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Present Peace

June 20, 2021 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

 

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

Filed Under: sermon

Living Shade

June 13, 2021 By Vicar at Mount Olive

Created in God’s image, we grow to be people who produce shade for all of God’s creation. A place where all can rest and experience the sheltering and protecting love of the Triune God.

Vicar Andrea Bonneville
The Third Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 11 B
Text: Mark 4:26-34

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

We have an apple tree in our front yard.

It was planted in a less than ideal location and now its roots are running out of room to spread and its branches are becoming heavy. Half of its branches are no longer bearing leaves while the other half is growing apples. It’s lopsided, its leaves are few and its branches are bent in uneven directions. It’s not a typical beautifully pruned tree and its apples are quite small, even though they’re delicious.  

We inherited this apple tree when we moved into our home, but it is clear that its time is coming to an end. At the beginning of spring, I figured I would leave it to bear fruit for one more season, so that way we could enjoy its apples again.

Bearing fruit is good. We as humans are created to bear fruit through our love and service to our neighbor. We give our resources and extend ourselves. We know that part of our purpose is to bear fruit, fruit that will last. And we also know that bearing fruit takes a significant amount of energy and can be overwhelming at times. So much of who we are is assessed by what we produce, how much we produce, and the quality of what we produce.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus shares two parables to help us glimpse into what the reign of God looks like in the here and now.  The first parable focuses on the mystery of planting, growing, and producing a harvest.  A miracle and mystery that continues to amaze so many.

Yet the second parable doesn’t focus on what the seed will produce, the focus is on what the seed will become. Jesus says, “[the reign of God] is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”  

This is who we strive to be, a community of people living out the identity of who God has created us to be, not solely focusing on what we can produce, but focusing on how our very presence can be an invitation for someone to experience the sheltering and protecting love of the Triune God.

We become a living shade that provides comfort, shelter, and rest so that people, like every winged creature, can build their nests and find a home within us. Opening ourselves to how God is working through us and holding within ourselves the capacity to be a shelter for any one of God’s beloved, not knowing who is going to build a nest in our shade.

We are a living shade as we provide and create a listening presence to neighbors as they share stories of their lived experience, as we provide hospitality so that someone feels they have a place to belong, as we see each other for who we are and not solely for what we can produce.

How can we, not only bear fruit, but also be shade for all to feel safe, secure AND nourished under our branches?

We don’t exactly know how and perhaps there is comfort in that. But what we do know is that there is going to be growing involved and that God is going to do it.

And if we are being honest with ourselves there is probably going to have to be some trimming as we unlearn patterns and messages that kept people from making their home in our branches. Replacing them with new patterns of inclusivity and radical hospitality in which we are invited to change and grow by that impact others have on us.  Only making our branches stronger and roots deeper.

We know that there are going to be growing pains. At times, we may feel like a small, uneven apple tree. The one with little fruit to share and a small patch of shade. But with God’s love and grace, we are sharing what we have with the rest of creation.

As small as it is, birds’ dwell in our apple tree all day long and while it was blooming bees were buzzing at every flower. Yet as often as we do, I only saw what the apple tree could produce for me and not the impact it has on all the other creatures that find a home within it.

Even when we’re tired and we’ve bore all the fruit we can in one season of our life, we know that the structure, the presence, of who we are will be a place where people can find shade, a place where people experience God’s love and see the ways that God dwells within us.

We are this presence because we have been created out of and rooted in the nutritious soil of God’s love and grace, watered with the waters of baptism, fed at Christ’s table, and sent out in community to grow branches and be who God has created us to be.

For we never know who will build a nest in our shade.

Amen.

Filed Under: sermon Tagged With: sermon

Clothing Love

June 6, 2021 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

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

Filed Under: sermon

Only Love

May 30, 2021 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

God’s true essence is vulnerable love, that binds the Trinity together and opens to invite the whole creation into that love.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The feast of the Holy Trinity, year B
Texts: John 3:1-17; Romans 8:12-17

Ruth revealed God’s true nature to me this past week.

On Tuesday, when the governor called for a state-wide time of silence at 1:00 p.m. to remember George Floyd, those of us in the church building sat in the nave with lighted candles. I sat in my favorite place in the nave: outside aisle, lectern side, so I could see Ruth in the south gallery, my favorite window in our building.

As I sat in silence, thinking about George Floyd, and that day, and our world, and looking at Ruth, I remembered Ruth was also marginalized, oppressed, even threatened because of who she was biologically and ethnically. As a widow with no sons, she shared Naomi’s destitution and desperation in a patriarchal society where women’s only value came from men in their lives. She and Naomi were also both outsiders, foreigners in each other’s country. As I prayed and thought about our own siblings and neighbors who are marginalized and oppressed, I realized Ruth and Naomi understood the plight of George Floyd and people of color in our society far better than I do.

But these two women saw family in each other. Formed a bond of love that became inseparable. A love so strong Ruth left her place of familiarity, where she might have found a husband from her people, and willingly became a foreigner and outsider to be with Naomi.

And Boaz, the respectable Bethlehem farmer and citizen, also saw these two outsiders and saw them as family. Brought them into his family in love, marrying Ruth and ensuring that Naomi wouldn’t starve to death. They belonged.

It’s the Sunday of the Holy Trinity, and this wasn’t in our readings.

But it’s all you need to know about the Triune God. Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz lived with the love that God created in them, the love that is God. They crossed borders, saw kinship with people who were not like them, and made a family. They lived the only reality of God that matters. That is, if you care what Jesus thinks and teaches and models and lives.

Jesus didn’t explain the mystery of God’s internal make-up. He revealed the heart of God. He spoke of the Father and he being one in each other, one in love. He spoke of sending the Spirit who is also one with the others. A few centuries later, believers came up with the idea of the Trinity as a way of doing justice to these revelations of Jesus, and to Paul’s proclamation. Driven by political realities and anxiety over varying teachings, shaped by Greek philosophical terms, the formal doctrine of the Trinity was developed.

It’s just not something Jesus seemed to think we needed to have clear. What Jesus wanted clear about God, what the early Church wrote repeatedly in the New Testament, is God’s true nature is love.

God’s primary essence, God’s reality in the universe, is self-giving love.

God’s self-giving love is a cosmic love, Jesus says today. Out of love for the cosmos, the Trinity sent the eternal Word out of the inner dance of God’s life to become a human being. To risk everything, even being lifted up on a cross, to bring the creation back into God’s life.

God’s self-giving love is a birthing love, Jesus says today. In love, the Trinity sends the Spirit from the inner dance of God’s life to give new birth to all people, to enliven and renew the whole world with the essence of God’s love.

The love that Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz knew and lived for each other and their world. You can’t write that love into a doctrine.

The only thing you need to know about the Trinity, then, is that God is held together by the bonds of self-giving love.

As Jesus revealed it and New Testament writers proclaimed it, the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit, is abiding love that offers itself and receives itself again and again.

You don’t need to be able to do the math on the Trinity. Just trust that the heart of God revealed when the Son came in person and when the Spirit gives birth to life within you, that the heart of God for you and the cosmos is this vulnerable love.

What more would you ever need to know about God?

And living in the way of the Trinity is living in the same way of love as God.

If God’s heart for you and all creatures and the cosmos is this self-giving, transformative love, then you are, as Paul says, all of us are, children of God. Heirs of God through the Spirit, joint heirs with Christ.

You don’t need to write a dissertation on ethics to know how to live. Just trust that you are in God’s heart and in God’s family, and the way that binds that family together is love. The way that family lives is love. Love that gives of itself. Love that crosses borders. Love that sees all people as beloved of God and will not rest until they are treated that way in our society and world. Love that both embraces your heart so you know you are beloved but also gives you the courage to be love in a world of prejudice and oppression and violence. So you can follow the family way and be the change God wants to see in the world.

What more would you ever need to know about how to live in God’s family?

This divine love is costly, though.

It cost Jesus his life. It cost the Trinity so much in centuries of suffering love over the destruction of the creation and the hatred that the beloved creatures inflict on each other. Paul says being an heir to God’s family also means being an heir to God’s suffering. So living in the family way of God’s beloved ones might mean suffering for you. Jesus always said it could.

But you are in the family of God, a family that is bound together in the Triune God’s love that creates universes, breaks death, knows the smallest sparrow’s falling, even the hairs on your head. Any suffering you might come to as you live in the family way of the Triune God is embraced and healed and held in the love that made you and called you and treasured you in the first place.

Ruth lived God’s love. Millions have. So can you.

The living and Triune God has opened up the dance of love that makes up God’s true essence and life and invited the whole creation into it. So that the whole creation, and even you, will be bound together and shaped and inspired and renewed and given life by this love, the only thing about God that really matters.

And the best part is, when you find yourself loving as God loves, you’ll realize you are truly home, truly alive, truly loved. You’ll know all you need to know. And you are Ruth and Naomi and Boaz to someone else. Who might even find they are beloved of God, too.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

Filed Under: sermon

Called Alongside

May 23, 2021 By Pr. Joseph Crippen

Pentecost is the next and final piece of God’s plan in Christ: called alongside you and me, our community, and the whole creation to bring life and hope and healing.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Day of Pentecost, year B
Texts: John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15; Romans 8:22-27; Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:24-34, 35b

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

“Paraclete.” It’s a strange word the Greeks left us.

It’s a beautiful word, with such richness of meaning that translators keep trying new ways to express the depth and breadth our predecessors would have sensed in hearing it.

The King James translators used “Comforter.” The Revised Standard Version and New International Version, solid 20th century translations, used “Counselor.” The New Revised Standard Version, our current mainstay, uses “Advocate,” but in the footnotes the translators offer an alternative: “Helper.” All these are part of the cloud of meaning, as are Mediator and Intercessor.

But Paraclete literally means: “Called alongside.” The Holy Spirit, Jesus says, is the one “called alongside” us, which of course explains all the meanings the Greeks heard in the word and our translators have used. So, ponder this: God now calls the Holy Spirit alongside you!

Today is Pentecost, and we celebrate that the Holy Spirit still comes to empower us and send us into our lives as Christ.

Acts tells the story of Spirit-filled believers spreading everywhere proclaiming God’s life and love. We rightly call Pentecost the birthday of the Church, as what began there continues through the gift of the Spirit.

But today we heard that God also has other purposes for sending the Holy Spirit. “It is to your advantage that I go away,” Jesus says. That sounds wrong. But it’s because in the plan of the Trinity, the Spirit now takes her turn on the earth. She is called alongside us, a Paraclete, in this life we live.

Pentecost isn’t just about power and sending. It’s about God’s Spirit walking alongside you every step of your life, doing really important things.

The Spirit is called alongside you to guide and teach.

 “I still have many things to say to you,” Jesus says, “but you can’t bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you into all the truth.”

Like children, we need to grow and learn, come into who we are made to be. Sometimes it takes painful centuries for humanity to learn lessons. Sometimes it will take a whole lifetime for a person. And sometimes we’re not ready to hear things personally or as a community.

So God calls the Spirit alongside you, and our community, and the whole creation, to reveal new truths from God when we’re ready to bear them, and guide us every day into new life.

The Spirit is also called alongside you to speak on your behalf.

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness,” Paul says, “for we don’t know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” Last week our joy was that God’s Son prayed for us, lifted the needs and pains of us and of the world into the life of God. Now our joy explodes, because the Spirit is called alongside us to continue Jesus’ prayer always.

In our weakness, the Spirit is called alongside to carry sighs too deep for words from your heart so God can hear them. To carry sighs too deep for words from our community so God can hear them. To carry sighs too deep for words from our world and the whole creation, so God can hear them.

Living in one human body, God couldn’t do all this. That’s why Jesus says this is all to our advantage.

In God’s great plan, as the Son returns, the Spirit is called alongside us to make the Incarnation real in you, in our community, and in the whole creation.

In you: as the Spirit is called alongside you to share your joy and pain and speak for you into God’s life. To guide you, and reveal things you need to know and are ready for, as you grow into Christ.

In our community of faith at Mount Olive: we seek to be faithful in this city, to address the evils of the world and our participation in them, to be Christ’s love as a community. So, the Triune God graciously calls the Spirit alongside us to speak for us into God’s life, guide us to truth, reveal new things when we’re ready for them.

And in the whole creation: the psalmist today proclaims that God sends the Spirit to renew the face of the earth. Paul calls that renewal a birth process. The creation creaks and breaks under our destructive habits and pollution, suffers as it is filled with creatures who hate and kill and oppress each other. The Spirit is called alongside to give birth to a new creation, with all the labor pains that means, all of us the Spirit is transforming.

Pentecost is the final part of the blessing of God coming into this world.

Begun at the creation and born into the world in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, the final piece of God’s plan to heal all things is the Spirit of God alongside us. Alongside you. Alongside the world, so that you, and we, and the whole creation, might be birthed into God’s life and love.

Sometimes it feels like more struggle than answers, more pain than resolution, more difficulty than we can handle, but these are the birth pains. The Spirit is giving birth to something amazing. Just look alongside you, and you’ll see.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

Filed Under: sermon

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