Blog – Page 258

But to those . . .

March 4, 2018 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

Christ Jesus is the new Temple, where we meet God, and at the cross reveals the uncontrollable, unstoppable nature of the true God’s love: a scandal, foolish, but when we find this healing, it becomes life and wisdom.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Third Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: John 2:13-22; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

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

Religious leaders, people like me, often try to put God in a box.

For thousands of years, human beings have called out people from their midst to speak to and of God in the community, to help the rest explore and face the mysteries of God.

But such religious leaders often create ways to control this. We build boxes – temples, churches – and say they’re the only places to meet God. Once God is well-boxed, we make theology about what God says and does, controlling God for the people.

We typically try to control the people, too. To decide who gets in and who doesn’t, who’s beloved of God and who isn’t, who’s worthy of notice and who can be ignored.

We religious leaders, and, let’s be honest, many religious people in general, can be fiercely protective of our God-boxes, of our right to have the final say about God, to control access. It’s a huge temptation, and we don’t like being challenged about it.

The Temple in Jerusalem was just such a box, like all made by peoples throughout history. Its leaders controlled the God-message, and access to God, and taught that in this place alone the true God was found.

Enter Jesus of Nazareth. Being the Son of God, a conflict with this box’s leaders was probably inevitable.

So Jesus challenges the way they’ve cared for this God-box.

They’ve made a market out of a holy place, he says. Necessary things for sacrifice in the Temple are bought and sold within. Lambs sold for sacrifice, money changed from Gentile currency to Hebrew, and folks are making a profit. And the Son of God will have none of it. This isn’t what the house of God is for, he says.

This challenge to their authority, the driving out of animals, spilling of coins, and unmistakable rebuke is – no surprise – not well received. We religious people don’t like that.

But Jesus was only getting started. If it was scandalous to criticize how the Temple was run, the real scandal was coming.

Jesus declares that the time of God-boxes has passed, and the Temple is now found in his body.

Hardly anyone, disciples included, understood him at the time. But it was profound. If Israel met God at the Temple, the true Holy Place, with the Holy of Holies, now Jesus claims that he is the new Holy Place.

Jesus is the intersection between God and humanity, the house of God. God is now with us, in human flesh, able to be loved, touched, embraced. God’s Love is embodied in Jesus.

This moves God out of protective custody, breaks human control over what God says or does. This means Jesus is the face of the Triune God for us, how we know God.

This threatens religious institutions. If our business is to control God and access to God, Jesus just shut us down.

But he’s not done with scandal.

Jesus declares that this Temple, his body, will be destroyed, and on the third day be raised up.

If Jesus is now the Temple, the Holy Place, where all God’s people meet God, surely the first order of business would be to protect himself. Keep safe, so God can continue to be with us in this personal, intimate way.

But that’s not the plan. The plan for God-with-us, Jesus, is to love us back to God in person. Even if that love threatens our need to control and box up God, until finally someone with enough authority kills God-with-us.

This is the deep foolishness, the scandal Paul is talking about. God’s unstoppable, eternal love for the creation and all creatures, embodied in Jesus, will not stop loving. Power, glory, strength, winning, all these proper “divine” things, none of that is how God will act in human flesh.

Paul’s right, whatever your religion or ethnicity, this is a problem.

It’s a stumbling block if you want to control God. In Christ’s death on the cross we realize we don’t control God. No boxes, no altars, no dogmas can contain such a God who isn’t threatened even by our violence and rejection.

It’s a stumbling block if you want to control other people’s access to God. If God’s love is able to face death on a cross and rise to new life, if God’s love – a love John says embraces the whole cosmos – is so pure and constant it’s not tempted to use power and might against us, no one can control such love.

Scandal, stumbling block, foolishness, that’s what this looks like, Paul says. Unless you’ve found healing in this love.

But for those who are being healed, Paul says, it’s all different. Once we release the need to control God, or decide for God what’s going on, we find ourselves open to the astonishing Good News that if in Christ Jesus all people have access to God, so do we. That if in Christ Jesus all people are loved, so are we. That if in Christ Jesus life and healing are for the whole cosmos, they’re for us, too.

When we find such healing in God’s love in Christ, such grace from the cross and resurrection, we see everything differently. We look at weakness, and see its power to heal all things. We look at rejection and suffering, and see the beauty of such true love for all. We look at foolishness, and see a wisdom that makes all things clear. We look at death, and see life that cannot be controlled or limited.

This is our deep mystery and joy: once we stop trying to control God, trying to tell God what to do and whom to love, trying to decide which people God can reach, we find our own inclusion and healing and love and life.

There is one more scandal left.

Once the Holy Spirit started flowing into the believers at Pentecost, those who followed this Holy Place of God, this risen Temple, suddenly realized they, too, were Holy Places. Intersections between God and humanity. Temples of the Spirit of the Living God. They were sent, on God’s behalf, into the whole world. So are we.

But remember: because we follow Christ, we know from him that to be God’s Temple in the world is to risk everything for the sake of those whom God loves. To walk Christ’s path, to sacrifice with our love, our lives, our hearts, our hands. Even to die, if it comes to that.

So we gather together in this box, this place of worship, this place that we don’t control that is filled with the life of a God we also don’t control, for no other reason than that here we’ve found this life, here we’ve been healed by this love, here we’ve been fed to our depths with this grace, here we have met this God.

And from here, we are sent with this Good News, so that all might also find this healing and life, might find that God is with them, too.

In the name of Jesus. Amen

Midweek Lent, 2018 + A Cross-Shaped Life

February 28, 2018 By Vicar at Mount Olive

Week 2: The discipline of repentance

“Return and Rejoice”

Vicar Jessica Christy
Texts: Luke 15:1-7; Romans 12:1-3, 9-18

There’s this show I love called Adam Ruins Everything. In it, the host, Adam, delights in debunking popular misconceptions with the aim of helping viewers better understand their world. It’s well researched and immensely entertaining. But no show is perfect. Over the course of a few seasons, the writers got some facts wrong. They made some potentially misleading claims. At times, they failed to live up to their mission. So the show decided to run a corrections segment to address the errors. That doesn’t sound out of the ordinary, but here was the amazing part. The host seemed thrilled to accept the criticism. He didn’t push back, or try to defend himself, or lash out at his critics. He simply acknowledged his mistakes with a smile and thanked his critics for giving him a chance to improve. His cheerfulness was refreshing, almost astonishing. It felt like a revelation to see someone so openly admit their faults and promise to learn from them.

Why is that so hard for us? Why is it so difficult to face our missteps with honesty and grace? Why do we feel the need to keep up a brittle façade of perfection when we could instead be seeking the relief of confession and reconciliation? When we do wrong, we love to run away from our misdeeds. It’s deeply unpleasant to feel guilt twisting at our insides, so we push it down and try to deny it. We choose to live with our ugly, secret feelings of wrongdoing rather than exposing them to the light and moving on. Or, instead of hiding: when someone tells us that we’re not being our best selves, we fight back instead of listening to the truth of their words. We are so quick to become defensive when faced with the hard reality of our sin. We mistake critiques of our actions for attacks on our very selves, and so we can’t stand to hear that we’ve done wrong.

Sometimes, our transgressions feel so deep-rooted that we mistake them for an integral part of who we are. Sin worms its way into our hearts and tries to lay claim to our innermost being. We can’t imagine ourselves living lives that are truly whole, or peaceful, or equitable, so we cling to our failures and call them our identity. Individuals do this, when we become addicted to our vices – whether that vice be arrogance, or cruelty, or the misuse of our bodies. But we also do it as a society. We have trouble imagining our nation without inequality, without violence, without war, so we shrug our shoulders think that the way things are is the way they must be. We forget that we are our truest selves when we are living as the image of God, and so calls to repent feel like existential threats. We fear the pain of change more than the pain of the status quo, and so we turn away from the chance to repent and reconcile ourselves with God and one another. When we mistake our sin for our selves, the call to repentance sounds overwhelming. It feels us with terror and shame.

But Jesus tells us that repentance doesn’t have to cause us such pain. Our way back to the right path doesn’t need to pass through denial or anger or self-flagellation. For Christ, repentance is joy. That’s the word he uses. Joy. The shepherd carries the lost sheep home and throws a party for his neighbors. A sinner repents, and all of heaven rejoices. It is a purely joyous thing when any one of us turns from our mistakes and grows closer to God. When we refuse to repent, we are cutting ourselves off from the joy of our Triune God. But whenever we choose to turn towards God, heaven breaks into celebration and welcomes us home.

This joy is always within our reach. We always have a chance to see where we have gone astray and direct our steps back towards God. No matter who we are, or where we are in life, we can in faith renew our minds and discern what God finds good and acceptable and perfect. In Hebrew, the word for repentance quite simply means to turn, or to return. It’s not some single, wondrous transformation that replaces a wretched sinner with a perfect pillar of righteousness. It’s a rekindling of our relationship with God. It’s a rediscovery of who God intends for us to be. Some of us might have that road to Damascus moment, where God appears in a flash of light and forever changes our path. But even then, anyone who has read Paul’s letters knows that that encounter did not forever free him from sin. He still struggled to walk the way of the Cross. As do we all. As we always will.

For as long as we are on this earth, we will remain our fallen selves, and so we will always wander from the path of righteousness. That lost sheep that came home, its feet are probably going to walk away from the herd once more. But the shepherd still brings it home, and delights in its return. If we expect that one magical moment of rebirth will heal and save us forever, then we’re just setting ourselves up for failure. If we think that’s how repentance works, then we’ll fall prey to disappointment and despair when we inevitably stray again. We need to give ourselves the grace to fail, and fail again. We need to have the wisdom to know that we’re going to fall short, and the courage to acknowledge when it happens. Friends, this is hard work. It is uncomfortable, painful, to look at our failures head-on and to work to set them right. But we can do it because we know that God is rejoicing in every step that leads us back to Christ. Repentance is forever ongoing, in every step of our days. And that means that every step is an opening for joy.

The wilderness of sin is not our hearts’ home. We were not made to wander lost and alone. That’s why Jesus speaks of repentance as a return. It is the way back to our true selves, our true relationships, our true place with God. The discipline of repentance is to find joy in opportunities to return to God, even when sin and doubt tell us to replace that joy with denial and shame. It is to always be correcting our course, to constantly be finding the image of God anew in our hearts. Our weeping may last for a night, but God’s joy comes in the morning. The sun is rising, and God is waiting to welcome us home. Return and rejoice.

Amen.

The Olive Branch, 2/28/2018

February 27, 2018 By office

Click here to read this week’s issue of The Olive Branch.

Beyond All Thought and Fantasy

February 25, 2018 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

The way of the cross is what Jesus wants us to look at and follow, and it’s the way of divine love, self-giving, love that will heal the world once we also follow in that way.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday in Lent, year B
Text: Mark 8:31-38

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

“You’re not setting your mind on divine things, but on human things.”

These are the words of Jesus we need to focus on. Jesus’ other words to Peter are harsh words, yes. But our more pressing problem is that we’re setting our mind on human things, not divine things.

Something Jesus says points us to this. Throughout Mark’s Gospel Jesus often tells people to keep silent about signs and wonders they’ve seen him do. Even demons, who recognized Jesus’ authority and divine origin, are silenced by Jesus. Coming off the mountain of Transfiguration, as we heard a couple weeks ago, Jesus told the witnesses not to speak of it. It’s like Jesus wants to keep his Messiahship a secret.

But someone in our Tuesday noon Bible study noticed something important. Mark says that when Jesus spoke about his suffering, rejection, and death he “said all this quite openly.”

Do you see? Jesus insists on people keeping quiet about the very things that most impressed the disciples and the crowds. And us, to be honest. But when he spoke of his suffering and death, he spoke openly. He didn’t mind people hearing about that. Human things and divine things? Jesus thinks the divine thing is the truth about the cross.

Being focused on things of glory and power is a common human mistake.

God gave us the power of mind and body and spirit to be creative, to make things. We naturally like to use power, to make the world as we want it. We admire power and success in our world.

But if we think that’s what God is really about, if we focus on glory, impressive displays of miracles, splashy shows of glowing wardrobe on mountaintops, we’re looking the wrong way.

So the Son of God comes to turn us the other way. To call us to repent, to see the world as God sees the world. To be drawn into God’s life and God’s heart. And Jesus says we do this by looking at and understanding the cross.

But when we listen carefully to Jesus today, we see the cross might mean something different than we thought.

Much of Western Christian teaching has seen the cross of Christ not as Jesus spoke of it but as we thought it should work. Coming to power and strength under Roman law and justice, the Church saw God in the same system.

Many of us grew up on this. We were given the image of a courtroom, an angry God as judge, ready to sentence us to death. Then the Son bursts in and substitutes himself for our sentence. Or we were told that God the Father is so angry at our sin, forgiveness alone isn’t enough. God needs to be compensated for our sinfulness. So the Son dies on the cross to satisfy the Father’s need for the scales to be balanced.

These teachings make no sense if we listen to Jesus. If Jesus is meant to substitute for our punishment, or if Jesus’ death is meant to satisfy the blood-lust of the First Person of the Trinity, then the original cross should be enough.

Why, then, does Jesus ask us to take up our cross as well? What possible reason is there for me to take the path of the cross? Whom am I supposed to satisfy with my sacrificial love? Am I, are you, supposed to substitute ourselves for the punishment of another? If the Church’s theories are right shouldn’t Jesus have done all this already?

Jesus is absolutely clear: he must go to the cross, suffer, and die, and all who wish to follow him must do the same thing. Therefore, the divine view of the cross must be different than what we’ve learned. It needs to comprehend why not only Jesus walks the way of the cross, but why we are called to walk it, too.

Not surprisingly, we see the answer throughout Jesus’ teaching.

Jesus never says he goes to the cross to substitute for our punishment, or to satisfy his Father’s need for blood.

But he constantly calls us to a life of self-giving love, to follow his model. Everything he teaches about how we deal with each other, face our enemies, use money, deal with anxiety and fear, involves our letting go of our control, our need to be in power, and our need to do things our way.

If humanity is in love with power and glory, and that’s led to oppression and war and murder and violence and poverty and homelessness, and all the things that grieve the heart of God, the only way out of that is if we turn our minds toward God’s way. To divine things.

Now the cross makes sense. God-with-us, Jesus the Christ, comes with utter, complete, unstoppable love for the whole creation, and calls people to follow him in the same love. Because that’s a complete reversal of how we like to do things, of course at some point his love threatened people who could do something about it, and he was killed.

Jesus says this is always a possible outcome of loving as God loves. We probably won’t be crucified. But he wants us to realize how risky this radically different direction is for us.

This is why Jesus talked openly about dying, and downplayed miracles.

He needs us to see how deep and broad and high God’s love is, to quote Paul and the hymn, so far beyond human thought and fantasy that we couldn’t have imagined it on our own.

We couldn’t envision God loving us so much to suffer and die for our sake. There’s no sense in that. But when we keep our eyes on the cross, we see a truth about God’s love that drives us to our knees in awe.

And seeing the cross as the revelation of true, divine love, shows us why we’re called to the same path. It’s the whole point. It always was. God needs to turn us away from our lust for power and strength and winning, because when our minds are set on such human things, people die. People suffer. People are broken under our feet.

But when we see what the cross reveals about the love of God, and actually set our hearts and minds on this divine truth, we change. We begin to love as God loves, willing to lose everything. But in loving this way, we find everything. Healing, and life, and hope bloom all over this world.

If you want to know what God’s about, look at the cross. Jesus told us this quite openly. So did Luther.

And thanks be to God for the divine love we see there, poured out for the creation.

Turning around isn’t going to be easy. We’re going to need the Spirit’s help. We might stumble along the way, and, like Peter, find ourselves in opposition to Christ.

But Peter’s rebuke wasn’t the end of the story for Peter, was it? The love we see at the cross is such a pouring out of divine grace and goodness that forgiveness washes over the whole creation in God’s self-giving. We’re renewed and blessed and healed through this cross-shaped love. Like Peter, when we turn from our sin and mistakes we find the loving face of Jesus once more calling us to love, to feed his lambs, to follow.

Now that we know what to set our minds on, that’s exactly what we want to do.

In the name of Jesus. Amen

Midweek Lent, 2018 + A Cross-Shaped Life

February 21, 2018 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

Week 1: The discipline of seeing

“New Eyes”

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
Texts: James 2:1-8, 14-18; Matthew 25:31-46

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

Master, when did we see you?

That’s the haunting question. Neither those who cared for the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the naked, the stranger, the prisoner, nor those who did not, knew that these people were their King. Poignantly, those who are judged suggest that had they known it was Christ who was hungry, or naked, they surely would have done something. They just didn’t see.

It’s troubling, because all the people in this are followers of the King. All want to serve, to be disciples, like us. Yet half miss their opportunity. The problem is a problem of sight. Do we see the face of Christ in those whom we meet in the world?

Now, obviously, half of these folks were loving and caring without seeing. They had Christ’s heart in their heart, and cared for people in need, without hope of reward, with no hidden agenda.

But maybe Jesus told this parable because he knew that most of us struggle to see this way. Maybe he told it because by far the more common reality is that we don’t automatically live Christ’s love like the first group. We have to learn it, be shaped by it. We need to see with Christ’s eyes.

A rabbi once asked his disciples, “How do you know when the night is giving way and the morning is coming?”

One of the students said, “Won’t you know that the night is ending when you can see an animal well enough in the dim light to tell if it’s a sheep or a dog?” “No,” answered the rabbi. Another said, “Will you know the dawn is coming when you can see well enough to distinguish between a fig tree and an olive tree?” “No,” answered the rabbi.

The students pressed him for an answer, and at last the rabbi said, “You’ll know that the night has passed and morning is coming when you can look at any man or any woman and know that you are looking at a brother or a sister. Until you can see that well, the night will always be with us.”

Christ calls us to see that well, if we wish to follow.

Jesus told a parable about a rich man who had a poor, sick man sitting outside his gated community. The rich man must have passed this starving, diseased Lazarus every day. He never saw him. (Luke 16)

Jesus told a parable about two religious leaders who walked from Jericho to Jerusalem and passed by a man lying in the ditch, beaten and left for dead. They never saw him. (Luke 10)

But, that’s not true, is it? These three in the two parables had working eyes, optic nerves that connected to their brains. Their visual cortex registered Lazarus and the man in the ditch. But they didn’t see them. Not like God saw them. Not like the Samaritan saw the wounded fellow-traveler. “Until you can see a sister or brother in every person, the night will always be with us.”

This is critical for Jesus, seeing and not seeing. When he heals a man who was born blind, Jesus turns the tables, saying that the religious leaders who can’t see this was a healing from God are the ones who are actually blind. (John 9)

When Christ calls us to follow, Christ calls us to learn the discipline of seeing in God’s way.

Something about being centered on ourselves, focused on our own needs, blinds us. James today understood this when he criticized the vision of his people. They noticed rich, fancy folks, and ignored those who were poor. The two religious leaders and the rich man in Jesus’ parables were top of society, important people. So were the leaders who criticized Jesus’ healing of the blind man. All these people, their lives focused on themselves. It’s hard to see anyone else when we’re always looking in the mirror. The Samaritan was lowly, like the beaten man in the ditch, and a racial outcast in that society. Maybe that gave him better eyes to see another in pain.

Clearly the first group in Matthew 25 are people who see beyond their own need, their own comfort. When they see others in need, in pain, lost, alone, they see them. Then they act.

This is the way of the cross. Jesus calls us to lay down our lives, to love as sacrificially as God does. To get out of our self-centered obsession and begin to see, and then love.

So much of the pain in our world is deepened and spread by our inability to see others with Christ’s eyes.

If we can’t see a poor person lose their home and their family because they had catastrophic medical bills and no way to pay, really see them as our sister or brother, then it’s still night.

If we can’t see a child of God in someone who is different from us, if we defensively protect our opinions and our way and attack those who are not like us, then it’s still night.

If we can’t see that another’s pain, any pain, any person, is our pain, if we can’t vote beyond our own self-interest and greed and stubbornness to ease the pain and suffering of others, see all as sisters and brothers, then it’s still night.

When we take up Christ’s cross, begin to follow, we need new eyes to see. Eyes that see the world as God in Christ sees the world. Eyes that connect not just to our visual receptors in the brain but to our hearts and hands and voices.

And when we see as well as Christ, light shines everywhere we go.

Isaiah says when we see well enough to share our bread with the hungry and bring the homeless into our homes, to clothe those who are naked as if they were our own family, then our “light will break forth like the dawn, and [our] healing will spring up quickly.” (Isaiah 58:7-8)

We’ll be walking in light, we’ll be healed, too. That’s the mystery of the cross-shaped life. That as we lose, we gain everything. As we see the face of God in the face of others, we find ourselves in God’s healing grace as well. As we see well enough to give ourselves away in love we find ourselves awash in love.

Let’s make this our life-long discipline, not just for Lent. Let’s ask the Triune God to give us new eyes for seeing and loving as God sees and loves, that we might begin to welcome God’s morning dawning in the darkness of our world.

In the name of Jesus. Amen