You, Too
You matter to God, too. You get to ask for healing and hope, too. You are God’s beloved, always. Trust that.
Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, Lect. 5 B
Texts: Isaiah 40:21-31; 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
God’s people felt abandoned by the God who had chosen them.
In exile, they wondered why God disregarded them, ignored their bitter path.
And today Isaiah speaks hope: “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The God you call I-AM-WHO-I-AM is not only Creator of the ends of the earth, this God never tires, never grows weary, and is coming to bring power to those who are faint, to strengthen you, God’s people. You are going to be healed, restored.
This is beautiful. But it’s remarkable to me that Israel felt they could cry out their pain and sorrow to God. Because I’m sometimes not sure I have the right to ask God for such healing and hope for me.
In our Prayer of the Day we asked, “Make us agents of your healing and wholeness.”
And we lean into that prayer. So many suffer in the world from hunger and need, and there are so many massive problems in our world, from racism to sexism to oppression, to rising fascism here. And in this place we know the Triune God has called us to do something. To be Christ’s healing. So of course we pray, “make us agents of your healing and wholeness.”
But do you know you get to ask God for healing, too? And I don’t mean “you” for this whole congregation here. I mean you, singular, you personally. Do you know God cares about your pain, your suffering, your struggles? Do you know you’re permitted to pray, “send me an agent of your healing and wholeness, please”?
Have you not known this? Have you not heard?
It’s hard to know what we know and believe we also have a right to ask for help.
The privilege so many of us enjoy, some more than others even in this community, is real. We know that so many of our neighbors daily suffer from things we can’t imagine experiencing. We’ve learned to open our eyes and see that privilege, and in this place – I see it all the time – in this place we are a group of people committed to making a difference.
But there’s a trap there. With a faith like the one we share, you might find it hard to believe you also get to name your pain and ask God to help you. Maybe it’s part of the cultural truth of this area that so many of us learned: “Don’t complain, lots of people have it worse than you.” It’s definitely deeply rooted in my DNA. Why would I tell people if I was in pain or suffering? Isn’t that just whining, compared to the horrors that so many go through?
But have you not known? Have you not heard? God loves you – you specifically – with a love that cannot be stopped by anything.
Jesus, in deep wisdom, commanded you to love your neighbor as you love yourself.
For Jesus, it’s simple: the loving of neighbor you want to do starts with you loving yourself. A friend of mine puts it this way: if you want to live a life of non-violence, the first step is to not be violent to yourself.
So if you’re suffering, you deserve to ask for healing, too. If you’ve got decades of abuse to work through, or new diagnoses of disease facing you, if you’ve felt ostracized or left out, if you don’t think you belong, or matter, or will be missed, God wants to bring life to you. And if you are so filled with guilt over your privilege, or your implicit biases, or your participation, unwilling or not, in the systemic evil that surrounds us everywhere, you get to be forgiven, too.
Jesus said God so loved the cosmos God came to us in the Son, not to condemn but to heal, to save. (John 3:16-17) But Jesus also says God so loved you that God came for you. For your healing. For your new heart. For your abundant life. Don’t omit yourself from the “cosmos.” You also count to God.
Have you really not known this? Didn’t you hear today?
Isaiah says, and you sang the same in the Psalm, that God counts the stars and calls them all by name, doesn’t miss a single one. But God also heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds. The Triune God who holds the entire universe of stars in embracing love, calling them by name in joy, still notices your tears, your sorrow, your pain, your fear, and comes to you, too.
I-AM-WHO-I-AM gives power to the faint ones, Isaiah says, and strength to the powerless ones. That means you, too. Those who wait for I-AM-WHO-I-AM will fly like eagles and never get weary. That means you, too.
It’s right there in these stories of Jesus.
Jesus is doing all these healings and exorcisms, and is probably exhausted. So he heads to Peter and Andrew’s home. And Peter asks him to heal his mother-in-law. Maybe Peter worried he was imposing. Maybe he didn’t. But he asked. And she was made well.
All these people heard about someone healing and driving out demons and flocked to Jesus. They didn’t think, “it’s not for me, others have it worse.” They thought, “how can I not go?”
But you already know this. You’ve heard this.
You’re here or joining online because deep down you need to hear that God loves you. Whether you feel attacked by demonic powers or stricken by medical illness, whether you don’t know where the pain is from or you do, whether you have a sadness needing comfort or a fear needing hope, you came here to see if maybe, maybe, you can find healing and wholeness from God, too. And that’s a good thing.
And yes, in worship you will hear that you are called to be Christ’s love in the world, to reach out to others with God’s wholeness. That’s good and right, too, and you take it very seriously.
But just for today, maybe try to trust this: The Triune God has come to this world in Christ for you. For your healing. For your life. For your hope. There is no one more important in God’s eyes than you, and no one God wants to hear from right now more than you.
Have you not known? Have you not heard? You are God’s beloved, and always will be. Go ahead and ask for what you need. God’s waiting for that very thing, and never gets tired or weary.
In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
Blood and Flesh
God transcends holy purity to enter into impurity in blood and flesh, sharing even the hard and gross experiences of life with us.
Vicar Lauren Mildahl
The Presentation of our Lord
Texts: Hebrews 2:14-18, Luke 2:22-40
Beloved saints, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
It’s hard being trapped in these bodies.
Even in the best of times, when everything is working like it should, these bodies of ours still require so much care, and they still produce so many various fluids and waste. Even when we are perfectly healthy, living in a body is, just a little bit, gross.
That’s what I was thinking about this week as I was imagining this scene in the temple. Imagining the moment when Simeon took the baby Jesus in his arms, I was reminded of the times I held my newborn nieces and nephews. And how cute and tiny and perfect they were – but also how their tiny baby bodies were kind of gross sometimes. Every parent I know has a horror story that ends with the line, “and that’s how we learned that you always need to bring two sets of spare clothes.”
Snot and spit up and overflowing diapers-that’s what being around a baby is like.
Perpetual messiness, briefly interrupted by rare moments of cleanliness. And so who’s to say that while Simeon was singing the Nunc Dimittis, Jesus wasn’t leaving some kind of fluid on him? Like babies do. Because he was. A real alive baby, experiencing the reality of living in a baby body.
And I think that’s pretty amazing! God alive as a baby! Tiny and vulnerable and smelly and alive – just like we are!
And this was clearly an important point for the writer of Hebrews as well.
Our text today begins in the middle of a theological argument centered around Jesus’ divinity and Jesus’ humanity – trying to answer the question that Christ-followers have been grappling with since the days when the New Testament was still being written: Why did God become human?
The Preacher in Hebrews answers: “Since, therefore, the children [that is humans – creatures – you and me] – since therefore the children share flesh and blood, [Jesus] himself likewise shared the same things…to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect.”
To free us and to help us and to reconnect us with God – Jesus shared our flesh and blood.
Actually, in the Greek, it’s the other way around. It says “haimatos kai sarkos” – “blood and flesh.”
It probably shouldn’t make that much of a difference. Every English translation I could find switched the two around because it makes perfect sense to use the familiar English idiom “flesh and blood.” But I almost wish the translators would leave it in the original order: blood and flesh.
Blood and flesh feels so much visceral, more connected to the earthy stuff of our bodies. The liquids and the solids that make up these meat sacks. Jesus doesn’t just share our “flesh and blood” because we have some kind of kinship in a nice, sanitized, metaphorical way.
Jesus shares our blood and flesh – our experience of life from within our biological containers.
So that he could share in our experiences about everything we undergo in life – every joy and pleasure and satisfaction and every craving and pain and ache and excretion of our bodies. Everything! Even the things that are a little bit gross. The things that are literally called “unclean” in the Torah.
God becoming blood and flesh meant that Jesus, like everyone else, was “unclean,” ritually impure, most of the time.
Purity, for Jews, doesn’t mean a state of sinlessness.
It doesn’t really have anything to do with sin – it has to do with living! Any time you come in contact with the fluids and the stuff of living, because of menstruation or because of ejaculation or because of childbirth or because of burying a corpse1 – all these things of blood and flesh – which are perfectly normal and perfectly good and healthy – are unclean as well.
The idea of maintaining a permanent state of ritual purity is laughable. It isn’t supposed to even be possible for creatures who are blood and flesh. For Jews like Jesus, permanent purity was only achievable for God, who didn’t experience the viscera of life, or for angels, spiritual beings who didn’t experience embodied earthiness.
Because that’s what holiness is: that set-apartness that transcends reality and materiality.
God’s holiness lies in the fact God isn’t a being, God is Being-Itself.2 The creative force of all existence, permeating all existence, and somehow also the things that doesn’t exist – so completely and utterly incomprehensible to us because we are small and finite and contained. And how could we ever approach divinity with our limited senses and leaking orifices?
We can’t. Holiness isn’t our natural state. And this is what the rituals of purification practiced by Jews for centuries are for. And if you remember, this is half of the reason that the family went to the temple that day: “When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses.” Most scholars assume that Luke was talking about a purification ritual that was required after childbirth. Childbirth is one of the most bloody and fleshy experiences a person can have – an experience so human, so creaturely, so alive, so good, but so different from the intangible, ineffable, disembodied holiness of God. The rituals of purification helped connect the two, helped tend to the joys and sorrows of living and dying, helped unite the physical and the spiritual, helped each person see beyond their blood and flesh container to glimpse the transcendent holiness of God.
And it is in the temple that day – after going through the ritual practices of purification – that Simeon and Anna recognize the Messiah. Salvation is revealed and the veil is lifted – and what they see is that God has chosen impurity. God has chosen the uncleanness and the grossness of blood and flesh. God has entered into life.
So that Simeon holds in his arms, not God – holy and unknowable, but God – tangible and accessible. God, transcending divine purity itself to become an unclean baby boy.
This is the paradox at the heart of our faith.
The paradox of the kind of love that leads purity to embrace impurity. That depth of love that leads God to share our human body. And this is the paradox that we celebrate every Eucharist when we proclaim with singing God is Holy, Holy, Holy and then immediately turn around and hold up the bread and say the words of Jesus “This is my body.” This is my blood and flesh, eat it so you don’t forget how my love drew me to you – every single part of you. Even the parts of your life that are hard and gross – you are good – you are beloved.
You are saints – holy ones.
You are fleshy containers not just of humanity, but of divinity as well. Catching glimpses of God’s transcendent perspective through Christ. So that your experience of life, though mediated through your blood and flesh, is not limited by it. Because in Christ you experience life that transcends the limits of your body. In Christ you are free from the fear of death. You are free to embrace the goodness of the grossness of created life, and free to welcome death as a friend. So that like, Simeon, you can sing, “Lord you may now dismiss your servant in peace.” You are free, through the love of Christ, Jesus our brother in blood and flesh.
You are free.
In the name of the Father, of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
1. This list is adapted from Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington’s commentary on the Gospel of Luke, 2018, pg 64.
2. This section relies heavily on the works of Paul Tillich, especially Systematic Theology: Volume 1, 1951.
Worship, February 4, 2024
The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, Lect. 5 B
Download worship folder for Sunday, February 4, 2024.
Presiding and Preaching: Pastor Joseph Crippen
Readings and prayers: Allen Heggen, lector; David Anderson, assisting minister
Organist: Cantor David Cherwien
Download next Sunday’s readings for this Tuesday’s noon Bible study.
Worship, Friday, February 2, 2024
The Presentation of Our Lord
Download worship folder for the Presentation of Our Lord, February 2, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
Presiding: Pastor Joseph G. Crippen
Preaching: Vicar Lauren Mildahl
Readings and prayers: David Engen, lector; Jan Harbaugh, Assisting Minister
Organist: Cantor David Cherwien
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