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

 

God-in-the-flesh is God in the messiness of our animal bodies and lives, and in this Incarnation God will save and restore all things.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 20 B
Text: John 6:51-58

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

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.”

There’s something shocking about hearing Jesus say this. Not because it’s a new idea. Every week at Eucharist I retell the story of the meal. Jesus said, “Take and eat, this is my body.” “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” But maybe we’ve heard that formula so often it doesn’t strike us as strongly as Jesus’ words here.

Because Jesus here isn’t just shocking. He’s almost disgusting. It’s even more so in Greek. Instead of using one of two very common, very frequently used words for eating, three times here John uses a third word, a word that’s only found once in the New Testament outside of John. Instead of “eat,” a better translation is “gnaw, chew, devour.” It usually describes how animals eat. So Jesus really says, “Those who gnaw my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.”

What kind of decent God talks about faith and life like that?

Well, in Scripture, God gets into far greater indecency.

On Christmas Eve in the late 1970s a friend of mine read the Christmas Gospel from Today’s English Version, a new translation speaking in everyday language. He read aloud that Mary was “pregnant.” After the service, a furious parishioner made it clear that sort of language didn’t ever belong in church.

Hold back from laughing too quickly. When did you last consider that the manger scene was full of blood and water, sweat and smells? That’s what happens when a baby is born. God-with-us in the middle of lots of things decent people don’t talk about publicly.

And what of the crucifixion? Do you ever envision what it really was like? The smell of bodies transfixed in fear, covered in sweat. People who are executed often soil themselves as they die. Blood is everywhere. This is where you see the Son of God.

Incarnation isn’t a polite theology. God-in-the-flesh means God in the mess, bodily fluids, smells, human life. Flesh and blood for real. Jesus evacuated his bowels and bladder every day. There wasn’t a portable shower following him around. This is what God Incarnate means.

What kind of decent God would permit this? What kind of decent pastor would preach about this?

It’s not just God. Our culture is squeamish about the reality and mess of our own animal bodies.

Funerals have changed from families carefully washing and preparing their loved ones to professionals sweeping them out of our sight. Anything that happens behind the bathroom door with the fan on is off limits to talk about. We won’t admit that we age, embarrassed to say we need hearing aids, or to be seen with a cane. What would people think?

Polite conversation is fine. Talking about our smells and fluids and dying bodies isn’t conducive to a dinner conversation. But if we’re so squeamish about the very real bodies we have, we’re separated from the gift of God our lives can be, the gift to us of God’s Incarnation. And our lives are deeply diminished.

That’s because intimacy and love live in the reality and mess of our bodies.

The one who has to deal with flesh and blood, with bodily fluids and smells of another, is the one most intimate to them. You like holding someone else’s baby because someone else has to change the diaper.

But when a child is sick in the night, has found a way to vomit between the mattresses and in other impossible places, the one who loves that child, who has already smelled and wiped that child countless times, is the one who washes sheets at two a.m., finds clean pajamas, wipes the walls, tucks the child in.

Near the end of my beloved uncle’s life, several times I needed to help him with some very intimate issues, something neither he nor I ever imagined would happen. Most of us dread the time when someone has to do this for us in our aging. But in those moments I realized the holiness of our broken, messy, fluid-producing bodies, how in these moments of truth we really understand what love can be.

Flesh and blood, all those things decent people don’t talk about: they’re where we experience true love. And where the Holy and Triune God enters into our bodies.

God’s Word took on our human flesh, not a sanitized version of humanity.

The Word became flesh and lived among us. Mary, a real woman, experienced the Son of God sitting on her bladder during her ninth month and making her very uncomfortable. God’s Word had all our aches and pains and smells and fluids and embarrassing noises. Was truly human.

Becoming one of us, God says, “Did you not believe me in Genesis 1 when I declared all this – everything about your fleshliness – good? Did you not believe that I still thought it good when in John 1 you learned that I took this flesh on myself, for your life? Did you not hear what Peter was told in Acts, that you may not call something unclean that I have called clean?”

God takes on every aspect of our humanity, and redeems it all as decent, good. Even the parts we call ugly. And now we can hear what Jesus says that means for the whole creation.

Jesus says that if God can enter our human reality, God can enter the very stuff of creation.

Flesh and blood are no different from bread and wine. Gnaw on that bread. Guzzle that wine. Take it in you and understand, but don’t try too hard to reason this out, Jesus says. Just chew. Drink. Feel how this is God’s life for you.

Saying that the eternal and Triune God can be present in such basic things as bread and wine is just as shocking as the rest of what Jesus says today. We try to deflect that shock with doctrine. We mumble things like “transubstantiation; consubstantiation; real presence; in, with, and under.” As if we can explain this.

But if we simply trust Jesus’ word while we gnaw on the bread, and drink the wine, trust that God is not only in Jesus’ messy body but in these lovely, tasty things, a new truth begins to emerge.

That God can also be in you, and me.

If God can be present in Jesus’ human, unsanitary body, and if Jesus says God is also present in simple bread and wine, then God can be in you.

Not a sanitized version of you. You after a shower, with your favorite clothes on and your hair the way you like it. As if you don’t own a toilet, don’t ever soil your clothes. As if you’ve never had a bad thought, or guilt and shame in your heart.

No. You are Christ, God is incarnate in you as you are, messy, smelly, broken, foolish inside and out.

No decent God would ever want to be embodied in you or in me. But who said God was decent?

And now God sends you out as witness in your body.

You go out with God in you, messy and flawed, and witness by your very body, your vulnerability, that God is in all things and in you. That love is incarnate. So that those who meet you might also find this wonder for themselves.

You have gifts, too. Blessings. Strengths you are uniquely prepared to offer the world as Christ. But today remember that all the things you’re not thrilled about seeing in yourself are holy gift, too. I give you my flesh and blood, messy as that is, for your eternal life, Jesus says. I give you as my flesh and blood, messy as you are, for the life of the world.

Do you see why you are so needed? God’s love can only be known in the flesh. Not through books or institutions. Through the flesh and blood and life of a child of God witnessing by their messy presence to the love of the eternal God for the whole creation.

Do you understand how this can change the world?

It’s indecent, really, how joyfully God enters into the depths of creation, into you and me. But this is a holy indecency that will save all things.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

God is drawing us into each other and into Christ, and joined together, all our hunger and thirst is truly satisfied.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 19 B
Texts: Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2; John 6:35, 41-51

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

Is Jesus really telling hungry and poor people that they should stop worrying about where their next meal is coming from?

It sounds like it. These four weeks we’re focused on just one day, the day after thousands were fed. Last week the crowds wanted another meal. That’s not out of line. Jesus showed he can do it, and yesterday’s meal was gone.

But last week Jesus told them not to worry about perishable food, or hope for daily food from God like the Israelites’ manna. Basically, Jesus told a bunch of hungry folks that looking for more food was misguided. Instead, we hear today, he said “believe in me – I’m the true bread from heaven. Those who come to me will never be hungry; those who believe in me will never be thirsty.”

Little wonder lots of people left. Many of the thousands who followed Jesus around the Sea of Galilee after the miraculous picnic were poor, working long hours to provide food for their families. If God could take away just that one worry, what a blessing that would be.

This is hard. Jesus uses hunger and thirst, real problems in our world, to imagine a new life of faith. So we need to know if Jesus isn’t really being uncaring. And then, what truth is he trying to get us to see? And that’s not easy, even for people like us who don’t live with food insecurity or water shortages.

To start with, we’re never going to understand Jesus if we don’t better understand our real hunger and thirst.

Our old assumptions about what we need and want need to be transformed. Our world has taught us to long for things that aren’t good for us – wealth, possessions, things that we think benefit us, and actually cost someone else. We need to change from that.

Think of actual food tastes. When you were a child, there were foods you’d have loved to eat all the time, but wouldn’t have given you good nutrition, would be damaging to eat all the time. As a child, I dreamed of getting myself secretly locked into Woolworth’s overnight and having free reign of the lunch counter and the soda fountain. How many milkshakes, burgers, and fries could I go through? But we grow up, and mostly learn to eat food that really is good for us.

And now Jesus invites us to grow into another new way. He uses the idea of hunger and thirst to help us change because we understand those realities. Jesus says we have deep needs that only God can fill. Not for food or money or possessions. Things we really hunger for but often don’t realize it.

This is the heart of Jesus’ words to the crowds after the meal: God wants to draw you into God, where you’ll find all you really need.

Today Jesus says, “No one comes to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me.” So if faith is being drawn into God by God, Christ the Son then draws us into each other in the same way. Paul’s beautiful description today of our new life comes from being transformed into one new reality together. We become, Paul says today, members of each other.

This is amazingly radical. We’re culturally conditioned to think of ourselves as individuals. Your life is your own, mine is mine. So we hunger and thirst to help ourselves most times. Yes, we have community, friends, family. But for centuries we have taught and lived that ultimately you only have yourself.

But everything Jesus taught, everything Paul proclaimed, assumes the exact opposite. In Christ there is no life of the individual. You are not you apart from me. You belong to me. I belong to you. And we all belong to Christ, and are made into Christ.

Christ’s teachings of faith and life make no sense if we think we’re individuals. They only make sense if we’re all connected. Joined together we then find our deepest hungers and thirsts that can be filled forever in Christ.

When God transforms us into a shared body, our hunger and thirst become for the good of all.

If my knee is damaged, it hurts my whole body, how I walk, sleep, sit. I can’t ignore it as if it’s not my problem. If we could imagine the body of Christ that way – and Paul certainly has tried to help us do this – our lives would never be the same.

That’s why Jesus redirects the crowds away from their very real hunger and thirst. Not because he doesn’t care about their bellies. But because if they see each other as one body in Christ, no one will ever go hungry again. That’s what he taught with the miraculous feeding: all belong, all matter. If one hurts, all hurt.

So knowing in faith we are all part of each other, we find our deepest hunger and thirst is for justice. If any of God’s children are in pain – from hunger, oppression, disease, racism, sexism, violence – so are we. We are as affected as if our own bodies were in that pain. And because God’s abundance of resources, community, and love are meant for all, our hunger for justice will be satisfied when we live into our new reality of being one body with each other in Christ where all are cared for.

The surprise of belonging to each other in God is that our own personal hungers are also filled forever.

At our core, we hunger to belong. None of us wants to think we’re alone, that we don’t matter to someone. Well, you’re part of me, and I of you, and all of us with all God’s children on earth. Your hunger for belonging is forever satisfied.

At our core, we hunger for love. Love that can overlook our flaws, love that brings light and joy to our hearts. Well, you’re part of me, and I of you, and we are joined to Christ whose love for the world and for you broke death’s power forever. If we are members of each other, if we are joined in that love to all God’s children on earth, your hunger for love is forever satisfied.

At our core, we hunger for a purpose. We deeply hope to make a difference, to matter. Well, you’re part of me, and I of you, and we are joined to all God’s children on earth. Each of us is vital to each of us. At every moment you matter to the body of Christ, you have something to offer. And your hunger for purpose is forever satisfied.

So this is Jesus’ invitation: let God draw you into God – God’s life, God’s love.

You’ll be changed. You’ll stop seeing yourself as an individual, and begin to feel your connection to all people, all creatures, the whole creation. You’ll hunger and thirst for new things. Not selfish, material things like the world teaches you to want.  Real things. Things that matter. You’ll finally experience what it is to really be filled, the joy of being so connected that no one can tell who’s doing all the feeding and loving of God’s creation, but joyously it turns out all have all they want.

This is hard stuff to grasp. Next week you’ll hear more challenging things from Jesus. You’ll see more people walk away, some angry, some confused. You might be tempted, too.

But stick around. Take the chance of letting God draw you in anyway. Because if there really is a hunger and thirst inside you that God can fill forever, isn’t it worth sticking around to see how that will happen for you, and for this world?

In the name of Jesus.  Amen