sermon – Page 19

Unless a seed dies . . .

March 17, 2024 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

There is abundant life in you, God’s dream for you, that only needs to have its shell, its husk die and break apart for you to bloom and grow as God’s gift to this world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fifth Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: John 12:20-33; Jeremiah 31:31-34

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

Seeds don’t die when they’re planted.

Pretty much everyone who plants seeds knows they contain within them the life of the plant to come. They’re not actually dead. Jesus certainly knew this, too.

That means he’s doing something with this metaphor. Stretching our imaginations, to see something different, something vital. Something about dying and rising.

That’s definitely not a new topic for Jesus.

This is the central idea of Christian discipleship for Jesus, and also the New Testament. Jesus constantly speaks of self-giving, of sacrificial love, of being vulnerable, as the path of Christ, his and ours. Again and again, including today, we hear of losing our lives to find them, of letting go as central to our walk of faith.

But notice: this way is always described positively by Jesus and the others. Lose your life, and you will find it. Die to this way of being and you will live. Die like a seed and you will see much fruit. Scripture believes that self-giving, sacrificial living as Christ is the path to the abundant life Jesus came to bring.

We make it out to be a negative thing.

We live in a society and culture based on acquiring, finding security in wealth and in things, no matter how unsustainable it is across this planet. We live in a country founded on equal rights, though still not yet for all. But somehow our culture individualized rights so that we’ve each been taught to believe for ourselves that what I want, who I am, what I have, is the paramount thing to care about and protect.

So, it’s hard to hear Jesus’ call, no matter how often he makes it, without wincing a bit. Voices like these often speak in our hearts and minds: “I don’t want to lose, because winning feels better. I don’t want to give of myself, because I might lose what I’ve acquired, or someone might take advantage. I don’t want to be wounded, because that hurts, and why would I want that?”

Maybe that’s why Jesus stretches the seed metaphor. Though a seed doesn’t technically die, it is profoundly changed. There is an outer shell, a husk, that, when the buried seed is watered and begins to germinate, is cracked open and left behind. If it stays intact, the plant can’t grow.

What if Jesus is asking what needs to die, be broken open in us for our true new life to begin?

Now, Jesus says the seed also applies to him.

So did something need to die in Jesus for him to be God’s Christ, to be what he was meant to be?

Certainly fear. Today he speaks of his troubled soul, which will worsen in Gethsemane. Jesus feared the cross, the suffering, and wasn’t sure he could do it. That fear needed to die, be broken open, so his courage to be the sacrificial love of God for the whole cosmos could bloom and grow.

And what of Jesus’ need to control? The eternal Word of God who participated in the creation of all things must have struggled not to control what happened in this earthly ministry. Satan thought so in his temptations, and in Jesus’ relationships with stumbling disciples and angry opponents, his need to control had to die so he could trust that what happened would lead to life.

And maybe we wouldn’t call it pride, but for the Son of God to willingly suffer the humiliation of the cross, something had to die in him. That sense of being one with the Father and the Spirit in the Trinity, that joy of his divine existence and power, had to die so he could let them hang him in public shame for all to see. So he could draw all things into the life of God.

So what husk is trapping-in your life, your future?

What if your fear could die and be buried? Your fear of the future, or fear of not belonging? Your fear of not being enough? Your fear of failure? What kind of courage could grow in you if that fear was dead and gone?

What if your greed died? Your need to have, to acquire, to find security in money or things. If that were dead and buried, what contentment could flourish in you and even bear fruit that would start changing the balance of privilege and oppression in this world?

Maybe shame is a shell around your true life. What if that were broken open, dead? Can you imagine a life trusting you were worthy of love, God’s and others’? What if you didn’t have to worry anymore about what others think?

And what if your need to control things could die, too? To live knowing that since important things, like life and death, were beyond your control, why try to control all the other things? Can you see yourself with such happy freedom?

There are so many more possible husks. But do you see what Jesus is offering you? A chance to bury the thing clamped around your life, your heart, your soul, and so find abundant life. Eternal life, right now.

When I am lifted up, Jesus says, I will draw all things to myself.

Jesus promises that in his dying and rising you will be drawn into God, to be like Christ. And so you’ll be given what you need to die and rise daily yourself. This isn’t a bar for you to get over, this is a gift of God for you.

God promised to write this covenant love in your heart, Jeremiah proclaimed, so you’ll have the ability to let all these hindrances embedded in you die. You will know in your heart, in your being, the way to life.

And the Holy Spirit will help dig the hole for these husks, too, even while breathing life into that newness inside you, gently watering it and drawing it out into the light of day.

And while Jesus is talking about seeds, remember that growing seasons take time.

No seed immediately becomes a huge corn stalk bursting with cobs. This new life, this dying of the husks and shells that are keeping you from living, this takes time. So ask the Spirit for patience, too. It will take your whole life to live into this growing.

But you’ve already begun. There are husks of whatever it is that needs to die in you that have already been broken open, and you’ve seen signs of the fruit to come. Maybe only a glimpse or two. But this life is already at work in you.

Unless a seed dies, it stays a tiny thing. But when it dies, it bears much fruit. Trust this, and live.

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

God’s Got This

March 13, 2024 By Vicar at Mount Olive

Midweek Lent, 2024 ☩ Love One Another ☩ Week 4: Encourage One Another

Vicar Lauren Mildahl
Texts: I Thessalonians 5:4-14, John 16:12-15, 32-33

Beloved children of God, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

For the last three weeks, we’ve been diving into some of the tougher aspects of the command to Love One Another.

We’ve talked about agreeing with one another, confessing our sins to one another, and not judging one another. We’ve been dealing with brokenness in our relationships – broken by conflict, and isolation, and superiority.

But this week, we finally get a fun one: “Encourage one another!”

This is the kind of instruction that a smiling, optimistic, positive person like me can really get into. I even like all the different ways that you can encourage. You can give compliments, reminding people of their unique gifts: “You’re amazing! You’re so strong!” You can offer optimism, sharing your faith in the restoration that God promises: “Everything will turn out all right! It gets better!” Or you can really lean into the confidence we have as God’s beloved children: “You’ve got this.” “You can do it!”

These are nice things to say and really nice things to hear. Who wouldn’t want to spend their time offering encouragement and being encouraged? It almost seems silly that we would need to be commanded to do it. And even Paul admits that the Thessalonians are already on it: “Encourage one another,” he writes, “as indeed you are doing!”

So what am I going to preach about?

Well, unfortunately, there is a darker underbelly here.

Because just like you don’t need to be told to agree unless there is conflict, and you don’t need to be told to confess unless there is violation, and you don’t need to be told not to judge unless you are judging, you don’t need to be told to encourage one another unless there is discouragement.

Because even in a community of faith–even as we are experiencing the love of God, the grace of Jesus Christ and the communion of the Holy Spirit–we sometimes feel discouraged. Dis-courage-ment.

Sometimes we are robbed of our courage.

Often by fear–fear of losing the people or the things we love. Fear of the unknown, fear of pain, fear that there won’t be enough, fear of guilt or fear of judgment–we are anxious and afraid and dis-couraged.

Or sometimes it’s doubt that discourages. Doubt in ourselves and our ability to bear the weight of living. Doubt in each other – will you all really be there for me? Or doubt in God. Doubt in God’s promises or God’s love or even uncertainty about whether God is there at all. And when we doubt in this whole project of faith and hope and love and life, it seems a lot safer to look out for ourselves, to retreat from each other. Doubt robs us of the courage to believe that God will use the hands of those around us to catch us when we fall.

And sometimes it’s despair that discourages. On days when it’s hard enough just getting out of bed, how can we stand boldly in faith and face it all? When everything seems so hopeless–we keep hurting each other and burning the Earth and we know we’re doing it but nothing ever changes–what’s the point of courage? It’s all lost anyway.

That’s the dark underbelly: Fear and Doubt and Despair.

That’s why we need our courage back and why we need each other to be en-couraged.

And we need real encouragement. En-courage-ment isn’t just plucky pick-me-ups or stock sayings about silver linings–maybe that can buck us up when our hearts are a bit faint, but what about when our hearts aren’t even in our chests anymore, but have fallen all the way to the ground?

Compliments and optimism and “You’ve got this”–those things don’t really work then. Not when fear and doubt and despair shatter our illusion of control. Because no matter how many times I tell you that “you’ve got this,” the truth is, you don’t. And you never did. No matter how many times you tell me “you can do it,” the truth is, I can’t. I never could. We were never in control. And no matter how many times we are told we are children of the light, we still fall asleep.

But we have a God who never sleeps. And that’s where the real courage comes from.

I remember two things about the summer camp I went to in high school. 1) I hated doing the high ropes course. 2) I loved rappelling. Which seems weird. Both of those activities involved heights, involved wearing a harness and a helmet, and all of your friends standing around on the ground staring at you, shouting, “You can do it! You’ve got this!”

In both activities you are up high, strapped in, and completely safe. But I remember clinging to the high ropes course, shaking and trying to will my feet to move for what felt like hours, absolutely petrified, and then the next day, leaning over a cliff to rappel down the side of a mountain in seconds, with no trouble at all.

Because the crucial difference is that with rappelling, you can feel the rope holding you the whole time. From the very first moment you lean back over the cliff, you feel the rope tighten and support you. With high ropes – you only feel the rope when you fall off. The rope is the back up, to jerk you to a stop when you fail. And most of the time you are supposed to pretend it’s not there, and just trust in your own strength and balance – and I hated that.

Either way the rope was there. But only one of them gave me courage.

And it wasn’t the one that held me so loosely that I was supposed to forget about it as I figured out how to get through the course under my own power. It was the rope I could feel the whole time, trusting it with my weight as I descended. That gave me courage.

God is our rope – but much better than a rope. God will not let us fall. And the best, real encouragement that I can give you, that we can give to each other, is not “You’ve got this!” but a resounding “You don’t got this! God’s got this.” That was the encouragement that Jesus offered his followers, in their last conversation before he died: “In the world you will have distress and trouble, but take courage: I have overcome the world.” I’ve got this. And it’s the same encouragement Paul offered the Thessalonians: “whether you are awake or asleep you live with him.” It doesn’t matter what you do – whether you’ve got it together or you’re falling apart – you live with Jesus. Who’s got this. Who’s got us.

So, we need to offer one another better encouragement than just retelling each other the myth that we can do it on our own, that we can be in control.

The myth that we’ve got this. Because we’ll just need to be jerked back up again when we fall. Instead let’s encourage one another, let’s hoist one another up in the Spirit, reminding each other that to lean back and feel the rope, to let the God that will not let us go take all the weight, until we feel lighter than air.

Until we relax into the peace of Jesus, who has overcome – overcome all the fear, all the doubt, and all the despair that the world can throw at us.

Dear siblings, this is your encouragement: You don’t got this. God’s got this.

In the name of the Father, of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Look – And Live

March 10, 2024 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

The Triune God is always about healing: come into God’s light, look, and live.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: John 3:14-21; Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10

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

Nicodemus came to Jesus at night, John says. We don’t know why.

But Nicodemus was a leader of his people, part of the ruling Jewish council, prominent, respected. By the end of this Gospel he and his friend Joseph of Arimathea publicly show their allegiance to Jesus by taking his body for burial. So, many assume this early conversation was at night because Nicodemus was afraid of being seen by his colleagues, wasn’t ready to out himself as interested in Jesus.

Nicodemus seemed to think Jesus was fully in line with Jewish teaching and the Scriptures. A few verses earlier he says Jesus is clearly a teacher sent from God. That was the division among the Jewish people: some thought he was from God, a rabbi and prophet steeped in their tradition, and others thought otherwise.

But Jesus ends his little sermon to Nicodemus reflecting that some are willing to come into the light and be seen, while others hide in the darkness so that who they are and what they do is unseen. Hard for Nicodemus to miss that point.

But Jesus raises this to all of us: are you hiding in the dark from God, and do you know why?

If God knows all about you, or if others could know all about you, what things do you wish you could hide in the dark? Maybe sins long past, or thoughts you’re thinking today. It might be shame over things you’ve done or neglected to do. It might be opinions you have, or feelings you carry. It’s rare that any of us can say we don’t feel guilt over things deep inside, or wouldn’t be horrified if others knew some of those deepest thoughts, past history, truths, that lurk inside us.

What would you rather keep in the dark, hoping that even God can’t see it?

And how might you learn to trust Jesus, as he invites, to open even that deepest heart to God’s light?

Because Jesus gives Nicodemus good news in his fearful night skulking.

God loves you, Nicodemus, Jesus says. In fact, God loves the world, literally the cosmos, the universe, so much that God’s Son came in the flesh, to save you, to heal you, Nicodemus, not to judge you. Come into the light, you have nothing to fear from God, Jesus says to our friend. You are wholly and fully loved.

Amen, Paul says to his Ephesians. God loves you in the depth of your wrongdoing, and raises you up in Christ to a whole new reality. God has saved you, healed you, by God’s grace alone, Paul says, without your doing anything. Come into the light.

That’s what Jesus and Paul promise you, today, too. God fully forgives you out of love and grace. Wipes away your shame out of love and grace. Holds you in the light in an embrace of love and grace. Come into the light.

But what if you’re in the dark for other reasons?

Maybe you hide in the dark from God because you’re afraid you’re not worthy. Just because of who you are.

Maybe you fear you’re one of those Jesus mentions who don’t trust, because you struggle with your faith, you have doubts, and you don’t know why, you sometimes look at the world and wonder where God is.

Or maybe you don’t fit in anywhere, so, you think, why would God want you? Why would God be different? Best not to expect there’s light to be found, you think. You’re not strong enough, or wise enough, or confident enough, and God will see that right away. Why risk it? Where’s the proof, Paul? Jesus?

Well. Now you’re ready for the heart of Jesus’ promise.

Jesus says the Triune God is all about healing, not destruction. Not judging.

That’s actually God’s Word in all our readings today. Jesus starts by reminding Nicodemus of that terrible episode in the desert where God’s people were beset by an appalling number of venomous snakes and God offered healing. All who looked up at the bronze serpent would find healing from God and live.

But didn’t God send the snakes in the first place? Well, the narrator says so. But the only word God speaks in these verses is the word of healing. Clearly the people complained and argued against God, ran into a valley of snakes, and thought God sent them. But the fact that God didn’t remove the snakes as requested (since they thought God sent them), but offers healing instead, hints that the snakes were just part of the pain of living in this world. And God never asks God’s people to repent first, then look. Just look, and live.

That’s certainly how God’s Son reads the story. Moses’ serpent is the sign Jesus gives Nicodemus to show God’s whole operation is healing. He calls himself the Son-of-Humanity, an ancient Jewish term Nicodemus would certainly recognize, and says he’ll be lifted up just like that serpent, so all can look and live.

That’s what sets up John 3:16 and following: they depend on that context.

“For God so loved the world,” Jesus says. God’s love is why the Son is lifted up, just as it is why the serpent was. That lifting up, Jesus says to Nicodemus and to you, is because God so loved the world. That lifting up, which is the cross, is the proof God’s love is true and real. God is offering a way to healing for all who look at that lifting up, just as in the past.

Except now it’s not just God’s people in the desert. Now it’s all things, all creation, the whole cosmos, as Jesus will make even clearer in our Gospel next week. God’s love embraces all reality.

So come out of the darkness into God’s light: you’ll be welcomed with love, and grace, and healing.

Just look up at the cross and you’ll see God’s own life poured out in love for you, and the whole creation. That’s how you can trust Paul’s confidence in God’s free grace, why you can trust Jesus’ promise of God’s undying love that came to heal, to save, and not to judge. Just look up, and live.

And remember, Paul says you are saved, healed, by God’s grace so you can do all the good in the world God has planned for you. Or, as Jesus says, you’ve been loved, so now you can do all your deeds and thoughts and actions out in the light, for all to see. You can be the one who by how you live, how you love, how you walk with God in the light, points others to God’s love lifted up from the earth and invites them into the light.

You are loved. You are graced. You are bathed in the light of that. Now walk in that light into the shadows of evil and pain in this world so all can come safely into God’s light.

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

Logged and Loved

March 6, 2024 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

Midweek Lent, 2024 + Love One Another + Week 3: Do Not Judge One Another

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
Texts: Matthew 7:1-5; Romans 14:7-13

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

This is a hard one.

If loving one another as Jesus commands involves not judging others, a lot of us will struggle with that. Jesus’ words about ignoring a log in your eye while seeing the speck in your neighbor’s eye have become common cultural imagery for a reason. Humans can be pretty judgey with each other.

And our judging of each other, no matter how light or great, is a stumbling block to truly loving another person. Non-judging takes discipline, effort, attention, because it’s in our nature to do it.

But if we, with the Spirit’s help, can unlearn that nature, that habit, we’ll find a depth of love for each other, and even for ourselves, we previously couldn’t imagine.

But let’s get one thing out of the way at the start.

This isn’t a command to ignore evil and sin. No one says we shouldn’t name evil, or work as hard as we can against it. No one says that if I sin you can’t call me on that, and I don’t need to confess it. That’s not the judging Paul and Jesus are talking about.

Our lives as Christ seek the good, seek to be loving and gracious in this world, seek to bear the heart of God. If there is evil in us, if we’ve sinned, we confess it to each other, ask forgiveness of those we’ve wronged, and of God, so our lives can flourish.

Jesus and Paul aren’t saying ignore all that: just look at the majority of their other teachings. This is a different thing.

See, the problem is hardly anyone ever is exactly like me or you.

When we’re young, we assume everyone thinks like us, cares about what we do, has the same interests. Pretty quickly we learn there are differences, but mostly as children we gravitate toward people like us. And that’s really hard if you’re the outlier in your own family.

As we become adults we learn just how diverse and different other people are. Some never mature enough to accept that, and spend their whole lives trying to be in a group that thinks the same, looks the same, acts the same. We see the sickness of this deeply infecting our national political life. But if we do mature, we begin to rejoice in differences, find them critical to the beauty of life and the world.

That’s what Jesus and Paul are commanding us to do, to mature into this way.

So this is the challenge: can you love without judging?

That means, can you love someone not in spite of their differences, or what you might see as flaws, but because of them? It’s a huge difference.

Loving someone “in spite of” their differences is barely better than dismissing them. You discount a piece of this person and say “I love you anyway.” Thanks, but no thanks. That’s not love.

Imagine that you just don’t care for people with blue eyes, or maybe people who talk fast. It’s irrational, but all such judging is. So, if someone in this community has blue eyes or talks fast, and you said, “I love you as a sibling in Christ, in spite of your eyes,” or, “I love you in spite of how you talk,” how do you think that would be received?

We generally judge in two categories. We all have flaws, we all make mistakes that aren’t sin, we all have personality traits and habits, and so on, things that bother people; and we also all have things innate to us that someone can dislike or even despise. And Paul and Jesus say that loving each other means not judging any of those things. It means loving others for those things, not in spite of them.

The most obvious category today is our innate differences.

The list is familiar: race, orientation, ethnicity, gender, and so on. These differences are deeply divisive in our society. Tolerance is usually urged as a way to deal with them.

