All are rooted in God’s love in Christ, flowing love up into the creation, through all seasons and into the life to come.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
Texts: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; Psalm 139:1-18, 23-24; Romans 8:35-39; John 15:1-17

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

The branch growing from the trunk of the vine probably doesn’t understand the seasons.

It likely doesn’t plan for spring rains or summer heat, anticipate the drying up inside that comes with autumn, or the blasts of winter cold.

The branch doesn’t know why buds along its length turn into clusters of small fruits which fill with juice, until some fall with ripeness. It doesn’t comprehend the life in the vine’s ancient bole, holding it and feeding it with all it needs to produce grapes.

But here is God’s mystery: even without knowing a single thing, that branch draws the nutritious sap, drinks in the dew and rain, luxuriates in the warm sun, and does what it was made to do. It bears fruit. The only thing that could stop it from that is to be cut off from the vine.

The branch doesn’t know this. But wouldn’t it be a blessing if it did?

Jesus told those who loved him they were branches on his vine.

This wasn’t a careless metaphor. Jesus loved to speak of his own connection within the inner life of God, his oneness with the One he called Father and with the Spirit he promised to send. But he also loved to tell those who loved him they had the same connection.

He called it “abiding.” Abide in me as I abide in God’s life, he’d say. And you will have life. My love will flow up this vine and into you and you will bear the fruit of love.

And that love will sustain you, he said, whatever happens, good or bad, because I will take it through death into life. That love will connect you to all God’s children, and when you love as I love, it will shape all of your life, transform you into someone who is God’s Christ in the world.

And Jesus’ late-comer, his servant Paul, added this joy: nothing, nothing can separate you from that love of God in Christ Jesus.

Not things present or things to come, or even past regrets. Not any malicious powers, systems, or structures in this broken world. Nothing in creation can cut you off from the Vine that is God’s love in Christ Jesus. Not even life, hard as it can be. Not even death, terrifying and unknown as it can be.

Ecclesiastes says there is a season to everything. There are spring times in our lives where things are budding, summers when everything is gold-tinted and flourishing. But there are also autumns, where energy fades, and changes are coming; there are winters when things grow cold and die. There’s a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to be born, and a time to die.

Yes, that’s true, Paul says. But still: nothing, nothing in any of those seasons of your life can separate you from God’s love in Christ Jesus.

You are branches of the Vine of Christ, dear friends, and you are deeply connected to the flow of God’s infinite love in the world and you always will be. No matter what season you find yourself in.

But here’s God’s mystery all over again: all this is true even if you’re not aware of it.

Just like the vine’s branches, even if you live your life unaware of God’s love, you still are deeply loved by God, and God grows love’s fruit in you. The cosmic, all-encompassing love of God is not limited by doctrine or human decision or organization or even awareness. The Holy Spirit we proclaim goes wherever and whenever she wants to, and joins all people to God’s love, knowing or unknowing.

That’s the love Susan knew and trusted. Today, as we carry her to the hands of the God she trusted and loved her whole life, we rejoice in this love of God she so beautifully proclaimed in hymn after hymn, in reflections and poems and essays and prayers. And in person.

A love she describes this way:

[God’s love] that flows up into us
from Christ the Vine
 . . . is absolutely limitless,
. . . a never-ceasing well
of living water.
God’s love is
absolutely boundless
and God never says
to anyone,
“Oh, I’m sorry,
I’ve used up
all my love for today . . .”
God’s love constantly
flows up into us
like energy into a tree
Changing us
filling us
to be beautiful
compassionate
wise. ^[1]

Susan embodied clearly and insistently the all-embracing arms of the Triune God for the whole creation. Not just all humans, but all creatures. Not just all creatures, but the smallest atom and the vastest galaxies. Whether any of these know it or not.

But wouldn’t it be a blessing if all God’s children did know?

Susan seemed to think so.

She taught us to sing this love. To pray this love. To reflect on this love. So we’d know it. Trust it.

Because if your whole life is joined into the love of God forever, and God’s love flows in you like sap in a vine, giving you fruit to bear, and literally nothing in the universe can stop that love of God for you, wouldn’t it be a blessing to know it?

And if you know it, Jesus says, you can live it, share it in a world that desperately needs it. You can take this fruit God grows in you and bear it in your family, your work, your world. So that God’s inseparable love for all things can start healing all things, as God dreams.

Today we grieve that Susan has come to her wintertime season.

She was such a blessing to her family, to this community of faith, to so many in the Church, and her season of winter did not arrive at a time any of us wanted.

But Susan herself has been reassuring us for decades that these seasons do come. Reminding you that you are never alone in whatever season you are. You can trust God’s resurrection love is always with you, whether you’re in the summer and it’s all going beautifully, or your heart is wintry and cold and fearful.

In the beautiful psalm we sang, the psalmist says there’s nowhere you can go God will not be, nowhere you can be God has not been, nowhere you can get lost God cannot find. The psalmist promises that every day of your life, from before you were born until the day your life here ends, you are God’s.

And then, on that day, God will welcome you to the place that has been “expect[ing] your return for years,” as W. H. Auden’s beautiful hymn says.

Our sister’s legacy of reassuring God’s children of the inseparable love of God for them will last far beyond all of our lives.

Susan will be drawing people to know the Vine of God’s love and grace for many years to come.

And so, thanks to her, we, too, gather here in our sadness and tears with this hope: we know she faced her wintertime without fear of it, and clinging to the trust she sang about and generously shared with us. She knew God’s love was still surrounding her to the end, and that God’s love would take her from here to the place that’s been expecting her return for years.

That is your joy today. You are connected to God’s undying love, to that Vine, always and forever. No matter the season. Let that fill you, and flow through you always in this world, until that day God brings you on your way to the place expecting your return for years, where those who have gone before you will have prepared your welcome home.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

_{[1] From the poem “Revealing,” part VI. Love; in Glory Into Glory: Reflections for worship, pp. 124-125; copyright © 2009 MorningStar Music Publishers, Fenton, Missouri}

You are God’s holy, precious child, and are called by your sibling, Christ Jesus, to be about your Heavenly Parent’s business.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The First Sunday of Christmas, year C
Text: Luke 2:41-52

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

The Church has a longstanding Father problem when it comes to language about God.

For a very long time, and in many parts of the Church, even today, the name “Father” has been by far the predominant image used to evoke the reality of God in people’s minds and hearts. And for many, including here, it’s a precious one.

But as Christians who believe in the One, Holy, and Triune God, “Father” can never fully substitute for God. It is part of the name of God given in Matthew 28, and we use it, along with Son and Holy Spirit, when we invoke God, as part of our nearly 2,000 year tradition. But “Father” is too often carelessly used to refer to the entirety of God’s reality. For we who confess a Triune God, that’s close to heresy.

Even now, when people are asked to image God, God is an old, white man in a robe with a long white beard and long white hair, not a mystery we call the Trinity, a relationship of love between Three Persons who are yet at the same time One God. That’s a huge problem.

Worse, the Church for many centuries was – and continues to be in many places – a patriarchy run exclusively by men in power. Perpetuating an image of a solely male Deity conveniently keeps everyone who isn’t male (or who disagrees with the powerful) in their place. And if they want to be controlling and judging, claiming those as characteristics of a Father God also conveniently lets those in power act as they want, using God’s wrath and judgment as an excuse.

There’s also the very real problem that many human beings sadly don’t have a happy or wholesome image of what a father is like because of their experience with fathers. Many people hear “God the Father” and feel trauma because of their life experience.

It’s enough to wonder if the name is at all redeemable.

But there is this one thing. Jesus taught us to use and trust that name.

Today we see the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple, teaching and challenging and amazing the teachers of God’s law. When he’s finally found by his parents, he says, “Why are you surprised at what I’m doing? Didn’t you know I must be about my Father’s business?”

But be alert now. Now we tread into mystery. We confess this human child, Jesus, is also the Son of God, that Jesus, the Christ, the Anointed, Crucified, and Resurrected One, is also fully God. And within the mystery that is the life of the Trinity, this One we call God and human experiences his relationship to the First Person of the Trinity in a way he describes as father. (Stay with me now – this is mystery.)

So the Trinity is not Father. But within the inner life of God, the one we know as the Son calls this other One Father, at least for our sake. There is a relationship within God’s life that Jesus can only describe for you and me in parental terms.

This Jesus whom we have learned to trust with our lives and our deaths, wants us to know something about the Trinity that is blessing and gift within God’s life and for us. Within, because there is a joy of this relationship within the life of the Triune God that Jesus wants us to know about. For us, because, as Jesus taught us to pray, we can know this Person of the Trinity in the same way. We can also have a relationship of child to parent within the Trinity.

This is mystery and hard to grasp. But Luke, our Evangelist today, makes all this much simpler. Luke shows what this could mean for you.

Luke tells you things no other Evangelist does, and they’re astonishing.

Luke gives breathtaking glimpses of what a relationship with the Trinity that is like father and child could be for you.

Luke is the only one to tell Jesus’ parables revealing a prodigal God who so desperately wants to bring wandering humanity back, God will do whatever it takes. That story of a father who lost a son and got him back is a wonder. All-powerful, male gods in human history tend to demand vengeance and punishment. They don’t sit on the front step day after day after day looking down the road, waiting for sight of their lost ones so they can prodigally welcome them back with robe and song and feast. They don’t turn their houses upside down like an old woman looking for her lost precious one, rejoicing when they are found.

When the Son of God is brutally crucified, only Luke says that Jesus’ words as he was being nailed to the wooden beam were a prayer to the One he called Father, asking forgiveness for those hammering, for those who caused this, for those who betrayed him.

For Luke, the image of Father he knows from God is one of endless, foolish love, willing to be taken advantage of, instantly and always ready to welcome back all who stray. For Luke, the image of Father he knows from God is one who could even forgive those who have done the worst things imaginable to God’s own Child.

There are many rich and beautiful images for God in Scripture, and we always need to seek them, use them, rejoice in them.

In our song and prayer and preaching here at Mount Olive we try hard to use the whole palette of grace-filled images God’s Word gives us for God and they bless us.

And though we must never substitute “Father” for the entirety of God, Jesus in Luke gives us a precious gift: one of the ways the Trinity comes to you, to me, is as a loving, forgiving parent. A parent who cares more for you than you can ever imagine, who will do anything to love you, even risking everything. If “father” is too hard for you to recover, Jesus’ll OK with that. Use “mother,” or “parent”. But this is too important a relationship, too blessed a gift, to lose.

You are God’s beloved child You’ve heard this often from this pulpit, from God’s Word, from our hymns and prayers. That’s what the 12-year-old Jesus is talking about. That’s the business of God he came to be about: to show God’s parental love is real and precious.

And like Jesus, you and I are called to be about our Heavenly Parent’s business.

You and I and all God’s children are asked to be prodigal in our loving, radical in our welcoming. This is God the Father’s business, according to Luke. That we look in every nook and corner for any who are lost to find them and bring them home to the God who loves them. That you offer to all who hurt you, just as Stephen did, the risky, transforming forgiveness of a God who will go to a cross to change that evil into life and love.

Jesus teaches you today as a child, and later as an adult, to be about your God’s business, to be like your Heavenly Parent, with the same wisdom, the same relentless love, the same searching heart for all who are lost. To be the kind of person no one will be surprised to find being about God’s holy, loving business in this world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

The world is unsafe for all the creation, so God enters it, risks all that is unsafe, to bring healing through the creation, as we learn to risk, to be unsafe, for the sake of all.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Eve of the Nativity of Our Lord
Text: Luke 2:1-20

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 not a safe world.

And you know it. We gather tonight and sing “all is calm, all is bright,” “glory to the newborn King,” knowing very little is calm, or bright, or glorious in our hearts, our society, our city, our culture, our world.

This is not a safe world, and you know it. Even worshipping here in this place tonight, something we missed so dearly last year, we can’t be one hundred percent sure we’re safe. We vaccinate, wear masks, keep distance. But even with these best protections, over two years of pandemic uncertainty have taught us any decisions to leave our homes for any reason are judgment calls with risks.

This is not a safe world, but God knows it, too. So God entered this unsafe world as one of us. The Incarnate God is already out there, in the unsafe world. That’s the wonder of this night.

And tonight that Incarnate One calls you out into the darkness and cold, into the noise and fear, into the sickness and pain. Where God-with-us truly is. Where God-with-us, Emmanuel, hopes you will be, too.

The birth of this child shows God’s willingness to risk everything, to be unsafe.

This is a story that begins at creation, a story of the eternal God who desperately loves this God-made world of beauty and life but is pained beyond belief at the destruction we, God’s own children, have made of it by our own actions, our own lives.

This is a story of the Triune God who answers that brokenness and destruction by risking everything to draw the creation back into God’s life and love. God enters an unsafe, cold, hateful, sick, broken world to transform it from within. To become completely vulnerable to it, rather than destroy it. To say to us, to all God’s children, “I’m in your hands,” hoping that from that vulnerable love we might also learn to love.

This child is meant to draw us into this story of God’s unsafe love for the world.

Babies are born without power and protection, at risk from any number of dangers. This baby, born into a world which already had no room for him, was at risk from the moment of his conception. In this birth God says, “I come to you without any power or might, so that you can hear me, know me, love me. Follow me.”

But beginning as a vulnerable, weak baby, God also is saying, “Know me, follow me . . . or kill me if you have to. Reject me. Walk away. But I will come to you in this way. It’s the only way to life for this world.”

Which means, on this holy night, you’re faced with a decision.

What will you do with this baby? You can love the story, the idea of a baby in a manger, and imagine this is all sweetness and light. But then you’ll go out into that unsafe world with little more than a lie. Because if this beauty, this quiet, this peace in here has nothing to do with reality out there, what’s the point? If God is actually doing something for this unsafe world in this birth, loving this story does nothing.

But if you can see that this vulnerability, this risk of God is the whole point, this baby becomes very important. Then you see that this baby is the beginning of God’s answer to this broken, cold, unsafe world.

Without power, without weapons, without defenses; without strategy, without plan of attack, without manipulation; this is how God enters the pain of this world. The Triune God’s wisdom is at once astounding and troubling, that the only way to make this world safe and whole is to risk being broken and unsafe, even though God has the power to make and unmake universes.

This baby is only the beginning of God’s answer to an unsafe world, though.

The cross and empty tomb continue that answer, showing how God’s life rises from sacrificial love. But this God-with-us, Emmanuel whose birth we celebrate, made it clear: you and I and God’s children are the rest of the answer. We are called to embrace God’s way of healing the world and no other.

God’s unsafe way is now offered as your way. It’s kind of easy to think you go into this world powerless and defenseless, since you’re not the eternal God of creation. You probably feel powerless often enough. But you and I still have power, still cling to our self-built protections, build barriers, try to pretend we can be safe. There’s enough risk in following God’s unsafe path that we need to hear what Christ taught us in his words, in this birth, in that death and resurrection.

That the only way to healing, to light, to warmth, to wholeness, to peace, is for you to enter the pain, the darkness, the cold, the brokenness, the struggle and be willing to put yourself wholly into it. For me to do that. For all who hear God’s voice to do that. In that risking, the world will be healed.

God’s path goes straight into the unsafe.

But it’s the only way for God. So it can be the only way for us.

So keep your eyes tonight on this baby who is the God of all creation, heaven and earth contained in such a little space, such a vulnerable place. This baby means God is already walking in this unsafe world, walking the path Christ now calls you to. So you are never alone on this path, even when it leads into danger and cold, into unsafe places.

And if you are with such a God on this path, then you are also given the courage and strength to risk as God has risked and be a part of God’s healing of all.

And that is truly tidings of comfort and joy.

In the name of Jesus. Amen