God’s words – God’s Word – speaks into existence good and beautiful and life; this is counter to the world’s wisdom, but in Christ Jesus we are invited to trust the path of God’s words as our heart’s joy.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The Third Sunday in Lent, year B
   texts:  Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; John 2:13-22

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

In the beginning, God spoke, and it was good.

God’s words were uttered into darkness and chaos and from them came light and order and beauty and life.  This is what God does with words.  God creates.  God creates good.  God creates joy.  God creates life.

Exodus says: “Then God spoke all these words.”  The God who made all things, who called Abraham and Sarah and their family, who rescued them from slavery in Egypt, this God now speaks words to the people at Mount Sinai.  In Hebrew the Ten Commandments are “The Ten Words”.

If God creates good with words, creates joy with words, creates life and beauty and light with words, why do we fear God’s law, God’s words?  Why is our theology so thick with language about how the law kills, cuts, destroys?  Why are God’s words our enemy?

We sang with the psalmist that “the statutes of the LORD are just and rejoice the heart.”  When was the last time you heard the law of God and your heart rejoiced?

Mount Sinai is a moment of grace and promise for God’s people.

The Hebrews knew God desired a relationship with them, sought out their ancestors.  Centuries of slavery and hardship in Egypt must have felt like abandonment.  Has the true God forgotten us?  Then came Moses, and rescue from Egypt, and even with hardships along the way, the people arrive at Sinai in hope of a new life in a land promised to be their home.

To these people, in that place, with this hope, God speaks a word of covenant promise.  God has already fulfilled the divine part of the covenant: “I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt,” they are told.  I am the one who has saved you, who is with you.

Now, God says, as my people, loved and saved, here’s the good path, your way of life.  God’s not threatening to withhold grace: they’ve already received life and freedom.  As always, God’s words are creating good, and beauty, and light, and life.

Seeing this giving of the law as grace and hope for Israel could set aside our ancient fear.

Our fear of God, seeing God as bringer of judgment and criticism, while we cringe.  Our fear of God’s law, seeing the law as forbidding, harsh, judgmental.  Afraid of God, of God’s words, we find ourselves enemies of the law, enemies of God.

Consider these people at Sinai, still learning about the Creator God who has just saved them from oppression and slavery, who now gives them direction for life.

In a world where people use violence, and kill to get their way, this God says, “that’s not a path of life.  You won’t kill if you are my people.”  What a grace for them.

In a world where people betray those closest to them and aren’t faithful, this God says, “that’s not a path of life.  You won’t commit adultery if you are my people.”  What a grace for them.

In a world where old people feel like burdens and fear not being able to care for themselves, this God says, “Honor your father and mother, that’s the path of life.  If you are my people, you will take care of your elders.”  What a grace for them.

In a world where it’s hard to know whom to trust, where people lie to get what they want, this God says, “Don’t witness falsely about each other.  That’s not a path of life.  Tell the truth and be honest, if you are my people.”  What a grace for them.

In a world where people don’t know God, don’t believe in God, assume God is the cause of all suffering, this God says, “I have saved you, so get to know me.  Don’t worship other things, only me; take time to rest as I do.  That’s the path of life for my people.”  What a grace for them, to be given the promise, the command, of a relationship with the eternal God.

God speaks and good things are made.  God speaks what is good, and beauty, and light, and life.  Just as it brought joy to the hearts of Israel – as it did the times they understood instead of the ones they resented, as we do – this confidence in God’s words can bring our hearts joy, too.

Especially when we remember what God’s Word has become for us.

God’s Word, the Word that creates good and beauty and light and life, took on our human flesh, became one of us.

All of God’s Word – creation and law and grace, everything God speaks – is now incorporated – embodied – in Jesus.  His life and presence is the Word of God in the world.  His voice is the Word of God.  His actions are the Word of God.

But he also is one of us.  Jesus not only is the entire speech of God in the world, as a human being he can carry our part of the conversation with God as well.  Speak for us to God when we are afraid, when we hide, when we can’t see God’s Word as good.  Jesus teaches us to speak with God freely, without fear.

Jesus holds the conversation between God and humanity in his own person.  He teaches us in our own words that God’s good word for us and the world is still good, and beauty, and light, and life.  In Christ Jesus we are reconciled to God, Paul has told us, because both we and God are brought together.  Christ is God’s temple, as John tells us today, where we meet God.

At the cross God’s Word absorbs all our bad words, all our breaking of the law, and destroys death’s power over us.  God’s Word creates good even in dying, and fully joins us to the life of the Triune God forever.  There is no need for us to be enemies anymore.  In Christ Jesus there is no way we can be enemies with God.

Look at God’s law, then, and rejoice: here’s the path to life.

In Christ we see God’s path – love of God and love of neighbor – as the only way we want to live.  We understand God’s forgiveness in Christ not as avoiding punishment but as putting our feet right, our hearts right, our eyes right, our heads right, on the path God’s Word shows is life.

God’s law, Christ reveals, is the instructions for how we’re designed to live in happiness and love, the operating manual for humanity to live in joy and hope.  It’s the wisdom to how we can live in a world of peace for all, the answer to the suffering of this planet.  If we lived according to the Ten Words, adding to them Jesus’ deepening in the Sermon on the Mount and Luther’s expansion of them into positive actions toward God and neighbor, this world would be an astonishingly good place to live in.  That’s our heart’s joy.

Today God still speaks and it’s still good.

God’s words are uttered into the darkness and chaos and evil of this world and from them come light and order and beauty and life.  This is what God does with words.  God creates.  God creates good.  God creates joy.  God creates life.  God creates a path that is good, and beauty, and light, and life, for all people.

When we understand that, we can really start to sing our psalm.  We become people living in the heady world of joy in God’s goodness.

We can sing “the teaching of the LORD is perfect and revives the soul.  The statutes of the LORD are just and rejoice the heart.  The commandment of the LORD is clear and gives light to the eyes.”

We can sing it because we know now it’s true.  Because we know now this is the path of joy we’ve been looking for our whole lives.

And because God spoke this Word.  And when God speaks, it is good.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

The path of Jesus is a path that does involve loss and sacrifice, but so does the world’s path; the difference is that the path of Christ is the path of life and joy now and in the world to come.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The Second Sunday in Lent, year B
   texts:  Mark 8:31-38; Romans 4:13-25; Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

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

“For I am convinced that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.”

Are we?  As convinced as Paul in Romans 8?  As Abraham in Romans 4 today?

Abraham was “fully convinced that God was able to do what God had promised,” Paul says, he never wavered.  In truth, Abraham did waver a bit, about trusting the child would come, about trusting God to keep him safe in a foreign land.  Paul exaggerates to make a point.

He’s right about “convinced,” though.  Abraham ultimately trusted God would do what God promised to do.  He and Sarah left home and went where God said.  They eventually trusted a child would come, trusted God’s promise.  They are models of faith for Paul.

But the issue is more one of God’s faithfulness than our faith.  No strength of faith helps us if God doesn’t keep promises.  No solid conviction is worth anything if we can lose God’s love.  Our question is whether we are convinced of God’s ability to keep promises, keep covenant, when it can be hard to see in the midst of the difficulties of life.

Peter today struggles to understand how Jesus can save if he’s dead. 

It’s not a question of his faith.  He believes in Jesus.  But he doesn’t believe this is the right path for God’s Messiah, a path he can trust for salvation.  He followed Jesus because he spoke of God’s eternal life, because he loved Peter and the poor people Peter knew.  Because he brought God’s life into a world of death.

But how can God bring the promised salvation if Jesus suffers and dies?  It makes no sense.  There must have been many wandering days for Sarah and Abraham where it didn’t make sense, either, that God could keep such promises.

Yet they followed.  So did Peter, if not always fully convinced.  So how convinced do we need to be of God’s faithfulness and love to follow as they did?

Jesus invites us to follow him.  To trust in his faithfulness.

We worry about “deny yourself and take up your cross,” get stuck in “lose your life” and what that means.  It’s simple: Jesus says, “Follow me and I will give you life.”  Then he adds, “but when you follow you will lose some things, maybe everything, along the way.”  It’s like God’s call to Abraham and Sarah to leave all comfort and head into a life of wilderness wandering, trusting only in God’s promised blessing.

Jesus promises God’s path leads to abundant, full life now and in the coming world.  He’s also totally honest about the costs.  This is the path to life and love with God, yes.  But it also means losing everything that keeps us from life and love with God.  Things we value.  Things we don’t want to lose.  Things we don’t have the wisdom to see are a problem.  Jesus does see, though, and tells us up front they’ll have to go.

Our self-reliance.  Our self-pity.  Our pride.  Our biases and prejudices against others.  Our need to win.  Our need to be right.  Our trust in material wealth, and desire for that.  Our desire for pleasure even if it harms others in its pursuit.  Our hope for a life free of pain.  Our fear of death.  Our self-centeredness, selfishness.

All these things are going to have to be dropped, Jesus says.  You’ll sometimes feel like you’re dying.  You might even in fact die.  It’s a lot to ask.

But Jesus said, “Follow me,” and many followed, then and since.  They heard “follow me!” as hopeful cry, not dismal threat.  They willingly dumped all their baggage at the fork and took Jesus’ path.

That’s the crossroads before us.  How convinced must we be to trust Jesus and follow his path?

Well, what about the other path, the way of the world Jesus mentions?

Are we convinced the world can keep its promises?  It seems fair to ask this of the other fork in the road.  There we’re promised lots of good things: happiness, youth, fulfillment.  Wealth, abundance, avoidance of death.  No suffering.  If we buy the right things, ignore the people who can’t help us, put ourselves first, focus on getting all we want, all we ever could hope for, we’ll be happy.

Hardly anyone ever gets all those things the world promises, though.  Most don’t.  We know this.

The world never tells us what it will cost, either, even for those who think they get what they want.  It never explains that tragedies happen to even the richest in the world, that self-centered, selfish people might gain everything but have no one who wants to love the person they are, that a life built on caring only for ourselves at the expense of the rest becomes so empty and devoid of meaning despair is the only option.  That we can chase the American dream or whatever dream is out there and the more we get the more we will never have enough.  The world never tells us this.  The world just says, “this is the fun path, the rewarding path.”

Every path we choose involves sacrifice and loss, it’s just a question of what we’re giving up.  At least Jesus tells us his cost.  So we need to know which path can really give life.

Against the reality of the world’s failure to keep promises, we have 2,000 years of believers witnessing that Jesus’ path is the path of life.

We have witnesses who tell us God is always faithful.  Who took the path of self-denial and sacrificial love, the path that at the crossroads looked like the harder one, and found abundant life all along the way.

They say: this path might look like you’re letting go of a lot, and you are.  It might look like you’re being changed into something different, and you are.  But this path, from the very first step, is a path of joy and hope, they say.  Walking in trust with the Lord of life, you live without fear.

The same storms and sufferings hit both paths, they tell us, but on Jesus’ path we have help to handle them.  The same problems and fears assail people on both paths, but living in the life and grace of the Triune God takes all the bite and sting out of them.

These saints, these witnesses – think of those who showed you this, some who now are beyond this path – they have told us, shown us, this is a path of life where we have companionship and love and grace with each other, where God fills our lives and the world with hope no matter what happens.

We shouldn’t get so frightened by Jesus’ words that we’re going to be losing things that we miss all his words and the words of the saints that describe what we’re gaining.

And that’s only in this life.  Just wait till you see what’s at the end.

Jesus’ sacrificial path is the more life-filled and rich path in this life, we have evidence this is true.

What convinces us of God’s faithfulness is the end of each path.  The world’s path always ends in death.  No wealth in the world changes that; we all are dying.  People hope science will find solutions, but we know everyone dies, no exceptions.

Of course that means Jesus’ path also leads to death.  Except there’s one small difference.  In willingly suffering death, Jesus destroyed its ultimate power, and rose to new life.  Not only is Jesus’ path more abundant in this life, because of the resurrection it’s the path that leads through death into eternal life with God.

God raised Jesus from the dead.  God is able to do anything to keep promises.  This we know.

I am convinced that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.

Not the present nor the future.  Not heights nor depths.  Not life or even death.  Nothing can separate us, our brother Paul says.  How convinced are we?

Most days I am.  But on the days when I struggle with my conviction, you, my sisters and brothers, hold me up in faith.  It’s what we do as a community, why Jesus put us together.  Between us we’ve got more than enough conviction to go around.  If we all find ourselves struggling a bit with our faith, we’ve also got those whose footsteps we follow, dear to us, or to the Church, whose faith now is fully lived in the presence of God.  Their witness reinspires us and gives us hope.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  There’s nothing to fear in this path that lies before us.  Jesus is our leader, our guide, even in death.  We walk it together, hand-in-hand, encouraging each other every step of the way, finding the joy of the path, until we reach journey’s end, our hope and our life.

Don’t be afraid.  God will do what God has promised.  I’m convinced of that.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

The path of Jesus is a path that does involve loss and sacrifice, but so does the world’s path; the difference is that the path of Christ is the path of life and joy now and in the world to come.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The Second Sunday in Lent, year B
   texts:  Mark 8:31-38; Romans 4:13-25; Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

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

“For I am convinced that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.”

Are we?  As convinced as Paul in Romans 8?  As Abraham in Romans 4 today?

Abraham was “fully convinced that God was able to do what God had promised,” Paul says, he never wavered.  In truth, Abraham did waver a bit, about trusting the child would come, about trusting God to keep him safe in a foreign land.  Paul exaggerates to make a point.

He’s right about “convinced,” though.  Abraham ultimately trusted God would do what God promised to do.  He and Sarah left home and went where God said.  They eventually trusted a child would come, trusted God’s promise.  They are models of faith for Paul.

But the issue is more one of God’s faithfulness than our faith.  No strength of faith helps us if God doesn’t keep promises.  No solid conviction is worth anything if we can lose God’s love.  Our question is whether we are convinced of God’s ability to keep promises, keep covenant, when it can be hard to see in the midst of the difficulties of life.

Peter today struggles to understand how Jesus can save if he’s dead. 

It’s not a question of his faith.  He believes in Jesus.  But he doesn’t believe this is the right path for God’s Messiah, a path he can trust for salvation.  He followed Jesus because he spoke of God’s eternal life, because he loved Peter and the poor people Peter knew.  Because he brought God’s life into a world of death.

But how can God bring the promised salvation if Jesus suffers and dies?  It makes no sense.  There must have been many wandering days for Sarah and Abraham where it didn’t make sense, either, that God could keep such promises.

Yet they followed.  So did Peter, if not always fully convinced.  So how convinced do we need to be of God’s faithfulness and love to follow as they did?

Jesus invites us to follow him.  To trust in his faithfulness.

We worry about “deny yourself and take up your cross,” get stuck in “lose your life” and what that means.  It’s simple: Jesus says, “Follow me and I will give you life.”  Then he adds, “but when you follow you will lose some things, maybe everything, along the way.”  It’s like God’s call to Abraham and Sarah to leave all comfort and head into a life of wilderness wandering, trusting only in God’s promised blessing.

Jesus promises God’s path leads to abundant, full life now and in the coming world.  He’s also totally honest about the costs.  This is the path to life and love with God, yes.  But it also means losing everything that keeps us from life and love with God.  Things we value.  Things we don’t want to lose.  Things we don’t have the wisdom to see are a problem.  Jesus does see, though, and tells us up front they’ll have to go.

Our self-reliance.  Our self-pity.  Our pride.  Our biases and prejudices against others.  Our need to win.  Our need to be right.  Our trust in material wealth, and desire for that.  Our desire for pleasure even if it harms others in its pursuit.  Our hope for a life free of pain.  Our fear of death.  Our self-centeredness, selfishness.

All these things are going to have to be dropped, Jesus says.  You’ll sometimes feel like you’re dying.  You might even in fact die.  It’s a lot to ask.

But Jesus said, “Follow me,” and many followed, then and since.  They heard “follow me!” as hopeful cry, not dismal threat.  They willingly dumped all their baggage at the fork and took Jesus’ path.

That’s the crossroads before us.  How convinced must we be to trust Jesus and follow his path?

Well, what about the other path, the way of the world Jesus mentions?

Are we convinced the world can keep its promises?  It seems fair to ask this of the other fork in the road.  There we’re promised lots of good things: happiness, youth, fulfillment.  Wealth, abundance, avoidance of death.  No suffering.  If we buy the right things, ignore the people who can’t help us, put ourselves first, focus on getting all we want, all we ever could hope for, we’ll be happy.

Hardly anyone ever gets all those things the world promises, though.  Most don’t.  We know this.

The world never tells us what it will cost, either, even for those who think they get what they want.  It never explains that tragedies happen to even the richest in the world, that self-centered, selfish people might gain everything but have no one who wants to love the person they are, that a life built on caring only for ourselves at the expense of the rest becomes so empty and devoid of meaning despair is the only option.  That we can chase the American dream or whatever dream is out there and the more we get the more we will never have enough.  The world never tells us this.  The world just says, “this is the fun path, the rewarding path.”

Every path we choose involves sacrifice and loss, it’s just a question of what we’re giving up.  At least Jesus tells us his cost.  So we need to know which path can really give life.

Against the reality of the world’s failure to keep promises, we have 2,000 years of believers witnessing that Jesus’ path is the path of life.

We have witnesses who tell us God is always faithful.  Who took the path of self-denial and sacrificial love, the path that at the crossroads looked like the harder one, and found abundant life all along the way.

They say: this path might look like you’re letting go of a lot, and you are.  It might look like you’re being changed into something different, and you are.  But this path, from the very first step, is a path of joy and hope, they say.  Walking in trust with the Lord of life, you live without fear.

The same storms and sufferings hit both paths, they tell us, but on Jesus’ path we have help to handle them.  The same problems and fears assail people on both paths, but living in the life and grace of the Triune God takes all the bite and sting out of them.

These saints, these witnesses – think of those who showed you this, some who now are beyond this path – they have told us, shown us, this is a path of life where we have companionship and love and grace with each other, where God fills our lives and the world with hope no matter what happens.

We shouldn’t get so frightened by Jesus’ words that we’re going to be losing things that we miss all his words and the words of the saints that describe what we’re gaining.

And that’s only in this life.  Just wait till you see what’s at the end.

Jesus’ sacrificial path is the more life-filled and rich path in this life, we have evidence this is true.

What convinces us of God’s faithfulness is the end of each path.  The world’s path always ends in death.  No wealth in the world changes that; we all are dying.  People hope science will find solutions, but we know everyone dies, no exceptions.

Of course that means Jesus’ path also leads to death.  Except there’s one small difference.  In willingly suffering death, Jesus destroyed its ultimate power, and rose to new life.  Not only is Jesus’ path more abundant in this life, because of the resurrection it’s the path that leads through death into eternal life with God.

God raised Jesus from the dead.  God is able to do anything to keep promises.  This we know.

I am convinced that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.

Not the present nor the future.  Not heights nor depths.  Not life or even death.  Nothing can separate us, our brother Paul says.  How convinced are we?

Most days I am.  But on the days when I struggle with my conviction, you, my sisters and brothers, hold me up in faith.  It’s what we do as a community, why Jesus put us together.  Between us we’ve got more than enough conviction to go around.  If we all find ourselves struggling a bit with our faith, we’ve also got those whose footsteps we follow, dear to us, or to the Church, whose faith now is fully lived in the presence of God.  Their witness reinspires us and gives us hope.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.  There’s nothing to fear in this path that lies before us.  Jesus is our leader, our guide, even in death.  We walk it together, hand-in-hand, encouraging each other every step of the way, finding the joy of the path, until we reach journey’s end, our hope and our life.

Don’t be afraid.  God will do what God has promised.  I’m convinced of that.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

Noah experienced a radical housecleaning by the waters of the flood that carried him in the ark. When the clutter of corruption and chaos in his old world was washed away, God’s covenant of love and faithfulness became clear. God’s covenant is revealed to each of us in the waters of our baptism.

Vicar Meagan McLaughlin
   First Sunday in Lent, year B
   Texts: Genesis 9:8-17, Psalm 25:1-10, 1 Peter 3:18-22, Mark 1:9-15

Grace and peace to you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We moved into our house in the Longfellow neighborhood in the heat of summer, and immediately began to take advantage of the bike trail along the River Parkway. My favorite part of the ride into downtown is the stretch from Franklin Ave to the Bohemian Flats, because I love the feeling of flying down the steep hill on my bike, and just as you get to the bottom, the river seems to appear almost out of nowhere, as if you hadn’t been riding alongside it the whole way. The trees on the river banks up to that point are so thick with leaves, you can easily forget the river is even there!

Biking or walking along the Parkway in the late fall or winter is an entirely different experience. Once the leaves have fallen from the trees, the view is clear from the trail to the river below, and the first time I walked there in the fall, I was really surprised to realize that the river had been there, that close, all along. When the leaves are gone, I can see what was hidden before.

The same thing happens when I take time to clear away the “leaves” in my own life. In preparation for doing taxes this year, I spent a couple of hours one morning going through files, and cast away a few trees worth of paper in the process. The feeling of lightness and clarity that came out of that was liberating! Suddenly, the clutter was gone, there was space between files in the drawer, and we actually know what is in there.

Noah experienced a radical housecleaning when the flood swept away everything he knew, leaving only his family and two of every animal in the ark. When the waters receded, and the ark landed, God showed Noah the foundation of their life on the renewed land. The clutter of corruption and chaos in Noah’s old world was washed away, and the promise of God was made clear. God established a covenant with Noah to protect and provide for him. God promised to be faithful.

God’s covenant was not just with Noah, but with Noah’s descendants and every creature of all flesh. God promised that God will never again destroy the earth, and gave the earth to us all as a place of abundance. God promises to protect us and provide for us.

And the best part is, God’s covenant with us comes with no conditions. God makes this covenant with us out of love. The Gospel of Mark tells us that when Jesus was baptized, God spoke to Jesus, saying “You are my son, my beloved.” This is the basis for God’s covenant with Noah, and it is the basis for the covenant that each of us are baptized into. Our baptisms are a sign of God’s promise to us. We are all God’s children, beloved of God. You are God’s child, beloved of God. You can’t earn that. And you don’t have to. It is simply there, like the river is always running at the bottom of the cliffs next to the Parkway. We just can’t always see it.

The truth of God’s promise, and who we are as God’s children, gets hidden in the clutter of many things in our lives, and we can even forget God is there. We get easily wrapped up in the “doing” of our daily lives, and in the midst of the busyness we are not aware of God who makes our “doing” possible. The truth of who we are is buried under messages of doubt, and judgment, and shame, until we can’t see the love and call of God for us, and if we can see it, we don’t believe it. We get caught up in striving for whatever we think will make us happy or satisfy us, be it the approval of other people or financial success, or addictions to alcohol, or food, or drugs, and we forget that the one thing that truly gives meaning to our lives is right in front of us.

Just like the dying of the leaves each fall clears the view to the river below, and makes new growth possible in the spring, we all need to take time to clear the clutter from our own lives. It is a natural part of the cycle of the life we live as children of God. There are times of growth and abundance, and there are times when what is not needed, what is destructive to us and our relationships, what is not true about our God, needs to be washed away.

Sometimes this can feel like we have entered the ark in the midst of the flood—we are awakened suddenly by a change in our lives, and overwhelmed by awareness and emotion as we adjust to the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, or even the birth of a child. We are changed as all the things that distracted us before are swept away, and we can see what is really important. In the midst of this experience, we realize we have no control over this journey. Like Noah, we are just along for the ride. Over time, as we look back, we can see the hand of God, who guides in our journey, leading us through the flood. The waters that seemed to threaten to wash us away become a reminder of the promise God made to us in the waters of our baptism: no matter what happens, God will never abandon us.

Other times, our experience of clearing out the clutter of our lives may feel more gradual—perhaps more like Jesus’s journey through the wilderness after his baptism. For no particular reason, it may seem, our perspective shifts, we recognize things in our lives that are blocking our relationship with God, and feel moved to let go of them. The process of letting go can leave us feeling somewhat empty or dry, even as our awareness of God in our lives slowly grows to fill the space that has been created in us.

However it happens, whatever it is that brings us to a place of reflection and awareness of our “clutter,” looking honestly at ourselves is not easy. It can be uncomfortable as we begin to change and see things in new ways, and it can be painful when we attend to places of shame, grief, and wounded-ness that we hold within us. The covenant of God’s love and presence with us stands firm, even then. Especially then. God is present with us, and has put us here together so that we never need to walk through this life alone. And God works in us through these times of spiritual housecleaning to make it possible for us in all our humanness to grow in our relationship with God, and be fully present to whatever God calls us to do in this world.

In the season of Lent we take time as a community of faith to remind ourselves and each other of our humanness, of the reality that we will never be finished changing and growing. Lent invites us to pay attention to the things that block our view, that stand between us and our God, and to ask God to clear that clutter from our lives so that we can better serve God and each other. We remember God’s faithfulness and love, and that, along with Noah, we are all people of the covenant. And when the leaves of our lives have fallen from the trees, we will realize once again that God has been, and will be, with us all along.

Thanks be to God!

We are all dying, and today we face that so that we never forget it in the days to come; in that truth we discover the deeper truth of God’s life and grace that, in the cross, raises us now and always into God’s eternal love.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   Ash Wednesday
   text:  2 Corinthians 5:20b – 6:10

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

So, how quickly will you wash off the cross of ashes from your forehead?

It’s always the question, isn’t it?  Will you be where you don’t want people looking at it?  Do you care?  Our children always had an eagerness to get washed off pretty soon after church.

I’m not sure it matters.  But this does: how quickly will you forget that you had a cross of ashes on your forehead?  How soon will “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” be shunted to the attic of your brain, not to be thought again?

Our world is terrified of that truth.  So terrorists have power over whole nations: we’re afraid to die and they threaten us with death.  So billions of dollars of profit are made by companies all over the world promising pills or creams or foods or clothes or cars they say will make us young, invincible.

Yet we come here today and have burnt ashes drawn in the shape of a torture device on our foreheads.  How strange is that?  We come here today to be told we are dust, we are going to die.  We don’t think like the world.

Unless we wash this out of our minds as quickly as off our foreheads as soon as we get home.  Our challenge is to understand and embed in our hearts and lives what it is we do today, why that cross, those words, need to stay with us as if they were permanently visible not only to us but even to others.

The world considers such talk of death morbid.  It’s really the opposite.

Living in a culture and society where every single person will die one day, every one, yet where our emotional, financial, physical, and mental energy is expended in vast amounts to deny that reality, that’s morbid.  If you’re on the Titanic and it’s going down, it’s not morbid to recognize something’s amiss.

For us, there is joy and hope in what we do today.  To look at a little child with a cross of ashes on her forehead next to an octogenarian with the same is to see that both share a humanity, a life, that is finite.  That’s truth.  But to look at those two together is also to see in that cross shape that this life they share is grace and light.

Placing a cross of ashes on ourselves doesn’t make us mortal, it reminds us we are.  Facing or not facing our mortality isn’t an option, whether we die young or old, of natural causes or violent tragedy.  We are going to die.  There is great freedom accepting this truth.  Then we can learn how to live with it.

Paul talks of reconciliation with God: our acceptance of our mortality is also reconciliation with truth.

Whether or not the Triune God came to the world in Christ Jesus and ended the power of death, death has always been reality.  It’s part of God’s creative process: things live and die and return to the earth to feed other things that live and die.  Denying this only leads to anxiety, frustration, fear.  Today we reconcile ourselves to the truth that we are mortal, we die, and we accept that.  We began in dust, we return to dust.

Yet we belong to the Triune God, creator of all that is, who knows what to do with dust and ashes, who creates life out of dust and ashes from the beginning.  In the reconciliation Paul talks about, this God did enter our deadly existence, took on our reality, dust to dust.  Ashes to ashes.  When Jesus was born he was born into our death, well before the cross.

But our great mystery is the cross, the shape of the ashes on our forehead.  In willingly taking on an evil death, God somehow killed death.  That’s what we realize at the empty tomb: our truth is still there, we die.  But it is all changed now.  Jesus takes our mortality, our sin and brokenness and death, and dies with it.  When he rises from death, he brings us, too, joining us to the immortality of the Triune God.

We still die.  But we die as people joined to the eternal life of the Triune God forever, so death isn’t an end but a beginning.

That’s our joy today.  Knowing the whole truth, we can live.

We are marked with a cross of ashes in the same place we received a cross of oil at the font, the same place we mark a cross of water each time we remind ourselves of our baptism.

This cross marks our whole lives, not just our foreheads: in ashes, for we are dying.  In oil, for we belong to the Triune God.  In water, for we are washed and made new.  And everything’s different.

Paul describes the suffering and difficulty the believers have faced: afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, sleepless nights . . . it’s a long list.  Yet in this reconciliation in Christ’s death and resurrection, we live that list very differently.  We face the same pains and tragedies anyone does.  But we face them as people willing to accept them, as people who know these are not the final truth about us.  They have no power over us.

We are seen as impostors, then, Paul says, as people who live as if there is a greater truth others can’t see.  And there is, so we are not false but true.

We are unknown to the world, Paul says, confusing, odd, because we live both in the truth of our mortality and in the truth of God’s eternal love.  But we’re well known to God.

We look as if we have nothing, yet we have everything; we face sorrow head on but are rejoicing.

And we are dying, we claim it, accept it, but we are really alive in God now and always.

The cross is always on our forehead, on our bodies, on our lives.

There’s a story, I don’t know if it’s true, that some church used lighter fluid to burn palms for their ashes, and the petroleum residue gave slight burns to the people’s skin, so that even after they washed there was a bright red cross for a day or so.

We won’t have that bright red mark after we wash.  But the cross on us is just as indelible.  It reminds us that our journey of faith travels through suffering and hardships, even to death, with God’s grace and hand supporting us, giving us life.  Our cross reminds us that the cross of Christ transforms our deadly truth, so we find hope in despair, light in darkness, life in death.

This cannot be washed off of us, thanks be to God.  The waters of baptism have covered us forever in this life in the midst of death, this green shoot out of our ashes.

So we rejoice, and hope, and live.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen