God promises everlasting love and graciousness, even knowing that we will betray such trust, because such cross-shaped love God has can save you and all creation.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Second Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: Mark 8:31-38; Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 (with references to other readings from the Hebrew Scriptures assigned to this year’s Lenten lectionary)

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

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

Most of us have heard and perhaps even said that common aphorism. We don’t like to be tricked, let down, betrayed. It makes us feel foolish to have trusted. We know it happens, but this little saying tells us that if we let the same person do it more than once, we only have ourselves to blame for our humiliation.

So what does it mean that the Scriptures say that the Holy and Triune God not only keeps trusting after even two times of betrayal, rejection, abandonment, but into the millions and billions of times?

According to the Bible, God apparently has no limit to the amount of trust God puts in you, in me, in all people, and apparently no limit to the amount of times God will endure our inconstancy and failure, our betrayal and trickery.

This Lent we’ll see God’s relentless trust five times.

Each week we hear a covenant God makes with humans, a solemn promise to love and care for them, and each promise God makes is everlasting, forever. Last week it was God’s covenant with Noah; this week, a covenant with Abraham and Sarah; the next two weeks the covenant with God’s people at Sinai, and on the Fifth Sunday in Lent the new covenant God promises in Jeremiah 31.

You’d think that any recipient of such a covenant with God would gratefully live up to it, faithfully serve and follow God’s ways, joyfully try to be worthy of God’s trust.

You’d be wrong.

Every single covenant God makes with humans, they abandon, break, avoid, discard.

Noah hears God’s promise never to destroy the earth again, and this good man immediately gets drunk on new wine and exposes himself to his adult children. Abraham is repeatedly promised that he will receive land, many descendants through his wife Sarah, and will bless the world. But this good man twice passed his wife off as his sister when he felt threatened by a ruler, in hopes that the ruler would sleep with her without having Abraham killed as her husband.

We heard God’s covenant with David this past Advent season. David, Israel’s greatest king, is promised that his line will rule over Israel forever. Does David, in gratitude for such blessing, live a holy and pure life? No, he wickedly rapes his neighbor, gets her pregnant, and has her husband killed in battle.

The covenant with God’s people at Sinai is given by the God who just rescued them from centuries of slavery and now has graciously given them a law to guide their lives and keep them whole. So they faithfully and gratefully serve God, right? No, they complain about the food and drink in the desert, about God’s chosen leader, about God’s care for them. They worship a golden calf!

Seriously, doesn’t God ever get embarrassed at making covenants with unworthy people who betray and abandon them all the time?

Even the new covenant God promises through Jeremiah is one we trample.

Explicitly given because humans have broken every previous covenant God made with them, this one will be written on our hearts, a covenant of God’s forgiveness and forgetting. This is fulfilled in God’s coming in person in Jesus to write God’s love on our hearts and call us to love of God and neighbor.

Surely humanity would respond to such trust, such love, by welcoming God’s Son with open arms, repenting of our sinfulness, and following God’s ways?

Of course not. We humiliated God’s Son with a public torture and execution, and even more hurtfully, with betrayal and rejection by his close friends. We continue the humiliation to this day in our embarrassed unwillingness to follow his way of love.

But, you say, doesn’t Jesus finally say “Enough!” in today’s Gospel?

“If you’re ashamed of me and my words,” he says, “I’ll be ashamed of you when I come in the glory of God with all the angels.” Maybe Jesus – the face of the Triune God for us and the creation – reveals here that God has finally had enough of our untrustworthiness.

Maybe . . . if Jesus’ actions matched his words. They do not. Only weeks later Peter forgets the harsh rebuke he received today and abandons Jesus in his time of need. Whatever motivated Peter, fear or shame, his denial of Jesus – which Jesus himself witnessed – is precisely what Jesus says he will repay by being ashamed of anyone who does what Peter did.

But what Jesus actually does is go to the cross and bear, as God-with-us, all the humiliation humanity could dump on God, all the pain, rejection, betrayal. Christ brought God’s life into the deepest, degrading shame possible, and died. Then he rose from the dead, and that very day he sought out Peter and the others in forgiveness and love. Jesus wasn’t ashamed of them in retaliation. Jesus welcomed them back.

