Pr. Joseph Crippen

This is the week when the Triune God makes clear the plan for this world, and for you, the answers God has for your healing and the healing of all things.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Sunday of the Passion, year B
Texts: Mark 11:1-11; Philippians 2:5-11; references to parts of the Passion story

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

This is the second Holy Week in a row we’ve been apart.

Last year, we were so shocked and stunned at how quickly the world shut down only a few weeks before Easter, it was hard to believe we weren’t in church for this week.

This year was no surprise. We’ve been in this for so long, we expect disappointment. Even last fall it didn’t seem likely we’d be open before Easter. Vaccinations give us better hope now than we’ve had in a while. But worshipping at home yet again for Holy Week just seems like another thing to struggle with in a year full of struggle.

It’s important to name that pain as real.

This has been a terrible year, and everyone is going through it. In normal times if one suffers, there are many who can support and help. But what if everyone is suffering? Our friends and family are as exhausted and depressed and lonely as we are. Nearly every human being on this planet is. That makes it hard to know and find support.

We know, too, that many have it much worse. Every one on the planet is dealing with pandemic fatigue and all the suffering of COVID. But many suffer worse from the pandemic because of the racism or poverty that already trapped them in systems that seem unbreakable, and even keep them from treatment and help others get.

But it’s OK to say that it’s been a hard year for you, too. You’re feeling depressed; that’s to be expected. You’re feeling lonely; that’s normal. You’re feeling anxiety about going out or never going out again; of course you are.

But here is good news for you. This week is exactly what you need, right now. Even at home.

This week isn’t special because together we play-act Jesus’ week of suffering, death and resurrection.

We don’t pretend while we sing Hosanna that we don’t know what’s going to happen Friday. We don’t weep together Friday unaware of how the Three Days ends with Jesus’ resurrection. This week isn’t about us pretending we were there back then.

This week is about us learning to walk with Jesus every day of our lives. Every year, this week begins with Paul urging us to have the same mind in us that was in Christ Jesus. We walk this week every year because by looking deeply at these events, entering into them with our hearts and minds, we learn ever more deeply the heart and mind of the Triune God who entered into our suffering.

And that you can do at home, too. As much as we miss this time together, and will rejoice when we have it again, what you need to learn this week you can learn wherever you are.

Right from the beginning of today’s liturgy, the heart and mind of God begins to be revealed.

In the processional Gospel, after the entrance into Jerusalem where Jesus looked and acted like an Israelite king, and received the praise and adoration of the crowds, Mark says Jesus entered the temple, looked around, decided it was pretty late, and left the city for the suburb of Bethany with the disciples.

That procession of royal cheers with strewn palms and garments sure looked like a power-grab. Now this One who reveals divine power and love is positioned to take over everything. Nothing can stop him.

Except, he enters the heart-home of his Jewish faith, looks around, checks his watch, and quietly leaves the city. That’s the first sign this week that the mind of Christ, the heart of God, is very different than the world’s lust for power and might and control.

When you watch Jesus this week, worship at home with the videos or CDs, participate in the footwashing at home, wave palms today, make a cross for Friday, stay up late and pray with the Vigil video, you will see that this quiet departure set up everything. The command to self-giving love flows from this moment. The willingness to be betrayed and tortured flows from this moment. The forgiveness offered while being executed flows from this moment. The struggle with God’s will in Gethsemane begins with this decision not to assume power and authority and ride the crowds to glory.

Because of this moment and its aftermath, this week is God’s answer to the world’s suffering.

If Jesus had seized power in Jerusalem that Sunday, instead of quietly heading to his friends’ house, he could have taken care of a lot of systemic oppression and injustice, fixed the whole Judean political system, used his divine power to force people to do his will, maybe even ruled the whole world.

But that isn’t God’s way, to ride political power to domination. God’s way is to change hearts and minds to the heart and mind of Christ, one at a time, and spread the seeds for the end of oppression and injustice everywhere. Not by force but by love. And over the centuries, those seeds have knocked down tyrants and healed societies. Even exhausted people this year have done their part.

There’s still much to be done, but God is confident with enough of us it can be done. By our love and self-giving, multiplied.

This week is also God’s answer to your depression and loneliness, your pain.

God multiplying servant love one at a time means that God has put people in your life to be with you even when you feel most alone. This year that’s been harder to see. The people you love to see and talk to are often physically kept away, and most of us have found great difficulty in dealing with those missed ties. But look at this year to see this truth: God sent many people to bring you hope.

And in coming to be with us, the Triune God also promises to come to you in the Holy Spirit. To shape your mind and heart to be like Christ, yes. But simply to be with you, too. God’s Spirit is always with you, even in this time of separation. You are never alone in God’s embracing love.

And this week is God’s answer to a COVID pandemic that has put every person on the planet into a year of suffering and killed millions.

God’s heart and mind is to enter into the suffering of the world, even death, and bring resurrection life. A real, abundant life even in the worst of times, as billions of people have learned over the centuries.

Every sign of hope given by you or someone else this year, when you didn’t have enough energy to care another moment but you still tried to help, all those sacrificial moments, God shows this week, will change the world and bring life. Think of the times someone’s sacrificial love transformed you.

This week reveals God’s true heart and mind for the creation.

