sermon – Page 25

Labor of Love

October 29, 2023 By Vicar at Mount Olive

We so often approach the commandment to love God and love your neighbor as labor, leading to exhaustion or despair. But it becomes easier when we remember the crucial insight of the Reformation and mystics: that it’s actually about God’s love for us!

Vicar Lauren Mildahl
Reformation Sunday, Lect. 30 A
Texts: Leviticus 19:1-2, Psalm 1, Matthew 22:34-46

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

We hear this morning “the greatest commandment” – the very center of Jesus’ teaching.

And it’s pretty simple. Love God and love your neighbor. That’s it.

This wasn’t some secret that Jesus revealed. The two parts of this commandment are both pulled straight from the Torah, God’s gift to the children of Israel, which we often call the law. It’s what God had been saying all along. “Love me and love each other.”

And I really do believe that it is a gift. And that if I could just do that, just really get good at loving God and loving my neighbor, my life would be better. I could be so happy, like it says in Psalm 1. I could be like a tree planted by streams of water, bearing the most beautiful fruit in due season.

And I feel like I should be able to do it.

I feel like I should be able to love the Lord my God with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all my mind and to love my neighbor as myself. But then, I start to think about actually doing it and all of a sudden, my anxiety ratchets up, because that’s a lot! My brain immediately goes into problem solving mode and I think maybe if I break it up, try just one of the pieces at first. Maybe if I just focus on the easier one to start with, that might help! Okay, Well. Which one is easier?

Is it easier to love God who sometimes feels so far away? Or is it easier to love my neighbor, who, you know, a lot of the time feels way too close?

Either way, it’s not so easy.

Either way, it feels pretty hard. A labor of love with an emphasis on the labor. It feels like work.

It’s hard work to love a God whose sheer vastness I can’t hope to comprehend! Hard work to love my neighbors who are so small and petty (and so am I).

And I start to wonder, how can I possibly love God with my entire self, my heart, my emotions, my center… With my soul, my being, my identity… With my mind, my intellect, my understanding? And how can I do it when I’m afraid that if I really did love with all of that, with all of me, there wouldn’t be any left of anything else?

And how can I hope to love my neighbor as myself, when I have such a hard time loving, or even liking, myself?

It’s exhausting! And so easy to despair. And that’s the bad news.

Not the commandment itself, that is a gift, but the way I tend to approach it as a checklist. How I experience it as a burden, as labor. The way I obsess over all the ways I think it’s too hard, impossible even. The way I let the tree from the psalm be withered, instead of watered.

But here’s where the good news comes in.

It’s hiding in plain sight, in the very verse from Leviticus that Jesus quotes, although he stops before he gets there. But in the Torah, it says: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” I am the Lord.

So often, we don’t say the last few words of this verse, focusing so much on the imperative (you shall love), that we miss the declarative: “I am the Lord.” But these words ought to resound, like a bell, calling us back to the Great I Am, the source of all life and all love.

It’s about God! This is the good news! It’s not about how hard we work, how much we labor to love. It’s not about all the shoulds and should nots or our insecurities over whether we are loving enough or the right way. This little refrain (“I am the LORD”) is our reminder that it’s actually and always about what God did and does. How God has loved and will love and always loves.

The same good news that the writer of I John captured so eloquently and succinctly: “this is love: not that we loved God, but that God loved us.”

And it’s the same thing Martin Luther was trying to tell everyone.

The reformers of 16th Century Germany that we celebrate today recognized how easy it is to get caught up in the fear and the anxiety of doing the labor of love. And how toxic and depleting that approach is and how often it leads to despair. Their remedy was to insist that it isn’t about us doing work, isn’t about us doing anything – it’s all about God. Because God saves, we are saved. Because God is faithful, we can have faith. Because God loves, we can love.

The crucial realization, or maybe we should say recentering, of the Lutheran Reformation wasn’t earth-shattering because it was a new insight. It was earth-shattering because God’s love is earth-shattering.

After all, many people throughout time, the medieval mystics in particular, have experienced the earth-shattering love God has for us. Often in evocative and sometimes frankly erotic terms, they have written about how God loves us with God’s whole heart, soul, and mind.

I want to stay on that image for a moment.

To take a cue from the mystic imagination, and play with the idea of how intensely and passionately God loves you. Let’s imagine God’s heart –whatever that might be – that it aches. I imagine God’s heart aches for you, composing love letters and poetry for you, sending you messages of every kind, hoping someday you’ll respond.

I imagine God’s soul – God’s very being – warming at the thought of you, itching to embrace you, leaning with longing toward you.

I imagine God’s mind – and God is head over heels in love, utterly fascinated and mesmerized by you, hanging on to every word you say.

That’s the kind of love that kindles reformation. On the scale of Christendom – and also deep in each person, deep in me, and deep in you.

Because when you accept God’s outrageous love for you, it changes the way you hear this commandment.

It’s not an order to try harder, piling up greater and greater labors of love. It’s an invitation to relax, relax into God’s love, like sinking into a warm bath. Not just around you but inside you too. The love of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit dwells in you and wells up in you, warming you from the inside and spilling over to others.

God’s love around us and within us frees us and transforms us. That’s what allows us to love as God loves, in a way that is abundant and abiding, and a tiny bit absurd. Because when we are snuggled in the warm, fuzzy blanket of God’s love, we experience the commandment like Luther did, who said that “the heart draws joy from the commandment and warms itself in God’s love to the point of melting.”¹

Melted in the furnace of God’s love, suddenly it isn’t labor any more.

Suddenly it is an exquisite joy to love God back, heart for heart and soul for soul and mind for mind, a perfect dance of desire and longing. Suddenly it’s easier to love ourselves, to turn down the volume of our anxieties and fears and self-consciousness because we are too busy blushing at God’s tenderness toward us. Suddenly it’s a delight to love our neighbors – because we know God is absolutely crazy about them as well.

This is reformation. And it’s on-going and it’s happening in you. Every time you remember how utterly and completely God loves you. Every time you are reminded that this commandment isn’t a to-do list, it’s a love letter. Then your heart, and soul, and mind are re-formed, made new, every day by God’s love.

So, relax. And be loved into love.

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

_{1. Martin Luther, “The Third Commandment,” Treatise on Good Works, 1520.}

Alive and Illimitable

October 22, 2023 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

God is alive and beyond our control: but the Good News is God is working for the healing of all things and needs you and me.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 29 A
Texts: Isaiah 45:1-7; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22

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

Is God doing anything in this world? How would you know if you saw it?

Israelites in Babylonian exile saw God’s hand in a foreign general, Cyrus of Persia, who destroyed Babylon’s power and made an edict that they could return home, to Judah, and rebuild. Isaiah says God-Who-Is, the one, true God, anointed Cyrus Messiah to save Israel. Israel trusted God enough to have the imagination to see God working in ways beyond their comprehension.

The Pharisees seem to lack the imagination of their ancestors. They defended God’s law, and were good at it. And this rabbi from Nazareth played a little too fast and loose with it. He challenged their authority, questioned their interpretation, didn’t clear things with them before saying them. In these last days of his life, they tested him again and again. Even though, as we’ll see next week, the center of his teaching, summing of all God’s law into love of God and love of neighbor, was taken straight from the Torah itself.

The question behind this is, do you get to decide where and how God is working?

Maybe some ancient Israelites had doubts about calling a foreign emperor Messiah. But they saw what happened and concluded God was behind it. The Pharisees can’t see Jesus as from God because he’s outside their control.

That’s the real issue. It’s not about choosing Caesar or God, Cyrus or Jesus. The question is do you get to control God? But surely a God whom you can control is no god at all.

Today Paul praises the Thessalonians’ trust in a living God, not in idols.

“In every place,” Paul says, “your trust in God has become known, how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.” We can control idols because we make them. In ancient times, idols were made in human images, animal images; today they’re reflections of our wants, our desires. Reflections of us.

But we can’t make a true God. It is the very truth that we do not control God that tells us we’re connected to the true God. If we create our gods, there’s nothing we don’t know about them, nothing we can’t explain or control. And there’s nothing real about them.

The true God creates us, comes to us from the outside, and we can’t always know what God is doing. And we can never control what God is doing.

But that makes life in a painful world challenging.

There’s no shortage of people who know for sure what God is doing in international affairs and politics, sure their view of God’s law and ways should be forced on everyone, sure they know who’s with God and who isn’t. People of most faiths can often act as if they’re in charge of God. And need to control things to make sure their view of God prevails. So they feel comfortable.

But when we live with the humble certainty that we’re not in charge, and we look at the wars in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in Sudan, at the oppression and violence that shape our world, at the paranoid politics that infect the spirit of our nation, at the violent rhetoric that just keeps on a crescendo, and we know we don’t have all the answers, we do wonder: what are you going to do, God? Do you care? Is there a plan?

And in the imagination of the ancient Israelites, we find an path. They trusted God was working in the world, and had promised restoration. And they trusted God worked through people to do that restoration. Even unexpected people. Even through God’s people themselves.

What if we follow their lead?

Theologian Tom Wright has said, “Because of the cross, being a Christian, or being a church, does not mean claiming that we’ve got it all together. It means claiming that God’s got it all together; and that we are merely, as Paul says, those who are overwhelmed by [God’s] love.” [1]

If we trust God’s got it all together, and we don’t, we can trust God’s promise, that God is working to bring hope and life to this world. Even to the most devastating of places and scenarios. That every act of grace and kindness, every step away from the usual human violence and hatred and retaliation and revenge, is inspired by and led by God. That can be our hope and prayer.

And if God can use a Persian emperor to bring about restoration, God also can use you. That’s central to Jesus’ hope. He called people to follow, to become like him, to be shaped by love of God and neighbor, because God needs as many hands as possible to bring about the healing that is needed.

And yes, we feel we aren’t up to the task. We feel helpless here, in our place. We don’t elect every leader in Congress, we don’t have the ability to shape foreign crises personally. We can’t even fix our own city. We despair that it seems we lack the ability to help in anything that really matters.

But Jesus seems to think you’re critical to all this. That you, with a changed, new heart, filled with God’s Spirit, will make a difference that will tip the scales. That your love of neighbor, your careful voting, your engagement with your neighborhood, your prayer and supplication, your ability to hold in tension seemingly contrasting truths and find hope, all this makes a difference. You make a difference, Jesus thinks. Even if you can’t see it.

Like Paul’s Thessalonians.

Their trust in a living God whom they can’t limit or control, instead of whatever idols they’ve had, made them into people of grace and hope and healing that became known all over the region. They had no ability to control the Roman emperor, or probably even affect much beyond their own towns and villages. And yet Paul says the word got out: these people are living as Christ in the world and making a difference.

And since you are loved by God in Christ, since you are made in the image of God – that’s the image printed on you, not Caesar’s – when you give to God what is God’s, you give yourself, and you, too, will change the world. And even if you can’t see it, God can.

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

You Coming to the Party?

October 15, 2023 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

The feast of the Triune God is a feast of welcome and restoration of the whole creation, starting now and continuing into the life to come, and you’re invited. Period.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 28 A
Texts: Isaiah 25:1-9; Psalm 23; Matthew 22:1-14

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

There’s only one question for you today: are you coming to God’s party?

It’s going to be glorious. David says the cups will overflow and the feast will be spread between enemies, it’s a reconciliation feast. Jesus says the feast celebrates the joining of the Son of God with the creation, and all can come. Isaiah says God’s feast starts here but continues beyond death, destroying death in the process, and it is for all peoples, a feast of rich food and well-aged wines. It sounds wonderful.

And you’ve got the invitation in your hands, embossed with the royal seal: “child of God, beloved of God, come to my party, eat and be filled with my goodness.”

So, are you coming or not?

You realize, don’t you, that we don’t have to read this whole parable, with all the destruction, right? You can stop early. If the invitees had come, there just would have been a party, a feast, a celebration. No one has to miss this feast, not in Isaiah or Psalm 23 or Jesus’ parable.

But, maybe you think it’s cheating to stop the parable early, when the meal’s ready, and all are told to come.

That’s fair. We should look at the painful parts of this parable.

The first invitees ignore the invitation, abuse and kill the people who came to get them. Their city is burned to the ground with everyone in it. One guy who comes in the second sweep rejects the robe provided for him and gets bound hand and foot, tossed into the outer darkness, where there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth. Many are called, but few are chosen, you say. That’s how the parable really ends.

Fine. Let’s consider that. Matthew says all these parables we’re hearing in these weeks were told by Jesus in the first days of Holy Week. And we can’t pretend these late parables aren’t filled with strong warnings of punishment by Jesus for those who don’t comply.

There are a couple possibilities. Jesus is under intense stress as he approaches Good Friday. He’s running out of time to teach, and knows he’s going to suffer horribly. At least half his disciples – the male half, since the women seem to acquit themselves much better – keep missing his point and misunderstanding his mission. Maybe he’s frightened they’ll never get it, so he fills his parables this week with threats to get their attention.

Or maybe he meant every word. Maybe Jesus really meant you don’t get second chances. You turn from God’s invite, and that’s it. You’re outside God’s grace and love. It’s a horrible thought, but it’s possible.

But if I can’t stop reading the parable early, you can’t stop reading early either.

If I have to read all the way to “many are called and few are chosen,” I insist you read all the way to the end of chapter 28, the end of Matthew. (While you’re at it, check out the other three Gospels in full, too.) You’ll going to see an entirely different picture. There may be mystery over why Jesus said these harsh things, but there’s absolutely no mystery about what Jesus actually did.

Because whatever Jesus meant to say with his threatening words in Holy Week, he does none of it when he rises from the dead. He does the opposite.

The king burns the city who rejected the wedding, and kills everyone? The Risen Christ sends his disciples back into the city to proclaim the Good News of the resurrection, even to those who rejected it before, in hopes that now they’ll come to the party. He insists they start with Jerusalem.

The king takes a guy and throws him into the outer darkness? Jesus, God-with-us, on Friday will allow himself to be bound hand and foot and thrown into that very outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. And will bring back everyone from the darkness into resurrection life.

And “many are called, but few are chosen?” The Risen Christ sends the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and pours God’s grace and power over anyone who wants it, and then sends out those Spirit-filled ones to try and get to every person on earth. Christ chooses everyone.

There is something so simple and joy-filled about all of these late parables of Jesus.

But we obsess over the judgment parts. It’s as if we need to insist that the awful punishments threatened by the Son of God still apply, still must be accounted for, or else we despair about how God’s love in our human flesh would make such threats.

But why focus on those parts? Every single parable here starts with invitation and joy and can stop right there. If you just focus on that invitation and joy. If you hear Jesus’ loving voice saying, “come to me.” You’ll find a joy glorious to behold.

So – are you coming to God’s party or not?

It’s a party for here and for now. God’s clear about that. God intends the abundance of creation to be shared with all God’s children on earth, with all having enough to eat and drink, all sheltered, all whole, all happy. We’ve got more instructions than we need from God’s Word as to how we can help that feast happen here in this life. But if you don’t want to be at a feast with everyone, if you’re worried that if everyone’s cup runs over, yours might go dry, maybe it’s not your thing.

It’s a party for everyone, “good folks and bad folks,” Jesus says. David says your enemies are invited to God’s feast, too. Maybe that’s the dealbreaker. You only want to feast with God with your people.

Why reject Isaiah, though? Isaiah says the party’s going to keep going after you and I and everyone dies. Eventually, the party favor everyone gets is that no one ever has to leave the party. Death is now a blip, and the feast just keeps going. In even more raucous joy and celebration. For all people, Isaiah says.

In a moment, we’re going to have a feast.

It’s not exactly the same as these we’re hearing of. We sometimes call it a “foretaste of the feast to come,” a sign of what God’s feast will look like not only in the world to come, but if God’s way is done, in this world as well.

Because you and everyone are welcome to come and eat God’s very being, to be blessed by God’s undying love for you, to be forgiven and healed and made whole. Anyone here who wants to come to the feast can come. This feast reveals what God’s greater feast is meant to be, even on this earth. So we never turn people away.

Maybe this time, as you eat and drink, you can imagine the overfilled cups and groaning tables of the feast God intends for all on this planet, now and forever, and say, “yes, I really want to come to that party. And I want to help make sure everyone else is there, too.” Because Good News: the invitation has always been there for you. And for all.

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

The End of the Story

October 8, 2023 By Vicar at Mount Olive

When we read the parable of the Wicked Tenants with the resurrection in mind, we can see both a warning for those that think they own the vineyard, and the reality of new life for the whole vineyard.

Vicar Lauren Mildahl
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 27 A
Texts: Isaiah 5:1-7, Philippians 3:4b-14, Matthew 21:33-46

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

It’s been a crazy few days for the Jewish religious leaders.

Passover is coming up, which is always a busy time, and worshippers are arriving in Jerusalem from all over Judea. And just yesterday there was a huge commotion when some rabbi from Nazareth rode into the city on a donkey, like he was some kind of Messiah. The people thought he was a prophet and they didn’t check with the chief priests and the Pharisees – they just started spreading their cloaks in front of him and waving their palm branches, and singing “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” A huge disruption and a great way to catch the eye of the Roman occupiers.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, this Jesus went straight into the temple and started turning over tables! What were those chief priests supposed to do when Jesus chased out the money changers and the dove sellers? When he threatened and condemned the whole temple economic system that they relied on? And then Jesus had the audacity to park himself there all day, healing the sick, with no regard for the proper procedure of their sacred spaces. And the children wouldn’t stop singing that chorus, over and over again.

And the chief priests and Pharisees had had enough. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, they thought. We have systems. This is OUR temple!

And so when Jesus came back the next day, they confront him. Last week we heard them, summoning all their bluster, practically frothing at the mouth, “By what authority are you doing these things?” The thing is, they don’t really want an answer to the question. They want to maintain their power, and the status quo. They want their tables back in their places.

And Jesus is pretty frustrated too. I imagine that he still smelled a little bit like donkey, that he still had splinters in hands from the tables he was tossing around, that he still had the words of the song the children were singing stuck in his head. And he can see the path that he is on, and where it will lead by the end of the week. And here are these chief priests and Pharisees, the ones who absolutely should know better, the ones who should have understood what was going on, and they are quibbling about authority.

So Jesus tells them a story.

A story about a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a watchtower. And then leased to tenants. And not very good ones as we soon find out. He tells a story that is pretty harsh. With some uncanny similarities to what is about to happen. A story that doesn’t end well.

This is a story meant for specific people.

Not only is it directly addressed to the chief priests and Pharisees, it is a story that was deliberately constructed for them too. It was clearly meant to be heard by those who really knew their scripture. Right off the bat, Jesus makes an allusion to Isaiah 5, the Song of the Unfruitful Vineyard, in which God sings about planting a vineyard, digging a winepress, and building a watchtower. In that passage, the prophet Isaiah is warning the people of Judah. “You may be God’s cherished garden, but God will not abide your rotten grapes forever.”

The religious leaders would have picked up on this, would have realized that by invoking Isaiah 5, Jesus meant the parable to be a warning. In fact we are told explicitly that they knew that Jesus was speaking about them. They knew that they were the wicked tenants.

But they couldn’t bear to give up the idea that the vineyard was theirs.

Of course, the kingdom of God wasn’t theirs and deep down they probably knew it. But they were so resentful of the fact. They wanted it to be theirs. Just like we sometimes have to remind ourselves that this isn’t our vineyard. It’s God’s. It’s not our kingdom, it’s God’s. It’s not our church, it’s God’s. We aren’t even the tenants.

We are the vineyard.

We are a vineyard that doesn’t always produce good grapes. But we are beloved and cared for and lovingly tended by God. We are the vineyard that God plants and builds a watch tower over and agonizes over. The vineyard that God would send the Son to claim and save. The vineyard that the Son would die for.

And if only the chief priests and Pharisees had taken a moment to consider, wait a minute, what if we don’t have to be the tenants? What if they had given up their claim to the power and the systems they were clinging to? What if they embraced their place as part of the vineyard? They might have produced some good fruit.

And at this point, we have to talk about the end of the story.

At the end of this parable it seems like the tenants win. The Son is dead. With no grapes to show for it. But we know that’s not the end. Jesus died, but he didn’t stay dead.

The resurrection has to change the way we read this parable.

It takes the rhetorical question asked in Isaiah, “What more could I have done for my vineyard?” and answers it forever. God sends the Son, the Christ, God’s own self to be with us. And not just to die, but to live! To create life where there was no life. To restore and renew everything! When we read this parable with the resurrection in mind, we can see that it isn’t about God’s wrath, it is about God’s closeness. It is about the Gospel that comes as a person to be close to us. A story about a God that is so close that you could trip over him, like a stone you didn’t see and stumbled over. And it is a story about how easy it is to trip and fall on that stone if your eyes are set on protecting your own power.

This parable is a warning to all those who think that they own the vineyard, but it isn’t a categorical rejection of the chief priests and Pharisees, because that’s not the end of the story. Punishment comes, yes, but so does reconciliation, because God came to save the whole vineyard, including the Pharisees. And we know that because a Pharisee who wrote half of our New Testament!

Paul was one of the very people that this parable was meant for.

He rattles off his entire pedigree to the Philippians: “circumcised on the 8th day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”

Before he met Jesus, Paul thought the vineyard was his. Maybe he even thought he was doing God a favor by persecuting the church, when all he was really doing was protecting his own position. Paul thought he knew it all. Until he stumbled right over the stone that the builders rejected on the road to Damascus. When Paul meets the Son who died and rose for the vineyard, he realizes that all of those credentials, everything that he might have boasted about, everything he knew before – it’s all rubbish. The real value, the surpassing value, is knowing Christ and the power of his resurrection.

The resurrection makes all the difference.

For Paul and for us. This is the end of the story. The end that is just the beginning. New life in Christ. For everyone. For disciples and for Pharisees. A beautiful, beloved vineyard, built on the cornerstone of Christ.

This is the Lord’s doing. And it is amazing in our eyes!

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

Sermon for the funeral of Eunice Hafemeister

October 7, 2023 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

Nothing in this life can separate you from God’s love in Christ. And of course, not even death itself.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The funeral of Eunice Ruth Hafemeister

Texts: Romans 8:31-39; John 14:25-29; Isaiah 61:1-3

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

Paul’s promise to the Romans is the best news we could hear today.

Talking about the challenges and suffering of our lives and of the creation, he says: “nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” And he specifically says even death can’t. Death cannot keep you from God’s love in Christ. And in his death on the cross and resurrection to new life, Christ made this absolutely clear and trustworthy and certain.

Today we carry our sister Eunice to her rest, and it’s tempting to focus only on this amazing promise: death cannot separate us from God’s love in Christ. So Eunice, who has died, is in God’s arms now, in the life to come. That’s what we came here to hear and trust.

Except it’s only part of the promise. And only part of the truth.

Paul included a whole lot of other things in the “nothing”: life can’t separate you from God’s love in Christ either, he said. What’s happening today can’t, what happens tomorrow can’t. Except for death, everything else on Paul’s list happens in this life. Paul’s promise is mostly for here. Here, you are always in God’s love.

So while Eunice absolutely is in the arms of God right now, that’s nothing new. Because life, and the present, and the future, and nothing in the whole creation could separate her from God’s love in Christ, she has always been in the arms of God.

And she knew that. She’d want you to know that you are, too.

Dear friends, this gift of God in Christ is for you now.

The promise of God’s peace Jesus makes in our Gospel today is for you and for now.

He says so specifically. He’s going away, but he wants those who trust in him to know that they will not be alone, they don’t need to be afraid of this suffering world, and they don’t need to have troubled hearts.

God is with them. So God is with you. And that peace that the world can’t give, because the world lives in selfishness and anxiety and fear, that peace from God is yours now. You can be confident in that.

If you knew Eunice you heard this witness from her.

Of course she was human like us. She had doubts and fears and anxieties, and I’m probably not the only one who talked with her about her God questions.

But she had a deep and abiding confidence that God loved her always, and loved this world. She lived her life fully in that confidence, traveling, going on adventures with friends and family, always being of service to God and others. She taught countless people and shared her wisdom and faith with them. She lived every minute of her nearly 97 years as gift from God and was a blessing to her huge family of siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles, and even more to her family she raised with Lester.

This is her witness she leaves behind for us: that life can be lived trusting God is with you, giving you peace and hope that makes this life worth living. And also peace and hope for the life that’s yours to come.

Today, Eunice is just where she trusted she would be, where she was confident God was taking her.

We grieve because she’s no longer here with us. But we grieve with joy for her.

And the witness of God’s Word is that you don’t need to be anxious about you or your life or this world, either. Nothing that has happened to you or will happen, no matter how painful or difficult, can keep God from loving you in Christ. And giving you peace through God’s Spirit.

Living in this trust, life becomes a blessing with a joy and hope that transforms you. Life becomes a gift to live. As Isaiah says, you get your faint heart, your faint spirit, strengthened in God’s love and you become like a great oak tree.

But don’t just take my word for it. Or Eunice’s. Or even Paul’s.

Christ gives you the Holy Spirit who speaks in your heart and teaches you what you need to know to find God’s peace in this life. Reminds you of God’s love when you doubt or are afraid. Listen for that Spirit. God’s Spirit lives in you so you’re not alone, and God’s love shapes your life here. And gives you confidence in a life to come that is yours.

Trust God on this. Where else do you think Eunice got all her faith and trust? She got it where we all get it, from God living in her. And God now lives in you.

Nothing in this life or the next can separate you from God’s love. Nothing. So live in that peace now. Until you, too, go to that wonder that is to come that Eunice now knows fully.

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