That’s the shameless love God has for you, for all people, and for the creation.

There’s no limit to the humiliation and rejection and betrayal God will endure for the sake of bringing all creation back into God’s life. Covenant after covenant God makes, covenant after covenant people break, and still God comes back for more.

Even for you. After all, in Baptism, God made one of God’s classic everlasting covenants of love and grace with you, with no point where God says you’ve failed one too many times, been untrustworthy once too often.

That’s the cross the Triune God is willing to bear again and again in hopes of bringing the creation back into harmony and justice and love, as God intended.

Because that kind of love empowers you and all it touches to love in the same way.

To take up the same cross. Call it self-giving, sacrificial, vulnerable, shameless, but as the reality that God’s love for you is such love sinks into you, it transforms you into someone who can love shamelessly, sacrificially, vulnerably, selflessly. And as more and more are so transformed, the whole creation starts healing.

Don’t think you can do it? Worried that you’ll let God down? You’re probably right. But God’s used to it. That’s why God always adds the words “forever” to God’s promises. So you know they are always yours, no matter what. And so you can realize that God’s shameless love is always transforming you into someone worthy of God’s everlasting trust.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

The disciplines of Lent are the shaping of your whole life to live in the grace and love of God for you and share it with the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
Ash Wednesday
Texts: Isaiah 58:1-12; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

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

When was the last time you fasted and disfigured yourself so everyone would know what you were doing?

Or when did you last make your offering in a public way, announcing to all what you were giving? Do you have a problem with praying out loud on street corners so people know you are faithful?

These are the things Jesus critiques today, and it makes us wonder if they even apply to us. Isaiah’s criticism is easier to grasp: his people are fasting and putting on ashes as a sign of repentance, but they aren’t changing their lives. And they’re disappointed God isn’t impressed with their rituals.

But fasting, giving, and praying are disciplines that believers have found deep grace and help in practicing, and in which they’ve experienced the Holy Spirit’s power to transform them. And, every Ash Wednesday, the liturgy invites us to the “disciplines of Lent,” “self-examination and repentance, prayer and fasting, sacrificial giving and works of love.”

These disciplines may not always be things we hold in our hearts on a daily basis, whether in or out of Lent. But they can be a tremendous gift on our path of faith that the Holy Spirit can use to shape us as Christ, the calling we each received in our baptism. That’s Ash Wednesday’s invitation to you.

The discipline of fasting may be the most important one we could learn today.

Isaiah says fasting is far more than intentionally going without food for a time. The fast God seeks, Isaiah says, is nothing less than loosing the bonds of injustice, undoing and breaking the yokes that bind people in oppression, and freeing those people.

All these systemic problems in our culture and world that we’ve been awakened to see over the last number of years and most especially since the trauma this past year in Mount Olive’s city and neighborhood, all these, Isaiah says, must be broken apart and ended. That’s true fasting. And it’s a huge job. How can anything you or I do on Ash Wednesday, or ever, loose the bonds of injustice and break yokes of oppression?

Fortunately, in the next verse Isaiah makes it simpler. The fast God wants is for you to offer your bread to someone who’s hungry. Invite someone who has no house into your home. Provide clothing for someone who’s naked. Concrete, personal acts will show God where your heart is. And as each of us do such concrete, personal acts, the greater systems start to fall apart, too.

Most of us don’t have the spiritual habit of fasting to compare to Isaiah’s turn.

But even if many of us may not fast, a lot of us have gotten into the habit of giving up something for Lent. Use that as your entry into Isaiah, and exercise the discipline of self-examination and repentance here.

What if you quit thinking about giving up something for Lent and began to consider what you could give up for life that could draw you closer to your path as Christ?

No one is helped if I don’t eat chocolate for six weeks. But if I learn to let go of things that draw me from God, behaviors, privilege, assumptions, or even material things like food and possessions, many others could be blessed.

Because Isaiah says that true fasting, in addition to engaging personally with hunger and homelessness and poverty, is ultimately not hiding “from your own kin.” Fasting is seeing all people as your family – siblings, cousins, beloved – and your life as affecting all. When you let go of something you cling to, for the sake of someone else, you will be God’s blessing in ways you can’t imagine.

This might suggest a different way to practice the discipline of giving, too.

Mount Olive is a deeply giving congregation. Just in this past year we saw so many generously give food and time and energy over the months we had a food distribution in the parking lot, to help those who lost access to stores in the unrest. A number of times, word was sent out that we had a neighbor in need, and within a couple days supplies, furniture, household goods, all that was asked was given abundantly by you. This is good and a blessing, as is all that is given by Mount Olive’s people financially for God’s ministry here and around the world. This answers what Isaiah proclaims God is seeking.

But what if we imagined giving as also part of fasting? For example, what if fasting meant for you that you were willing to spend more money and more time to get what you need because it supported local businesses which paid local workers a just minimum wage, or because it avoided businesses that harmed their workers or the environment? If you “fasted” from convenience and cheap prices for the sake of the other? That both gives food and clothing and homes to those without and also starts breaking down the yokes of oppressive business practices and unjust economic realities.

What fasts might you be called to undertake, for the sake of God’s children, your siblings, in need?

The discipline of letting go, either for a time or permanently, can shape your life in profound ways. Your behaviors and attitudes, even prejudices and assumptions that seem written in, can be let go and changed. And such a discipline can be a blessing far beyond the confines of the Lenten season. It can continue past Easter, to the rest of your life. That’s the point of Lent, isn’t it? To learn patterns and disciplines of living our baptism that we can carry with us through the joy of Easter and into the life of God that flows in us always.

The mystery of these disciplines is they bring joy.

As daunting as the social problems are in our world, as much as we think we fail to faithfully deal with the systems of injustice and oppression, hunger and homelessness, being disciplined into becoming God’s blessing isn’t a burden. Isaiah says it’s a path filled with God’s light where you also become God’s light to others. Living these, you’re like a garden planted by a spring, and God’s Spirit pours into your life what you need to thrive and be filled, while blessing others through you.

And, Isaiah says, when we do these, we’ll even raise up ruined cities, repair breaches in our society, restore streets to live in. You and I are invited to renew our discipline today, that God’s Spirit might open that path of life for all God’s world.

And the great joy is, you get to be a part of God’s grace in bringing life and hope to this world, too.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

“Give me a share of the Spirit,” you pray with Elisha, so that you might be God’s light to all who live in darkness.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Transfiguration of Our Lord, year B
Texts: 2 Kings 2:1-12; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-10

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

Jesus. Moses. Elijah. That’s a powerful gathering.

Moses, Israel’s greatest leader and great law-giver, who woke them from slavery in Egypt and, with God’s Spirit, led them to freedom. Elijah, Israel’s greatest prophet, faithful in the midst of widespread rejection of the true God, who did marvels through God’s Spirit, and for whom a seat is always left in waiting at Passover meals around the world even today.

And Jesus, the Incarnate Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, God-with-us, in our human flesh, who reveals his divine glory, his clothes dazzlingly white, the Triune God’s light shining from him.

Peter – still reeling from the shame of Jesus’ rebuke a week earlier, and the brothers James and John, witness this. Little wonder they’re terrified. But the offer to build dwellings makes sense. If Jesus is God’s Anointed, God’s Christ, then with the affirmation of great Elijah and great Moses, all would be convinced. Why not reveal this to everyone?

We know that didn’t happen. Within moments, Jesus was alone again, the four headed down the mountain, and Jesus commanded their silence about all this. From here, Jesus headed to Jerusalem and the cross.

But there’s something else you need to notice.

As impressive as these three are, they all handed off their ministry to others.

Moses didn’t lead forever, Joshua took over, and many more after him. Elijah didn’t remain God’s great prophet forever, as we heard today. Elisha took over, and then many more prophets after that.

Jesus didn’t stay on earth forever. He called Peter, James, John, Mary Magdalene, Martha and Mary, Andrew, and millions more up to today, to carry on his ministry.

God’s servants always eventually pass critical ministry on to others, and that means to you, and me, and whoever else hears God’s call today.

But it’s intimidating, isn’t it, to follow such giants?

You can see why Elisha asked for a double share of God’s Spirit that filled Elijah.

Elisha wasn’t greedy. He likely saw all the wonders Elijah did, the trials and sufferings he faced, his faithfulness, and thought, “I can’t do that without a lot of help from God’s Spirit.”

Joshua was also blessed by God’s Spirit after taking over from Moses. And you know about those who first followed Jesus: the Holy Spirit flowed into them and gave them the power and courage and wisdom and gifts to do what God needed them to do.

It is the Spirit of God that empowers the servants of God, not their impressive gifts or resumes. That’s what you need to ask for. Because now God needs you to carry on the ministry of God’s Good News.

Paul declares this, and Elijah, Moses, and Jesus would heartily agree.

Paul says today that people are blinded by the “god of this world” and can’t see the light of the Gospel of Christ, the image of God. The challenges, sufferings, fears, and temptations of this world keep people from seeing the Good News that God has come to the world in Christ to bring life and healing.

But, Paul says, you and I witness to God’s coming by God’s light shining from us. God shines in our hearts to give light to those who can’t see it, by our love, our kindness, our work, our prayers.

Just after these verses, Paul reminds us that God’s Spirit in our hearts is a treasure held in clay jars. We’re fragile, weak, flawed. We make mistakes. We never imagine ourselves to be like Moses or Elijah, let alone Jesus.

But we carry God’s treasure in us, and so, Paul says, “we do not lose heart.”

And that’s really important to remember.

Because it isn’t only Jesus who leaves this mountain to face the cross, suffering and death. All his followers faced great difficulties as they faithfully took up God’s ministry. So did Elisha, and Joshua, and all who are called.

The path of Christ leads the servants of Christ through self-giving love and vulnerable caring for others, through risk and sacrifice. Knowing we are clay jars filled with the treasure of God’s Spirit not only helps you as you know your own weaknesses and flaws. It’s also comfort in the struggles that faithfully serving as Christ will bring you to know God’s Spirit is always within you.

So, you’re going to need Elisha’s prayer for God’s Spirit.

Paul says God doesn’t expect you to be Moses or Elijah or Jesus. God just needs you to be you. God will fill you, and me, and all who wish it, with the Holy Spirit.

And God’s Spirit transforms you to shine with God’s light into a world that is beset by so many things that would crush it. Shining God’s love and grace, God’s justice and hope for all God’s children, with your words and actions and presence.

So, go ahead and ask for God’s Spirit to fill you. You’ll find God’s already within you, God’s light is already shining out of you. People have already seen God’s love through you, flawed as you might be.

And so through you, and me, and so many more, God’s light will continue to shine, and even spread.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

God sends us into the darkness as agents of God’s wholeness and healing, having experienced it ourselves, to reach all God’s children.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, Lect. 5 B
Texts: Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-11, 20c; Mark 1:29-39

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

That was a really long night for Jesus.

After a long day, as we heard last week, ending with an exorcism in the synagogue, today we hear that as soon as Jesus and the others left the synagogue and went to Peter and Andrew’s house, he had another person to heal, Peter’s mother-in-law.

And then the sun went down, Mark says, and people started lining up. Word was out. “The whole city” gathered outside the door, Mark says. So Jesus healed “many” who were sick, and cast out demons. You have to wonder how late into the night he went, and if he slept.

Then, in the morning when it was “still very dark,” Jesus got up to go to a quiet place to pray and re-center. But the disciples thoughtlessly searched him out in the dark and told him the crowds were back.

It was still very dark. Jesus had been working most of the night. And they still wanted more.

And what of all those waiting in the darkness with sick loved ones?

It was a long night for them, too, ending in deep disappointment. Because Jesus didn’t go back to heal the others. He went to the next town, leaving behind a huge, sad crowd, still in the dark, waiting for God’s healing.

Isaiah asks, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? God is the great one who made all things. Don’t you trust that?”

And a lot of people today say, “No, I haven’t heard. I haven’t seen God. I don’t know where God is in the mess of this world. I’m in the dark, wondering if light will come. I’m at the back of the crowd hoping for healing and no one’s there to help me,” many would say to Isaiah.

Isaiah asks, “Why do you say ‘my way is hidden from God, and my right is disregarded by God?” “Because,” many, many people today would answer, “it sure feels that way to me.”

It might even feel that way to you. That it’s still awfully dark out there. And you know what it is to wonder where God is and what God is doing.

That’s why today’s readings are important.

They do what the Bible does so often: re-focus us on what God cares about and whom God wants to help. God gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless, Isaiah says. God’s not impressed by success, the psalmist sings but rebuilds broken cities, gathers exiles, heals the brokenhearted and binds their wounds. And Jesus embodied this care, bringing healing when he saw suffering, proclaiming God’s desire for a new creation of love and justice.

Today’s Scripture reminds us that the reason we care about ending racism, or eliminating poverty, or cleaning up and restoring the environment, the reason we want to rebuild and heal our broken society until all are treated justly and given the chance to thrive, is because God cares deeply about these things. And God – as we know well from Jesus – will deal with them through you and me. We are God’s answer to those who cry in the darkness for God’s wholeness and healing, who don’t see or hear where God is.

So the most important person in today’s Gospel might be Peter’s mother-in-law.

Jesus healed her of a fever, and she got up and served them. That might feel awfully sexist, but this was her gift to give.

I only remember a handful of times in over 50 years of going to my Grandma’s house where anyone used the front door. You went into that house – family or friend – through the kitchen door. And Grandma always had food ready. You’d be invited in, and she’d put things in front of you. If she’d been lying in bed with a fever, and Jesus came to the house and healed her, I guarantee she’d have gotten up and said, “You need something to eat.”

You see? If you’re waiting all night in the dark for healing, hoping for God to act, and you experience in any way God’s healing grace in mind, body, or spirit, this woman says, “well, get up from your healing and see what you can do for others.”

That means for the second week in a row, our Prayer of the Day reveals our path.

Last week we prayed “God, bring wholeness to all that is broken, and speak truth into our confusion.” This week we prayed what’s next: “Make us agents of your healing and wholeness, that your good news may be known to the ends of your creation.”

Today we hear God’s priorities, and are re-focused. And, as ones who’ve been given wholeness and healing from God, we’re asked to work on those priorities. God’s care for the faint and powerless, the brokenhearted and wounded, comes through those whose faintness and powerlessness and woundedness have found God’s healing.

And you’re only asked to do what you can do. Peter’s mother-in-law knew how to do hospitality. As our vicar preached a couple weeks ago, the four Galilean fishermen somehow had skills as fishermen that Jesus needed for God’s work.

You, too, have what you need to be an agent of God’s wholeness and healing, if you’ve ever experienced it yourself. No matter how isolated you feel right now, or how incompetent you think you are to serve Christ, in every interaction you have with someone you could be a sign of God’s wholeness and healing. You can be grace. And love. You can help those who feel exiled by being God’s home for them, bind up the brokenhearted and wounded by being God’s healing presence for them, maybe only for a moment. But that’s enough.

Because it’s still awfully dark out there, isn’t it?

There are so many daunting things, we can’t even count them, so many people hurting, sometimes even we ourselves, so many systems that need to be dismantled, we can’t imagine how to help or start.

But God counts the number of the stars, sings the psalmist, and calls them by their names. God knows all the faint and powerless, all the people of the world by name, Isaiah says. All the broken cities and exiles, all the brokenhearted and wounded, all of these God sees. Even in the dark.

And what God needs to reach them all is you, and me, and many more, as agents of God’s wholeness and healing to whomever we are with.

Don’t worry you’re not enough. You’ve got what God needs to bring wholeness in your place, and so do all God’s children, so that God’s good news can, as we prayed, finally reach the ends of God’s creation.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen