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

Do not lose heart: you are embraced in God’s clothing of love which removes all shame, and you are God’s beloved, no matter what.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 10 B
Texts: Genesis 3:8-15; 2 Corinthians 4:13 – 5:1

“Who told you that you were naked?”

It’s a ridiculous question. As Sunday School children for centuries have accurately and insistently pointed out, these two obviously knew they were naked. They didn’t have clothes on. Who needed to tell them that?

That means God’s asking something different. God’s asking, “Who told you that you should be ashamed of yourselves?” You’re hiding from me, embarrassed to see me; you’ve never done that before.

Our Hebrew forebears had amazing insight into our truth as human beings before God. This whole story is as true for us as it was for the first to tell it.

The Hebrews spoke of the creation in several ways, to show the full truth of God revealed to them.

Genesis 1 tells of a powerful God declaring a creation into existence, an explosion from chaos and nothingness into gradually increasing order and beauty, planets and stars formed, then life on planets.

But these people told a second truth of God’s creation in the next chapters: God is intimate with this creation, too, they said, building relationships, on hands and knees making plants and creatures. This God, named I Am Who I Am, a name that, when spoken in Hebrew, sounds like breathing, breathed life and love into the creation personally. And the two people in this story don’t have proper names, because they stand for all people. The man is called adam – soil, dirt – and the woman is called chavah – life. Our forebears tell this story because it’s your story, and my story, the story of all children made by God’s hands out of dirt and life.

And there’s a tremendous problem in this intimate story of God we heard today. Your problem. My problem. The problem of all humans, the Hebrews believed.

Who told you that you were naked? God asks. Who told you to be ashamed?

Human creatures, whom God declared “good” when they were made, learned to be ashamed of who they are, and taught each other to be ashamed.

But God’s Word isn’t about shaming. For centuries we’ve piled shame onto our reading of Scripture, piled it on to others, piled it on ourselves. We created a teaching called original sin that’s simply not found in the Bible and taught ourselves and each other that we can only approach God out of our shame, our utter wretchedness.

But these Hebrews onto whose faith we are grafted in Christ saw it differently, and so did Christ Jesus, by the way: God’s view of you and me, born of adam and chavah, dirt and life, is that you are beloved. I am beloved. All God’s creatures are beloved.

It’s not a question of right and wrong.

God’s Word is clear: God cares about right and wrong. About justice and ending oppression. About the sins you and I do that we know, and the sins you and I do that we are unaware of, including our implicit biases and prejudices that shape our lives and our culture, and the ways we participate in systems that crush others. God’s Word calls you and me to God’s way of righteousness and justice, the way of love of God and love of neighbor.

God’s Word is also clear about God’s unconditional love for all of us, for you, when you fail to live as God calls you, the forgiveness that flows from God’s love, leads to the cross, and bursts out in the resurrection life the Spirit pours into you. A life that brings God’s justice and peace to the world in you and in me.

But living as Christ, following God’s way has nothing to do with shame. There’s no place for shame in the love of God we know in Christ, the love of God the Scriptures proclaim.

It’s clear in this story from the way the Hebrews ended it.

In this second creation account, God goes looking in the garden, still seeking intimacy and relationship. God finds them when they hide, and is sad when they’re ashamed of who they are.

And in the end of this story, not in today’s reading, God does an amazing thing. While God would prefer that they didn’t have the knowledge that made them ashamed of being who God made them to be, God realizes that it’s going to take time for them to re-learn they are beloved, created good. So God gives them clothes.

God clothes them so they don’t have to hide, don’t have to be embarrassed. God gives them ways to cope with their unnecessary shame, until they can let go of it.

And God clothes you, too.

God would rather you weren’t ashamed of yourself, that you saw yourself as the beloved one God sees in you. But the Hebrews say that God knows it may take most of your life to unlearn what you need to. So God gives you ways to cope with whatever shame you feel.

God tells you repeatedly in Scripture that you are beloved. God offers unconditional forgiveness when you sin, when you are not Christ, and dies for you – not because you are a shameful pile of refuse but because God loves you.

On the cross, God’s Son hung naked in front of a city of thousands, and wasn’t ashamed of himself or of you. Out of love for the whole universe, for you, for all, Jesus allowed himself to be unclothed in the most public and humiliating way and to be killed. To finally convince the world, to convince me, to convince you, how much God loves you, loves me, loves the world.

Who told you that you were naked? God says they’re a liar.

So even when you hide from God, God still looks for you and invites you to be found. To let go of any shame or self-dislike and rejoice that you are God’s beloved child born of dirt and life.

And God clothes you with love that will never be ashamed of you, so even while you still struggle with shame, you are covered in your belovedness. So clothed in God’s love, the Spirit can heal the world through you, and me, and all God’s children. So, as Paul says today, grace extends to more and more people, and eventually to all.

So do not lose heart, Paul says. You are clothed in God’s love now and always, so that even you might one day believe how beloved you are.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen