You are God’s beloved child, and God knows you by name, and is with you in all things, good and bad. Now God sends you to share that good news with all God’s children.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Baptism of Our Lord, Lect. 1 C
Texts: Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

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

“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine.”

Hear that again: God, the creator of the universe calls you by name, and you belong to God.

Jesus heard the same thing at his baptism, as the Holy Spirit came upon him in the waters: “You are my beloved Son.” Nels will hear the same thing today, too, as he comes through the waters of baptism: “You are my beloved child. You belong to me. I know you by name.”

But this is your gift, too, always: as the Holy Spirit comes upon you in your baptismal waters, God says to you, “You are my beloved child. I have called you by name, you are mine.”

Let that sink into your heart and mind.

The Triune God who placed the stars, created the planets and galaxies, knows your name. “You are precious in my sight,” God says to you today, “and I love you.”

What if you could live every day in the joy that the God of the universe has claimed you, knows you by name, loves you? That you are precious to God? If you could cling to that promise, you wouldn’t need to be afraid anymore. That’s worth hoping for. When was the last time you weren’t afraid of something?

Because maybe you don’t feel precious to God very often, or beloved.

You might feel abandoned by God sometimes, as if God were absent. You might feel you’re not worthy of God’s love. Maybe you’re burdened by the weight of guilt and regret, the pain of things you know you’ve done wrong.

We can live under heavy weight these days – a weight of “might have beens” and “should have dones”. Especially in this broken world where so many of us are awakening to realities we didn’t understand before, awakening to our involvement in other peoples’ suffering even without wanting to be. Lots can make you fret about God’s love for you.

But God says – don’t be afraid. Don’t carry that weight. I have redeemed you, God says. I came to you in my beloved Son, to show you a way of love that will transform you and the world. To take all of the hurtful things you and all my children do, and draw them into my love to be forgiven and forgotten. To carry the world’s brokenness and suffering through death into my risen life that can heal all things.

When God says to you today, “I love you, and you are precious to me,” God means it. So you really don’t need to be afraid.

And know this, child of God, known to God by name, redeemed of God: nothing in this world can take you from the arms of the God to whom you belong.

God says to you today: when you pass through the waters, the floods, you will not be overwhelmed. Don’t be afraid.

When you pass through the fire, through the suffering in this world, you will not be burned. Don’t be afraid.

Did you hear? God says, “when” you pass through the flood, “when” you pass through fire. God expects bad things can and will happen. But whatever happens –  flood, fire, death, tragedy, pain, suffering – God says, “do not be afraid, for I am with you.”

God promises far better than a life free of suffering and pain. God promises to always be with you, no matter what happens. Even if it’s death: God in Christ has broken death’s power. Even there you are safe with God.

Like Jesus, you are God’s beloved child. And, like Jesus, there’s one more thing to know.

After his baptism, Jesus went out into his ministry as God’s beloved Son, to let all God’s children know who they are, too. And so you, and I, and all God’s beloved, are sent out as God’s children in the world to let all the others know they’re precious to God and known.

Just before today’s words in Isaiah, God tells the same people in exile who are promised God’s eternal love that they also will be sent into the world. “I will give you as a light to the nations,” God says to them – and to you – in chapter 42. I need you to free prisoners from their chains, to heal those who are sick, to be a sign of my covenant promise of love for all my children.

In a couple weeks in our Gospel we’ll hear Jesus claim those words of Isaiah 42 as his own call. But in Acts, Luke says they’re your call and mine, the call of all who are filled with God’s Spirit, all who are God’s children.

It was that way for Jesus after his baptism. So it will be for Nels. And so it is with you.

You don’t need to be afraid. You are God’s beloved.

You don’t need to be afraid. God knows you by your name, and you belong to God. You don’t need to be afraid. You are precious to God, and God is always with you.

Now take that love and grace into your world. To those who are going through the waters and the fires but don’t know God is with them. To those who are in pain and in need, wherever they are. To those who are oppressed, or captive, or sick. So they know they don’t need to be afraid, either. So they know that God knows them by name and they are beloved and precious to God.

Go, now, and do this. It’s what God’s beloved ones do. It’s who we are. So that all can know this joy themselves.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

God calls us to get up and go from our comfortable places, to be stretched in our ways of thinking and being, and we will see God’s light dawning in the world’s night, bringing life and hope.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Epiphany of Our Lord
Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-12

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 Magi weren’t Jewish.

Maybe that’s obvious. But these astrologers, likely from Persia, had a very different belief system than Judaism. They didn’t study the Hebrew Scriptures, either.

But they did study the skies. And something there told them a new ruler was to be born for the Jewish people. Born far to the west of them. Far from their culture, their faith, their practices.

And they followed that heavenly phenomenon, traveled long distances, both from their country and from their faith. Because something drew them. We would say that God led them. Even if they didn’t know the one God of all creation the Jewish people trusted.

The Holy Spirit filled them and drew them far from their comfort zones, their families and neighbors, their base of knowledge, their cultural touchstones.

Now, we claim Jesus is the Messiah promised to the Jewish people.

He was a Jew himself. His first disciples in the first years of the early Church were mostly Jewish. But today Isaiah proclaims that God’s light is dawning for all, not just for the Jewish people. He promises that other nations and rulers will also be drawn to this light and come. Something will shine in the world’s night that God will use to draw all people to see what God is doing.

And those early Jewish Christians, including Matthew our evangelist, claimed this promise was fulfilled. When Jesus was a young child, non-Jewish strangers from the east, foreigners, were drawn to him by God. Saw God’s light shining in him.

Do you see the wonder of these two things?

That people completely unfamiliar with Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures would uproot themselves and travel a long way to a faith unknown to them, give up the comfort they had in their lives and go see the mystery that was drawing them.

And that the Jewish people they came to also stretched themselves from their certainty to trust that God’s light wasn’t theirs exclusively.

These are both beyond remarkable things.

For most of us, if God wants to show us something, God needs to do it in our context.

We’d prefer it to be within doctrines we understand, using language we find comfort in, in places we’ve grown to love.

Can you imagine feeling the Spirit’s pull and heading off on a journey to another country where people have never heard of Jesus, let alone of Lutherans, not to tell them you’ve got the answers, but because you heard God say, “I will be there, go look for me among those people”?

On this day of Epiphany, if you’re going to see God manifested in the world, the Magi tell you, be ready to go where God leads you. And it might be strange lands, or strange neighborhoods, to people unlike you. But there you will meet God.

The Magi fell on their knees in joy when they saw God in this baby. They’d never have seen anything if they hadn’t gotten up to go where they were led.

As daunting as it was for the Magi to get up and go, don’t underestimate how hard this challenge was for the Jewish people.

God’s chosen ones were asked to understand God’s choosing of them wasn’t meant to be exclusive. It’s not enough for God just to save Israel. “I will give you as a light to the nations,” God declares in Isaiah 49, “that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” They were chosen, but to be a blessing to all nations, to welcome all into God’s light.

We hear Jesus proclaim that at the cross he will draw all things – not even just all people, but all things, the whole cosmos – into the life and love of God. But how often have we wondered about that breadth, that inclusion? How often have we doubted God’s expansive love included people unlike us? How often have we acted as if God’s love had limits and that if others were included, perhaps that meant there’d be less love for us?

On this day of Epiphany, if you’re going to see God manifested in the world, Isaiah and Matthew challenge you, celebrate God’s light dawning in the world without restricting where God can be, who God will be with, who might show you a truth about God you’d never known before.

The Magi were the first to witness to the Jewish people that their true ruler was now born. Those who came to believe in Jesus never would have found that joy without being open to God’s inclusive ways.

Today the good news is that the light of God has come, is revealed in Christ.

Morning is dawning on the long night of evil and suffering this world has been in. But to see it you’ll have to go look where God leads you. How far might you be willing to go from your comfort to see God revealed in the world?

And to see God’s light, you’ll need to look at the stranger beside you with God’s eyes of love. How much are you willing to let God stretch you out of your ways of thinking to see God’s light where God is shining it?

This day promises you: when you let God’s Spirit send you out, and stretch you within, you will see God’s light in Christ dawning over the whole creation, bringing life and hope to all.

And then you, too, can be overwhelmed with joy.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

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