Week 5: The discipline of salt and light

“Noticeable”

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
Texts: Matthew 5:13-16; Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2

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

Are you a disciple of Jesus for your own sake? That is, is your faith just meant to benefit you?

Many seekers would probably say yes. People seek connection with God, however they define God, for their own good. It’s not necessarily selfish. People look for faith experiences or faith communities or faith teaching to meet their deep need for God.

Christians, too. Christian faith is often thought to be a personal question. Are you strengthened by it? Does it help you make sense of your life?

But on Wednesdays this Lent Christ has shown us a different view of discipleship: to see others as Christ sees them, to love others sacrificially like Christ. Two of our weeks – the discipleship of repentance and of emptying – could become self-centered. Empty yourself spiritually to be renewed and filled; repent and turn to God so you’re better. But we’ve seen them more deeply, as paths to see and love others as Christ.

But Jesus’ words today can only mean one thing. Jesus proclaims the influence we have in the world. Jesus clearly says we are disciples for the sake of others, not for ourselves.

You are salt, he says. You are light. And neither exist for themselves.

Salt is the universal seasoning, used by and essential to every culture.

Found all over the world, salt makes food palatable, brings flavor and life to what gives us nourishment.

Salt is also universally used as a preservative. It keeps things from getting rotten and decayed. It permits people to survive climate crises and the normal flow of seasons by keeping food when food is hard to find.

But salt does nothing for itself. Salt by itself isn’t edible. Its value is influencing something else.

Light is the same.

As our planet rotates on its axis, half the world is in darkness while the other is in sunlight. For all the peoples of the world of all times, bringing light into the times when they couldn’t see has been a priority.

The smallest amount of light can fill huge darkness. Fires flickering on cave walls enabled some of the earliest human visual arts. Human ingenuity realized that the wax made by bees or the oil of olives could feed a wick and burn slowly, and candles and lamps powerfully helped human development. Light shining in the darkness became a strong symbol of hope.

But light doesn’t do anything for itself, either. Light’s purpose is to enable things to be seen.

Jesus declares we are the same, made for the sake of others.

We are changed by the Spirit into something different than our world and culture. Something that brings flavor and enhances goodness, preserves things from decay. Something that brings light to a dark world.

You are salt. You are light, Jesus says.

In the Sermon on the Mount, where this comes from, Jesus describes many challenging, cross-shaped ways his followers are different from the world. We don’t hold on to anger with each other. We pay attention to our inmost thoughts that harm others. We don’t worry about the future. We are peacemakers. We are non-violent, which is what he means by “the meek”. Paul’s list in Ephesians today of how we live continues Jesus: we are imitators of God, shaped by kindness and forgiveness, not bitterness and anger.

So Jesus says, influence the world with what you already are in Christ.

Be salt. Be light. Be what you are, Jesus says.

Jesus is opening our eyes to how different the way of Christ is, and encouraging us not to be afraid of that. If we follow, do what Jesus teaches and walk where he leads, we are salt and light. We are an influence of God’s grace in the world.

So let your light of God’s love that fills you shine out in your words and actions, so people see that light and are led to God. Make a difference in the darkness that surrounds us.

Let your alternate reality as a follower of Jesus, your different way of understanding love and grace and forgiveness, salt the world that you walk through. Let it enhance what is good and make it better, and bring an end to rottenness and corruption.

We don’t follow Jesus for our own sake. Christ came as one of us to call us all to the same path of the cross that he walked. So that the world might be brought back to God.

So, be what you are. Be salt. Be light. And eventually all people will know the eternal love of God that we know.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

Week 3: The discipline of love

“The Greatest of These”

Vicar Jessica Christy
Texts: 1 Corinthians 13:1-3; John 15:12-17

The church in Corinth was barely formed when things started to fall apart. Economic divisions had appeared in the community. People were anxiously squabbling over which spiritual gifts were the best. There were fights about how worship should be conducted. All around, people were jostling for power and prominence. And so Paul writes to them to remind them what it means to be in community. In his first letter to the Corinthians, he addresses some of their concerns about proper worship, and tries to show them the way forward in their disputes – but here, he gets to the heart of the matter. The problem isn’t that the Corinthians haven’t figured out the proper doctrine; it’s that they don’t know how to live together. They don’t seem to want to live together. They’re so concerned about who’s in the right, who’s in control, that they’ve completely lost sight of why they came together in the first place. And so Paul tells them about love.

This text is famous as a favorite for weddings, and of course it’s beautiful for that purpose, but when Paul writes, he doesn’t have a relationship between two people in mind. He’s talking about love in a community, the love that knits together the body of Christ. This love is a commitment to one another as we try to show the world what the kingdom of God looks like. Even if we disagree with each other, even if we’re in community with people who we don’t naturally like, we’re called to care for one another, and to lift up each other’s needs above our own. We often use the phrase “sacrificial love” to describe how we try to practice love in the church. Our ethics and our theology lift it up as the kind of love that Christ shows us, love that gives of itself for the good of others. It’s good and beautiful teaching – but Paul here tells us that those words, “sacrificial love,” are redundant. He writes that love is sacrifice. It’s that which acts for the sake of others. It does not insist on getting its own way, but rather lowers itself for the sake of treating others with patience and kindness. We say “sacrificial love” because we need the reminder that that’s what real love looks like, but you can’t have love without self-giving. That’s what the Corinthians had forgotten. The Corinthian church was in turmoil because its members were worried about asserting their status relative to each other. They wanted to know who was coming out on top in all their debates – so Paul tells them that, if you love someone, you have to be willing to let that person take the win. You have to let go of your desire to be proven right or get your way. The very notions of winning and losing are foreign to love, because it doesn’t keep score. There is no competition or calculation, only care.

This is so hard to do. It takes discipline, practice. We are social creatures, trained to be attentive to where we stand in relation to others. We hunger for victories and are deeply cut by defeat or insult. We are satisfied when we can assert our will, and we begrudge those who have wronged us. We all experience this in different ways and about different things, but all of us know what it’s like to insist on our own way over others, and to become resentful when we can’t have it. But love means learning to let that go. It means learning to lose, at least by the standards of our world. But in that loss, we discover something far greater and far more joyful than anything our earthly striving could give us. We find each other. We learn what it is to know each other, and to be known. When we’re fixated on who wins and who loses, we cut ourselves off from each other. We can’t be in community when we treat each other as obstacles to be overcome. But when we let that go, when we stop keeping score, we break free of our self-imposed isolation and discover what it means to be one in Christ.

For this is how Christ led his disciples. He taught them that the greatest among them was not the one who could win the most converts or collect the most offerings or perform the greatest miracles. It wasn’t the one who knew the most about scripture or who could pray the most fervently. He taught them that the greatest thing is love, and that the greatest love is in laying down your life for others. He shows us this on the Cross, but martyrdom isn’t the only way that we can die for the sake of others. We follow Christ when we die to our arrogance, to our need to control, to our need to be right. We follow the commandment to love when we let go of our grudges, or our cliquishness, or our hierarchies and dare to simply call each other “friend.” We die to ourselves when we learn to live for each other. When we do this, not only do we follow Christ, but we become the body of Christ, living together in love.

This is the entire reason that we are here on this earth. As Paul reminds us, everything that we value is meaningless unless it is done in love. Deeds that are done without love, even if they look good on the outside, are as empty. The wisest and most beautiful words are, without love, as meaningless as a clanging cymbal. Whatever accomplishments we achieve, whatever virtues we foster, they are nothing on their own, because without love, our actions are about ourselves and our status. Even things like prophecy and faith can be hollowed out until they are nothing more than a way to score points over each other. Paul says that a person could give away all their possessions, even their life, and it would mean nothing if it were done for acclaim instead of done for love. Love is the only thing that is good in itself. It’s what gives all other things meaning.

Love is also the only thing that endures. As Paul tells us, all other things will pass away when they become complete in God. Prophecy, knowledge, hope – they are tools for seeking God in the here and now, but there will be no need for such spiritual gifts when we see God face to face. We will not need to place our hope in God when we know God fully. But love, love is forever. It will not be completed when we are made one with God – it will only be made more perfect. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.” Knowledge and prophecies and tongues are how we peer through that dark mirror, but love is the image shining through on the other side. It is the very essence of God, which God longs for us to know. God who knows us fully wants us to fully know love, here and now. That means learning to lose. It means learning to let go of the things that keep us apart. It means learning to die. But in that death is where we find the abundant and everlasting life that God has planned for us. It’s where we find ourselves, it’s where we find each other, and it’s where we find Christ.

Amen.

Week 3: The discipline of emptying

“Have the Same Mind and Love”

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
Texts: Philippians 2:1-8; Mark 8:31-37

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

Emptying, self-giving love is God’s blueprint for how the universe works.

Here’s how we know this: in the beginning, God made room within God’s own self for the creation. God risked losing everything by putting human beings in the creation who could disobey, destroy, reject. God’s emptying love is the basis for creation.

But there’s more. John says that Jesus is God’s eternal Logos, that is, Word of God, present at creation, one with God, and now in human flesh. But Logos is more than Word. It’s Pattern, Blueprint, Logic. God’s pattern, God’s logic, God’s blueprint is now knowable, seeable, in Jesus.

So Jesus, in teaching, healing, welcoming, loving, suffering, and dying, reveals the shape of God’s pattern. In Jesus, love is always giving up oneself for the other, emptying, and finding filling on the other side. That is, death and resurrection.

So if Jesus is God’s Blueprint in the flesh, and that’s what Jesus revealed, then self-giving love is the blueprint for how the universe is supposed to work. It’s the pattern of God and the pattern of creation. Dying to live. Losing to win. Letting go to receive all things.

We’ve already seen this in the creation. The whole universe thrives and grows on dying and rising.

Stars collapse and die, and new planets and galaxies are born. Plants die and decay, feeding the earth. Seeds effectively die, only to be born into new life. Animals die, giving life to other animals and plants.

Even our bodies follow this pattern. Except for our brain cells, which last our lifetime and aren’t replaced when they die, every other cell in our bodies has a life span. Skin cells live for about two weeks, die, and are replaced by new ones. Colon cells last about four days. We’re constantly dying and living. If cells don’t do this, don’t die to provide new life, we call that cancer. They persist and grow and take over the rest of the body. They don’t follow God’s blueprint for life.

If this is God’s blueprint for the creation, we need to re-think death and loss.

We’re used to seeing dying as the enemy, to resist losing. We live competitively, see winning and success and strength and power as the goals of life.

But if that’s just cancer in human-sized form – and to judge by the shape the world is in right now, that’s a good analogy – then to find life we need to embrace God’s way, the other way.

God’s design is: life is found in dying, gain is found in letting go, winning is found in losing. This provides life to the whole universe. Since this is radically different from the world’s view, if we’re going to see differently, live differently, we’ll need help. And that’s what God gives us. God’s Logos, God’s Blueprint, Jesus, took on flesh, to call us back to God’s design that gives us life.

Be of the same mind, having the same love, as Christ Jesus has, Paul says.

Take up your cross and follow me, Jesus says.

This is the whole point of Jesus’ coming, to re-teach us the meaning of life. To call us back to the way of divine Love, the pattern of all things. The way humans are living and doing things leads to destruction and pollution and brokenness, without life or love or hope. But God’s way, the universe’s pattern, is a path that gives life and hope and healing. Jesus’ emptying his divine glory and facing the cross is our model for our lives. Jesus’ resurrection proves that this path leads to life.

So follow my cross path, Jesus says. It’s what you were designed to be. That’s the discipline of following me, he says, the discipline of emptying. Be ready to lose everything. If you cling to all you think you need, you’ll really die. You’ll miss the joy and hope of abundant life. When you let go, lose, yes, it will feel like dying. But you’ll find life and wholeness and healing.

Read all the teachings of Jesus. This is where they lead.

So Paul says, be of the same mind, have the same love as Christ Jesus. That’s the path to life.

This letting go, this emptying, looks different for each of us.

Often the Church describes this in terms of pride and humility: let go of your pride and find the humility of Christ. But that’s only a problem if pride is what you’re clinging to, what fills your life and your heart. Since powerful men with pride issues have controlled much of the theology of the Church in the West for centuries, it’s little surprise that’s the common take on emptying. But everyone has different things to let go of, different things to die to.

If you’re filled with self-doubt and anxiety about your value, that’s what you need to let go of to walk this path. If you’re filled with fear and dread about the future, about your life, that’s what you need to let go of. If you’re obsessed with security and making yourself or your loved ones safe, or if you’re centered on doing things your way, trying to control your life and others, those things are what need emptying.

There’s no room for God’s life to fill us if we’re filled with something else.

God wants this for us because God wants us to find the fullness of life.

When we share Christ’s mind and love, learn what crosses we each are taking up, what emptying of ourselves we each are doing, when we start living as we were designed to live, we find what Jesus calls abundant life. Jesus says today that those who lose their life for his sake, and for the sake of the Good News, will heal their life. Will find what it is to be truly alive.

When we let go of all that fills us but doesn’t satisfy us, we find we’re able to be filled with God. God’s life now has room to come into every corner of our hearts, every room of our soul. Luther called this letting the old self die every day and asking God to raise the new self. It sounds contradictory, but as we’ve seen, it’s the pattern of the universe. The more we empty ourselves the more we are filled with God’s love and peace.

It’s true of our relationships with each other, too. Love isn’t love if we control it, if we fill our hearts with fears and anxieties and greed and control and gain. There’s no room in there for anyone or anything else. Love happens when we let go of what we cling to and make room for the other. When we lose. Become vulnerable, able to be wounded. Empty ourselves. This is how “love your neighbor as you love yourself” is really lived out.

It’s hard to really hear Jesus’ words today.

To dwell on what he means by us losing our lives to find them. To contemplate what it would be like to have the same mind and the same love as Christ.

But it isn’t required that we understand this all at once. In the living, the letting go, the losing, the vulnerability, that’s how we learn more and more what Jesus is about. How we find our true divine design. As we journey together, we help each other discover our own particular baggage, and help each other find the courage to let it go.

Eventually, we begin to know in our bones, in our hearts, that this is life for us. Life like God really meant us to live, life we see so clearly in Christ’s resurrection, life that really can heal this world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

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.

 

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