sermon – Page 2

Living in a world that is in deep need of God’s healing, we continue to discern how we can be opened to be a healing presence to all of creation through who we are and what we do.

Vicar Andrea Bonneville
The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Lectionary 23 B
Texts: James 2:1-17, Mark 7:24-37

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

Do your actions really reflect the love of Jesus Christ?

This is what James asks us today. It’s a fair question. James wants to know if you are willing to roll up your selves and get to work so that the love of Christ may be reflected through how you are loving your neighbor.

Suggesting a life of service that puts our actions of caring for our neighbors at the center of who we are and the center of what we do. Loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.

It should be simple. It is simple. We are empathic people who know how to show love. But as Pastor Crippen shared last week, doing good in a world filled with evil systems and structures of power is really really complicated.

So complicated at times it can leave us dormant. Moving through our days doing what we need to do just to care for ourselves and our families. Turning away from the pain and suffering and disasters that uproot peoples and communities. Going from point A to point B trying to find rest and nourishment in our exhaustion.

Doing so we turn inward. Into our own wants and needs. Into our own biased perceptions of people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, income, and wellness. Into our own patterns and expectations of success, wealth, and knowledge.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus acts in a way that suggests he is turned inward. Traveling to a new region, he stops at a house to rest and doesn’t want anyone to know that he is there. A woman who doesn’t fit the norm for various reasons comes to Jesus asking for healing for her daughter and she is met with undeniable rudeness.

The woman experiences Jesus’ rudeness and challenges him to turn outward. Seeing her and her daughter as people in need of healing rather than the labels that society had placed on them, Jesus heals the little girl.

As he continues traveling, Jesus encounters a man who is also in need of healing. In this event, Jesus realizes that he can’t bring healing to this man alone. He turns toward the heavens, sighs, and says to the man “be opened.” The man is healed.

And Jesus is transformed through his encounter with and the healing of the woman and the man. Moving away from the regions he had been doing ministry and into new regions with different people showed Jesus that his ministry is more expansive and more life changing than he could have ever imagined.

And it shows us that God’s healing and love and grace is not limited by location or laws. It isn’t found only in certain places or through certain people. If anything, God’s love and healing is happening where we least expect it.

So if you are feeling dormant in this season of your life, it is time to take Jesus’ lead and be open to a new way of imagining what the Triune God can do in your life and community.

Move out of your routine and your comfort zone. Take a new way to work, shop at a different grocery store, volunteer with or donate to a new organization that sparks a passion. Listen to and share stories of love and healing and hope. Go to new areas of our cities. Speak to people you’ve never met. Be open to new ways of seeing Christ at work in your life.

Doing so will challenge the ways that we have ignored the pain around us thinking that someone else would do something about it, challenge when we have been negligent in caring for creation suggesting that the problems are out of our control, when we have put our comfort before the needs of others.

All of it is going to transform us while God works through us to transform the world.

God is healing the world through all of us. Through the way we turn our ears to hear the cries for justice. Through the way we open our hearts and show love to a neighbor we have never met. Through the way we look at the brokenness of the world and trust that even the most broken thing can be made whole through God’s love.

Seeing the Gospel embodied and proclaimed through each of you and this community, reminds me of the love and grace and healing that God is doing. So try not to let the evil and injustice of the world make you dormant, the world needs your love, your passion, your hope.

But if you are feeling dormant, water and nourishment and sunlight are all around you. And God will continue to use it to heal you.

So be opened from the healing that comes from Christ. Be opened from God’s love for you. Be opened from the transformation that is taking place in your life.

And let it guide you in love and service.

The world needs you, your neighbor needs you, God needs you, to zealously proclaim God’s healing, God’s justice, and God’s love.

Not just through your words, but in every action.

Amen.

The Triune God is a God who transforms, gives you and me a new birth as God’s gift and blessing for the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 22 B
Texts: Mark 7:1-23; James 1:17-27; Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9

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

Being good is really complicated these days.

For most of human history, if you were kind to your family, good to your neighbors, decent to those you lived by, you were a good person. Evil and unkindness, sin and wrongdoing – you knew them when you saw them.

But we know now this whole planet is interconnected. Systems and structures have power beyond any individual action or belief, and actions have consequences far beyond us. Buy an apple and give it to a child. Is that good? Well, were pesticides that harm the environment or the eater used? What’s the carbon footprint of that apple – how much gas was burned to carry it to you? Were those who picked it fairly paid? Is the company distributing it involved in unsavory things? It’s not easy.

You and I recognize that we have embedded racial prejudices, and are trying to change our minds and hearts. But even good decisions we make are intertwined with systems that promote racial discrimination, without our wanting it, and we benefit from them. You and I deeply want all people to earn fair wages and get out of poverty. But systems that help our pensions and IRAs, support our medical benefits, help us in many ways, are often unfairly built and cause harm to people we want to help. So: are we doing evil or not?

When we look at the problems in our society and world, and the problems in our own personal lives, we want to be good people, to live as Christ, make a difference.

It’s just really, really complicated.

And God’s Word doesn’t make it any easier.

Now when we open the Gospels, Jesus’ teachings seem ever more challenging and unsettling. If being good is more than just simple acts we do every day, and all are interconnected, everything Jesus says is harder today than it felt years ago.

Jesus’ evils of the heart in today’s Gospel feel much more about us than they used to. Murder is mentioned. We used to be able to say we didn’t do that. But if we’re part of a society that causes the death of our neighbor, a society we support and benefit from, aren’t we complicit? Jesus mentions theft and avarice and wickedness. If people do such things on our behalf, are we also doing it?

The Hebrew Scriptures are just as challenging. The prophets’ demands for God’s justice and peace, the ending of poverty and oppression, the restoring of God’s reign where all live with full stomachs under sheltering roofs without fear of others harming them, seem to point directly at us now in ways they might not have before.

It makes it hard to hear Scripture in worship. Every week seems to address these complicated, painful things and include you and me among those who need to listen and turn our lives to God.

So you might want to find some empathy for the Pharisees today.

Moses wants the people to flourish and urges them today to keep all of God’s law. So the Pharisees, trying to faithfully obey God, built all sorts of rules and rituals around God’s law in Scripture, so that they and the people could be good. Do the right thing.

Jesus’ criticism is exactly what the prophets said, what James says: if your rituals and rules don’t result in behavior that is good and just, visibly loving your neighbor and witnessing to your love of God, they don’t have much point. Here, the Pharisees’ attempts to honor their pledges to God led them to break the Fourth Commandment of loving and caring for their parents. That makes no sense.

But you can see why they tried. If being good, doing God’s way, is your goal, maybe a system of rules could help. But the problem, Jesus said, wasn’t that they needed an outer system. What they needed was an inner transformation.

And that’s where you find your hope from God in these days.

It’s true that James strongly declares that the only faith worth having is one visible in loving actions. Doing God’s love for those who are poor and oppressed is far more important than having a doctrine of God’s love for those who are poor and oppressed.

But look at the promise James makes today: James says every generous act ever done, every good gift, is actually from God, the Father of lights. Because, James says, God’s Word gives birth in you and me and all people to a new kind of person who does those generous acts and good things.

The Triune God is a transforming God who, through the Word, creates a clean and new heart in you and me and all people. So all those evils that can come from inside us are driven out by the fruit of the Spirit of God that Paul proclaimed, and Jesus proclaimed, and James delights in today. That’s your hope.

Now it’s not a question of how to be good or not. It’s a question of letting God’s Spirit work in you to make you good.

To transform you from the inside out, bearing in you love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, as Paul taught us. To transform your heart into completed love of God and love of neighbor, as Jesus promised you.

This is the new thing Jesus brought in the Incarnation. He taught what God’s prophets had long taught. But he came as God-with-us, filled with the Spirit, and said, “This is the plan of God for all God’s children, to give birth in the Spirit to new beings living God’s gifts in the world.”

That’s how God will heal the world. By healing you, and me, and all God’s children. One at a time, and everything will become new.

For today and tomorrow, then, what if this was your focus and your hope from God?

Not despairing at the complexity of our world and dreading you can do nothing, but praying for and seeking God’s transformation of you, a new birth into what is good and holy and of Christ. Yes, the world is challenging and overwhelming. Yes, your life and mine can be struggles and we can often feel we’re lost. Yes, it’s hard to know what the right thing is at any given time.

But God’s transforming new birth is happening right now in you. Rejoice in that. Seek to see it more clearly. Ask God to clear out those things that come from you that Jesus speaks of and replace them with God’s fruits.

God is good. And is making you good. And that will change the world. There’s nothing complicated about that at all.

In the name of Jesus. Amen

Be Opened

Inside Out