence a beautiful gilded version of the cross, when we put one over our altar, even when we gather tonight to worship, are we doing anything other than the same?

Paul insists there is deep wisdom in the cross, wisdom that gives life to the universe. But to get to that wisdom, we need to first admit the foolishness.

You need to take the cross out of the silver box, off the gilded pole to start with.

This was a humiliating death for the Son of God. Brutal torture, extreme emotional suffering, agonizing death. None of us have the stomach to witness something like this.

But the foolishness runs deeper. Jesus of Nazareth revealed the creative power of God, with the ability to heal, to change physical reality. Jesus didn’t have to face this cross. He had power to do whatever he wanted.

But in the wilderness after his baptism he faced the lure of using power to help himself, using power to force the world to bow down to God’s ways, using power to save his own life. Once he rejected that use of divine power, the cross became inevitable. He preached and lived God’s love and grace, and when that threatened his people’s power structures, they denounced him as a political threat. Revolutionaries suffer the cross under Roman rule.

So this is the heart of the foolishness: God’s Son comes to us in love, and is not willing to set aside that love to protect himself.

This is the power of God, Paul says: weakness dying in shame. This is the wisdom of God, Paul says: foolishly risking everything out of love. That’s what we need to understand.

John agrees: the cross reveals the heart of God.

It’s easy to claim that John sees the cross as triumph and glory, and to a certain degree he does. But to read John carefully, it’s not triumph and glory as we usually understand them. It’s a triumph of losing. It’s a glory of shame. And it starts at the beginning of the Gospel.

In chapter 1 John claims the foolishness that Jesus is the living, creating Word of the eternal God, who takes on our human body. And in this embodied Word of God, John says, we see the heart of God. And nowhere more than at the cross.

John brings the cross front and center. The other Gospels introduce the cross at this Sunday’s Gospel reading, in the middle of Jesus’ ministry. John names it already in chapter 3. What we heard tonight is an astonishingly potent claim about God’s foolish ways. Jesus, God’s Son, will be lifted up on the cross because of God’s love for the whole cosmos. So that all things, all creation, including all people, will be healed.

For John, this is the reason behind all of Jesus’ ministry, and the heart of God. On the cross, Jesus says in John 12, he will draw all people to him. And since Jesus is the face of the Triune God for us, this means on the cross Jesus will draw all people into the life of the Triune God.

So it is a victory, this cross. But a victory that looks to the world like a humiliating defeat. That’s what we need to learn.

This foolish act of God reveals God’s true wisdom from before the dawn of time: life is only found in love that gives itself away completely.

The cross isn’t a doctrine that we keep in a box, guaranteeing that our sins are forgiven and we get to go to heaven. The cross is the definitive witness of the heart of God for this creation, and for all humanity. It is God’s witness of love that is, as we will hear Jesus say on Sunday, now intended to be our witness of love as well.

What Jesus – the Word of God from the beginning, the face of God – what Jesus reveals of God’s heart is that the whole universe is created and sustained by self-giving love. The creation is designed by this self-giving Word to operate by vulnerable giving of love, one creature to another. A vulnerability first shown by the Triune God in creating human beings with the free will to reject God’s love.

Yes, the cross is the sign that our sins are forgiven. But not by some legal transaction. But because the cross is the definitive revelation of God’s love. And yes, the cross is a sign of a life after we die. But not because it gives a ticket to heaven. But because the cross is the beginning of our understanding of a divine love that is willing to die, a love that then conquers death itself, a love that shapes all reality.

This is the wisdom the foolishness of the cross reveals for our lives and for the healing of the universe.

That only this kind of love – a love that looks to the world like losing – only this kind of love can transform individuals, can restore relationships, can even bring life to a world filled with death and pain. The cross is the template, the pattern of foolishness, for how we will live as Christ in the world for God’s healing of the cosmos.

Paradox can look utterly foolish. Life that dies to live. Power that finds strength in weakness. Love that loses to be found. If you don’t see this foolishness in the cross, keep looking and praying.

Because once you grasp just what God is doing for the whole cosmos at this cross, and that you are included, God’s wisdom that brings you and all things into life and joy will begin to dawn in your heart. Your path of love, shaped like a cross, will emerge. You will find, as God longs for all creatures to find, abundant life beyond your wildest dreams, and the healing of the nations.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

True worship shapes our hearts into God’s heart, and is seen in our lives of love in the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 22 B
Texts: James 1:17-27; St. Mark 7:1-23 (adding back the cuts of 9-12 and 17-19)

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

This isn’t about ritual. It’s a heart problem.

James says, “Be doers of God’s Word, not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” Jesus agrees, quoting Isaiah’s speaking for God: “this people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

James’ whole sermon addresses people who claim faith in God but don’t show such faith in their actions, particularly in caring for those in need. Jesus, like James, points to the separation between the leaders’ proclaimed faith and their real actions in the world.

This raises uncomfortable questions we’d rather avoid: does your faith change your life? Do your faith practices shape how you live as God’s ambassador in the world?

It’s a mistake to avoid that discomfort and think this is all about ritual.

Remember, the tradition the Pharisees so carefully protected intended to do exactly what Jesus wants. After the exile, the Jewish people had to learn a different way of being faithful, and following God’s Torah. Their leaders developed many traditions and rituals to help the people walk with God as God desired.

Jesus apparently allows his disciples not to do one of those traditions, to eat without doing the ritual hand-washing first, and the leaders believe this proves he’s not from God. Jesus deflects this by pointing to another problematic tradition.

“Corban” meant sacrificial offerings made to God, commanded often in the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus’ problem was obeying this command at the expense of another, more important one. So if you told your parents you couldn’t help them because you’d sacrificed your cow already and had nothing left to give, that was permitted. (But actually, the Jewish Mishnah, formulated after this Gospel was written, also does not permit this.)

Jesus cares more about the heart here. An offering to God that prevents someone from taking care of their parents shows there’s something wrong inside. It’s not about whether we wash hands or not. Jesus says that what’s inside us matters more than what we do outside.

Which becomes an important question for this congregation.

Mount Olive is very familiar with external traditions and rituals handed down over time.

Our worship is deeply rooted in the Western Catholic tradition, which was the central practice of the Lutheran reformers. In recent years we’ve also received many blessings from the East, and not just our new vicar. Decisions about the shape of our worship are always made in conversation with the great tradition.

To do this worship, we pay close attention to how we do our ritual. If, as Mark mentions today, you’re looking for rituals for washing cups and pots, we have them. Our Altar Guild handbook is 96 pages long, comprised of 13 sections. From the washing of cups and plates and linens, to the setting of the altar in all seasons, we’ve got it covered, along with beautiful photos and charts. Our handbook for liturgical servants is 26 pages long, and helps us train those who fill six or seven hundred jobs involved in leading worship through the course of a year.

So the question for us as a congregation is, to what end is all this care about ritual actions?

And our answer is, “because God is worthy of such care, worthy of such praise.”

We attend to beauty here because God is the giver of all beauty, and we seek to reflect that gift back to God. We train our liturgical servants so those who lead worship reflect our love of God by their respectful preparation. We have an extensive Altar Guild handbook because caring for the things that we use in worship is a way of caring for the God we worship, the Triune God who is worthy of all praise.

We do these things because when we worship, we sense we are standing on holy ground. Worship opens us up to the mystery of God’s presence in our lives and in this world, and feeds us with God’s Word and Sacrament for our lives in this world. We expect to meet God here. We experience in silence and in song, in Word and in Meal, in prayer and in preaching the Holy Spirit’s moving in our hearts and so we praise the God who gives us life.

But, like the Jewish people, our practices are also meant to help us know who we are and how we walk with God in this world.

So: do they? Does our practice of faith actually help us walk with God in this world? Are we doers, as well as hearers? Does honoring God with our lips actually shape our hearts?

If we do all we do here, and leave worship each week unchanged, something is seriously wrong. Tradition, ritual, worship can be rich blessings and shape us as disciples of Christ. They also can become the only thing we care about, for their own sake.

Jesus asks you to “listen, and understand” this point today: What God cares most about is what is in your heart, and how that flows out into your life. Everything evil, Jesus says, comes not from external things, not even rituals or traditions, but from inside. Your life as Christ in the world is precious to God, and changing your heart is the focus of God’s desire. Transformation from within, one person at a time, is how God intends to reign in this world.

That’s how you know your worship is faithful, when your life is transformed by it.

If you go from here different than you were before you came. If your heart is shaped by God’s grace and love when you experience it in this place, and you look different, act different. Because your heart is different.

James says today that true religion is to care for orphans and widows in distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. We’d say the same, that true liturgy shapes us into people whose lives bear witness to God’s love in concrete ways. If you leave worship today and go down the hall and are drawn to write a letter as part of Bread for the World’s offering of letters, worship has shaped your heart. If you feel compelled after worship to think carefully about your life and your assumptions, and make changes in how you live, worship has shaped your heart. If the grace of God you experience here causes you to become grace where you are out there, worship has shaped your heart.

We know this in our bones here. Because we expect to experience holy ground in this place, we’re not surprised when we experience holy ground everywhere in the world. Because we expect God’s grace to fill our hearts in this place, we’re not surprised when we experience our hearts changing into grace outside these walls. Because we expect to meet God in this place, we’re not surprised when we meet God on the streets.

This is what we seek each time we come here: new, clean, re-shaped hearts, hearts that are the heart of God.

All the sinfulness that fills your heart and mind is cleansed not for its own sake, but so you are free in God’s love to be God’s love. You live in the presence of God so that you become the presence of God in the world. All the evils Jesus lists today, all our list of society’s evils and pain and suffering, all will go away as your heart is changed, and mine, and eventually every one of God’s children.

And this new heart is pure gift from God. Every generous act of giving, James says, every perfect gift we give, is from above, from God. You already came here expecting to meet God today. Now God’s Spirit will do the rest and draw you fully into God’s life, with a new heart ready to bear God’s love to the ends of the earth.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

Is Jesus too hard to accept, or is Jesus offering abundant life like nothing you’ve ever known?

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 21 B
Text: John 6:56-69

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

Two questions rise above the Gospel today as turning points for all who hear.

Each is paired with a statement. The first begins with a statement of fact: “This teaching is difficult.” Then the question: “Who can accept it?”

The second begins with the question: “Lord, to whom can we go?” Then the statement of fact: “You have the words of eternal life.”

From these two points Jesus’ disciples divide. Those who ask the first question leave. Those who ask the second stay. And they’re all disciples, John says. We’re not hearing the hungry crowds anymore.

We face both these signposts. It’s important we realize this, since when we answer as the first group we don’t do their honest thing and leave. We stick around, acting as if we’re on board with Christ’s path. While inwardly, there are places we won’t let the Spirit lead.

And it isn’t just Jesus’ teachings on flesh and blood that are difficult.

In our path of discipleship, we resist or reject Jesus more than we realize.

Maybe it is this incarnational teaching we’ve focused on for over a month. It isn’t easy to accept that you take in your body the body and blood of God’s Son, and are changed. You can spiritualize Holy Communion all you want, but Jesus will insist on saying it will completely transform you from within.

Maybe Jesus’ insistence on losing your attachment to your possessions is your sticking point. St. Francis may have given away everything and followed, but you’re not so sure. Financial security, protecting your house, voting for things that keep your stock accounts growing, not thinking of those who suffer as a result, maybe this is Jesus’ hard teaching.

It could be sacrificial love. The cross-shaped path Jesus invites you to follow is a challenging path. To let go of your pride in service to another, to genuinely forgive for no reason other than love, to offer yourself, no matter how inconvenient, to help someone, these are hard to accept. We’re conditioned to look out for ourselves.

And what of Jesus’ teaching that all are loved and welcomed in God, all are valuable and precious? Can you look at your innate racism and prejudice (because most of us have it), and let the Spirit really clear that out? Are you ready for Jesus to challenge your inmost assumptions?

This teaching is hard; who can accept it?

Pay attention to this crisis point for so many of Jesus’ disciples, and ask if you feel the same. It doesn’t mean that you don’t find hope and joy somewhere in all of Jesus’ teaching. Those who left had loved Jesus’ teaching enough to become disciples. But when Jesus insists on following completely, as he always does, do you hesitate?

Yes, I’ll give some of my wealth to charity, to my church. But Jesus says, can you lose all your attachment to material things? Yes, I’ll try to be kinder to those who aren’t like me. But Jesus says, can you be honest about your participation in unjust systems that perpetuate racism or sexism, your complicity that makes kindness not seem nearly enough?

Jesus is a hard teacher, no question. It’s all or nothing: all your heart, soul, strength, and mind in love of God. All your life in love to neighbor. All of yourself on Christ’s path. Don’t start to plow, Jesus says, and quit part way.

But wait before despairing. Before you walk, hear Peter today.

He asks the question you need to ask: “Master, where else can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

This is the other corner in this Gospel. You follow Jesus, you come here to worship the Triune God whose face Jesus reveals in person. You seek life in Christ because something in you knows you’ve never heard anything like what Christ offers anywhere else.

“Eternal life” is in your words, Jesus, Peter says. Remember, this is before Jesus’ death and resurrection. They aren’t following Jesus so they’ll live in heaven after they die. They have no idea what’s coming. Easter is a surprise and a joyful one.

But eternal life – this they sense in Jesus right now. “Life of the ages” it could translate. Abundant life, Jesus calls it. A life of meaning and purpose. Filled with hope and trust. Where peace fills one’s heart in the midst of the worst chaos. A life shaped by knowing you are forgiven and loved forever. A life, as Jesus keeps saying, lived in the heart of God’s life.

That’s what Peter is starting to sense. Hard as Jesus is to understand and harder yet as he is to follow, something Peter can witness to firsthand, Jesus is life. To hear him, to be with him, is to hear God, to be with God. To follow him is to learn a way of living that is unlike anything you’ve ever known.

These are the points of turning.

Many of Jesus’ disciples leave. They haven’t even seen the cross, faced the worst of doubt and fear. But they know they can’t do this teaching, or be shaped by it.

The others, more than just twelve, stay. They will be traumatized by what is to come, and astounded by what comes after that trauma. They will experience being filled by the very Spirit of God and changed dramatically. They will witness with their lives, some with their deaths, to the eternal love of God that is life right now. And because of Easter, they will also proclaim that bonus joy, that there is life after we die, too.

But right now, all they can say is, “We have nowhere else we’ve ever found such life.” They stay, because in Jesus’ difficult words they hear truth and forgiveness and hope and love and life.

So how will you answer?

Before you do, though, remember one more question and answer from God’s Word. The flawed King David, whose family story we’ve followed all summer, once sang a question and answer you need to sing now: “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139)

And his answer was, I can’t. If I turn away because your teaching is too hard, and lie down in death’s darkness, you’re still there. If I turn to you in hope because I find life in your words, ascend to heaven, you are also there.

Whichever disciple in this Gospel reading you imitate, there is One who will never turn away from you. Those who walked away from Jesus, well, Jesus never walked away from them. If you turn away, God will still be there, will still surround you, watch over you, and never take away the love that is yours.

Jesus’ teachings are hard. So hard that Jesus let himself be executed to live them out. But that unimaginable love, God poured out in death to draw all people, all people, even those who turn away, back into God’s life, that’s the answer to the only question that matters.

And if you realize you’ve never found any life like the life you’ve found in God through Christ, then rejoice. Because that life of the ages, the abundant life God dreams for all God’s children, will fill you until you, too, understand and follow even the most difficult of God’s teachings. Until you are in God and God in you, and all together with the whole creation in eternal love and life.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen