Pr. Joseph Crippen

Wake up and be the Christ you are made to be, for the healing of the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The First Sunday of Advent, year A
Texts: Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44; Isaiah 2:1-5

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

Let’s talk about “woke.”

The term describes people awakening to their privilege, implicit biases and prejudices, and facing them. Realizing what people other than themselves experience, whether racism or sexism or abuse or oppression or poverty, or anything else, as well as their institutional aspects.

“Woke” has become a term of derision and mockery among many who can’t be bothered to face anything different than their own experience, beliefs and practices, who lack the imagination to step outside their tiny, limited minds and lives and see the world from another’s perspective, and act on that vision.

So we probably need to let go of the word “woke.” It’s beyond redeeming in our culture.

Fine. Let’s use Jesus’ word. Awake. Keep awake, Jesus says. It’s time to wake up from sleep, Paul says. And apparently for Paul and Jesus, hitting the snooze bar on your alarm is the last thing you should do.

This metaphor makes so much sense.

At this point in my life I wake up several times in the night. Sometimes, once awake, my body at this age says, “as long as you’re awake, you could probably use the bathroom.” I don’t turn any lights on, I go, and as I get back into bed, I tap my watch to show the time. It’s a moment of truth. If it flashes 1:45, or 3:32, I relax in relief. I can go back to sleep. I’ve got hours before the six o’clock alarm. Some days I’ll even hit the snooze bar after the alarm and blissfully stay in the dark.

Paul and Jesus say that when that happens in my life of faith that’s a problem. I’m too often breathing a sigh of relief and going back to sleep. I’ll ponder whether I’m ready to get going on what Christ is calling me to do, on what I see out there in the world, and think, “I’ve got more time. No need to act now.” Even if the alarm goes off, I can buy another 9 minutes, or the equivalent in real time avoidance of serving as Christ in a world in desperate need.

I must not be the only one. Christians can’t hear Isaiah today without doing it.

It’s an amazing promise that in days to come all will come to God’s mountain and God’s word will spread to all nations, making a massive change in how people live with each other. Whole countries will take their weapons of war and melt them down and make tools for feeding the world’s people.

And we hear this and say, “won’t that day be wonderful? When it happens.” We push this promise into an unknown future day when God comes to fix all things. We’ll do it with the reading we’ll hear next week, too, the peaceable reign of God where wolf lies with lamb and babies happily play with venomous snakes. Won’t that be wonderful when that day comes?

But that’s just hitting the snooze bar. Looking at your watch and going back to sleep. Nothing in Isaiah says this is some unreachable future. “In days to come” could mean tomorrow. Next week. For people who are Christ in the world, those days to come are now. It’s time to wake up, Paul says. Get out of bed. Start bearing God’s word of peace and love and wholeness into the world. Because it’s the spread of God’s word of life, Isaiah says, that leads individuals and even nations to things like disarmament and to focusing energy on feeding, sheltering, healing.

But maybe that work seems too much for us to handle, that’s why we stay in bed.

Here’s another truth of my sleeping. Most of my adult life, since college, I’ve had anxiety dreams from time to time. In college, the dream was that the final exam had started, and I was nowhere near the place. I also was completely unprepared, I hadn’t studied at all. And I was often missing some key pieces of clothing. Usually pants.

Since I’ve been a pastor, the dream is the same, just different details. Now the service has already started, I haven’t prepared a sermon. I’m usually a long way away from the nave, and as always, I’m missing clothes. Still pants, a lot, though now sometimes it’s missing robes, and I’m wearing jeans and a t-shirt at the door of the church as the procession is about to start.

It doesn’t take a genius to see what my brain is doing. It’s painting a vivid picture of an inner anxiety that I’m not prepared to do my job, I’m not ready, I’m running out of time. Now, my anxiety dreams always end with me waking up and realizing I have days till the thing, I’ve got time to be ready. I know my job, and I can do it. I can go back to sleep.

But our anxiety about waking up as Christ, about being able to do what needs doing for Christ in this world never really goes away. Even awake, we realize we’re not terribly confident that we can do anything to make a difference in this world, to be a part of God’s coming into the world in Christ for hope and healing.

So, Paul refocuses that anxiety and just talks about how you live in the light.

Being awake is walking decently in the day, he says, with three pairs of behaviors that aren’t part of that.

The first is reveling and drunkenness. Paul says if you’re awake you don’t escape reality by masking it, hiding it. Doing all the things we find ourselves addicted to that keep us from looking at the world as it is and facing that world. Whether media, entertainment, or even real chemical addictions, we find ourselves trapped in avoidance. It makes us feel good and we don’t have to worry about not doing our Christly work.

The second pair is illicit sex and licentiousness. This is more than Paul being prudish. Paul says we need to look at how we shape our lives and priorities for our own pleasure, at the expense of others. Is your highest goal what pleases you, rewards you? We can’t live lives focused on pleasure while others aren’t even able to live.

The third pair is quarrelling and jealousy. If you’re going to be awake, avoid the in-fighting in your community and family, Paul says, watch your tendency to distract yourself from what needs doing by disagreement and conflict. Our ability to get angry about something important can wake us up. But it also can become the focus, where we stay in the anger, blame others for the world’s problems, and never quite get to doing something about them.

Paul doesn’t say anything about your ability to be Christ. Neither does Jesus.

They both seem to think being awake and alert is enough to do what’s needed.

Because when you’re awake, Paul says, you put on the Lord Jesus Christ, clothe yourself in the goodness and healing of God in Christ. You are a washed, baptized child of God, you have been anointed as Christ, wrapped in Christ. You are the next coming of Christ the world is waiting for. Flawed, anxious, feeling unskilled, it doesn’t matter. This is what you and I were anointed to be and do.

So stay awake. Resist the snooze bar. Avoid Paul’s distractions and Jesus’ complacency. Wake up and let Christ fill you and hold you and clothe you as you go out as a child of the light for the sake of a world wrapped in the shadows of fear and hopelessness. And in you, Christ’s light will shine.

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

You and I may never make a measurable impact, be a visible success by the world’s standards, in serving Christ. But all we are called to be is faithful, and God gives us the strength we need.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 33 C
Texts: Luke 21:5-19; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

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 was right. We saw it.

Your group visiting our mission partners in Palestine stood last Monday morning on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. There was no Temple to be seen. A beautiful seventh-century shrine, the Dome of the Rock, and a mosque, stood there. Scholars can’t even agree exactly where on that huge platform this Temple that caused the disciples to gape in awe actually stood. So the chief rabbi of Jerusalem forbids Jews from walking on the Temple Mount because they might inadvertently commit sacrilege by straying onto what was once the Holy of Holies. No one knows for sure where it was. Nothing is left.

Not a stone will be left on stone? Jesus was absolutely right.

We saw that everywhere we went. At nearly every church erected on a holy place where Jesus and the women and men following him went, the story was the same. Again and again we heard that the first structures were built in the first centuries or often by the Byzantines, destroyed by the Persians, rebuilt by the Crusaders, torn down again by some caliph or sultan, and eventually rebuilt. Many we visited are only 20th or 21st century structures. As faithfully and lovingly as Christian believers built their impressive edifices, they didn’t last.

These are important words for us to hear.

For example, what about our building, this house of faith? Beautifully designed, carefully planned, lovingly cared for these 90 years. It would be easy to admire this place and all we do, and, like the disciples, say “we’ve got it all taken care of. Look how beautiful this is!”

Our tendency to trust in ourselves to secure our future, to look to build a legacy, to leave behind something permanent and lasting is folly. But this building and all we have could be gone in a moment, as people around the world constantly learn. That magnificent Temple was utterly destroyed only 40 years later. Palestinians regularly lose their homes in a single day to bulldozers. Churches are demolished by the next conquering force. Our democratic institutions prove fragile and vulnerable and susceptible to deep damage. Nothing will last.

Jesus isn’t trying to frighten. He’s almost calm as he speaks of end times, because his main goal is to invite you not to fear, not to worry about whether you’ll make a difference, or whether you’ll fail or be rejected. Instead, he says, focus on something else.

We need to unpack that a bit.

We might not be as focused on our building as I just made out. But we do hope to make a difference in this world. Whether it’s feeling like we’ve accomplished something to end racism or sexism or oppression or systemic violence or homelessness or poverty, we hope and wish we could make a lasting impact. To look back in five, ten, thirty years and see we made a difference.

Jesus says that’s just not guaranteed. In fact, he says you should expect to fail more than succeed. There will be setbacks, frustrations. Our efforts will be opposed, our spirits flagged, our hopes diminished. Our group came back from this trip pretty overwhelmed by the enormous, complex nature of the problems our partners face, and few answers as to how that could be transformed.

But that’s true of our work here, too. It’s never going to be easy to be a faithful follower, Jesus says. And we’re not likely to have huge, measurable accomplishments, either as individuals or as a community.

Which gives us a couple options.

We could circle the wagons, push away outsiders that don’t like us or that we don’t like, not worry about the planet because it’s all going away anyway, not worry about the suffering of others because we can’t stop it anyway, and just make sure we who are inside our circle of concern are OK. Given that goes against everything Jesus taught and lived, we’re safe to abandon this option.

But another way is found in Jesus’ parables of the end times. Jesus repeatedly tells stories where the master returns at a surprising time and honors the ones who simply tried to be faithful at their work. In other words, Jesus says again and again, just be about what you are called to be and do. Don’t worry about your impact. Just be faithful to your calling. Then, no matter how it all ends, you’ll be doing what needs doing.

And we know what that means for us. We can act on this.

There are needs, and we have God-given resources, and we can do something. There are children and adults in Palestine and India and Chile and Guatemala and Nigeria who need God’s care and love, and we can do something about that through our global work. There are partners in this city and through the work of our ELCA siblings around the country doing vital work for those in need of God’s grace that struggle for funds, and we can do something about that through our tithes and offerings.

There is ministry here in this place and in our neighborhood that needs doing the rest of this year and next year, and beyond, vital work of being God’s presence amongst our neighbors and seeing God’s presence in our neighbors, that in our serving and working and caring we can do something about.

So don’t grow weary in doing what is right, my dear family, Paul says.

Because nothing you do in Christ is ever in vain. Not your smile to the person on the corner with the cardboard sign and your greeting of peace. Not your helping of your neighbor, or your making a call to your elected leaders, or the time and passion and wealth you spend with your family in this faith community serving in any number of different ways. None of that is wasted. None is ineffective.

And: you’re in God’s hands and can’t ultimately be harmed, Jesus says, even if all this falls down. You’re in God’s grace and forgiveness, covering all you’ve done and haven’t done that’s hindered God’s work in the world. The grace of God fills you, the Spirit of God transforms you, and God removes your weariness.

In the end, nothing will last. But for now, you are needed, and Christ promises today you are blessed with Christ’s strength and courage, and wisdom to be able to serve.

So, my dear family, do not grow weary in doing what is right.

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen