We live in the confusion and fear of the disciples who struggle to follow Jesus in Mark 8-10, but are called together and re-centered and enlightened by Christ who leads us on this path of servanthood.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 25 B
Text: Mark 9:30-37 (plus 38-40)

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

It was all going so well, this following Jesus.

Dozens of disciples followed this rabbi from Nazareth and experienced wonders. Teaching that brought God close to them. Miracles defying explanation. A sense that God was in Jesus, so you could even hope for a new world, a restored Israel. The prophets’ promise that God would one day spread a table for all, so none went without, seemed to be happening, as thousands were fed in one amazing evening.

Sure, there were unhappy people. Some of the leaders of the local synagogues, even some teachers from Jerusalem, seemed angered by their teacher and his way of interpreting God’s law, threatened by his popularity. But as they traveled, in every village more and more people flocked to him for healing and guidance. Minor opposition couldn’t stand against such acclaim.

That’s what the first half of Mark’s Gospel feels like. Then chapter 8 arrives. As we heard last week, Jesus casts a cloud over the sunny hopes and dreams of his followers. He says he’s heading to Jerusalem to be killed. He asks those who follow him to also lose their lives for his sake and for the sake of this Good News they’ve been so happy to hear and experience.

This cloud covers the rest of the Gospel until Jesus’ death, with the disciples trying to get their hearts and minds around this new thing that Jesus says is the central thing, the servant path.

Today we heard the second of three predictions Jesus makes about his death in Mark.

In chapter 8 and chapter 10, Jesus makes a single statement. But here in chapter 9 it’s an ongoing conversation. Mark says Jesus takes his large group of followers away from the crowds and repeatedly teaches them he’ll be betrayed, killed, and, three days later, rise.

In these three chapters are some of the hardest teachings of Jesus, many of which we’ll hear in the next few weeks. In these three chapters, the disciples swim in a sea of doubt and confusion, as Jesus keeps making it clear that his path leads to death and resurrection. That he is offering his life and they are asked to offer theirs. That he will be a servant to them, and that his followers are called to be servants of each other and of the world.

The disciples don’t do well with this shift. We heard Peter’s fall from grace last week, called “Satan,” literally, “the adversary,” for trying to stop Jesus’ talk. John hears the call to servanthood and, as we heard today, responds by bragging about shutting down some people who were casting out demons in Jesus’ name, because they weren’t part of the authorized group. We’ll hear the chapter 10 prediction in our Gospel in about a month, and after it, John and his brother James ask Jesus for the seats of honor in God’s coming reign.

Following Jesus made sense to the disciples when it looked like he was a winner. It was a lot more challenging for these women and men when he said he was walking a path that led to losing, to serving, to offering himself.

The Church basically lives in the struggle of these three chapters of Mark and always has.

Our conflict between wanting to follow a winner, when Jesus persistently won’t let us see him as that, is centuries old. Ever since Christianity got imperial protection as the state religion 1,700 years ago, the Church has been tempted by the lure of power and wealth and domination. From the Crusades to the Inquisition to the 30-years’ war in Europe to the deadly alliance of evangelism and colonialism, Christians often seem to like the first half of Mark’s Gospel better. Today it’s manifest in the modern American myth of an exclusively Christian nation where Christian teachings are protected by laws and a strong military, and those of other faiths are marginalized and demonized.

Never mind that for 2,000 years Jesus has insisted that his way, God’s way, is the way of servant love, of offering oneself for neighbors and even enemies, of sacrifice so the Good News of God’s love can reach everyone. The Church has always found ways to lift up Jesus the Winner and artfully ignore Jesus’ teaching, tweak interpretation, turn his clear words into ways to manipulate and oppress others.

You and I also struggle with this conflict. But our faith practice, our worship, fatally undermines our attempts to bypass Jesus’ clarity. Thank God for that!

See, we continue to read the Gospels – from beginning to end – in our worship, blissfully appointing a reading like today’s, forgetting the Word of God is alive and active and won’t let us go.

Today we come to worship and once more Jesus sneaks in under our denial and self-protection, our unwillingness to let go of privilege and status and wealth, and calls out to us as he did to those women and men 2,000 years ago.

If we really didn’t want to hear Jesus or follow his call to sacrificial love and servanthood, we shouldn’t have let the Gospels be read to us again and again.

But it’s life-saving Good News that we keep making that mistake. Taking up our cross, losing ourselves for others, will never be easy. But as long as we keep letting Jesus talk, so we keep hearing God’s voice of love and call speak in our worship, God will make cracks in our denial and avoidance. Keep planting seeds of a new life. Give us courage to be servants to each other and the world, and to let others be our servants in turn.

We’re always journeying through the difficult awakening in chapters 8 to 10, sometimes making wrong turns in our discipleship.

Just like these folks. And we’re already doing what they did, keeping on listening to Jesus, reading these Gospels at home and in worship. That’s what led them to faithfulness in the end.

But we can avoid their critical mistake in today’s Gospel. They were silent in their confusion and fear to the one person who could have helped. “They didn’t understand what Jesus was saying,” Mark says, “and were afraid to ask him.” They spread their confusion and fear amongst themselves without ever turning to Jesus and saying, “This is really hard. Can you help us?”

We don’t have to make that mistake.

We’re already listening to Jesus. Let’s learn to ask him things, too.

As we worship and hear from the Gospels week after week, from Paul and the New Testament writers, from the Hebrew Scriptures, we faithfully put ourselves in the way of God’s Word, letting God’s voice speak into our worship and lives. When you read your Bible at home you do it, too.

But learn to pray as you hear and as you read. When you struggle with something Jesus asks of you, when God’s Word makes you confused about your divided loyalties or embedded biases or about the right way to go in that moment, learn to ask Christ to help you. Learn to say, “Help me understand this. Help me not run from this. Help me do this.”

And learn to use your community, too. If the disciples hadn’t argued on the road by themselves but had asked Jesus to help them, they could have all learned together. So can we. If we help each other listen and ask.

This path Jesus leads us on is hard, no question. But it also gives us hope.

Hope, because we have each other on our journey, to learn servanthood, to encourage each other, to be honest and open together about our struggles, and so find grace as we go out as God’s servants into this world.

Hope, because Jesus always walks with us on the road through the Spirit, opening the Scriptures to us, encouraging and guiding us in our servanthood.

Hope, because this path of servanthood and self-giving love will end all the deep-rooted problems that plague our society and plague our hearts. Racism, classism, patriarchalism, oppression, systemic poverty, war and violence, have no chance of surviving a world full of servants of God who live God’s self-giving love.

Come, let’s journey together, learn from Christ together, and, with God’s help, take our place among God’s servants who are healing this world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

God in Christ enters the world’s weariness and pain, and yours, and helps carry them, while inviting you and me to do the same.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 24 B
Texts: Mark 8:27-38; Isaiah 50:4-9a (also using Matthew 11:28-30, and 2 Corinthians 1:3-4)

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

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Are you weary of the weight of the world’s problems, the suffering of a global pandemic, the crises of our society? Are you burdened with personal concerns and anxieties, fears for your future?

Good News, then: Jesus, God-with-us, says, “Come to me, all you that are weary, and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. I will yoke with you and help carry the load.”

When Jesus said this to those first believers, they remembered Isaiah’s words we heard this morning: “The LORD God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word, and listen as one who is taught.” That’s Jesus, they realized. That’s what he said! God’s promise in Isaiah has come to us now.

And that’s your hope and mine in this weary world.

In Christ, God entered the world’s suffering in person, to help carry the weight of all that burdens life.

The world needs this promise more than ever. Nearly everyone is exhausted right now from the stress of the pandemic, the social crises and upheavals, the need for healthy change and transformation of our society. And everyone continues to have their own personal burdens, for them or those they love: concerns about health, about dying, about losing jobs, about struggling to make ends meet, about holding a family together in the midst of conflict or crisis.

Into this weariness and weight, Isaiah says, God comes to you in person – and yes, to all people, but to you, too – to ease your weariness, help you carry whatever burden you are carrying. The Triune God comes with shoulders already wearing a yoke, Jesus said, so that all that overwhelms you can be carried in tandem with God.

And that’s the point of Jesus’ path to the cross that Peter reacts against today.

Jesus didn’t go to the cross because he somehow wanted to suffer pain. Jesus, God-with-us, went to the cross to take the pain of the world onto God’s shoulders and bear it, even pain that the world inflicts on God. He allowed himself to be struck, spat on, insulted, as Isaiah says in this Servant Song today, to take the weariness of the world and heal it.

At the cross God shows you that you are not alone in your weariness or suffering. That God, as the prophets long promised, will be with you, hold you, bear you up. Give you hope that there is healing on the other side, even if sometimes that healing comes with death and resurrection.

At the cross God shows you that weariness and suffering aren’t to be avoided or feared, but shared. And when they’re shared, the burden is lighter, and hope is easier to find than when you’re drowning alone.

At the cross God shows you that there aren’t simple answers to what wearies you or the world, no easy solutions to suffering. But God’s answer is to come to you and the world and help bear the suffering, and so transform it into life.

What’s really beautiful is that Isaiah’s Servant Songs, like the one we heard today, were never meant to only be about one person, one Messiah.

If you read them carefully, they call the whole community to be the ones who know how to sustain the weary with a word, who offer themselves out of love for the sake of others. In our funeral liturgy, we claim this with Paul’s words from Second Corinthians, saying that “God comforts us in all our sorrows so that we can comfort others in their sorrows with the consolation we ourselves have received from God.” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4)

Isaiah says today that God has given you the tongue and listening ear of a teacher, that you may know how to sustain the weary with your word. With your embrace. With your sigh. With your self-giving love. That’s why Jesus asks you and me to take up our cross, to follow Christ’s path: take the comfort and consolation I give you as God-with-you, Jesus says, and share it with each other. Take the yoke over my shoulders onto your own, but then invite someone else under it, so you can share their burden.

Yes, that means sacrifice for you and me, Jesus says. Losing one way of life for the sake of the other way. But when we suffer with each other we reach the depths of what love is. Love shared in a community transforms burdens into grace, into life.

Peter was right. The path of the cross – for Jesus and for those who follow – doesn’t sound like a path worthy of a Messiah, a Christ, the Anointed of God.

Peter’s no different from any of us. The world always gets confused and thinks that winning is most important, that if you struggle or suffer you must have failed somehow. But the world’s way always results in more suffering and more pain and more oppression and more violence, and even the ones who think they’ve won really have lost.

But God has a plan that can actually bring healing to this world. Salvation. God has come, and still comes, to share the weariness and pain in the world, to offer rest to you.

And to all people, through you, you who also are Messiah. God’s Christ. God’s Anointed. Because this is the way God will save the world. And save you, too.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

The Triune God is a God who transforms, gives you and me a new birth as God’s gift and blessing for the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 22 B
Texts: Mark 7:1-23; James 1:17-27; Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9

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

Being good is really complicated these days.

For most of human history, if you were kind to your family, good to your neighbors, decent to those you lived by, you were a good person. Evil and unkindness, sin and wrongdoing – you knew them when you saw them.

But we know now this whole planet is interconnected. Systems and structures have power beyond any individual action or belief, and actions have consequences far beyond us. Buy an apple and give it to a child. Is that good? Well, were pesticides that harm the environment or the eater used? What’s the carbon footprint of that apple – how much gas was burned to carry it to you? Were those who picked it fairly paid? Is the company distributing it involved in unsavory things? It’s not easy.

You and I recognize that we have embedded racial prejudices, and are trying to change our minds and hearts. But even good decisions we make are intertwined with systems that promote racial discrimination, without our wanting it, and we benefit from them. You and I deeply want all people to earn fair wages and get out of poverty. But systems that help our pensions and IRAs, support our medical benefits, help us in many ways, are often unfairly built and cause harm to people we want to help. So: are we doing evil or not?

When we look at the problems in our society and world, and the problems in our own personal lives, we want to be good people, to live as Christ, make a difference.

It’s just really, really complicated.

And God’s Word doesn’t make it any easier.

Now when we open the Gospels, Jesus’ teachings seem ever more challenging and unsettling. If being good is more than just simple acts we do every day, and all are interconnected, everything Jesus says is harder today than it felt years ago.

Jesus’ evils of the heart in today’s Gospel feel much more about us than they used to. Murder is mentioned. We used to be able to say we didn’t do that. But if we’re part of a society that causes the death of our neighbor, a society we support and benefit from, aren’t we complicit? Jesus mentions theft and avarice and wickedness. If people do such things on our behalf, are we also doing it?

The Hebrew Scriptures are just as challenging. The prophets’ demands for God’s justice and peace, the ending of poverty and oppression, the restoring of God’s reign where all live with full stomachs under sheltering roofs without fear of others harming them, seem to point directly at us now in ways they might not have before.

It makes it hard to hear Scripture in worship. Every week seems to address these complicated, painful things and include you and me among those who need to listen and turn our lives to God.

So you might want to find some empathy for the Pharisees today.

Moses wants the people to flourish and urges them today to keep all of God’s law. So the Pharisees, trying to faithfully obey God, built all sorts of rules and rituals around God’s law in Scripture, so that they and the people could be good. Do the right thing.

Jesus’ criticism is exactly what the prophets said, what James says: if your rituals and rules don’t result in behavior that is good and just, visibly loving your neighbor and witnessing to your love of God, they don’t have much point. Here, the Pharisees’ attempts to honor their pledges to God led them to break the Fourth Commandment of loving and caring for their parents. That makes no sense.

But you can see why they tried. If being good, doing God’s way, is your goal, maybe a system of rules could help. But the problem, Jesus said, wasn’t that they needed an outer system. What they needed was an inner transformation.

And that’s where you find your hope from God in these days.

It’s true that James strongly declares that the only faith worth having is one visible in loving actions. Doing God’s love for those who are poor and oppressed is far more important than having a doctrine of God’s love for those who are poor and oppressed.

But look at the promise James makes today: James says every generous act ever done, every good gift, is actually from God, the Father of lights. Because, James says, God’s Word gives birth in you and me and all people to a new kind of person who does those generous acts and good things.

The Triune God is a transforming God who, through the Word, creates a clean and new heart in you and me and all people. So all those evils that can come from inside us are driven out by the fruit of the Spirit of God that Paul proclaimed, and Jesus proclaimed, and James delights in today. That’s your hope.

Now it’s not a question of how to be good or not. It’s a question of letting God’s Spirit work in you to make you good.

To transform you from the inside out, bearing in you love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, as Paul taught us. To transform your heart into completed love of God and love of neighbor, as Jesus promised you.

This is the new thing Jesus brought in the Incarnation. He taught what God’s prophets had long taught. But he came as God-with-us, filled with the Spirit, and said, “This is the plan of God for all God’s children, to give birth in the Spirit to new beings living God’s gifts in the world.”

That’s how God will heal the world. By healing you, and me, and all God’s children. One at a time, and everything will become new.

For today and tomorrow, then, what if this was your focus and your hope from God?

Not despairing at the complexity of our world and dreading you can do nothing, but praying for and seeking God’s transformation of you, a new birth into what is good and holy and of Christ. Yes, the world is challenging and overwhelming. Yes, your life and mine can be struggles and we can often feel we’re lost. Yes, it’s hard to know what the right thing is at any given time.

But God’s transforming new birth is happening right now in you. Rejoice in that. Seek to see it more clearly. Ask God to clear out those things that come from you that Jesus speaks of and replace them with God’s fruits.

God is good. And is making you good. And that will change the world. There’s nothing complicated about that at all.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen