Christ has already reconciled all things into God’s life and love, breaking down all walls; now it’s up to the Spirit to help us live into the one humanity that God sees, in truth for all to see.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 16 B
Texts: Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56; Jeremiah 23:1-6

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 vision of what God is doing in Christ might be the answer to all our problems.

Christ transformed Paul on the road to Damascus, and sent him, an educated, brilliant Pharisee, faithfully observant in Judaism, into Gentile territory as the one chosen to speak to non-Jews.

And Paul proclaimed a breathtaking vision. He saw in Christ God reconciling the whole cosmos into God’s life. Paul proclaimed, as we heard today, that Christ in his own flesh broke down the dividing wall, the hostility, between the two peoples, creating “in himself one humanity instead of two, thus making peace.” In this new humanity in Christ, all are siblings, all belong to each other, all owe each other only love.

Paul knew Jews and Gentiles had little in common. They differed in religious beliefs and laws and rituals, in their ways of eating and dressing and living. But Paul said, “in Christ, these can live together in love. In peace. In respect.” In Christ, Paul said, your particular cultural habits and practices are fine to keep, as long as they don’t divide you from those who are different.

This new creation in Christ connects diverse peoples into one without destroying their diversity! Can you imagine the impact of this vision if it were lived today?

The tragedy is that from the start, followers of Christ struggled tremendously living this oneness.

Even before Paul preached, the church in Jerusalem found a communal life, where all believers shared everything. But that lasted only a few months, it seems. Already by Acts 6, the Greek widows of the community were being neglected, not getting their fair share. In Galatia, Paul’s churches fought over requiring circumcision. In Rome and Corinth, struggles over acceptable foods to eat and over Torah observance threatened and even fractured communities of faith.

It’s actually hard to tell if any of Paul’s communities were able to live as one in Christ.

Today, the distinctions between people are even more divisive.

Christians have split into hundreds of faith traditions based on culture and doctrine, often enemies of each other. Followers of Christ have fought and killed millions who share the same baptism and millions more who hold a different faith stance.

In our country, for four hundred years we’ve constructed arbitrary divisions based on skin color, institutionalizing and systematizing them to put those called “white” above those who have more melatonin in their skin, building a world where people of color are oppressed, beaten, arrested, red-lined, killed, and suffer countless other injustices. We built a system rewarding the wealthy with more and more, while making the gap between the comfortable and those who struggle with poverty larger and larger. For millennia in the cultures of the Western hemisphere those who identify as male have built patriarchal systems of justice, language, pay, employment, and many other things, keeping everyone else in secondary places in the culture.

If God in Christ is reconciling the world into God’s own life, we seem to be fighting just as hard to resist that reconciliation, building dividing walls, weaving barriers, and embedding division into every piece of our culture and society.

But there is Good News today: Paul’s vision of what God is doing in Christ might be the answer to all our problems.

Paul says it today to the Ephesians: Christ is our peace, not us. Christ Jesus, in his own flesh, breaks down dividing walls and hostility between peoples. Christ makes one new humanity in place of what existed before, reconciling all groups “to God in one body through the cross, putting to death that hostility through it.”

Even as Paul desperately wrote letters to his communities urging them to remember they are one in Christ, this was his great hope: Christ, in his death and resurrection, has already broken down all divisions, and ended all hostilities.

Jesus today looked on suffering crowds and was torn up inside with compassion, seeing them as sheep without a shepherd. He took that compassion, and offered God’s life to the world on the cross, showing a path of compassion carved out by God’s self-giving love. A path that brings reconciliation to all things, all peoples, as they learn and live that love.

Do you see why this is Good News?

To those of us who, in Christ, see the need to dismantle any one of our systemic sins built to divide and separate God’s people, benefitting some while harming others, just that one is daunting work. All of them together is beyond overwhelming.

But God in Christ has already broken down everything that needs breaking down. The reconciliation between God and all God’s people has already happened. So, as Paul kept challenging his congregations, the question is whether we, as God’s children, will live in that reconciliation.

To live into Christ’s new humanity as it already exists, means several things.

First, can we recognize the reconciliation is already real and true in Christ? Each child of God on this planet is one in God’s reconciliation. Nothing divides us except what we create and act on. And God in Christ still works to draw all people together through the Holy Spirit. If you look, you’ll see it.

Second, can we share the same compassion of God we see in Jeremiah? The gut-wrenching compassion that led Jesus, God-with-us, to offer himself as shepherd not just to the lost and frightened crowds of today’s Gospel but to the whole world? If there’s Christly compassion in your heart for all God’s children, so you see your sibling, your beloved, in all who suffer, you’re living in Christ’s reconciliation.

Third, sharing Christ’s compassion, can we commit to God’s shepherding revealed today? That is, looking for any and all who are lost, so that none will be missing, as the prophet says. If you settle for nothing less than blessing and safety and peace for all God’s people on earth, you’re living into the reconciliation of Christ. Because the One who reconciled all things in his death and resurrection settles for nothing less than all, and if you follow this Christ, neither will you.

Paul says to you today: you are no longer strangers and aliens, but citizens and members of God’s household.

But if you don’t understand how God in Christ is reconciling all people regardless of culture or language or even religious differences, that doesn’t matter. God so loved the whole cosmos, Jesus says. This reconciliation isn’t stopped or divided by any walls or barriers we put up.

But we pray this: that the Holy Spirit keep changing our hearts, changing your heart, to beat with the rhythm of the Triune God’s heart. That God empower you to live a compassion that reveals this one humanity in Christ, created from all that divides us. That, living in that one humanity, we celebrate our differences in the joy of our oneness in Christ.

Until everyone knows they’re not strangers and aliens, but citizens and members of God’s own household.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

God’s failure is our model for our own ministry: in our wounded, vulnerable love God will bring healing to the world. Just not necessarily in ways the world will praise as a success.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 14 B
Texts: Mark 6:1-13; Ezekiel 2:1-5; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10

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 a failure. There’s no point denying it.

When Jesus came home early in his ministry, he failed for the first time. He had healed, preached God’s Good News, driven out demons, calmed storms, and people flocked to him. Some of the religious leaders opposed him early on, and his family, too, but he drew adoring crowds wherever he went.

Then he came to his hometown. He preached there, and impressed them, until they started to think about who he was. This was just the local kid, they knew his family. They said, “Where’d he get all this? This wisdom, this power? We knew him when he was nothing.” And they were offended at him.

But the true shock is that, for the first time in this Gospel, Jesus was limited in his divine power. Mark says he couldn’t do deeds of power in Nazareth due to this reception.

And that’s the moment Jesus decided to send disciples to do the same things he was doing.

Think about that. Jesus fails, and then says to the twelve, “Go and do likewise.”

How confident could they be? For the first time they saw Jesus show weakness, an inability to do “deeds of power,” and that’s when he said, “I think you’re ready.”

This might have been intentional. After all, Jesus was heading for the most epic failure for any movement leader: he’d be publicly humiliated and executed, hang naked and bleeding for all to see. Jesus’ ministry, by the world’s standards, ended in failure.

Maybe he sent the twelve now, after this mess in Nazareth, so they didn’t think they were supposed to be big successes. He sent them with his authority to heal, but with no guarantees they’d receive a better welcome than he got. He told them to expect rejection, and to simply move on when they got it.

We need to hear this and take it into our hearts.

Too often the Church falls for the world’s message about success. We judge our work by the standards of wealth and power. But we follow a failed Messiah who had all God’s power and allowed himself to be crucified. One who could heal even at a distance but was limited when people rejected him.

How will we know at Mount Olive if we’re doing our job, if we’re following faithfully? Not by any metrics the world uses. Can we tell how we’re doing if we have more people at worship, or fewer people, larger or smaller membership lists? Those numbers tell us nothing about our faithfulness, either way. Jesus says faithful witness in the world will very likely be rejected by a good number of people.

Will we know we’re doing well if our budget grows each year, and our giving, or if our endowment increases? Will we be unfaithful if they all fall? Not according to Jesus. Worldly standards are irrelevant to the mission we’re placed here to do.

And if we focus on such standards, we risk doing all sorts of evil protecting ourselves or our institutions rather than being faithful witnesses.

We’ll know we’re being faithful when we do what we’re called to do.

Our Prayer of the Day says it beautifully: “Give us the courage you gave the ones who were sent, that we may faithfully witness to your love and peace in every circumstance of life.” Just as the twelve were asked to do today. Go out into the world and faithfully bear God’s love and peace.

Some may refuse you, Jesus warns. You might have the hardest time witnessing to those who know you best. No matter, Jesus says. “Nazareth wanted to kill me. My own family thought I was losing my mind.”

And we’re not told to bring all the supplies we need, either – take no bread or bag or money, Jesus says today. That is, we don’t carry tons of abilities and talents as we go, or accumulate wealth. We just go out bearing God’s vulnerable, wounded love in our lives.

And even in failure, God’s love gets through.

Mark says Jesus couldn’t do “any deed of power” in Nazareth, “except that he laid hands on a few sick people and healed them.” That’s not nothing! The disciples, sent out expecting rejection, drove out some demons and even healed some who were sick.

God’s love gets through, when we faithfully and courageously bear it in our lives. We may look like we’re failing, but that was never the test. Easter life always breaks the power of death. By our broken struggles to be loving, our limping efforts at being peacemakers, our weak attempts to end injustice, God brings love and peace and healing to individuals, to our broken society and culture, to our wounded and suffering world. God takes our weakness, Paul says today, and completes God’s work in Christ.

In the end it doesn’t matter if the world praises us as a success here, or if we have any evidence we made a difference.

We plant seeds of God’s love and peace in the world, and they will sprout and grow and bring healing to our world. To our neighbors in pain. To our own lives and suffering.

In your lifetime you might just see the tips of the growth you planted, or none. It may seem that all your efforts are dead and buried, and you made no difference to anyone. But you belong to a God who simply won’t stay dead and buried. Who takes buried seeds and brings them to great fruit for the healing of the world.

“Go, and do what I do,” Jesus says. “I’ll be with you all the way. Don’t worry about the stumbles. Just be my love and peace, and I’ll take care of the success part. And if you can,” as he told the twelve today, “take someone along with you for the journey. It will help.”

And so, we walk this path together, trusting the One who sent us.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

God’s steadfast love and mercy never end, no matter the circumstances: wait for that, and find hope for you and the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 13 B
Texts: Lamentations 3:21-33; Psalm 30; Mark 5:21-43

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 is good that one should wait quietly for the deliverance of GOD-WHO-IS. There may yet be hope.”

That’s Jeremiah’s wisdom in the heart of Lamentations: wait, and hope for God’s deliverance.

But if you’re a woman who’s had a non-stop menstrual flow for twelve years, bleeding heavily every day of every week of every year, and no doctor can help, and you have no more money, would you hear “wait and hope” and be comforted? And if you’re parents whose twelve-year-old daughter, the light of your life, is dying of an illness and no one can help, would you hear “wait and hope” and be at peace?

Wait and hope are powerful words of comfort, but they can’t be imposed on others.

Jeremiah’s beautiful words are honest because they come from the depths of grief and suffering.

He’s not patronizing wounded people from a place of privilege, dismissing their pain with nice-sounding words. Jeremiah sings heart-wrenching grief over the destruction of the city of Jerusalem, the destruction of the kingdom of Judah, the destruction of the very people of God, at the hands of Babylon. Jeremiah mourns and weeps both the destruction and the sin of the people that led to it.

But right at the middle of this crushing outpouring of grief, a beam of sunlight bursts through the darkness. “But this I call to mind,” Jeremiah says as he pauses his weeping, “and therefore I have hope: the steadfast love of GOD-WHO-IS never ceases; God’s mercies never come to an end.”

In the midst of a devastated city, with death and destruction all around, Jeremiah has remembered that no matter how terrible things may seem, God’s steadfast love and mercy never fail. And he will wait for that. And hope.

Jeremiah’s situation might be more helpful than today’s Gospel.

Because the ending of that story can be misleading. Yes, the woman was made whole. Yes, the daughter was raised from her deathbed to eat her lunch.

But what of the leper in another village who’d also suffered for years, whom no doctors could help, whose story no one has written or told because he died and was thrown into a pit? What of the family in another village whose child was dying, whose story no one has written or told because she died, was buried in grief, and within a few decades was forgotten to all but those remaining of her family?

Thousands all over Galilee and Judea suffered oppression, poverty, illness, death, in the three years of Jesus’ ministry. Thousands didn’t experience this woman’s peace, this family’s joy. That makes today’s Gospel hard to hear.

Far, far more people suffer like those in villages Jesus didn’t visit.

If you’re suffering from a long illness, and doctors can’t seem to help, or if someone you love is near death and you can do nothing, what are you supposed to do with this Gospel? Wait and hope that somehow God will miraculously fix it all?

If you’re suffering from injustice and oppression, living in a society where your reality is substantially worse than others simply because of the way your body looks and functions, in the countless ways that’s true in our own city and country, what are you supposed to do with this Gospel? Wait and hope that somehow God will miraculously end systemic racism and sexism, poverty and homelessness, a broken justice system?

Is there any point to waiting and hoping for God’s deliverance if God rarely seems to be in the miracles business?

But Jeremiah doesn’t receive relief, or restoration, or an end to suffering.

No miracles happen to him here. It would be the better part of a century before the Jewish people returned to Jerusalem, and even then they returned to the same devastated ruins. All those who died were still gone.

And yet Jeremiah – in the midst of grief and suffering –remembered God’s steadfast love and mercy never end. He found a way to wait and hope for God, to trust God’s love to bring healing somehow.

This is the waiting for God the Scriptures encourage.

If you’re waiting for a perfect life where nothing goes wrong for you, or waiting for God to stop all your pain and suffering, you’ll be waiting a long time, the Bible says. If you’re waiting for God to miraculously fix problems in our city and our world that we’ve created and participate in, you’ll be waiting a long time, the Bible says. If you’re waiting for everything to make sense of your life, for all things to be clear, you’ll be waiting a long time, the Bible says. God doesn’t promise any of that.

But Scripture says God promises what Jeremiah remembered: God’s steadfast love and mercy are with you in whatever your situation, and will never leave you. Not even in death. Not even if things seem they will never change. God came to us in person in Jesus not to miraculously fix everything but to draw all creation – and that includes you, and me, and our city and our nation and our world – into God’s transforming life and love.

In God’s life and love, your suffering cannot break you, but can be transformed. In God’s life and love, God actually does begin to work to change what’s wrong in this world, inspiring God’s people, just as in Jeremiah’s day, start picking up the pieces, building foundations of a new life, reaching out to those crushed under the rubble, creating God’s desired justice where they can.

It is good to hope and wait for God’s deliverance. To trust in God’s steadfast love.

Let the Scriptures, with the Holy Spirit, change what you’re waiting and hoping for, and you’ll find the psalmist’s joy that comes in the morning. A joy that covers you like clothing and turns your wailing into dancing.

A joy that can be found in the heart of a broken city, a city that can be re-built. A joy that gives you peace in the midst of suffering, a suffering that can’t destroy you. A joy that even the death we all face can’t separate you from God’s love in Christ Jesus.

God’s steadfast love and mercies never come to an end, they are new every morning. That’s your promise. Can you wait for that? You might find it great hope there.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

God is with you in your storms, with the world in all our storms, and will bring you peace. Not answers. But real peace.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 12 B
Texts: Job 38:1-11; Mark 4:35-41

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

“Don’t you care that we’re perishing?”

That’s the disciples’ desperate cry to Jesus. Raging wind and rain, water filling their boat: even these experienced fishermen were terrified. But their Master slept on a cushion in the back of the boat. Didn’t he even care?

“Don’t you care that I’m perishing?” Job cried out. He’d lost all his possessions, all his children were dead, he was covered in sores. Job denied that he deserved all this, and desperately wondered where God was.

“Don’t you care that I’m perishing, God?” is your cry when the waters of depression and anxiety wash over your boat and you’re going under.

“Don’t you care that we’re perishing, God?” is the cry of people of color in this country who are forced to live under different rules than those of white people, suffering daily hardships in a system we’ve built that helps some of us while crushing others. It’s the cry of people we blithely call “aliens” who are beloved children of God looking for a better life among us and who are often treated as less than human.

“Don’t you care that I’m perishing, God?” is your cry when someone you love has died and you can’t make any sense out of it.

“Don’t you care that we’re perishing, God?” is the cry of so many who share our grief at how we’ve destroyed our environment and damaged the creation, longing for God to step in and fix what we’ve done, since we won’t get together as humans and do it ourselves.

“Don’t you care that I’m perishing, God?” is your cry, and the cry of millions like you who struggle with fears of the future, or a diagnosis of illness, or a loss of livelihood, or daily oppression, or loneliness, or addiction, or broken relationships, the cry of all God’s children who feel overwhelmed in the whirlwinds and storms of life.

But today God almost sounds annoyed at the question.

God says to Job, “who are you to challenge me? Were you there when I made the creation?” We heard the beginning of a magnificent four-chapter-long speech where God delineates in rich detail the breadth and beauty of the creation. But it feels a little like God’s irritated to have to answer puny old Job.

Jesus, God-with-us, does still the storm, yes. But God also seems a bit annoyed here. “Why were you afraid? Don’t you trust me yet?” Never mind that the disciples haven’t had much time with Jesus at this point to learn to trust. Is God’s Son irritated that they woke him up and made him do his God-stuff?

But look deeper.

Many have tried to tell us for centuries that God’s answer to Job is to give everything back. He gets a new family, is restored to wealth and health. But that’s nonsense, and we know it. A new family, no matter how much love that brings, cannot replace the tragic loss of the first family. That can’t be the point of the book of Job.

Job proves that by admitting he asked what he didn’t understand, and by accepting God’s answer before any restoration happens. Job does this for one simple reason: God answered. “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,” Job says after God’s speech, “but now my eye sees you.”

What Job needed, Job got: God showed up. Job admits he can’t understand the complexity of the creation or the Creator. But in his grief and suffering, he just wanted to know if God cared enough to answer. The actual answer wasn’t as important. The Answerer was.

Like Job, the disciples got relief of their terror and danger; the storm ended.

But, like Job, the important thing isn’t the ending of the storm. It’s Jesus’ questions that help them find Job’s peace.

“Why are you so afraid? And why is it hard to trust me?” The disciples will face those questions the rest of their lives. Including on the worst night of their lives, that terrible Thursday through Friday, where the storm broke over Jesus and swept him away in terrifying death and they were drowning in confusion and grief.

Why are you afraid? What makes it hard for you to trust? In the end, Job finds his trust and sets aside his fears. Eventually, so do the disciples.

Today, God still answers “Don’t you care?” by asking about our fear and our struggles to trust.

It still might not seem like a great answer. But neither do the attempts of others to answer for God.

Job’s friends piously tell Job that he must have deserved this, and he needs to man up and admit it. That’s the pattern we fall into ourselves when we’re with someone crying out to God, “Don’t you care that I’m perishing?” Somehow, rather than just being with and loving those who suffer, we look for pat answers to where God is in human suffering. But that just piles more grief and pain on those who suffer.

God’s answer to Job today makes it clear there’s no easy answer to understand the Creator of the universe. But God’s answer to the universe in Jesus the Christ tells us the real answer we need to let go of our fears and learn to trust: God enters into the heart of the storm with us.

God on the cross took all human suffering into God’s own heart.

Even after the resurrection, the disciples didn’t get all the answers to what God is doing when bad things happen. But that weekend they did get the answer to their first question, “Don’t you care that we’re perishing?” God says, yes, I do. More than anything in the universe. I will perish with you and bring you into a new life that cannot be drowned or crushed or broken, even if you actually die.

And after the resurrection, Mary Magdalene, Peter, and the rest (with a lot of help from the Holy Spirit) learned to set aside their fears, learned they could trust God with their lives.

But here’s the hard part.

At this point you might expect me to explain what God will do about your pain or the world’s pain. You’d like answers. But I can’t give you them. Glib, simple answers just don’t exist for human suffering. What easy answers are there to cancer? To racism? To mental anguish? To devastating loss? To loneliness? To tragedy?

But I do trust this, with all my heart: God is with you in whatever storm, whatever suffering you are facing. God is with the world in all its suffering, with all who are oppressed, all who are beaten down, all who deal with tragedy and pain. God cares, and God shows up in the storm and brings peace and stillness. Abundant life.

I trust this because I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it. I can show you countless ways the Scripture witnesses to it, countless believers who were able to set aside their fears and learn to trust God.

Trust this: God cares and is with you. With all of us. With the world. Even if you think the boat’s about to sink. Nothing, nothing can separate you – or the whole creation – from God’s love in Christ Jesus.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen