The vision of the other crucified convict is the vision we need to see God’s work in the world: to look at the dying Jesus of Nazareth and see the Christ, ruler of all things and the image of the invisible God.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, Christ the King, Lectionary 34, year C; texts: Luke 23:33-43; Colossians 1:11-20

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

The sign was, in the end, unnecessary.  Everybody knew who the man in the middle was.  Still, it was the custom to hang a sign over each crucifixion, naming the convict and the charges against him.  So Pilate, the governor and judge of this case, had one made for Jesus.  “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”  John tells us that the religious authorities protested that the charge should be “he claimed to be the King of the Jews.”  But all four evangelists agree that the crime, the charge laid against Jesus by the Romans, was that he was actually the King of the Jews.  A little bit of gallows humor, with the added bonus to the oppressor that the oppressed are offended by it.

But everyone knew who he was.  Jesus of Nazareth.  An itinerant rabbi from Galilee who’d been drawing big crowds for a couple years.  Rumors of healings and miracles were breathed, but most of his work was in the north country, where you can get hicks to believe anything, even that water can be changed into wine.  Those in the city, the sophisticates, likely doubted he was anything real.  But they knew of him.  Everybody did.  Every generation it seemed there was someone stirring up the people and raising hopes for freedom and restoration to Israel.  At the very least, he was the latest news.  And here he was, ending the way the rest of them always ended, on a Roman cross.

The title “king” was never really in question, except as a Roman joke, not to the crowds.  Even to those who might have heard him teach, might even have found hope in some of his words, this execution, this death was probably not a surprise.  No one really thought that he was a king of anything.  And who ever could be king in a world ruled by Caesar?

Except there is this: one man, strangely enough one hanging on a cross next to him, with his own name and crime above his head, one man looked at this dying teacher, this failed hope, and saw a king.  A real King, one who was somehow yet to inherit his kingdom, his reign.  Dying himself, this convict asked only one thing, to be remembered when this King entered his kingdom.

Look, everybody knew he was Jesus of Nazareth.  Everybody knew that the title King was either a big joke or an offense.

So answer this: how in the world did this convict see the Christ, the ruler of all things, when he looked at the dying Jesus?

That is the truth we must grasp, above everything else in this world, because until we see how this convict sees, we understand nothing about God.

In some ways we have made a wall of separation between what we know and think happened at the cross and what we consider about God in our world today.

There’s no question we believe that Jesus, the Son of God, died on the cross, and was raised.  We debate about how this saves us, what needed to be made right that only Jesus’ death could do.  But we know that he died and he rose.

Yet, when we consider what the Triune God is doing in the world today, when we seek signs of God’s hand, of God’s will, somehow we separate this death of Jesus from that.  We ask where God is in suffering and death.  We ask what God wants of us and of the world.  We blame God for things we ourselves have caused, we abandon faith when challenges come.

We believe that Jesus died and rose, but we have segregated that event to having something to do only with what happens after we die.  We don’t consider that it might have something to do with everything in this world.

But the apostle Paul sees with the convict’s eyes.  He looks at the cross, at the dying Jesus, and sees Christ.  He looks at the cross and sees God’s ongoing action in the world.

This paean of praise at the entrance to Colossians is majestic in its beauty.  Paul claims that Christ is the “image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation;” “in him all things in heaven and on earth were created,” through him and for him.  And on top of it all, Christ is “before all things and in him all things hold together.”

This is a cosmic view of the lordship of Christ Jesus, the eternal Son of God, the ruler of all things.  But that’s only part of the hymn.  Paul also claims that in Christ “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”  Not only the image of the invisible God, Christ Jesus is the fullness of God, fully God.  Now we are into Trinitarian lands, speaking of whom we know as the Second Person of the Trinity, very God of very God.

But then Paul adds: “through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.”  Thump.  This exalted Christ, God from God, Light from Light, bled on a cross?  This fullness of God, this image of the invisible God, ruler of all, bled on a cross?  And through that bleeding, reconciliation with all things in heaven and on earth happened?  Peace with God happened?

This is the vision of the convict: to look at the bleeding, dying Jesus and see the eternal Christ and believe that he is, in dying, acting his kingship, beginning his reign.  This is a death and resurrection that is not for a single moment segregated from the rest of our theology, held in reserve for our hope in life after death.

This is not an image of a superhero disguised in rags who sheds them at the last moment and reveals his power and glory: this Son of God wears the rags into death.  This is a Christ ruling over the universe through his bleeding and dying, a Christ who is only recognizable to the world in that dying rabbi from Nazareth.  A Christ who cannot be understood or known apart from this death on the cross.

What the convict sees is that this is how God answers human evil and how God will continue to answer human evil: by entering it and dying to it in order to rule over all things.

We know from what Paul says here and elsewhere that the center of all of this is to see that this death is God’s way of bringing reconciliation to all things.  “Reconciling” is the key word, isn’t it?  Somehow, by the Son of God, existing with the Father and the Spirit before all time and now living in our flesh, somehow by God entering suffering and death, God breaks through our evil and hate.

We do not love God with our whole lives and our neighbors as ourselves.  God, since the Flood, has committed not to use power against us when we sin like that.  So the Triune God sets aside all power and lets us kill the Incarnate Son.  And somehow that reconciles all things, that God is willing to be killed by us.

This is mystery, but this is the truth that the Triune God shows us consistently throughout the Scriptures: the only way to win is to lose all; the only way to be free is to be a slave; the only way to live is to die.  The Son of God, in dying, shows forever God’s answer to the brokenness and pain of the world.

If we can look at the dying Jesus and see the Christ, the ruler of all, and say “remember me when you come into your kingdom,” only then will the world begin to make sense.

This is the path we find when we see like this and follow our Lord Christ: a path through death into life.

Looking for ways in the world for us to protect our rights, secure our safety, ensure our sense that we are right and others not, to find gain at whatever expense, this is not a path of Christ.

If we think that Jesus’ death and resurrection are only important because they get us to heaven we deny that they are in fact the path we are all called to walk.

God’s biggest problem with humanity wasn’t that we die.  God could stop that with a word.  The Son of God didn’t need to die and rise to stop death.  God’s biggest problem with humanity wasn’t that we sin and need forgiveness.  God could forgive us with a word – look at what Jesus says about those who crucify him.  The Son of God didn’t need to die and rise to forgive us.

The witness of Scripture is that the Son of God needed to die and rise because he was willing to make himself completely vulnerable to us, to reveal God’s love by setting aside all power.  Even if we killed him.  And he did this, he said, to show us the path to real life, the path God needs us to walk, the way he invited his disciples to walk.  That’s how we’re reconciled to God: we return to our created path.

Forgiven, yes.  Given eternal life, yes.  But the important thing was that God needed to die to show us the way to life.  True life, Jesus’ death tells us, is found in letting go of our need to control, of our need to win, of our need to be the center of our lives, of our need to grasp for power.

We will love God with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength when we let go of putting ourselves in the center of our hearts and lives.  We will love our neighbor as ourselves when we put our neighbor before us, before our needs.

We will find God’s answer to suffering in this world to continue to be in the suffering and death of Jesus as we take it on ourselves; in other words, God’s answer is that we enter the suffering of others and hold them in it, taking it on ourselves.  That we learn to suffer so others might find life, that we stand firmly in love in a world of evil and hold on to the good and the gracious, even if it costs us everything.

Our willingness to be Christ means our willingness to lose like Jesus of Nazareth.  That’s the fulfilling of the reconciliation God works on the cross: in our lives, our voices, our bodies, our hearts, laid out in the world.  In our willingness to lose ourselves, like Jesus, that we might be found in the heart of God and in the resurrection life God makes happen only in death.
 
To see the eternal Christ the way the convict sees is to see the life God is making in the death of this world, and the path we are invited to walk.

It means becoming comfortable with paradox and mystery.  That power is truly exercised when it is released and let go.  That weakness is the true strength.  That death – daily death – is the gateway to life.  This was not only true of Jesus, the Son.  It is the path he holds out before us now.

And in repeating the words of that convict, we are committing ourselves to walk that path with our Lord Christ, seeking only the grace of his remembering us, that he might turn to us and strengthen our hearts and our faith, and transform us in our dying and losing, that we, and all things in heaven and on earth, might faithfully walk this path which ultimately ends in life.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

In his incarnation, death and resurrection our Lord Christ walks the same path he invites us and strengthens us to walk, and so we face fearful events and signs of tribulation without fear, witnessing by our walking as Christ walked and now walks beside us.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, Time after Pentecost, Lectionary 33, year C; texts: Luke 21:5-19; Malachi 4:1-2a; Psalm 98

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

“There will be wars and insurrections, nation rising against nation.”  There will be genocide and civil war in Africa and Syria.  Slaughter in Afghanistan and Iraq.  “There will be great earthquakes and portents and signs from heaven.”  There will be typhoons in the Philippines, tsunamis in Southeast Asia, hurricanes in New Jersey and vicious tornadoes in Oklahoma.  “There will be plagues and famines.”  There will be AIDS and antibiotic-resistant germs, powerful influenza viruses, cancer seemingly everywhere the eye looks.  Tens of thousands starving to death daily.  Drought in once fertile places and melting ice caps.

Do not be terrified, our Lord Jesus says, these things will have to take place.  And along with this, you may also face personal struggles directly related to your discipleship: even arrest, persecution.

And though that part of Jesus’ words doesn’t seem to apply to us as strongly in this country (though it certainly does to Christians elsewhere), this yearly excursion into the apocalyptic warnings of Jesus that we have each end of the Church Year is distressing and confusing.  Far too many of our sisters and brothers in Christ focus most of their energy on proclaiming the end times and little on the grace of God Christ embodied for the world, and that troubles us.  Yet, like virtually every generation before us since our Lord said these words, it’s hard not to hear them and then look at our newspapers or the Internet and tremble a bit.

“This is not the end, yet,” Jesus says.  It won’t follow immediately.  But in response to our forebear disciples’ small-town admiration of the beautiful Temple and rich appointments of the buildings of Jerusalem, Jesus says that while the end isn’t necessarily here, we might be wise not to depend on the institutions and works of our hands in this world to last forever.  Stones do get thrown down upon stones, and human enterprise envisioned to endure for centuries can quickly become overgrown with grass and weeds.

What we must not forget, then, is the only thing that matters about all these words, these sayings, and that is just who it is who is saying them.  Taking little bits of the Scriptures each week to read in worship is the only way we can do it – we can’t read the whole Bible each Sunday – but it sometimes causes us to focus on the external details of readings and forget the deeper core, the center of God’s written Word.  And in these verses there is only one thing we need to look at, one idea to understand, one place we need to see: we need to turn our eyes to our Lord Jesus Christ, who speaks these words, and thereby changes their impact on us forever.

The lectionary preparers gave us the first hints that the most important thing in the face of apocalypse is the Incarnate, Crucified and Risen Christ who is with us.

You might have heard two such hints as we moved through our readings.

At the end of Malachi’s dire warnings of the flaming destruction of the wicked was a burst of the light of grace, a beam which Charles Wesley placed at the celebration of the birth of Jesus.  “But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.”  So says the LORD through Malachi.  “Hail the heav’nborn Prince of Peace!,” says Charles Wesley.  “Hail the Sun of righteousness! Light and life to all he brings, ris’n with healing in his wings.”  Hark, you herald angels indeed.

And then we have this curiosity: when the lectionary preparers were considering a psalm for Christmas Day, they said, “We know – let’s assign Psalm 98.  It’s perfect.”  And Isaac Watts’ paraphrase of Psalm 98, known to us as “Joy to the World,” is also closely associated with the festival of the Nativity of Our Lord.

But then, when these same preparers of the lectionary considered this Sunday, these dire warnings from Malachi and Jesus, they also seem to have said, “We know – let’s assign Psalm 98.  It’s perfect.”  And so it is, and so they were correct.

Because God’s answer to the portents and disaster and tragedy and war and rampant disease and starvation and pain of the world is the coming of the Incarnate Son of God into that very chaos, that devastation.  The answer of the Triune God to this world’s pain and brokenness is not to overpower it, or avoid it, or even to pull the children of God out of it, but to enter that pain and brokenness and through losing, through dying to it, bring healing and restoration and life.

So when we sing “Joy to the World” on a day like today, do not the words “No more let sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground; he comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found,” do not these words sound different, feel different today than they do on Christmas morning?  Is this not exactly what our Lord is saying in these words from Luke today?  Is this not actually an Easter stanza, these words, as well as a Christmas one, and an apocalyptic one?

Our Eucharist each week is actually a living into and through the entire story of Christ embedded in the Church Year.  The whole work of Christ, birth, life, suffering, death, resurrection, ascension, Pentecost, and life in the Spirit, all are present in this moment each time we gather.  We inhabit it all in this one moment, this open rift in time, and in that context we hear the various teachings and readings and Scripture passages assigned each week, and they never can be heard apart from this greater truth and reality.

So when this Incarnate One, the Son of God, turns to us today and says, “It’s going to be pretty bad out there at times for you, and for all,” he’s only saying what he already knows to be true himself, in his own body.  And we cannot hear his words without remembering everything else we know about him, the one speaking.

And do you see how that changes this whole reading, to remember it is our beloved Lord Jesus Christ who speaks this word?  That he calls us to endure what this world is as one who has already endured what this world is?  That he promises to strengthen us and give us wisdom as One who has already made his way through the chaos, and in rising from the dead has begun to heal it?

When we know who it is who is speaking to us, then we can hear the grace in his words and promise, even on days like today, words like today.

So his first word today is: there is only One whom you should follow, One to whom you should listen, and that is me, your Lord and Savior.

This warning he gives today about people speaking falsely in his name isn’t about wondering who the Antichrist is, as if it’s one person.  It’s about realizing there are many who will claim to speak on behalf of our Lord Christ who are not.

So here is our test: if anyone tells us an answer from God to the suffering and pain of this world that does not involve entering it fully and transforming it, even losing, in order that life might come through it, they are not of Christ.  The world always looks for an easy path, but it does not exist.  Our Lord walked the path he now reveals lies before us, and no one truly of Christ can tell us there is another.

And if anyone tells us that in the apocalyptic destruction that may be at the end of the world, and in the devastating pain and suffering that certainly are in these days there are some who are blessed by God and who will avoid such things because of that, they are not of Christ.  The world always looks to those who suffer and seeks to blame, to explain, and to claim that those who do not suffer are the blessed ones.  Our Lord, the blessed, Incarnate One, the Son of God, entered the chaos of the world on our behalf, suffered its worst, and permanently blessed all who likewise suffer, and if we’re going to follow this True One, we’re going to have to go there, too, as vulnerable as the Christ Child, as willing to lose as Jesus on the cross.

So be careful, he says, whom you listen to, whom you follow, especially if they say they’re from me.  They might lead you astray.

But his second word to us today is: don’t be terrified.

Yes, this way of facing the pain and brokenness of the world with our lives and our work and our heart and our love and our bodies is a frightening way to consider, to live.  But don’t be terrified, he says.  Don’t be terrified, because none of this can ultimately harm you, for I am with you always.  Don’t be terrified, because as he said in John’s Gospel: “take courage, I have conquered the world.”  (John 16:33)

The Son not only was born among us, entering this broken world, not only died facing it, he is risen and gives life: he has overcome the world in this.  So we need not fear, though the earth shake and the mountains fall into the sea, though the nations rage.  Christ has conquered the world.

His third word to us today is: this all will be our opportunity to testify, literally, to martyr, to witness.  Our trust in the Incarnate, Crucified and Risen One who leads us through this wilderness, this world of destruction, not only gives us strength in this journey.  It is a witness.  We can become people who testify by our very selves that Christ has come and conquered the world, even if it is hard to see now.

Our grace under stress, our trust in the Lord, our willingness to be with others in their pain and suffering as the very grace of God, our courageous placing ourselves into the face of evil and holding the light of love high, this is our witness.  Our testimony to the risen Christ who offers life to all.

Our Lord says to us, instead of fretting about how hard it is to live in this painful world, instead consider what a witness you can be when you do, the opportunity to be the word of grace from God in the midst of a broken world, the one who helps others see the Son of God in our midst, healing all.

And his last word to us today is: don’t worry about what you will say (or do), I will give you what you need.  We don’t need to think about what we say, worry about not being brilliant speakers or gifted evangelists, fear that we aren’t brave enough or strong enough.

We have an opportunity every day to witness to the truth about what God is doing in this broken, suffering world, and God will give us what we need to do this witness.  The words we need.  The wisdom we lack.  The strength we cannot find in ourselves.  The courage that comes from the Spirit of God in our hearts.

This is our hope, always: we belong to Christ Jesus, and in that love nothing can separate us.

We need to hear these honest words each year which name the destructive reality that a world torn apart by sin is: wars, disasters, tragedies, disease, devastation.  We would be liars if we denied this truth, and our part in making it.

But today we remember that we cannot talk about any of these things as if they exist apart from the reality that the Triune God has entered this world to redeem it from within, and we hear none of this except in the voice of our Lord who loves us enough to die for us, and in rising gives us new life, life that will one day fill the whole world.

It is a hard world, a frightening world.  But we keep our eyes on Christ Jesus, who’s right in the middle of it already, holding out his hand that we might walk with him, and in our witness to others, lead the rest of the world to this life he is bringing.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

God seeks us out, welcomes us, finds us, and shares a meal of grace with us, when no one else would, and all we can do is live overwhelmed by that abundant love.  Such love changes us, shapes us, and helps us let go of what controls us and hinders abundant life.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, Time after Pentecost, Lectionary 31, year C; texts: Luke 19:1-10; Isaiah 1:10-18

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

When someone has told you that you are unacceptable and then you find acceptance, nothing is ever the same.

When someone has told you that you are different and therefore not welcome, and you find a place where your difference is embraced and you are welcomed, nothing is ever the same.

When someone has told you that your sins are such a problem that you have to suffer in them and then another person shows you God’s forgiveness and love for you, nothing is ever the same.

When someone has told you that God is anger and judgment, that “God is not mocked” means that you shouldn’t fool yourself into hoping for benevolence from God because you’re not worthy of it, that God is primarily concerned with how bad you are, and then someone brings you into a place where you meet the Triune God and are astonished to find love, and welcome, and grace; to find healing and Spirit-given holiness; to find that you are precious in the eyes of God and to actually meet this loving God in worship, nothing is ever the same.

This we know to be true here.  This we live here.

I am convinced that the hospitality and welcome this community offers others of all kinds is directly tied to the sense that in this place that welcome has been extended to everyone who is here, and that changed us and changes us.

I am convinced that our love of being in this room regularly and worshipping God with all our senses, our love of this liturgical life we have here is directly tied to the sense that in this place the Triune God comes to us with blessing and life, that this is holy ground, that here we are met by the God whom Christ has made known to us in death and resurrection and are regularly given life in the midst of our deaths, and that changed us and changes us.

I am convinced that our commitment and desire to make a difference in this world, to challenge ourselves to deepen our presence in this neighborhood and city, and in all our neighborhoods, is directly tied to our sense that in this place we have found the healing grace of God and are overwhelmed by our hope to see that grace abound elsewhere, and to be a part of that, and that changed us and changes us.

It is not hard for us to understand Zacchaeus, then.

Much of his pain is covered up by his wealth, his lifestyle.  But what rich man, secure in his choices, lets himself be vulnerable enough to chase down the street after an itinerant preacher and healer, and even hike himself up into a tree to see?  This is not a man content.  This is a man searching.

Does it matter that people hate him for what they consider good reasons?  Sure, he’s a collaborator with the oppressive occupation forces, taking their taxes from his fellow people, his own Jewish sisters and brothers.  Sure, he’s very likely the same as most tax collectors in that day, adding his own hidden surcharge on top of everyone’s tax bill, so he can profit, and have a nice house, nice clothes.  But does he deserve to be hated by all?

We can’t deny the truth of his public shame.  They grumble of Jesus, “He’s gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”  His sinfulness is so public, so reviled, that he gets the title “sinner,” as if the rest aren’t worthy of such a name.  As if they “sin,” but he’s categorically “a sinner.”

So we understand his reaction to Jesus’ inviting himself over.  To be welcomed by this one that everyone wants to meet, everyone wants to see, everyone is interested in, this is unexpected, especially by one who is hated by all his neighbors, accustomed to being a pariah in spite of his wealth.

Maybe part of Zacchaeus is just inwardly the thought that this is a feather in his cap, he scored a dinner with the famous rabbi.

But his reaction – and we notice it’s not clear if the dinner has happened yet or not – his reaction seems like there’s something else happening to him, his reaction is something we understand.  He explodes with a response of joy.

He doesn’t just promise to stop cheating.  Instead, he goes further and promises to return four times what he’s cheated from people.

He doesn’t just promise to stop profiting from others’ misery.  Instead, he goes further and promises to give away half of what he has.

He receives such grace and welcome from Jesus he bankrupts himself out of joy and thanks.

That kind of joy at God’s grace we can understand.

What we might not fully grasp is his own analysis of the connection between his wealth and his entrapment.

Isaiah speaks to people who do all that God commands with regard to worship, but that’s an end of it.  And that’s not our experience.

Shockingly, God rejects all their actions of worship, every one of which is commanded of them.  Coming to the Temple, doing sacrifice, celebrating the yearly festivals, burning incense, all were required, and of all of these God says, “I am sick to my stomach with them.”

Instead, the people are told to “learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”  The worship of the Lord God of Israel, says the Lord, is intimately tied to the actions of the people for justice.

Our experience of welcome, grace, love, acceptance, forgiveness, our very meeting the Triune God in worship has led us to commitment and passion; unlike Isaiah’s people, we do desire to “learn good,” and to seek justice.  We may not always be good at it, but we are committed to deepening, and growing.  I hear this from people here all the time, I know it is true.

However, Zacchaeus shows us a disconnect that we sometimes don’t understand as true in our lives.  Zacchaeus experiences the welcome and love of Jesus.  What connects in his mind is that his wealth is going to be in the way of his living in that welcome and love as he wants.

And his reaction to Jesus is pretty revealing.  Of all the ways Zacchaeus could respond in joy and gratitude, what he did was free himself from the enslavement of wealth, from what got him all he had.

He recognized that his privileged status, his comforts, his luxuries, were obtained on the backs of others, at the expense of his neighbors.  He recognized that his sinfulness was directly tied to his love of money, to its hold on him.  There was only one option open to him once he understood that.

What would happen if we learned that to be true for us?  It certainly is true that our privilege and wealth has come to us on the backs of others, here and around the world.  We don’t have to have been cheaters like Zacchaeus for that to be true.  Is it also true, then, that similarly our wealth enslaves us, traps us, keeps us from being free?

When you have been rejected, cast out, and you find welcome, everything changes.  You cannot help but welcome, even if it’s costly to offer it sometimes.  I have said to others outside this congregation on several occasions that if you really want to rile up the people of Mount Olive, hint that you might be excluding someone.  That will surely raise up an outcry.

Can Zacchaeus help us see with a similar passion that the freedom we find in Christ, this grace, this hope, is inhibited, blocked, even undermined by our clinging to our wealth?  There are many congregations who don’t find their way to be gracious and loving even though they have received grace and love.  That doesn’t seem to be our problem.

But Zacchaeus troubles me, and I wonder if he troubles you.  He keeps riling up inside me feelings of discomfort and even guilt at how well off I am.  He couldn’t see a way to embrace Jesus’ embrace while holding on to the riches he had.  He makes me wonder about me, about us.

He asks me, and perhaps you, these questions:

What if you learned your sense of welcome by God came at the expense of someone else’s rejection?  Could you live happy with that?

What if you believed that having grace and forgiveness from God was a limited resource, and you were going to cling to that as much as possible and not let go of it for others?  Would that seem right to you?

So Zacchaeus says by his actions, if your wealth is at the expense of others, and it isn’t truly yours in the first place, and it is abundantly given, is it fine for you not to respond to God’s love and welcome and grace by letting go of it?  Is it possible that you are not free because you are clinging so tightly, that it is leading you into sin?

Our understanding of stewardship is skewed because we’ve sequestered our wealth and life-style from everything in which we rejoice about God’s grace and love.

It’s that simple.  We’re generous when we perceive a need.  That’s a good thing, and better than some I suppose.  Lots of charities are grateful for such generosity.

But Zacchaeus wasn’t perceiving a need in others he needed to address with his ill-gotten wealth.  He was perceiving a need in himself that he needed to address by divesting himself of it.

When we understand that for ourselves, we will be on the path to being faithful stewards.  It is that sense of letting go, of recognizing that as much as being inhospitable and excluding is not in keeping with the grace we know, clinging to our own possessions as if they belong to us and as if they don’t in some ways control and own us is also not in keeping with the freedom we have come to know in Christ.

We look at Zacchaeus and see what it looks like when our whole lives are captive to God’s love and grace, everything, not just part.

This week we will receive invitations for us to pledge to each other and to God our promises for 2014, invitations for each of us to find a Zacchaeus revelation.

I have no urgings, no pleas to make.  Only prayers.  A prayer that each one of us, so deeply filled with the knowledge of living in God’s amazing love, might know without any second of fear that God loves us, loves you.  A prayer that we each find that freedom Zacchaeus found, that we can be so free that we can promise to each other from this point forward a transformative use of the wealth we have, wealth that we know is not ours.

When the good news that God has loved us, and still loves us, reaches our hearts and lives, things change, we change.  We know this.  Zacchaeus simply raises to each of us this possibility that there is more change that would give life, more letting go that would be freeing.  He raises the possibility that we might really know what life in Christ is if our response of joy and gratitude to God’s astounding grace in our lives involved breaking our hold on this idol, this master over our hearts.

When God answers these prayers, then we will hear the words of Jesus once again, and know it to be true perhaps more deeply than we ever have before: “Today salvation has come to this house.”  Today.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

In the waters of Baptism, God has claimed us as God’s own children, joined us with the communion of saints and promised eternal life in the future and the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives now. We belong to God now and forever. Because we belong to God, the Holy Spirit will equip us to live out the Beatitudes in Luke. 

Vicar Emily Beckering, All Saints Sunday; texts: Luke 6:20-31, Ephesians 1:3-23

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Are there any who are poor? You are blessed because God’s kingdom belongs to you. Are you hungry or empty? You are blessed because God will fill you. Have you found yourself weeping lately? You are blessed because God will bring you laughter. Do people criticize you, hate you, or exclude you? Jump for joy because your reward is great in heaven.

But what if we are sitting with more than we need? What if we have full bellies, smiles on our faces, and other people’s praise tingling in our ears? Should we be worried? Have we somehow lost God’s blessing? Must we be poor, mourning, and hated in order to have God’s favor?

The poor, the hungry, those who are grieving or depressed: these are the people who, according to our standards, are at the very least, down on their luck. At our worst, we say that they are the ones who have failed, or floundered, or have caused their own suffering. Not so, Jesus says, there is a special place in the heart of God for these ones.

But the ones who Jesus warns, on the other hand, these are the ones who we believe have it all together! Wealth, success, influence, good times, the best parties, and the love and admiration of all. Who doesn’t want that? These people have everything! Or do they?

According to Jesus, things are not as they seem. Jesus takes everything that we think we know about life and about God and flips it upside down. We have lived our lives according to certain rules, expecting to find ourselves on the right side, come to find out that the ones who we think are cursed are not cursed after all and the ones who we are certain are blessed are not, in fact, blessed.

So when we hear Jesus speak the warnings, “Woe to you,” we may begin to squirm. Is that us? We may also be tempted to think that we must be of a certain status or find ourselves in particular conditions to be loved by God. We may wonder if God’s very blessing and love is conditional.

But Paul tells us something quite different in Ephesians. In the extended reading of Ephesians today, we hear just what God thinks of us. We hear just what the Triune God has done, continues to do, and will yet do for us. God the Father, out of great love for us, chose to adopt us as children. God the Son has bought us back from the power that death and sin once had over us, forgives us for our sins, and through him, we are given the promise of eternal life. God the Holy Spirit has sealed us with these promises and continues to empower and send us to do God’s work on a daily basis. It was God’s great pleasure to do this: God rejoiced at choosing to be in relationship with you and now no condition—nothing—can take away that relationship.

We are not saints, or holy or blessed because of what we have, have done, or hear said about us. We are part of the communion of saints because God has called us Holy and Blessed and claimed us as God’s own. Yes, God has made a decision about us. God has decided to be our God and that we will be God’s people.

To confirm this, we do not look to our bank statements, or our GPA, or the titles added to our names, or the amount of people who want to come to our parties, or whether or not our plans for ourselves work out. We look instead to the waters of our baptism, for it is here that we know for sure that our God is a God of love and mercy, a God who gives all of God’s self to those who have little, who turns weeping and mourning and shame into joy, who transforms our longing into fulfilled promises, our hunger into satisfaction, hatred into love and death into life. God washes us with these promises and says: “You are baptized in my name. I am your God and I will never let you go. All I have is yours and I give it to you freely and with joy and great pleasure because I love you.”

God is, was, and always will be your God so that no grave will ever be able to hold you: God will raise you and all the saints from the dead. And so, it is here in baptism that we are joined with Christ and brought from death into life; here that God claims us as God’s own children and makes us members of Christ’s church and heirs to our inheritance in Christ which is life with God in eternity and the seal of the Holy Spirit. With that seal, comes the power of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives now, forming us to live as Christ for the sake of the world. The Holy Spirit equips us to do all that Jesus asks in his sermon in the gospel for today.

Jesus is describing the life of the saints here and now. Jesus is doing for us exactly what was promised to the Ephesians. He is enlightening our hearts, showing us what it means and what it looks like to live out of his love, so that, as Paul writes, we may know the hope to which we are called, the riches of our inheritance as saints, and the immeasurable greatness of God’s power in our lives. Jesus is not casting us aside for how we have been living; he is inviting us all back in: the poor and the rich, the hungry and the content, the mourning and the rejoicing, for he died for all.

In this invitation, as a loving parent, Jesus calls us back to his side to recall the promises that we have received in him. Jesus does not say, “in order to belong to me,” but “since you belong to me, live differently. Now that you know that you are mine, live as mine.”

Because we have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with Christ’s cross forever, our very lives will be marked by Christ and his cross. Christ was poor, Christ was hungry, Christ wept, Christ was hated and rejected, and so shall we be.

Because we belong to Christ and the Holy Spirit is at work in us, we will accept with open arms the people who exclude us and rally against us. Because we belong to Christ and the Holy Spirit is at work in us, we will encourage those who criticize us. Because we belong to Christ and the Holy Spirit is at work in us, we will pray for God to care for those who discount us, offer our forgiveness to those who only deal out hurt, and give away freely from the abundance of what God has given us.

And this work of bringing us from death into life that God has done in our baptism continues to be lived out daily in the lives of the saints. In Jesus’ words today, the Triune God is at work once again to bring light where darkness has crept in and life where death has tricked us into feeling its icy chill. Here in this place, through Jesus’ words, God is putting to death the fears and behaviors that lead us to destruction, that cause us to wreak havoc on our neighbors and ourselves, and make us doubt the love of God.

When we hear, “Blessed are you who are poor, hungry, weeping, and hated,” the Triune God is putting to death our assumptions about who is in, and who is out, where God is at work, and who has value. For those of us who have lived in misery, who know well the bitter taste of suffering, who are ridiculed, and ignored, and cast aside because we do not succeed in ways that the world values, for those of us who have begun to wonder whether there is any hope, the Triune God is putting to death the fear that we have been abandoned, and is raising up actual hope: you have a special place in the heart and in the life of God. Jesus is saying, “Nobody declares your value but me, and to me, you are precious, you are blessed, and you are mine.”

For those of us who have many friends and who find security in our comfortable lives, the Triune God is putting to death our assumptions that we have all that we have because we have God’s favor. Jesus warns, “Be careful who and what you let have power over you. Being rich or successful or influential or well-liked doesn’t make you count in my eyes. You are blessed, but know why. You are blessed because I have called you by name and made you my own: nobody declares your value but me and to me you are precious, you are mine.”

This is the promise that God gives not just to us, but to all, for everything will be gathered to God. Nothing and no one can take away this promise, not even our own tendency to live as if we still belonged to sin and death instead of to the risen Christ.

And so, may these tendencies to live as if sin and the fear of death still ruled us: that is, the tendency to accrue wealth and experiences for ourselves even though we are fully aware of those who are struggling, the tendency to meet our needs at the expense of others, to chase after approval and recognition no matter who we take down in the process, and the tendency to base our value on the world’s standards rather than on who God says that we are: may all these harmful patterns die. And may God raise us up anew, to live out of the Spirit’s power and out of the hope that our story does not end here, for we have a place in God’s story.

In the fullness of that story, an end will come to poverty, and hunger, and pain, and weeping, and hate, and we and all the faithful dead will be united with God.  But here and now, God is in our very midst putting to death our harmful beliefs and behaviors and raising us once again by the power of the Holy Spirit to live as Christ—to fill and be filled by the hungry, to weep with the weeping, to return hate with love, to forgive and lift up before God those who hurt us, and to give of ourselves and our resources for the joy of being apart of what God is doing. When this happens, all around us the clouds part and God’s future breaks in now.

This God who chose to make us his own and freely poured out on us the gifts of eternal life, forgiveness, and the power of the Holy Spirit, this God who has made us saints and called us blessed, will continue to call us back, to put to death harmful patterns, to raise us again to live as Christ, and to remind us whose we are until that time when before the throne with all the saints in light, we will know in complete fullness, the God to whom we belong.

Amen

God’s grace is permanently inscribed on our hearts and it re-forms us from within, shapes our hearts and lives into new ones for service in the world, a change which can be threatening to our sense of security in the status quo.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, Reformation Sunday; texts: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Romans 3:19-28; John 8:31-36

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

Tattoos fascinate me.  In the last decade or more, they have become more prevalent, and much more mainstream.  People of all ages and backgrounds get them, not just people in biker gangs, even a fair number of folks here at Mount Olive.  I find it so interesting that people are capable of making a decision to mark their bodies permanently.  Mostly because I can’t imagine how I would pick exactly what art I wanted displayed on my body for the rest of my life – how could a person make that choice?  Of course, a whole industry has also arisen around tattoo removal, for those who have second thoughts about that girlfriend’s name they chose, or about the design which seemed so daring at age 18 but somehow seems to be hindering job interviews at age 38.  It seems it’s a painful and lengthy process, though.  It’s probably best to think of tattoos as permanent when considering whether you want one.

So I don’t have a tattoo yet.  If ever.  But something like it is described in the words of the prophet Jeremiah today.  Through the prophet the LORD God says “I will put my law within [my people], and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”  This is the new covenant the Triune God is making with Israel, with us, a covenant fully realized in Jesus, God’s Son.  It’s a covenant, a promise, of forgiveness and love from God, and a covenant where God’s ways are inscribed permanently on our hearts, like a spiritual tattoo.

There’s a powerful sense of transformation in that image alongside the sense of permanence.  This heart-writing God does actually changes us from within, makes us new, shapes our very hearts and lives, marking us as God’s forever.

This is what Jeremiah proclaims: God’s promise of grace is imprinted on our hearts and we will never be the same again.

It’s an astonishing image: God literally writes on our hearts this amazing love we know in Jesus, and a way to live in that love.  It’s now part of our spiritual genes, so to speak; we act the way we’ve been marked.  Much as our own genes shape how we are.  It’s as if in writing on our hearts, God is re-writing our DNA and making us new from within.  We will look different, act different, be different because of this marking, this writing.

I was recently looking at a picture of my 13 year old nephew, my sister’s son, alongside pictures of him when he was small, and it was remarkable how much he now looks like his father, but how when he was younger he looked like some of my siblings when they were little.  It’s so interesting in families to see those traits, those shared looks, and how they change.  Sometimes it’s almost uncanny how someone can channel a grandparent’s face, or an uncle’s turn of phrase.  We are what our genes have made us to be, what our biological parents gave to us genetically.

And now, according to Jeremiah, God has done the same thing to us, has marked us to look like our heavenly parent.  That’s the real power of God’s image here: that the imprint of God’s grace changes us.

It would be a great deal just to know God’s love and ways because they’re written in our core, on our hearts in baptism.  Imagine how different the world would be if every person knew in their hearts that God loved them with a love death could not destroy.  That all knew they were forgiven by God forever, that God forgets all their sins.

But it’s a far deeper promise: having God’s Word tattooed on us, we’re changed by it, transformed into new people.  This vision of Jeremiah is that in having such heart-writing all would know the LORD and live by God’s ways, rather than needing written covenant or stone-carved law.

This is the core of Christian ethics, throughout Scripture: you are, I am, we are a new creation, made into new people in tune with God.  Like King David in Psalm 51, we asked for clean hearts and we now find that God is going us one better.  God’s remaking our hearts into new ones.

We should also note that God’s plan of heart-writing is for all God’s people.  it’s a group thing, not just an individual thing.

God speaks of all the people as getting this imprint, all getting a heart tattoo of grace and a way of life.

This is more than just saying all are important.  It’s about the experience of God’s grace and how it’s fully to be known and lived.  Key to God’s inscription is that we all have it, we all share it, and we become God’s love to each other and to the world.

So when God wants to write the Word on our hearts, it’s as a group.  Together we discern those ways, together we help make decisions about our lives, together we live in the covenant promise of God, and witness it to the world.

Together the heart of our community, of the Church itself is tattooed by God so we “know the LORD,” and so live in the world as people shaped by God’s DNA, as signs of this new covenant, ambassadors of this grace and love and justice God intends for the whole world.

But be very careful: we may not want this re-formation that God’s writing on our collective and individual hearts accomplishes.

Oh, part of these readings today certainly sound good, to think that God’s making a new covenant with us, especially the parts about God’s forgiveness and forgetfulness that mark that covenant, the parts about the Son freeing us from sin.  To think of justification by God’s grace, Paul’s words for what this covenant looks like, as removing our guilt and our sin, this seems like a good thing.

That is, if we don’t read the rest of Paul’s words today, or the main part of Jeremiah today, or anything Jesus says today.  It sounds good, that is, if we don’t consider all those things we’ve just been considering.

You see, if God writes on our hearts, and re-writes our spiritual DNA, we will be different, not just forgiven.  Individually and collectively we’ll become a new creation, different people.

We’ve said that.  But do we want that?  Like those considering a real tattoo, we should be careful we’re ready for this change.

To be justified is not just to be forgiven.  It is to be straightened out, fixed, made right, as much as justifying a paragraph in a text is, whether left or right or center.  You straighten it out.  It is as Jeremiah says, to be re-made into the image of God we were meant to be.

St. Athanasius [1] understood the fall of humanity to be like a gradual de-creation, that humanity more and more was becoming less and less the image of God.  Moving further and further into something completely unlike God.  According to Athanasius, the Incarnation of the Son of God, the Son who was there at the original creation, arrested that falling, that degeneration, that de-creation, and began to restore humanity back up into the image of God we were intended to be from the start.

That’s a beautiful thought.  But it can be plenty threatening.  Whatever we might think about what it would mean to be made a new creation, what is clear is that we cannot be who we were.  We will become more God’s image, not our image.

All those comfortable sins, all those lovely habits – even the ones we think we want to be rid of – these things define who we are.  We know our vices and our virtues, and the truth is, those vices sometimes are part of what we like about ourselves, part of what we are reluctant to release.  And if they’re gone and we’re different, will we even be recognizable as ourselves?  As our congregation?  As the Church?

That is to say, if the Son sets us free, as Jesus promises, and if the same Christ makes us into God’s way of righteous, as Paul promises, and if God re-writes our hearts as Jeremiah promises, who then will we be?  Are we ready to be something new and different?

I actually believe we could be ready, as long as we remain aware of our tendency to resist this change, this re-formation. 

It is a part of our broken human nature to want to cling to even the things that are not of God, because they are ours, because they are familiar, because we fear not knowing what we’d be like without them.  We can’t let ourselves remain naïve to our desire to thwart God’s transforming grace in our lives and in our congregation and in the Church.  If we can be aware of this tendency, we can also ask God’s help to overcome such resistance.

Because this promise of a heart-writing that will transform us individually and collectively into a new creation, God’s own people, is the only source of our joy and hope.  Our prayer today and always is that as God uses us to renew the world, and to continue to renew the Church, we more and more live with an awareness of our new identity and inscribed hearts, and let our lives show that love and transform the world.  Let our lives truly be re-formed, renewed, made different.

Then God’s promise in Jeremiah can really come to pass: “They shall all know me, from the least to the greatest,” says the LORD, and they all, all, will be my people and I will be their God.”  And all will be part of this new creation, this new grace that both frightens and thrills us.

Make it so, LORD God, make it so.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

[1] In his treatise “On the Incarnation of the Word,” http://www.ccel.org/ccel/athanasius/incarnation.html