But the command Jesus and Paul give is to move beyond mere tolerance into full love. Into non-judging. To love each other because of these innate differences, to appreciate and enjoy and admire the differences. That’s the challenge. To love the other as the other is, not in spite of who the other is.

The other category is more complicated.

Jesus tells me to take care of the log in my own eye before I judge the speck in your eye. To deal with my own flaws and mistakes and problems. These aren’t like our innate differences, but they’re deeply part of us. That means you also have a log in your eye, according to Jesus.

These logs may be the personality traits that bother others, or the habits that annoy others, or the ways of thinking that anger others. They may be the way I handle crises or the way you handle being sad, the way your neighbor copes with life or the way you take care of your business. We all have things that are different from each other that may or may not be fixable but are part of us. Some of us are working on them, some are not.

But the command is that I don’t judge you for these things, and you don’t judge me. You are worthy of being loved with your flaws and mistakes and your being annoying to others. Not in spite of these, but because they make you who you are, and me who I am. Without these, you’re not you, I’m not me.

Christian love is to see each other, flaws and all, and love each other for these things. And maybe learn to love yourself even as you work on your mistakes and weird annoying habits.

Paul says this love is possible, this non-judging, because of Christ’s love.

All that divided his Roman congregation lived under the embracing love that they knew in Christ. We don’t live to ourselves, Paul says, and we don’t die to ourselves – we live and die in Christ’s love.

And Christ loves you as you are, fully, flaws and all, innate differences and all. Not in spite of them. You are God’s precious child, full stop. No exceptions. No conditions.

So now you are free to look at your neighbor with the same eyes of love. Because all that makes them who they are, even things you don’t like, is what makes them real and true. And you are loved by Christ, as they are loved by Christ. So you also are to love each other.

Without judging. Logs and all.

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

Jealous Rage

March 3, 2024 By Vicar at Mount Olive

Thinking about the Cleansing of the Temple as a jealous rage refocuses our attention not on Jesus’ righteous anger but on God’s jealous love.

Vicar Lauren Mildahl
The Third Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: Exodus 20:1-17, 1 Corinthians 18-25, John 2:13-22

God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A lot of people really like “Angry Jesus.”

I’ve noticed especially among my fellow seminarians–we love this Jesus, whip in hand, flipping the tables of stagnant religious institutions; we love imagining him breaking down oppressive systems and driving out those who benefit from them and ushering in justice for all; we are inspired by him, bursting onto the scene at the beginning of his ministry (at least in John’s version) speaking passionate and prophetic truth to power. Maybe it’s because we think we can diagnose everything that’s wrong in the world and in our churches and we imagine that this will be the kind of thing we’ll do when we become pastors and leaders. “Give us a whip,” we think, “Give us a whip like Jesus and we’ll clean things up around here.”

And I think there is a true impulse there.

I do think that standing on the side of justice requires some anger. There is a truth to this anger – when we recognize that something has gone awry, and we cannot stay silent. And anger has a purpose–when something is wrong, anger can supply the energy necessary to make the changes that need to happen. Some tables do need to be flipped.

But, at other times I am very uncomfortable with this image. “Angry Jesus” can become a convenient figure to hide behind, and I’m uncomfortable with the way that even well-intentioned activists and allies can respond to injustice with blind anger, not ready to listen and learn, but only eager to fix everything immediately or burn it all down. It is easy to whip ourselves into a frenzy – and feel righteous doing it – until our anger creates more victims.

So, I am a bit wary of this story.

Especially since it seems like such an outlier in Jesus’ ministry. Jesus did not make a habit of brandishing whips and turning tables, he was much more likely to heal and feed and teach, even his enemies. And how could Jesus, whose own experience of being whipped we will soon hear about on Good Friday, respond in this encounter, even in righteous anger, with violence? What happened to God’s love?

But, maybe, in a way, this story is about love. Love has many faces. Sometimes it is sweet and tender. And sometimes it is impassioned and intense.

And sometimes, love is jealous.

“Jealous” is the adjective God uses in our reading from Exodus, when God commands the Israelites not to worship any other gods: “For I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” And since I was a kid, this line has always confused me. Jealousy is bad, isn’t it? It seems like basically the same thing as envy or coveting – which the last commandment tells us not to do! Then why would God admit to being jealous?

This must be something different. Not a sinful kind of jealousy, but a jealousy that’s actually hard to imagine. A jealousy without possessiveness or resentment, a jealousy that is entirely fierce devotion. It is jealousy that desires the reciprocal devotion of the beloved, but which is completely entwined in a passionate intensity to protect and provide for the beloved what is best for the beloved. An incredibly zealous love.

God’s jealous love is what prompts God to remind the children of Israel of all that God had done for them: “For I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery!” As if God were saying “This is how much I love you! These are the lengths I have gone for you. And all I want is for you to let love grow. To love me back and to love one another so that you can have what is best for you: abundant life. I am jealous for you.”

But even if God’s jealousy is not a sinful kind of jealousy, it is still not a pleasant experience.

And it strikes me like a weakness. God’s jealousy is a love that wants so badly to be loved back but will also fiercely guard the freedom of the beloved. Because love without freedom isn’t love at all. So the God of power and glory and wisdom and honor and to whom belongs everything in heaven and on earth and under the earth doesn’t exercise that power to force us to love in return. We have a choice. And God chooses to open God’s self to the ache of jealousy and the pain of unrequited love. God chooses weakness, chooses vulnerability, chooses jealousy – which seems utterly foolish for the creator of the universe.

But the apostle Paul reminds us: “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

God’s foolishness is love. God’s weakness is us.

God’s jealous love for us is what leads Jesus all the way to the cross. Embracing the ultimate weakness and humiliation for our sake and for the sake of what can be built and created and grown and repaired through the foolishness and weakness of love.

And so the scene in the temple takes on a different meaning if we think of it not as righteous anger prompted by injustice, but instead as a kind of jealous rage.

Because it wasn’t the Romans that Jesus drove away. It wasn’t the empire built on violence, who were exploiting and oppressing Jesus’ people. There was plenty of justice to proclaim among them. But it was God’s own people, the ones who had come to God’s own house, the ones who had let their love for what was on their tables turn their hearts from God.

When seen as a jealous rage, all this business with the whip and the flipping tables — that wasn’t a punishment or a rejection, that was love, jealously intervening on behalf of the beloved.

As if Jesus were saying: “Get rid of those tables! Forget about all that stuff – it won’t love you back. I freed you from Egypt and I am freeing you now from the system you are trapped in. I’ll crack this whip if I have to, to remind you that you don’t need to live like this, devoted to these fleeting things and putting up tables as barriers between one another. Come back to me! Come back to each other!”

Jesus is pleading with them with a passionate jealousy, begging them to step into the abundant life of divine love.

Inviting them to come back to the world imagined by the Ten Commandments. A world where they take care of each other, respect each other, where thousands of generations are cherished and beloved and blessed. A world where they love God back and they love the world that God loves.

And this invitation is for you too.

This Lenten season of confession is an invitation to examine our tables and everything we have put on them, everything we love that cannot love us back, everything we use to separate ourselves from each other, everything that the world says is wisdom and strength–and invite the Holy Spirit to knock our tables over once again!

Then we have a glorious chance to put those tables up again – but this time to fill them with weakness and foolishness, with love and care for one another. This is our chance to respond to Jesus’ jealous rage with a jealous intensity of our own, loving our creator – a God who is able to be loved, who wants to be loved, who chooses weakness and foolishness. And to love each other just as jealously.

There is a place for righteous anger. But there is also a danger that if we spend all of our time and energy turning over tables, we’ll never get around to sharing the feast of abundant life around the bigger and better table that God jealousy wants for us.

In the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit.