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

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

Faithful discipleship comes through failure and struggle, through the life that emerges from them to bless you and the world.

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

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

You are going to fail as a disciple if you try to be one. That’s certain.

You’re going to struggle to be faithful if you try. Count on that. And it’s the only way you’ll grow as a disciple, and find faithfulness.

Peter’s failures are necessary to him becoming the child of God, the disciple, he is meant to be. When Peter resists Jesus’ path of the cross today, he unknowingly takes up his own cross right then. That suffering he endures today helps him deepen in faith and learn to follow faithfully.

This is the mystery to grasp. Jesus says today that being a faithful disciple is about losing, about letting go. But losing means losing. Messing up. Making mistakes trying to be faithful. And Jesus says this is what you truly need in order to follow.

When Mark wrote his Gospel, Peter was a revered martyr, crucified like Jesus.

When Paul wrote to his Romans, Abraham was millennia into being the beloved head of God’s family. But both Abraham and Peter didn’t start there.

Paul says today Abraham never wavered in his trust of God. But Paul knew Abraham wavered plenty. Promised at age 75 that he’d have a child, a child not born until he was 100, Abraham had lots of doubt and struggle. Thinking God seemed to have forgotten the promise, Abraham sleeps with Hagar and fathers his beloved son Ishmael. Beloved, but not the promised child. Abraham struggled to trust God in Egypt, and when asked to sacrifice Isaac.

Mark painfully shows all of Peter’s failings in his story, though he’s writing to people who hold Peter in awe. After this debacle, called Satan by his beloved Jesus, Peter still has his collapse on Maundy Thursday and denial of Jesus to look forward to.

Paul and Mark take two different ways to say the same thing: these heroes, these models of faithfulness, got there through struggle and failure.

This is hard to grasp. We’d rather avoid failing as much as we can.

You probably weren’t sent out by a parent or teacher with the words, “Go ahead and mess up today.” As for your faith, you probably heard “trust always, be a good follower, you’re called to be like Jesus.”

But Jesus had to fail to become who he was meant to be. He is God-with-us, yes, but Jesus is also a true human being who was tortured, beaten, spit upon, and brutally nailed to a wooden rack for all to witness. Jesus failed miserably to convince God’s chosen people that God had come in person for them. Out of the half a million Jewish people living in Palestine, by his death and resurrection he’d picked up only about 120 followers. And was rejected by the vast majority of the leaders of his own people.

This is the path Jesus calls you to follow.

Peter’s actually brilliant in his courage following that path today.

Look, he’s given up a lot to follow Jesus: his livelihood, his stability, maybe his family. And he trusts Jesus is God-with-us, the Christ, God’s answer to the pain of the world. Things are going well, healings, crowds. And then Jesus says, “Oh, by the way, I’m going to be rejected and killed.”

And Peter knows this is a bad idea, it’s not right for the Messiah. And he privately tells Jesus that. Now, he’s obviously wrong. Jesus makes that clear.

But Peter risked. That’s the blessing. He’s struggling to learn how to follow, and he thought he had the right answer here. Just because he didn’t, doesn’t matter. He tried. And failed. And that helped him become the faithful leader he became.

But not right away. Even at Gethsemane, he’s clearly not on board with this dying. He fights the guards with his sword. And when his life is threatened, he curses that he never knew Jesus. Failures aren’t easy lessons. And sometimes take repeated stumbles to grow from.

But Peter’s risk today is your model.

Following Jesus means living in self-giving love, sacrificial love, for others and the world. Jesus talks about it all the time. But that means risking things, and risks are risky. Sometimes you mess it up. You say the wrong thing. You push someone away trying to help. You know you’re embedded in oppressive systems and try hard every day to break out of that and then do something harmful.

If you try to love as Jesus loves, you will fail sometimes. If you are vulnerable and self-giving as Jesus is, you’ll be hurt, you’ll offend, you’ll self-protect.

But that’s the point. Sitting back and trying to have a perfect faith, hoping you’ll never mess up, will never lead to growth. But your woundedness will make you someone who can walk alongside other wounded folks. In your failure to love, you’ll learn different ways of loving, you won’t make the same mistake again. Or, if you do, like Peter, at some point you’ll learn to stop doing it.

This doesn’t sound like great news. But remember: you didn’t make this path.

That’s the good thing. God called Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael and Isaac and said, “go where I lead.” And they did, with a lot of stumbling and failing. Jesus called Peter and the others and said, “follow me.” Follow me – Jesus is already on this failure track.

When you stumble and fall, you’re with the God who also stumbled and fell, who will pick you up, brush you off, and help you grow from your failure. This is Jesus’ path – that’s the good news – and he forgives your failures, binds your wounds, heals your pain, and gives you what you need to keep stumbling forward.

But Jesus also shows that the path of failure and loss always leads to life. Jesus’ resurrection is the vindication of sacrificial love and vulnerability. The Triune God who made all things shows that when you take the path that goes through failure you find life that cannot be defeated. Not just when you die. That resurrection life is yours now, the early believers realized. Even as Peter and Paul stumble through the book of Acts, the Spirit lifts them up and sends them on their way, restored for another day, another try.

Embrace Peter’s boldness. That’s your path.

Be the disciple God is calling you to be, even if you stick your neck out and it gets chopped. Even if you try hard and still don’t get it. Even if your love is rejected, or thrown back at you, or offends.

This is the way, Jesus says. Lose your life and you’ll find it. Like Abraham. Like Peter. It turns out failure is a good thing. It’s your way to faithfulness, to being the disciple of Christ you were meant to be.

And maybe, in your failure and growing from it, others who struggle can find hope for themselves. After all, that seems to be the whole plan Jesus has in mind.

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