April 5 ~ Easter Sunday

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Jeremiah 31:1-6

Psalm : 118:1-2, 14-24

Acts 10:34-43

Matthew 28:1-10

Sermon by Joel Crouse

Christ is Risen!  Christ is Risen!  Alleluia!

Easter morning invites us into a story that is both familiar and astonishing, and yet it is easy to let its power slip past us. We hear about an empty tomb, an angel, two women running in fear and joy, and we think we already know what it means. 

But the heart of Easter is not simply that Jesus arose. It is that God’s answer to a world full of harm, fear, and injustice is not to condemn us but to offer renewal.  In despair, we are offered possibility. In resignation, we are given courage. 

Jeremiah gives us the first hint of this when he speaks to a people who have lived through devastation. They know exile, violence, and the collapse of everything they trusted. Yet God says to them, “I have loved you with an everlasting love… again I will build you, and you shall be built.”  

This is not a sentimental promise. It is a declaration that even after the worst has happened, God is not finished. We are not finished. God imagines a future where people plant vineyards again, where joy returns, where communities rebuild what was broken. The resurrection is a moment of new beginning, and fresh starts, and renewed energy. God opens the tomb and builds us up.

That is an important message on this Easter. We arrive here to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus – this miracle offering from God – and yet also burdened by difficult realities of the world right now. We see leaders who trade truth for power. We see communities targeted because of who they are. We see the vulnerable pushed aside. We see the ethical bar fall lower and lower. We are good at condemning.  We are less strong when it comes to pushing back and building up. This is why God comes to us at Easter and does the building up on our behalf.

Easter is the happy ending to Lent. And sometimes happy endings get a bad rap for being easy and maybe fluffy. But in happy endings we find goals to aspire to, we find comfort in grim times, and we find hope. And that’s the story of Easter – an aspirational, comforting, and hopeful promise from God. 

But Easter also asks something of us: a response. To look for the people who need protection. To shift our attention from the ones who cause harm to the ones who bear its price. 

There is a village that shows us what this looks like. During the Holocaust, the people of Le Chambon‑sur‑Lignon (luh sham-bon-suer-leen-yon), a small Protestant community in the mountains of France, quietly sheltered thousands of Jewish refugees. They hid children in their homes, forged identity papers, and smuggled families across borders. They did this while so many others responded with fear and conformity. When asked why they risked their lives, many villagers simply said, “We had no choice. They were human beings.”

Their pastor, André Trocmé, told his congregation that the Gospel demanded a refusal to cooperate with injustice. And they listened. They did not spend their days condemning the cruelty around them, though they knew it well. They spent their days saving lives. They focused not on the perpetrators but on the vulnerable. Not on judgment but on service. Not on fear but on courage. They lived as if resurrection were already happening. And because of their bravery, many lives were saved.

Easter is the celebration of that serving, saving spirit that resides in each one of us. A spirit embodied by Jesus throughout his ministry. When he told the story of the Good Samaritan, he did not linger on the priest and the Levite who walked by; he lifted up the one who stopped. When he met the woman at the well, he did not dwell on the people who had shamed her; he focused on her dignity and her voice. When he called Zacchaeus down from the tree, he did not define him by his past; he invited him into a new future. Jesus revealed what was wrong in the world not to condemn it, but to show us what could be right.

And so, Easter morning begins with two women who refuse to be bystanders. They go to the tomb. They face the darkness. They show up. And because they show up, they are the first to hear the angel say, “Do not be afraid.” They are the first to see the risen Christ. Their courage becomes the doorway through which hope enters the world again.

This is the invitation of Easter: To build the world Jeremiah imagined, where people plant vineyards again, where joy returns, where communities rebuild what was broken. Easter is the call to live like the villagers of Le Chambon—quietly, courageously, persistently rolling away stones. To feel joy, and to create joy. To see the empty tomb and to be inspired with the power of the gospel. To be the women who bravely ran forward, and, in their courage, found God. 

Lent has ended. Easter has arrived. Christ is Risen!  Christ is Risen! Allelujah!

Now it is our turn.  

Amen

April 3 ~ Good Friday

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Psalm 22

The entirety of the Gospel of John

Sermon by Joel Crouse

Stay here now, in the crowd lining the path to Golgotha, while Good Friday confronts us with a story we would rather not hear.

Jesus is arrested, tortured, humiliated, and executed by the machinery of government:  the Roman soldiers who are just doing their duty. Pontius Pilate, the weak leader, who would rather hide comfortably behind a lie than save an innocent man from death. The executioner who nails Jesus’s hands and feet and tortures him, as he has done to so many others.

And all around him, stand crowds of people, the human mob. Some join in, throwing stones, taking out their rage on a man they do not know. Many, many more do nothing at all. They watch. They turn away. They say, “This is not my concern.”

In his book on the moral history of humanity, philosopher Jonathan Glover writes that the greatest moral catastrophes of the twentieth century were not only the work of perpetrators of evil and injustice. They were also created by the silence of those who stood nearby. Glover argues that cruelty thrives under three particular conditions: 1. when ordinary people convince themselves that someone else will act; 2, when we tell ourselves that nothing can be done; or 3, when we accept or ignore the suffering of others as simply the cost of keeping our own lives intact.

Good Friday is the story of God’s entering that world of bystanders.

A world like Jozefow in 1942.

Józefów was a small, poor town in eastern Poland. Before the war, 2,800 Jewish residents lived there, with long roots in the community. After the Nazis invaded, another 1,100 Jewish people were relocated there, despite the lack of resources. By 1942, overcrowding, hunger, and a typhus epidemic had devastated the residents.

On a summer morning that year, Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of about 500 men from the city of Hamburg, were given orders to round up the town’s Jewish residents in the forest and shoot them.

The reserve police battalion was composed of ordinary people much like us: middle-aged husbands and fathers who had been drafted into police service. Postal clerks and dock workers and salespeople with no special training, who had never before fired a gun at a human. They weren’t idealogues. They were ordinary, regular people, as we understand ordinary and regular people to be.

The Major of the Battalion, Wilhelm Trapp, was shocked by this order. He shared it with his men, and then made this offer: anyone who did not feel up to the task could step out. No punishment or consequences.

There were, as I said, 500 members in the battalion. Of that 500, about a dozen took up that offer. The rest remained, and on that day and into the night, they dragged families from their homes, marched women, children, and elderly to the forest, and shot them at close range. They murdered fifteen hundred people.

As the accounts show, many of the men who did this cried about it. They got drunk. They threw up. But they didn’t stop.  As some later said, they were too afraid of being seen as weak or disloyal.  Or as one man later said, “I didn’t want to be laughed at.”

What pushed them forward, Glover writes, is not unlike what held the rest of the townspeople quiet while they watched their neighbors being taken screaming into the woods. It is not unlike what stopped the crowd from rescuing Jesus, despite knowing that he was innocent.

The list includes the following: Conformity – once Jesus started up that hill, it was harder to stop. Obedience to authority – after all, didn’t Pontius Pilate sign off on this? Fear of social censure: what if someone judges me for speaking out? Moral numbing: the first step, the first bullet is hardest, the second and third step, the second and third bullets are easier. Diffusion of responsibility: I am not in charge; what can I change?  And crowd momentum: everyone is doing it, everyone is thinking it; I might as well go along to get along.

Above it all, this phrase: Not my business. Not my business.

The massacre at Józefów, like the murder at Golgatha, was possible only because people fell silent in the face of evil.

They are all there on Good Friday -- ghosts in our own hearts, reminding us of times when we fell silent when we should have spoken up. The indifferent bystander who looked up at the noise as Jesus processed to the cross and then went back to sweeping her stoop. The complicit bystander who joined in because being angry felt good, or because going along was safer than resisting. The fearful who saw the injustice and wept for Jesus, but were too cowardly to act.

Afterward, many of those bystanders, who would have gone away, perhaps felt shame and convinced themselves that they weren’t responsible.

But this is Good Friday. It is not only the story of what was done to Jesus. It is the story of what was not done for Jesus. It is the story of what happens when a crowd decides that someone’s suffering does not merit their intervention.

Dr. Glover suggests a solution: moral imagination – the ability to recognize humanity in the one who is suffering and feel responsible to help them.

And so, on Good Friday, we are asked: where do we stand? Whose suffering do we see?

But God is not calling us to a life of guilt. Good Friday is a call to courage.

And we find it there, in the shadow of the cross, among our last group of bystanders. There we find the women who walked with Jesus as he stumbled, and stayed with him, powerless to save him, powerless to do anything but bravely bear witness so that he knew he was not alone.

Even when hope was gone, they resisted with love.  Amen

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April 2 ~ Maundy Thursday

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John 13:1–17; 13:31b–35

Sermon by Joel Crouse

There are nights in the church year that feel almost too intimate for a sanctuary. Maundy Thursday is one of them. Tonight the Gospel doesn’t give us an idea. It gives us a scene. Water. A towel. A body leaning forward. Hands doing the thing that is normally beneath notice. The kind of work that keeps a household human.

John begins with a sentence that feels like a deep inhale: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” Not “to the end” like a deadline. “To the end” like the full stretch of love—love that goes beyond what is comfortable. Love that doesn’t quit when it gets complicated. Love that gets its hands dirty doing the right thing.

Jesus gets up from the table, takes off his outer robe, ties a towel around himself, and begins to wash feet. And immediately the story collides with our instincts. Because everything in us wants love to stay dignified. We want love that looks good and can be thanked properly. We want love that doesn’t ask too much and stays at the level of words and intentions.

But Jesus kneels.

He touches what is dusty. What is tired. What has walked through the mess of life. What smells like the day. And he does it without explanation, without a speech, without demanding that anyone understand first.

This is the first uncomfortable truth of Maundy Thursday: Jesus does not only call us to love. Jesus insists on loving us in ways that dismantle our pride.

Peter, of course, says what we’re all thinking: “You will never wash my feet.”

It’s not just modesty. It’s the panic of being seen. Because if Jesus washes our feet, we have to admit we have feet—real ones—feet that get dirty, and need care, and are not impressive. We have to admit we are not self-sufficient—that we are not above need. And that is hard for us. Hard for capable people. Hard for anyone who has survived by staying in control.

Jesus says, gently and firmly, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” In other words: this is not a symbolic add-on. This is the shape of the life we share with Christ. A life where God’s love comes close enough to touch what we thought was secret, but is seen by God. A life where grace is not abstract; it’s embodied.

And then Jesus turns it outward: “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

Now, at this point, some of us want to spiritualize it—turn it into a general reminder to be kind. But Jesus is not vague. He is showing a pattern: love that reaches others at their level. Love that takes the posture of service. Love that does not cling to status.

And it’s here that the progressive edge of this text shows itself. Because foot-washing is not only about personal humility. It’s also about how power works. In every society, there are people expected to do the dirty work while others remain untouched by it. There are bodies that get served and bodies that do the serving. There are people whose needs are treated as inconvenient and people whose needs are treated as urgent. There are those who are expected to “keep it together” and those who are allowed to fall apart.

Jesus steps right into that arrangement and breaks it open from within. He does not romanticize suffering. He doesn’t bless hierarchy. He does not say, “This is just the way things are.” Jesus kneels and says, with his body: this is what God is like.

And then—almost as if he wants to make sure we don’t miss it—John gives us the second half of tonight’s text. After Judas leaves and the night deepens, Jesus says, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified…,” and then: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you…. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.”

It’s important that he says this when everything is about to go wrong. Love is not a strategy for when life is stable. Love is what God does when life is unraveling.

And the commandment is not “Be nice.” The commandment is “Love one another as I have loved you.” With towel-love. With kneeling-love. With stubborn-love. With love that refuses to discard people. With sacrificial love.

This is the point where the church has to be honest with itself. If our “love” doesn’t move us toward people outside our financial status, then it’s not like what Jesus showed us. If our “love” extends only to those who agree with us, it’s probably not acting like Jesus. If our “love” never costs us anything—time, comfort, money, reputation—then it might be something else entirely.

This is why we, as a community, don’t just politely hand money over to other groups trying to love like Jesus. We make the meal for the homeless, and sandwiches for youth living on the street, and quilts for people who are cold, and serve coffee and pie to people living in shelters, and deliver flowers to those who feel forgotten or lost. We do these hands-on, earthly things as an embodied response to the love and grace we have already received from Jesus.

Tonight Jesus doesn’t give us a theory of atonement. He gives us a basin. He gives us a towel. He gives us a picture of God that is so close to human vulnerability that we can barely stand it.

And then he says, essentially: this is what we are for.

So, if you think tonight about Jesus’s foot-washing, don’t spiritualize it. And if you come up for communion, don’t think of it as a reenactment of the Last Supper. Let it be what it is: a living sign that Christ is still among us, still bending low, still washing what is dusty, still giving of himself and insisting that we belong to one another.

Because this is how Jesus loves to the end: not by remaining above the mess, but by entering it—by taking what is ordinary and making it holy.

And if we let him, that love will unmake us and remake us. 

Amen