Now, Paul says, share that mind and heart of God so others can know God, too. Though we can’t gather in person for worship, take the time you need this week to watch with Jesus, walk with Jesus, listen to Jesus, and learn. Everything the Holy and Triune God is doing in the world in Christ starts to make sense this week, as the Spirit shows you Christ’s path of self-giving love and reveals how you can walk that path, too.

Watch. Pray. Listen. You will be changed, and so will the world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

God so loved the cosmos, Jesus proclaims, that God came to heal, to save all things, through you and through all by the grace of the Spirit.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourth Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

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

What if the Israelites were wrong about the snakes?

A terrible plague of venomous serpents in the wilderness isn’t exactly an unexpected thing in that terrain. They’d been grousing about the bad food, saying that God and Moses led them out to die. So, they assumed God sent this plague as punishment.

They’re not the first or the last to experience tragedy and assume God was behind it. A year ago this week the world shut down for a global pandemic, and I’ve personally heard a number of people wonder if, or why, God sent COVID.

Israel’s logic falters with their healing. The attack of snakes could have been a natural event, or from God. But the healing absolutely could only come from God. Those who saw the bronze serpent God told Moses to make were healed. So, why would the same God both attack with snakes and provide healing from them?

The logic of God causing COVID also falters with the healing. Human brains, gifted with knowledge and imagination by God, have created multiple vaccines, and healing is happening, bringing hope for an end to this terrible period. Why would the same God plague the world with COVID and also inspire year-long efforts to end its effect on God’s beloved children?

We could argue both sides and never be sure we weren’t just idly speculating. If only God would come in person and answer the question definitively for us!

You know the Good News: God has actually done this.

If you struggle with what God is really about in the Bible or in the world or in your life, start with Jesus. If anyone knows what the Trinity is up to, it’s the person of the Trinity who took on human flesh among us, whom John’s Gospel says reveals to us God’s inner heart.

Today Jesus answers our very question unequivocally: the Holy and Triune God is on the side of healing, not punishment. God, living as one of us, will be lifted up on a cross to love all creation back into God’s life, raised on a pole like Moses’ serpent, but for the healing of the whole cosmos, not just a small part.

God’s love is a cosmic love, Jesus literally says, sent not to judge the creation but to save it.

This is the full gift Jesus offers in these verses, if you can learn to see it.

There’s a very restricted way to read John 3:16, and many Christians for many years have read it that way. In that interpretation, God’s love for the cosmos is to save individual people from hell and give them heaven when they die. But you have to believe in Jesus to get it, that interpretation says.

But that only misses most of God’s immense gift in coming in Christ into the world. Now, certainly in God’s cosmic love there’s life with God after death – Jesus clearly promises that he goes to prepare a place for us in that life.

But in everything Jesus says about eternal life, it’s a lot bigger, and it’s right now. Eternal life is life in God’s new age, begun in Jesus already, a whole new reality of life in God’s love, right now. Jesus calls it “abundant” life, and he came for all to know and live it.

Today Jesus uses a word we translate “save,” which means save, and it also means “heal.” There is healing in God’s Son for this world, this life, Jesus says today. Paul knows that, too, in Ephesians today. “By grace you have been saved,” or, “by grace you have been healed,” he says, and makes it clear that’s for this life, too, not just after death. Because you are healed by grace, Paul says, for the good works you can do in this world, this life.

God’s gift needs to be this massive because the healing the world needs is massive.

Seeing God’s coming in Christ as only to get people into heaven after they die means missing the abundant life God desires you to know now. But it also means God’s creation and beloved creatures of all kinds continue to suffer in chaos and destruction, against God’s will. So much evil is done by people who only care about their own status with God, and don’t grasp the cosmic love of God Jesus proclaims today.

If saving and healing means forgiveness, as Paul declares today, and if God intends to heal and save all things, as Jesus says, forgiveness can’t be just removing punishment for your sin. Forgiveness transforms you, Paul says, to do the good works that God has planned for you and for all before any of us were born. It is, Jesus says, to live in the light, doing actions that are of God, not evil. As more and more are so transformed by God’s grace, this world itself begins to heal, oppression gets broken down, justice happens.

And if saving and healing means your heart is brought into God’s, as the Scriptures say, then yes, you find peace and hope yourself, your true place in the universe. But you also become someone who spreads God’s peace and hope through your life in this world.

If saving and healing are knowing God’s abundant life now, as Jesus says, then yes, you are made whole now, alive now. But you also are changed to someone who spreads God’s abundant life to the world through your life in this world.

God so loved the cosmos, my friends. God’s healing is meant to heal the whole thing.

Because the Holy and Triune God is on the side of healing. Always. For everyone. Every thing.

We have this from Jesus himself, the face of the Trinity for us. God will clean up the mess of the world and heal the pain of the world’s creatures by transforming you, me, all, through God’s self-giving love lifted up on the cross, a love we are joined to in Christ’s resurrection life through the Holy Spirit. So that you, and I, and all, are “healed,” “saved,” our lives empowered to the same self-giving love Jesus showed God has for us, and in that self-giving love we, in turn, spread God’s love further into the cosmos God desperately wants to save. To heal. It’s a beautiful plan.

God is on the side of healing, and God wants the whole creation brought back into God’s life and justice and harmony. Trust that, Jesus says today. Trust that for you, for this life and for life after you die. And trust that as you are saved, healed, God will work through you for this healing eventually to reach all.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen