God desires that you know and have abundant life, and urgently begs you to turn toward that life, while patiently giving you all you need to thrive in it.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Third Sunday in Lent, year C
Texts: Isaiah 55:1-9 (adding 10-11); Luke 13:1-9

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

Do you have whiplash from that Gospel?

First Jesus clearly says God doesn’t cause tragedy or violence to punish people for their sins. But then Jesus just as clearly says if you don’t repent you’ll perish as those victims did.

Next, still with ominous tone, Jesus begins a parable with a fruitless tree whose owner is ready to chop it down. Then the gardener steps in with patience and love, offering to nurture the tree and help it bear fruit.

This short reading swings widely between implying divine judgment and punishment, and saying God doesn’t operate that way but patiently works for a different outcome. What are you and I supposed to feel, or think, or respond?

This whole section of Luke’s Gospel feels this way.

After the Transfiguration in chapter 9, Luke contrasts severity with grace in his telling. Stories of healing are alongside stories of people rejecting Jesus. A parable about a rich fool who dies with full barns is followed by encouragement to trust God for all your needs. Parables about faithful servants are paired with parables about unfaithful ones.

Jesus tells parables of mustard seeds and yeast in these chapters, promising growth in God’s reign, while warning about taking the narrow door that many will not be able to enter. He breaks the Sabbath a couple times by healing surrounding last week’s Gospel, God the Mother Hen who wants to gather all her chicks but they won’t. Then warnings about taking good seats at a dinner lead to a parable about a great feast where all the highways and byways are searched to get everyone to come.

All of this leads up to next week’s Gospel in Luke 15, the great story of a father’s senseless prodigal love for his two sons who somehow don’t trust that love.

So, should we be frightened about not being faithful, about God throwing us out? Or should we trust the loving wings of God the Mother Hen, the loving arms of God the Welcoming Father?

The key to this whole section really is Jesus’ warning today, “repent or perish.”

Now, remember, here Jesus categorically rejects the idea that God causes people’s suffering as punishment. Whether accident (like the falling tower) or evil (like Pilate’s massacre), it wasn’t because the people sinned. “Repent or you will perish like they did” has to mean something different.

Jesus’ call to repentance is a turning into new life and bearing fruit, into a new way of being from an old way. The severity of the calls to repentant turning in this long section of Luke comes from the urgency of Jesus’ journey to his death that began at the Transfiguration. Jesus knows he has little time left to teach all his followers the new way, and they have little time to start turning around.

In “repent or perish,” Jesus isn’t threatening a punishment. He just said that’s not how God works. God embraces. God forgives. Jesus is describing the consequences of a life lived outside of God’s way. If you don’t turn around soon, he says, you’re going to be stuck in your path of destruction and ruin.

Repentance is life, Jesus says.

The way of Christ is challenging and hard – love of God and neighbor, vulnerable love, these aren’t easy things. The turn of repentance, letting go of selfishness and stubbornness, confessing failures to love, seeking to do better, these aren’t easy things, either.

But Jesus says this is the way where you find abundant, full, rich life. Life trusting God provides growth and grace, life under God’s loving wings, life where God breaks God’s own rules to give hope and healing.

Turn to that, Jesus says. Turn to God and find life. Abide in me. Live in me, and you will bear fruit and have abundant life.

But maybe calling our Christly love fruit is part of the problem for us.

Jesus and Paul and others loved to use the fruit metaphor for the gifts of the Spirit, the life in Christ that God works in you and me. But fruit-bearing plants bear fruit for others to find nourishment and joy, not for themselves. Their fruit’s seeds are also for others, starting new plants that bear fruit. Maybe that’s not much incentive for us, that our fruit from God mostly benefits others.

But if the Triune God truly desires you to know life abundantly, fruit’s a wonderful metaphor. A tree or bush or vine that bears fruit is healthy, whole, vigorous. Beautiful from bud to ripeness. Plants not bearing fruit are often sickly looking, even dead.

That’s the secret to the life in Christ. You and I are created to bear fruit of love in our words, actions, lives, for the sake of others, yes. But in that bearing, we’re alive. Healthy. Beautiful. From John the Baptist to Jesus to Paul to James, the New Testament says when you bear the fruits of repentance in your life it’s a sign to others that the Spirit is working in you, filling you, blessing you. And it’s how you know you’re alive, too.

There isn’t a conflict in Jesus’ message at all.

Yes, Christ urgently wants you and me to turn our lives toward God and find life and hope and love and healing, and to be that for others. And he’s certain that if we don’t turn, it will be ruinous for our lives.

But if you trust that Jesus is the face of the Triune God for you and the world, then this persistent truth Jesus wants you to know is the only truth: God’s love for you is never-ending, cannot be taken from you, and, Jesus says today, it is also patient.

God will take time, patiently nurturing you, fertilizing you with the Spirit’s grace, pruning away the problem bits, until you bear great fruit. Because Isaiah promises God’s Word will always do what God intends, bearing the fruit God wants in the world. Always.

Today, once again, all you’re hearing is our regular, simple Lenten invitation: turn to God, and live.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

God’s loving wings are wide open to embrace you, and there is no reason not to go  in and find warmth and healing and life.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday in Lent, year C
Text: Luke 13:31-35

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

We almost lost our little dog Maggie this week.

She snuck out as I was leaving for work. She’s pretty fast, and must have darted out through the garage while I wasn’t looking. She’s broken free before in the summer – she loves to run. We know she’ll always come back, but there are coyotes nearby and if there’s a squirrel, she wouldn’t stop for a car.

It wasn’t summer, though, it was bitterly cold, and we didn’t know she was gone. A few hours after I left, our neighbor found her barking outside her door. Fortunately, our neighbor and her wife put our packages in the garage for us, and we for them, so she knew our code and took Maggie home.

Our fear after this is not the same as Jesus’ despair at his own people being unwilling to let him draw them all under the loving wings of God’s embrace. Maggie’s only a dog, not a whole nation.

But there is this: Maggie broke out of the loving, warm place that embraced her, to run free. And pretty soon, she likely regretted her decision, and longed for safety and warmth over that freedom. Maybe Jesus’ reluctant chickens have regrets, too.

Jesus proclaimed God’s grace and love for all people.

He had compassion on all who suffered, or were lost, crushed by life, looking for God. And lots of people let him embrace them in the loving wings of God the Mother Hen. But lots did not. Why?

Well, Jesus also called people to a new way, to repent of what they were doing, to change direction. To love God and love neighbor as their Scriptures had long proclaimed, to live in God’s reign that was theirs now, not just in heaven. For some, maybe that was a reason not to follow. Or even to have him killed.

But all the leaders that wanted him out of the way trusted in God, knew the Scriptures, heard their call to love of God and neighbor all their lives. They knew the prophets, and God’s deep concern for those who were poor and in need, the ones most attracted to Jesus. Whether or not they believed Jesus was God’s Son, they ought to have been glad to hear him, support him.

Why would they be unwilling to be drawn into the love of God Jesus embodied and preached? More to the point, since all these people are dead long ago: why would you be unwilling?

Maggie suggests that seeking freedom to do whatever you want isn’t always the best thing for you. But we want it.

If little chicks in the farmyard are running wherever they like and the mother hen tries to gather them, it’s for a reason. Maybe a storm is coming, or a fox is near. She wants her babies safe under her wings, doing it her way. But what does a chick know about foxes or storms? Running’s more fun. Maggie certainly hadn’t read the weather forecast that day.

Freedom to be what you want to be, do whatever you want to do, is intoxicating, even for us. No one gets to tell you anything. Just because we’re here doesn’t mean we always want to do things Christ’s way. But if you accept the embrace of Christ the Mother Hen, you accept the way of Christ. The Mother Hen wants you to live in a way that is abundant and good for you and for all. The way of love of God and neighbor, the path of vulnerable love. That’s the path of healing and God’s warm embrace of you.

So when you go under those wings, you give up your freedom to be and do whatever you want, to find freedom to be God’s love in the world. Maybe you’re not willing to do that.

And of course, the Mother Hen decides who else is under those wings.

That was a lot of the resistance to Jesus’ ministry and proclamation. He attracted all the wrong kinds of people. People that some simply called “sinners” – not calling them by name or occupation, just naming their whole identity as something they did wrong. Some of those drawn to Jesus were beggars, people with mental illness, hated tax collectors. Even enemies, whom Jesus said also were worthy of love and prayers.

It’s good to know you are loved and embraced under God’s holy wings, gathered into the never-ending forgiveness of God for you, snuggling your spirit into the warmth of your acceptance by God.

But look around you under those wings. How long will it take to see someone you don’t want to share the space with? Someone you think no one should love, let alone God? Inside or outside Christianity, we all have some we could name.

You might not be willing to share God’s embrace with some of them.

But life is under those wings. Warmth, healing, hope.

It’s because Jesus welcomes sinners and hypocrites and people who struggle that you know you have a place. Every single one of us is welcomed under God’s maternal wings of love solely because God loves us, not because we deserved it.

And a life free to do whatever you want becomes a life of pain and misery, because no one wants to be with anyone that selfish, that hard, that uncaring of the needs of others. That path seems fine until you realize how bitterly cold your life has become and you wonder where the warmth of love can be for you.

All Jesus, the Son of the Living God, wants is to draw all God’s children into the warm embrace of God’s love.

And put them on a path where that embrace is shared with more and more. Until all are under the wings. All know God’s healing touch and life. All are warm and cared for.

There’s absolutely no reason for you to stay away. And if you do, you’ll learn at some point what a mistake it was to value your own stubborn way over a way of grace and healing, or to value staying away from those you don’t want to be with over a place of warmth and life.

“How often I have desired to gather you together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing,” Jesus says.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

The Spirit asks you, “What kind of a person do you want to be?” and fills you and gives you power to be Christ, if that’s what you want, for the blessing of the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The First Sunday in Lent, year C
Text: Luke 4:1-13 (plus v. 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

What kind of a person do you want to be?

A friend of mine and his husband have a really nice, loving, fifth grader. At his recent teacher conference, though, his teacher reported that when he gets into competitive situations he can be a little aggressive with his peers. But she said, then she asks him, “Is this the kind of person you want to be?” And he’s able to step back from that behavior.

That’s an amazing teacher. It’s a brilliant and beautiful way to guide a young person on the challenging path of maturity.

So it’s kind of surprising the devil is the one who asks this brilliant question of Jesus today.

“What kind of person do you want to be?” is the heart of Jesus’ testing.

With hair dripping wet from his baptism in the Jordan, Jesus goes into the wilderness for forty days, to learn what it will mean for him to be God’s Anointed, God’s Messiah.

But the devil focuses that learning. If you are the Son of God, the devil says, what kind of Messiah do you want to be? Will Jesus use his divine power to help himself when he’s in need, like making bread to feed his famished body? Will he use his divine power to dominate and control the world? Will he test the Father and this mission to see if he really is loved and protected?

It turns out the devil is doing Jesus a huge favor. Jesus will face these same questions on that terrible Thursday night to come, in the garden on the Mount of Olives. This testing in the wilderness not only sets Jesus up for his earthly ministry. It prepares him for the torture and execution he will face, and the testing question of whether he will use his power to stop it.

But the devil is also doing you and me a huge favor.

What kind of person do you want to be? the evangelists ask you.

Jesus isn’t the only child of God, or the only anointed one of God asked that question. Matthew and Luke relate this story because it’s your testing, too. And mine.

What will you do with your blessings and wealth? Use them to remove your own pain and suffering, turn those stones into your bread? Will your priority be making sure you’re comfortable and cared for?

What will you do with whatever privilege and power you have? Maybe you’re not literally kneeling on someone’s neck until they die, but where is your knee and is anyone under it? That question haunts me. Maybe you’re not an autocratic despot brutally attacking a peaceful neighbor, but how do you manipulate your world? Is your comfort and your opinion and your security a higher goal than that of your neighbors?

And what will you do with God’s promise that you are beloved? Will you try to force the Triune God to prove that by giving you all you want, answering all your prayers as you demand?

This story says your sufferings and struggles aren’t the test, any more than Jesus’ were.

The test as God’s child, anointed in baptismal water, is what you do with your struggles, your suffering. And what you do with whatever wealth, power, privilege, or ability to care for yourself you have.

This story says one question is vital for me and for you: What kind of person do you want to be?

Do you want to be a faithful servant of God, living as Christ in the world? Do you want to serve as you were baptized to serve, as God’s Anointed?

If you do, Jesus’ path is the faithful path. A path that doesn’t turn stones into bread for yourself, but uses your gifts and blessings to feed and nurture and care for others. A path that doesn’t seek to dominate or manipulate so you get what you want, but sets aside power, becomes vulnerable for the sake of others. A path that doesn’t need constant proof of God’s blessing and care, but trusts God even when it’s not easy to see or sense.

But I haven’t told you the wonder you need to hear.

Listen to what Luke says once more: “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness,” Luke begins today. And then, at the end: “Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country.”

Jesus’ whole testing, answering what kind of a person he wanted to be, the fasting, the prayer, the discernment, all happens within one unbreakable reality: he is filled with the power of the Holy Spirit from beginning to end, Spirit-led throughout.

And if you say, “well, that’s Jesus, the Son of God, one with the Father and the Spirit in the Trinity, so of course the Spirit filled him and led him throughout,” you’re missing Luke’s point, and his joy.

In fact, Luke wrote an entirely separate book from this Gospel to tell you and all who are baptized into Christ this truth. In Acts, Luke repeatedly says that whatever Jesus was able to do filled with the Spirit, the followers of Jesus can do filled with the Spirit. That’s your promise. It cannot be taken from you.

You are God’s child, without question. You are God’s anointed one, without question.

If you want to be like Jesus, walk as Christ, be a part of God’s healing and love in the world, even if it’s hard, even if that means you’re vulnerable, or hurt by others, or it costs you in difficult ways, then good news, Luke says.

Because you are also filled with the Holy Spirit, without question. The Spirit leads you in whatever wilderness you serve, without question. And you will endure and thrive in every test with the power of the Spirit helping you mature and grow as Christ in your world, to be God’s blessing to whomever you meet. Without question.

Just know that the Spirit will also be the One periodically asking in your heart and mind, “Is this the kind of person you want to be?” Listen when you hear that, be ready to answer. It will change your life.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen