Christ calls us to look to the cross, and understand both God’s love and our own path. Let’s not be afraid to ask for understanding.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 25 B
Text: Mark 9:30-37; James 3:13 – 4:3, 7-8a

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

The disciples didn’t understand what Jesus was saying.

But they were afraid to ask him.

Of course they were. The last time Jesus predicted his death, Peter challenged Jesus as to the propriety of a Messiah being killed. No one needed a reminder of how devastating Jesus’ rebuke of Peter was.

Now Jesus predicts his death again. No one wanted to ask. Instead, they argued on the road about which one of them was the greatest.

Do you see the irony? Jesus speaks of giving himself up, and they talk about who’s most important among them. They act as if he didn’t say anything about suffering and dying, and get distracted by something else.

But hear Jesus’ response.

Jesus answers Peter’s criticism by calling everyone who follows him to take up a cross, to deny themselves, to be willing to lose all. We heard Jesus say last week that if you don’t think Messiahs should take this path, then know this: it’s not just for me. It’s for all who follow me.

Today Jesus responds to frivolous chatter about which of them is greatest in a similar way. Jesus says if you really want to be first among my followers, be last. Be a servant of all.

It’s clear they don’t understand this any better. But do we? And if we don’t, or perhaps don’t want to, are we also afraid to ask, afraid that then Jesus would become all too clear?

We’ve been hearing sayings like this from Jesus all our lives. So what are we Christians nattering about as we walk along the way?

Like the disciples, we’re talking about a lot. Unlike them, it’s mostly important things. Churchwide debates over Biblical authority, church order, sexuality. Church meetings in this city about how to address homelessness and poverty and starvation of far too many of God’s children among us. Workshops and meetings about the church’s problem with racism. Handwringing about membership decline in mainline churches, and proposed strategies.

Many of these things are important. We want to be faithful to God’s hope for the world. So we focus on how to do that, on strategy and plans, marketing and awareness.

But when was the last time you ever heard of a Christian group – national, local, congregational – have a focused debate, workshop, or strategy, on servanthood? We have committees at Mount Olive caring for our property, our worship, our stewardship, our ministry with youth and families, our mission, and more. All are important tasks.

But we don’t have a committee for cross-bearing. A director for servanthood. People to lead this congregation in understanding what Jesus asks of his followers, people to help us learn openness to the Holy Spirit so that God might change our hearts into servant hearts in every aspect of our lives.

They didn’t understand Jesus, and were afraid to ask. Can we learn from this?

If we read the New Testament, issues like the ones that dominate Christian thoughts and planning and strategy are deeply important, but are secondary to a greater understanding of what Christ came to do and to call us to be. Each of the three times Jesus predicts his death, he then calls his followers to a servant life like his. After his resurrection, he keeps at this core to his preaching and teaching. The New Testament writers all echo this center.

Jesus says two things in these predictions: Look to the cross. Understand what God is doing there. And then, follow the same way.

We struggle to understand how the cross and our following with a cross is the heart of everything for Jesus. When we think of the cross, it’s rarely to consider our daily decisions and actions. But that’s where Jesus always goes with it.

And thanks be to God, these disciples eventually did understand, and in the writings in the New Testament, they share what they’ve understood about this call of Jesus to follow, so we can understand. Today we hear from James.

It’s a wisdom from above, James says.

This servant heart is given us in the Spirit, comes from God. It is pure, peaceable. Gentle. Willing to yield. Full of mercy and good fruits. It has no trace of partiality or hypocrisy.

The New Testament describes this kind of wisdom again and again, and gives concrete ways to recognize when one is living in it. These writers take Jesus’ call and help us see how it might look to live that way.

And they help us see that all the things we talk about, those concerns of God for the world that we want to help with, flow from this new reality. That if this was the wisdom you sought from God, you’d be changed in such a way that doing the work God needs in the world would come naturally. If you asked to be made peaceable and gentle. If you asked the Spirit to teach you to be willing to yield to others, and to be full of mercy. If you asked God to take away any partiality you had or hypocrisy.

When we are changed into servants, cross-bearers, then we become part of God’s healing of all things. That’s the plan.

Do you understand? Are you afraid to ask Jesus if you don’t?

That’s OK. Jesus has a lot of experience with disciples who get distracted, who misunderstand. Like all the other lists that describe the path of Christ in Scripture, this is a vulnerable place to go, a vulnerable place to be. Jesus said it today, “be last, not first. Be servant to all.” It will take courage – heart strength – to do it, which comes only from God.

But that’s at the center of all of this: God wants to give this to you, James says. The love shown by the Triune God at the cross – where Jesus keeps telling you to look – isn’t just a model. It’s the power of God to enter your life and help you, change you, so you actually follow the model.

And remember: You’re not in this alone. Joined together in Baptism and God’s love, with the Spirit’s help, we can help each other lose our fear of asking, get the clarity we need from God, and the courage to take the path of Christ ourselves.

That’s something worth talking about as we walk this road together.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

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