"We are at the same Table, together"

Preached on the Feast of All the Faithful Departed (transferred), November 4, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Wisdom 3:1-9
Psalm 130:2-7
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
John 5:24-27

All Souls Day 1910, by Aladar Korosfoi-Kriesch

A poem by Seamus Heaney:

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

***

We will gather again later this evening, in the dying of the year, in our burial garden, to pray for those we love who have died. We honor our grief, and their lives, with solemnity. We proclaim our hope with faith. And we make our song of alleluia with confidence, even if our voices break with the freight of it all.

Our earliest forebears in the Christian faith, those who knew Jesus personally and the couple of generations that followed them: they were especially concerned about the topic of death. Many of them had assumed that Christ would be returning in their lifetimes, so the deaths of the first members of the movement were alarming and upsetting. They had to reinterpret the Gospel. They had to make sense of how they were a people of the Resurrection who nonetheless experienced physical death.

And so they have left us tonight’s passage in the first letter to the Thessalonians, which may be the very oldest book of the New Testament, in which Paul deliberately, consciously tries to console the first Christians that the dead will rise again and meet them, with the Lord, in the air. We may or may not imagine trumpets and clouds, but we share their great hope, and we proclaim with confidence another consolation they gave us: The first Christians taught us that we meet our beloved dead even now, long before a great apocalyptic reunion. We meet our beloved dead here at this Table. At this Table, the great cloud of witnesses descends as we go up, and all are together for the feast.

But I want to bring all of these grand ideas home for you with a story from my father, from many years ago. It happened in the 1970s, when he was still an attorney in southwest Minnesota. He was beginning to shape his career around family law, focusing particularly on the legal and social needs of children. This focus developed across his career, into the years when he sat on the Minnesota Court of Appeals.

One of my father’s clients was a woman in a domestic dilemma. I don’t recall the details, I think mostly because as her attorney, my father wasn’t at liberty to reveal the details. And they are none of our business, of course. As they worked together, my father learned that this woman was a person of faith, but did not have a community of faith. It’s possible that the family situation had left her abruptly without a church home, for some reason. She was in deep personal distress. She felt alone; she was alone.

My father invited her to come to church – to his church, the church where all seven of his children were baptized, St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Worthington, Minnesota. He mentioned that they offered Holy Communion, if I recall correctly, once a month. (Here, at St. Paul’s, tonight is our fifth celebration of the Holy Eucharist in just four days!)

He invited her to church, and then my father said this to his client: “If you come on a Communion Sunday, you will probably be sitting somewhere else in the room, away from me. We will probably get up at different times to receive Communion. If you see me up there while you’re at your seat, or if you see me in my pew while you’re up there, I want you to know: We are at the same table. Together.” 

We are at the same Table, together.

My father is not near my pew now, which in these years of my life is that bench over there. When I receive the sacrament, I do not see him with my eyes. But as I grow older, I look and feel more and more like my father, and I am weaving these stories of his into my own life. I sometimes look across this room and see someone, and feel that same connection he described to his lonesome and frightened client. 

None of that is possible for me without my father, whose physical presence has escaped far beyond this room, but whose spiritual presence is palpably here, alongside someone you love but cannot see. And so, yes, like you, I grieve, but then I dry my eyes, and I see my father in my very own hands – I have his hands – and I see my father when I look across this room and see you.

Our beloved dead sometimes tear our hearts apart with grief. But they are here with us, meeting the Lord with us, joining their prayers with ours, and drawing alongside us at the Table that banishes loneliness and fear.

The courage to turn the other cheek

Preached on the Feast of All Saints (transferred, Year C), November 2, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18
Psalm 149
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31

Celebration, by John August Swanson

Jesus said to them, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.”

Sometimes, over the course of my life, I have kicked myself with frustration. I’m in a conflict with someone, and I give away the store. I sell myself down the river. I don’t stick up for myself. I lament my own cowardice. And then, deepening my frustration, I think of a snappy comeback two or three days later, far beyond the moment of confrontation when I could have really zapped my adversary with a great line. 

I think of this occasionally when people voice their frustration about weak political resistance during this apocalyptic time. In the Senate primary campaign in the state of Maine, two candidates are taking up familiar positions: an establishment candidate in her late seventies who seems like a safe choice but is hardly inspiring; and a young idealist with the common touch who stirs and inspires many people but has a controversial past, and a controversial tattoo. I read news reports on this and I think, “I’ve never been to Maine, but I’ve seen this play. I know how it ends.”

We could really use a win. And by “we” I don’t mean a particular political party – I really don’t. My parents formed me to belong to one party with the same loyalty my father showed to one car company; but at this point I just want to support someone, anyone who can reduce student debt and reduce atmospheric CO2 and reduce predatory business practices and reduce the toxic madness of social media and reduce voter suppression and reduce the cost of all prescription drugs and reduce the stratospheric housing prices that cause most of our urban problems and reduce the environmental threat of AI and reduce the violence, racism, transphobia, and misogyny in our culture. And then, on day two…

But my hope for a political savior is not all that different from my vain hope to have a quick, witty comeback in a personal argument. It’s an attractive vision: characters portrayed by Martin Sheen and Allison Janney are running the country, and you and I, we’ve got Hollywood moments in our personal lives, rising up with just the right things to say and do, in every situation. We’ve got personal courage and interpersonal skill; we have what it takes to meet the moment; we’ve got this.

We could even point to all the saints as examples of this vision. The saints are great, right? You might know that old hymn with the line, “If you cannot pray like Peter, if you cannot preach like Paul, you can tell the love of Jesus, and say he died for all.” The saints rise in our imaginations as great figures of strength and skill. Dorothy Day was a twentieth-century saint known for her courage. (Okay, Dorothy Day technically isn’t a saint yet, but her cause is being championed in Catholic circles, and she was born in Chicago. I like her odds.) She wasn’t born in a faith tradition, and became an anarchist and social activist in a fully secular context.

But upon her conversion to Roman Catholicism, Dorothy Day quickly made the connection between her secular ideals and Catholic social teaching. She was a co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, which organizes social-service agencies that not only ameliorate suffering for those with food and shelter insecurity, but also advocate for them. The Catholic Worker Movement is known for its nonviolent stance and strong critique of the unequal distribution of wealth.

It would be easy to number Dorothy Day among the mighty saints, the Christian superheroes we’d love to vote for, the champions we need so desperately right now. But though I never met her, I suspect she would be among the many saints who disdained such honors in their lifetimes. This is the great disappointment of the saints: they all went down. Most of the first ones were martyrs, slaughtered for their beliefs. Paul (or someone speaking as Paul would speak) says this in the second letter to Timothy: “As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come.”

The saints are weak. The saints fail. The saints align themselves with the poor and the oppressed, and whenever you do that, you tend to take on the fate of the poor and the oppressed. There is not much worldly glory when you stock our little free pantry, or pull a wagon of hot soup around Uptown. There isn’t much snappy dialogue when you’re knitting hats and socks, or holding the hand of someone in hospice care, or just keeping your mouth shut and making eye contact and truly listening to someone telling you their story. The Catholic Worker Movement doesn’t win pennants, or primaries.

But sainthood – the life of the saints, being a so-called ‘saint’ – carries even harder consequences than the mild humility of social service. There’s a delicate loveliness in being a faithful companion, in sewing warm clothes, in stacking cans and dry goods on a shelf. But Christian saints also enter the fray, and we do so without weapons, without devastating retorts, without winning campaign strategies.

Let’s hear the losing strategy again, the strategy our Savior gives us for political engagement, for battle against the powers and principalities of this world. Here it is:

Jesus said to them, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.”

This can hit us, on first or second hearing, as weak, even pathetic. But a key insight is often lost when we hear these words. When someone says to you, “Turn the other cheek,” they usually misinterpret the teaching as encouraging passive submission. It sounds like we should just be doormats, that we should let the aggressor just take what they like. If the army invades our country or bombs our hospitals, we should just take it, let it happen, give in.

But that is not what Jesus is saying. His first hearers would have caught the subversive resistance in his teaching. In their time and place, any Roman official could strike someone on the face to shame them, but the honor code forbade them to hit the person below them more than once. That crossed a line: two hits amounts to abuse. A Roman official could also demand that a noncitizen give him her coat, but not also her shirt: that’s too much, because now she is naked at nightfall, and the Roman official brings shame upon himself for depriving another human being of basic clothing. 

It’s a subtle tactic that might not make much sense in our own cynical and chaotic place and time, but hear the great insight of this instruction: by turning the other cheek, you shame your opponent, whose face is now red because they went too far. To do this, you need a lot of courage. For one thing, it hurts to be struck on the face. It’s cold at night without your coat or even your shirt. 

Turning the other cheek is a stance of provocative defiance. There is a good reason the first saints were slaughtered. Their movement posed a real threat. For one thing, they shared all that they had in common, and this is an economic provocation: it disturbs the society of the empire when people see a group operating with such health and solidarity. And their movement posed a real threat by making it clear who the bullies were, empowering more and more people to stand up to them.

All of this might seem too subtle. Won’t the good guy do good things by fighting? But this is a powerful way to fight. This is a strong way to be in conflict, and to be effective in a conflict, even if the positive effect happens long after the death of the saint who steps into the fray with their cheek turned. It takes more courage, not less, to let the adversary score points at your own expense, and rise up as the better person.

The theologian Howard Thurman eloquently writes about the predicament of saints of color, who all too often have no choice but to turn their cheeks to the slap of the oppressor. In Thurman’s vivid description, their “backs are against the wall,” existentially. A person of color is rarely going to identify with the Roman official who can physically hit their inferiors and take their coats. Most of the people in this room, including me, are the aggressor in the story. But Saint Howard Thurman presents a Way of subversive resistance that can be taken up by all of us if not for our own sake, then for the sake of our neighbor whose back is against the wall. As we learn so often in the lives of the saints, this work is costly. There’s a reason it takes great courage.

In his great work, Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman tells a story about his mother, and how she embodied for him the courageous Way of Christian faith. She was a Black woman with a Black son: her back was against the wall. But faith helped her overcome any fear or hatred she may have felt, for herself or for her vulnerable son. Here is his story, a story for all God’s children, for all who want to learn how to turn the other cheek with courage. Thurman writes:

“When I was a very small boy, Halley’s comet visited our solar system. For a long time I did not see the giant in the sky because I was not permitted to remain up after sundown … One night I was awakened by my mother, who told me to dress quickly and come with her out into the backyard to see the comet. I shall never forget it if I live forever. My mother stood with me, her hand resting on my shoulder, while I, in utter, speechless awe, beheld the great spectacle with its fan of light spreading across the heavens. The silence was like that of absolute motion. Finally, after what seemed to me an interminable time interval, I found my speech. With bated breath I said, ‘What will happen to us if that comet falls out of the sky?’

“My mother’s silence was so long that I looked from the comet to her face, and there I beheld something in her countenance that I had seen only once before, when I came into her room and found her in prayer. When she spoke, she said, ‘Nothing will happen to us, Howard; God will take care of us.’

“O simplehearted mother of mine, in one glorious moment you put your heart on the ultimate affirmation of the human spirit! Many things have I seen since that night. Times without number I have learned that life is hard, as hard as crucible steel; but as the years have unfolded, the majestic power of my mother’s glowing words has come back again and again, beating out its rhythmic chant in my own spirit. Here are the faith and the awareness that overcome fear and transform it into the power to strive, to achieve, and not to yield.” 

Salt and Light

Preached at the Holy Eucharist with the Commendation and Committal of Ellen and John Hill, November 1, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
Psalm 23
Matthew 5:13-16

Ellen is salt.

John is light.

We begin with salt. Salt is often overlooked, a little canister in your kitchen that hides in plain sight, but salt is everywhere. Just a half teaspoon develops the flavor of your soup, or your cookies. Salt is the base for medications. You use salt when making ice cream to lower the melting point of the ice. Salt preserves food; it de-ices roads and airplane wings. Our bodies require salt to regulate fluids and nerve impulses. We use salt in cleansers. You keep salt on hand for your healing bath, and to soothe your throat. Salt softens hard water. Life on earth began in the salty sea.

And so, in turn, consider Ellen, our salt friend: she is modest and receding, but her influence is everywhere. She draws alongside you with a word, or with her famous side-eye. She quietly reads a library of books and attends countless plays; then she turns that curated wisdom into a lifelong vocation of skillful companionship. She is the ‘fairy godmother’ for countless children and youth; she comes to the aid of foster families; she is a feminist whose chosen full-time job was raising three children; she smiles with mischief when a grandchild says something lightly salty – or whenever they say something that their lightly-salty Nana would have said.

Meanwhile, John blazes. His light is blinding: we all know a polymath when we see one, a dazzling supernova who builds five or six careers just by following his own natural curiosity. In six weeks or so, under the shadows of the winter solstice, the church will once again imagine God as light. (More specifically, we will imagine Jesus Christ as our Dayspring.) ‘Dayspring’ is an older, poetic word for sunrise, for dawn, for a rising light, for a glorious star in the east. Our John shines with the Dayspring of Christ.

Ask John a question about this room, this sanctuary, and John’s star will rise in splendor: he’ll delightedly recount all the stories, all the background details that formed this house of prayer. He knows all about this pulpit, how it’s built like a boat, reinforced for hard sailing. He can tell you how everything works in here, architecturally but also theologically. He treasures hilarious old stories of wild parishioners who paused here. His eyes dance with light as he regales you, as he teaches you, as he makes your day with ideas and images, with stories and insights, with his endless dreams, with his insatiable creativity, in the visual and dramatic arts, but also in music – endless music. But then, to your astonishment, John turns the conversation back toward you: burning brightly with God’s light, John is truly interested in you, his neighbor, his friend, his kin. 

Ellen’s salt is everywhere, making life delicious, saving us from loneliness, encouraging and soothing us, delighting us with a word. And John’s light shines into every shadow, every dull corner, every dark day. 

Are they saints, these two? Of course! But they are also – and bear with me here: I’m about to say something that Ellen and John might heartily endorse – they are also, by heaven’s standards, not quite newsworthy. They are, in God’s sight, delightfully ordinary. All of you who sing their praises, please know that I share in your song, with gusto! Ellen and John are not newsworthy in God’s sight only because all of us are the salt of the earth; all of us are the light of the world. All of us, together, are salt and light.

The Good News does not belong only to two of our grievously departed friends, as much as our hearts ache with their incomprehensible absence. We join them, we draw alongside them, as salt and light. The salt washes over us at Baptism; the light dances on all of our heads, each of us aflame with the Spirit.

We grieve because these two are so easy to love, so tremendously strong and kind and wise and good. We grieve deeply, for those excellent reasons. But we also know – even if it’s hard at this particular moment to believe – we also know that everything Ellen and John taught us, everything they were and are, everything they showed us in lives of savory goodness and dancing sunlight, everything we grieve today is still right here, always here, close at hand.

You all are the salt of the earth, sent from here to save and preserve; to cleanse and enhance; to regulate and ravish; to deepen the flavors of life on this lovely planet.

You all are the light of the world, sent from here to enlighten those clouded with ignorance; to warm those chilled by the harsh injustice of the world; to delight and even dazzle Ellen and John’s grandchildren – and all children – with the wonders of this life. 

But we can all be forgiven for lingering a while longer in God’s garden, to grieve our departed friends. I’ll close with an image of a saint, an image of a woman in Paradise who captures or reflects – for me – the spirits of both Ellen and John. The Anglican writer C.S. Lewis wrote a fantasy novel that takes place at the edge, at the outskirts, of heaven. Lewis describes a saint walking down from the glorious mountains of heaven proper to speak to a poor soul at the edge, someone who isn’t sure he wants to stay.

We readers of the story see all of this through the eyes of a visitor, who turns to his heavenly guide with wonder and disbelief. Here is the scene:

“All down one long aisle of the forest the under-sides of the leafy branches had begun to tremble with dancing light… Some kind of procession was approaching us, and the light came from the persons who composed it.

“First came bright Spirits… who danced and scattered flowers… Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys and girls. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no [one] who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done… Only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.

“‘Is it?... Is it [the blessed Virgin Mary]?’ I whispered to my guide.

“‘Not at all,’ said he. ‘It’s someone you’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.’

“[I said], ‘She seems to be… well, a person of particular importance?’

“‘[Yes]. She is one of the great ones. You have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.’

“‘And who are these gigantic people,’ [I asked]... ‘Look! They’re like emeralds… who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?’

“‘Haven’t you read your Milton?’ [my guide replied.] ‘“A thousand liveried angels lackey her.”’

“‘And who are all these young men and women on each side?’

“‘They are her sons and daughters.’

“‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’

“‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’

“‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’

“‘No… [H]er motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more… [M]en looked on her [with] the kind of love that made them… truer to their own wives… Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.’

“I looked at my Teacher in amazement.” (End quote.)

Ellen and John are great saints – salt not only of the earth but the salt of heaven too; light not only of the world but light that shines even in that heavenly country. Ellen and John show us these delights; they teach us this Way. But like ordinary Sarah Smith of Golders Green, the salt always enriches someone else; the light always shines not on the saint himself but on the wondrous world around us.

Grieve, and keep grieving, for these beloved friends of ours. But hear also these great words of comfort, consolation, and also challenge:

You are the salt of the earth.

You are the light of the world.

God's compassions, new every morning

Preached on the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25C), October 26, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Lord Be Merciful to Me, a Sinner, by Gilderhus Grant

A reading from Lamentations.

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for God’s compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for the Lord.”

We could use some good news. We could use a few compassions of God, freshly baked this morning. Flaky, luscious compassions: the mercies of God lovingly prepared for us, like a croissant with homemade jam and hot coffee.

We could all benefit from deep rest. I think it is both probable and likely that every person in this room is sleep-deprived.

Since our celebration in late June, when the bishop was here and we thanked everyone who made it possible to refurbish and rebuild this church, we have grieved the deaths of four people: Tom, John, Ellen, and now, just two mornings ago, our own Robin Jones. Please pray for his wife, Denise, one of our companions who prepares God’s compassions, new every morning. Denise is in our knitting group, the group of saints who keep neighbors warm during the cold and wet months. Denise is also one of our protestors, giving voice to the voiceless. Pray for Denise, as she grieves… and as you grieve.

I miss Robin. I do not know, and neither do you, a harder worker in the service of this altar. Robin took every role, every task, extremely seriously. He sought out Gary James, our musician, for coaching, and practiced for hours to sing our prayers. He practiced holding and swinging the incense thurible. He carefully studied all the details of our liturgies. He prepared short introductions for the altar-serving team, to rally us and make us ready.

But we are not only exhausted with grief for our companion Robin. We pray fervently for several people in the parish who are sick, sharing in their anxiety, and also their hope. We have organized weekly protests while keeping up our usual life-giving mission in this neighborhood, but the political turmoils keep raging, as they have done for nearly a decade now. I wonder if it feels right now like it did two generations ago, when St. Paul’s buried so many beloved friends and the world was ravaged by the HIV crisis.

I want us to rest. I pray for the repose of the souls of our friends, and for all who mourn; I pray for all who are sick, frightened, and alone; but my deepest prayer is for rest.

And I have one more prayer, for you, for all of us. I pray that we might learn from two teachers in our life of faith. We just met them again, in the Good News according to Luke. For many of us, they might be flat stock characters by now, stale stereotypes from an old-time Bible lesson. But they still have something to offer. They still hold compassions of God in their hands, new this morning.

The first is a Pharisee, and right away I fear I’ve lost your attention. ‘Pharisee’ is a Bible word, and it hardly evokes warmth or kindness. We meet the Pharisees when they rise up against Jesus, and they rarely transcend the caricature of bad guys in a B movie. Jesus sketches a portrait of a Pharisee in today’s parable, and it’s not flattering: this Pharisee “trusts in himself that he is righteous, and regards others with contempt.”

But the Pharisees were faithful. They did their homework. They cared about things worth caring about: “What does our tradition really teach us?” they wondered. “How does one live a good life?” “What does it mean to be righteous?” There is even a possibility that Jesus himself was a Pharisee.

This particular Pharisee may be guilty of too much self-regard, but he is praying faithfully, and he’s praying next to a tax collector. Tax collectors were collaborators with the empire. They were part of the problem. They were not known to take the tradition seriously. They didn’t seem to care about living a good and honorable life. For us today, in this room, the Pharisee might be pulling one of our SPiN wagons around the neighborhood, serving hot soup to our neighbors. Meanwhile, the tax collector might be wearing a red ballcap, and attending a church very different from St. Paul’s Seattle. So: give the Pharisee a second look. 

Before I move on to give the tax collector a second look, I want to offer one more small defense of the Pharisee. There is a fuzzy, misleading translation of one small word in today’s Gospel, which was originally written in Koine Greek. In our English translation, we hear that the tax collector “went down to his home justified rather than” the Pharisee; but the original text doesn’t necessarily say that. It may be more accurate to say that the tax collector went down to his home justified “alongside” the Pharisee. If so, they were both justified, walking alongside each other, like a couple of altar servers walking down this main aisle.

So: The Pharisee isn’t a bad guy. He might not be someone you warm to; he might strike you as stuffy and pious; his contempt for others is not attractive; we’ve all met someone who is undeniably good but not good company. But I want that Pharisee on our team. I want to be his friend. I think he is our friend.

Next: the tax collector. He often seems much more relatable to us. What’s not to like about a guy who confronts himself with bracing honesty? But remember: in the ears of the first people to hear this parable, the tax collector was not a friend, not a companion, not relatable. If the Pharisee was a stuffed shirt, the tax collector was dangerous, even deadly. He defrauded them. Tax collectors of that day and time were not like IRS employees, just making sure people filed their tax returns. They collected funds for the rapacious Roman Empire, and only made money of their own by fleecing people on the margins. 

In this brief parable, Jesus doesn’t tell us whether the fictional tax collector mended his ways. If he did, then the story isn’t all that realistic: tax collectors didn’t exactly have good career prospects. They were trapped under the boot of Rome just like everybody else, and it’s extremely risky to let go of a trade that pays for your food and your home. This brings us back, then, to the relatability of this character: he knows he does what he should not do, and he repents of that, even as he may go right ahead and keep on doing it.

Soon we will finish our prayers here, and our time together as a community on this Lord’s Day will end. Then, like the Pharisee and the tax collector, we will go down to our homes, alongside one another. And, again like the Pharisee and the tax collector, we will all be more than one thing: good but sometimes insufferable; bad but sometimes self-aware and remorseful.

But hear this Good News: today, we will go down to our homes justified. God justifies us; God makes us righteous – righteous, a word that might sound haughty to your ears, but a good word that really just means healthy, strong, in right relationship, of sound mind, of stout heart. God gives us God’s compassions, new every morning. These compassions make us righteous, that is, they make us useful, and good, as we go from here to mend the world.

And so, when you go down to your home today, justified in God’s sight, I will be saying a prayer for you. I will be praying that whoever you are and however complicated you may be – the good and the bad within you, the proud yet prayerful Pharisee inside you who brushes uncomfortably against your inner tax collector with a heart of gold – whoever you are and however complicated you may be, I pray that you will rest in the soothing peace and healing mercy of God, all the night long.

"Courage is the best protection that a woman can have"

Preached on the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 24C), October 19, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Jeremiah 31:27-34
Psalm 119:97-104
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Luke 18:1-8

Stained glass window in St. John the Evangelist Church, Marquis, Saskatchewan

Last week, I watched a 2022 documentary produced and directed by the comedian W. Kamau Bell called “We Need to Talk about Cosby.” Now, these days, if you say you have deep thoughts and feelings about Bill Cosby, you are revealing that you are probably over the age of forty. My friend and former seminary classmate Josh is just thirty years old. I asked him, “Has Bill Cosby meant a lot to you?” He said, “No, not really.” But for me, as a teenager in the 1980s, I delighted in the many artistic gifts and achievements of Bill Cosby. I adored his sitcom, a colossal mega-hit that at one point attracted more than sixty million viewers. (Hit TV shows these days are lucky to reach twenty million.) But I remember “Fat Albert,” too. And “Picture Pages,” and its catchy theme song. I listened to Cosby’s comedy specials on my Walkman.

Bill Cosby was everywhere. He dominated popular-U.S. culture for decades. He broke barriers as an entertainer of color, even though he caused some controversy within the Black community because he essentially played by the white man’s rules. His consistently positive, disarming affect was criticized for papering over racial injustice. White folks could laugh along with Bill Cosby and go back to sleep. And now, forty years after the height of Cosby’s fame, when section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is under threat, we are painfully reminded every day that the nation is all too far from realizing the dream of Dr. King.

But despite Cosby’s waning popularity, his virtual irrelevance in popular culture now, lots of Black and white folks alike feel a need to assess and wrestle with his legacy. Cosby stressed the importance of education. He focused on the nurturing of children, especially children of color. He was hilarious – and humans need to laugh. His most famous show witnessed to the truth, dignity, and power of Black families, changing forever how Black folk are portrayed in television and films. He was celebrated as “America’s Dad.”

And yet, Cosby was convicted in 2018 of three counts of aggravated indecent assault, and he has been accused of drugging and assaulting more than sixty women. In the documentary, commentators cringed as they watched old footage of Cosby’s comedy work in which he hinted at his terrible secret. In retrospect, one can’t unsee or unhear the awful truth, as Cosby makes jokes about disarming a woman’s resistance to a man’s advances.

These revelations have been upsetting and confusing for many, many people who grew up loving and admiring Cosby as a cultural icon of racial equity and social justice. But the many dozens of women who survived his abuse have borne the heaviest burden. How can any of us – let alone the survivors of his abuse – reconcile the two Cosbys? Some don’t bother. One of the people on the documentary was asked how she would describe Cosby to the proverbial alien from another planet who asks who Cosby is. “Rapist,” she replied, flatly. “He was a rapist who had a really big TV show once.”

I bring all of this to you today not because you and I need to talk about Cosby, necessarily, but because I believe we need to, I believe we must, talk about the sixty or so women who charged him with criminal conduct. We also need to talk about still more women who did not come forward, despite the trauma they suffered. Why would they not come forward?

You know why.

Those who did speak out were accused of lying, of trying to impugn the character of a good person. They were questioned aggressively: “What were you wearing? Why did you take the drug he offered? Why did you wait so long to come forward?” and so on. Some accused all of the women of being white people tearing down a Black man, even though about a third of the survivors are women of color.

And then, in 2021, three years after Cosby went to prison, his conviction was overturned on a technicality. This was, for many of the survivors, another trauma, a body blow of disappointment and invalidation. Why come forward, many women wondered, when he’ll just get away with it anyway? Many people in the documentary talked about how hard – maybe even impossible – it is to get real justice against a rapist when we all live in a culture that tolerates and even celebrates misogyny and violence against women.

But this is where the Gospel, the Good News, comes in. The Cosby documentary ends on an ambivalent yet somewhat hopeful note: the various people interviewed, including several survivors of Cosby’s abuse, talked about courage – the ultimate, life-saving importance of courage. One of them quoted Susan B. Anthony, the 19th-century white suffragist and abolitionist who died fourteen years before the 19th Amendment extended the voting franchise to women. Susan B. Anthony said this: “Courage is the best protection that a woman can have.” “Courage is the best protection that a woman can have.” 

I would only add that those of us with male and cisgender privilege can also don the armor of courage as allies of all who suffer abuse in a misogynist and transphobic culture – in a rape culture. Courage: a word related to the French word coeur, which means heart. Courage is protection: courage protects people from harm. The survivors of Cosby’s abuse who came forward revealed tremendous courage, as did their attorneys, advocates, and allies.

Too often we dismiss the heart as soft: we say someone is either hard-headed or soft-hearted. But the heart is mighty: In today’s parable of the persistent widow, Jesus describes a strong-hearted woman, a courageous woman, a woman who protects herself from injustice by repeatedly entering the arena on her own behalf.

But courage isn’t just an individual practice or gift. For us Christians, courage is communal. On the same trip when I watched the Cosby documentary, I attended a lecture given by the Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde, Bishop of Washington. Her topic (unsurprisingly, given her recent history) was courage, but this time, courage as a virtue that we all share, together.

Bishop Budde reflected on the massive pushback she experienced after preaching an eloquent but fairly conventional sermon on a passage from the Gospel of Matthew. The pushback came because she preached this sermon at the prayer service for the new president, this past January, at Washington National Cathedral; and she directed at him in particular the charge God gives all of us: in Budde’s words, to “have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now.” 

It takes great courage to preach this Good News in these times, great courage to say something as straightforward and conventional as, “Have mercy on people who are scared now.” It may not be as courageous as coming forward to accuse “America’s Dad” of aggravated assault, but it’s courageous nonetheless. Bishop Budde has received thousands of emails, and countless threats. She has a stout heart, and she must have one to endure the onslaught. But again, for us Christians, Courage is not just an individual practice or gift. Budde didn’t speak truth to power by herself.

I asked her, in the Q&A that followed her talk, how her many years in my home state of Minnesota continue to shape her life and vocation. Minnesota is sometimes called – in jest, but sometimes in sharp critique – a “nice” state. Minnesota Nice: one thinks of docile white Norwegians, ice-fishing their way through a winter afternoon. But Minnesota is also the state where Mr. George Floyd was murdered. Minnesota is also home to many courageous progressive politicians and activists. I wondered how Bishop Budde’s time there as a parish priest shaped her in her courageous life’s work. 

She said she learned in Minnesota how to avoid taking personal attacks personally. She also learned – across her career – about the power of communal action, communal courage. She talked about “institutional courage” – the transformative power of a whole congregation, a whole tradition, a whole communion rising up as one to secure justice for survivors (and possible future victims) of violence and oppression. That is our heritage here, gathered around font and table, proclaiming the Gospel, and interceding for the world. With God’s help, we are a people of courage.

And so we do not lose heart. Today, in the little parable of the persistent widow, Jesus frames courage as prayer. Think of it! Prayer is not just – prayer is not only – asking God for things, and then waiting passively to see if God will give us those things. Prayer is an act of courage. Prayer is an act of resistance. Prayer is a prophetic and political intercession – that is, in prayer we intercede for a person in peril, for a survivor of abuse, for ourselves, and even for perpetrators of abuse.

The courage we receive from the risen Christ gives us power to pray for everyone, even Cosby – even the perpetrator. And what is our prayer for him? That he reforms; that he repents. But that power is not just a plea, with us begging God for the bad guy to acknowledge his dreadful wrongdoing and correct the error of his ways. We do ask for that. But we also pray to God for the perpetrator’s reform by standing strong and stout-hearted alongside the survivors, and pushing, prodding, insisting that the whole culture make amends for the crimes committed against them.

But our prayers take other forms, too. Like the persistent widow, we take our SPiN wagons around this neighborhood, every Sunday of the year, drawing alongside our neighbors in solidarity and friendship. Others of us pray in the form of weekly protests at our front doors, shouting our prayers for justice just a few feet from here. 

But we have several other forms of prayer! We stock the Little Free Pantry, each item of food a life-saving, prophetic intercession. We go before the unjust judge – before the cynical powers and principalities of the world – by writing letters, joining No Kings protests, supporting arts organizations, plying our trades, caring for our homes and families, strengthening this city one household at a time, one relationship at a time, one vote at a time.

Everything we say and do is a prayer of lament but also jubilation, a prayer of anguish but also hope, a prayer of heartbreak but also courage. Together, encouraging one another – encouraging, another heart word – we are all that persistent widow, and the unjust judge is almost at the end of his rope. Together, by the power of God alone, our courage swells into an unstoppable shout of triumph, a great act of advocacy and solidarity that breaks the grip of death and shatters the spear of the evil one. 

"These people actually believe in Angels!"

Preached on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels (transferred), September 28, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Genesis 28:10-17
Psalm 103:19-22
Revelation 12:7-12
John 1:47-51

St. Michael’s Victory over the Devil, by Jacob Epstein, at Coventry Cathedral

Years ago, Andrew and I watched “Scandal,” a smart, gritty television show about a political “fixer” named Olivia Pope. Olivia solved problems for hapless politicians who had gotten themselves into hot water. I haven’t watched “Scandal” for many years now, but I expect it is almost quaint by comparison to our current political misadventures. 

In one memorable scene, the White House Chief of Staff, a world-wise political operator named Cyrus Beene, is speaking with contempt about members of the opposition. He condemns them as brutally as he can, finding a particularly devastating insult to throw at them: “These people,” Cyrus says, “These people actually believe in Angels.”

What fools. They believe in Angels?! Fluffy, feathery winged beings of indeterminate gender who flutter about, invisibly, in the clouds. And the clouds are dotted with harps, most likely. And there’s St. Peter, right out of a New Yorker cartoon, standing behind a lectern next to the pearly gates, reviewing poor souls to decide whether they’ll get into heaven.

“These people actually believe in Angels.” How ludicrous!

But as I watched the show, I realized I actually like Cyrus Beene. He’s a wretch, a snake, a crook. But he is always more than one thing. He’s a gay man in a straight world, and if I remember the show correctly, it turns out he actually loves his husband, and is able to express that love. Cyrus harbors contempt for kind people, weak people, and stupid people. He doesn’t suffer fools. And since I am (I hope) much kinder than Cyrus, and I have several personal weaknesses, and I make my share of dumb mistakes, I surely would be one of the people he disrespects, and not just because I believe in Angels. Still, somehow, I like him.

But as surprisingly likable as he is, Cyrus is wrong about something: belief in Angels makes good sense. Belief in Angels helps us look at ourselves differently. Belief in Angels helps us cope with this troubled world, and make this world better. And, Belief in Angels even helps us look differently at, feel differently about, and relate differently to that awful man himself, Cyrus Beene, and all the other Cyrus Beenes out there right now.

But first, a quick sidebar about belief, about believing in things, and about your possible suspicion that this church needs you to believe in things. You may already know this, but you are currently sitting in a church that does not begin with belief. We don’t require you to sign on to a complex theological system before you can approach the Table. No. We begin with practice. So I don’t need you to believe in Angels; more importantly, God doesn’t need you to believe in Angels.

All you’re invited to do today is join us in our practice of prayer, singing, and contemplation; our practice of drawing alongside our neighbors in solidarity; our practice not of merely looking forward to an angel-filled afterlife, but rather our practice of celebrating the astonishing beauty of our physical, mortal lives in this wondrous world, and in that celebration, finding — and bringing about — God’s heaven right here, saints and Angels and all.

So let go of the dreary question, “Do I believe in Angels?” It’s not the right question, and anyway you probably do believe more than you think you do. Let’s ask this question: “Do we trust that God’s messengers are here, and do we trust that they are active, whether they’re angelic or human?” “Angel,” after all, is a Hebrew concept that only means “messenger of God,” not necessarily a surreal flying humanoid creature beyond our sight, and often enough beyond our belief.

Angels — God’s messengers — run vital errands, representing God to God’s people. Angels were – and this is as reductive and dismissive as I’ll get, when talking about Angels – Angels were a way for the ancient Hebrews to see and relate to the one God who is not visible, and whose image must not be carved in stone or drawn on wood. Angels speak with God’s inaudible voice. They appear on behalf of the invisible God, the ultimate One, the One beyond our comprehension, the one we cannot see or fully understand.

Are Angels winged creatures, like John Travolta in the starring role of the film called “Michael”? No, or at least they don’t have to be. Neither do they have to be the terrifying monsters described in the book of Ezekiel, with countless eyes and wings. The ordinary person sitting next to you right now may not be an Angel, but she might be, well, she might be angelic.

An Angel is someone real but always a little beyond our grasp, someone of ultimate importance who escapes our full understanding. 

I’ll say that again: An Angel is someone real but always a little beyond our grasp, someone of ultimate importance who escapes our full understanding. 

But Angels — and that wondrous human being sitting next to you — these aren’t the only beings or things that are real but beyond our full grasp; ultimately important, but impossible to fully understand.

Take love, for example. Whatever your belief in Angels, do you believe in love? (I encourage it! I take my cue from Cher, who not only believes in love, she even believes in life after love!) But as much as I believe in love, I will never fully understand it, let alone control it. But I sure do believe in it. After all, I see love all the time: I see people practicing self-effacing kindness, one of my favorite forms of love. I have experienced passionate love, but also the heartbreak that inevitably accompanies such an intense and dangerous gift. And grief, as most of us have learned, at great cost – grief is a stinging, searing form of love. 

But love evades our full understanding. It is difficult to know why we humans love so deeply, and in so many ways. It is almost impossible to understand why or whether love is worth it, given all the grief it brings. We Christians look at an ancient instrument of execution, depicted right behind me, up here, and see in that horrible image a life-giving sacrifice of love. In one of our prayers as Episcopalians, we give thanks to God for “the mystery of love.” And that’s Angel territory: the mystery of something we know about and experience, but can’t fully grasp, can’t fully understand.

But I want to go back to the source on Angels, for more insight, and to demonstrate why all of this matters today. I want to consult a direct descendent of the people who first recognized and wrote about Angels. I need help from a Jewish rabbi.

This past Tuesday I began a two-part book study on a book called The Amen Effect, by the progressive Los Angeles Rabbi Sharon Brous. This is maybe my third mention of Brous’s work from this pulpit, but bear with me. Rabbi Brous reflects on the role of Angels in the great stories of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. It was an Angel who ministered to Hagar and her son Ishmael after they were cast out of Sarah and Abraham’s home. It was an Angel who intervened to prevent Abraham from slaughtering his son. Angels bridge heaven and earth, as we just heard this morning, in Jacob’s unsettling dream. An Angel appears to Joseph as he searches for his brothers, setting into motion the long story of salvation that culminated in the rescue of God’s people from bondage.

For us Christians, Angels travel a bridge that stretches from our Eucharistic community into the heart of God. Jesus Christ is, for us, the keystone of that bridge. 

Here is how Rabbi Brous interprets this tradition of Angels in the realm of God: “There’s a powerful through line in the angel stories that appear throughout the Bible and Rabbinic literature,” Brous writes, “from sacred text to folklore to liturgy.” She continues: “Angels, each one fueled by a unique purpose, appear in moments of great vulnerability to give us moral strength, clarity, and hope. They help us believe again. They awaken us to our responsibility to one another. They challenge us to think creatively about what might be possible. They let us know that we’re not alone. They offer protection. Connection. Inspiration.”

Brous then recounts personal stories when mentors and friends behaved like Angels in her life, guiding her, and others, offering protection, connection, and all the rest.

But later on in the chapter, Rabbi Brous gives us the compelling reason why all of this matters, why Angels matter. She asks herself this eternal human question: “Why do Angels sometimes appear, just precisely when we need them, and yet sometimes they do not?” This question looms before us in this chaotic, traumatic time. And here is Brous’s answer:

“I can only conclude that because we don’t understand the inner workings of angels, it’s that much more essential we make sure we step forward in those moments in life when we’re called.” I’ll quote her again: “Because we don’t understand the inner workings of angels, it’s that much more essential we make sure we step forward in those moments in life when we’re called.”

You don’t always believe in Angels? Okay. That’s reasonable. You’re as smart as the cynical, calculating Cyrus Beene. Probably smarter. But what’s not absurd, what’s easy to believe, is this: we are angelic when we protect, connect and inspire. We are angelic when we are more than one thing, never fully understood, and, every so often, when we are a delightful surprise to others in our lives. We are angelic when we bring God’s authentic message of hope to others. We are angelic when we go about all of this earthy — but also heavenly — work in God’s sight.

Believe in Angels if you like, with my encouragement. But I must insist that you adopt one particular, essential belief: Please, friend, please: believe in God; and believe also in yourself. God is with you, and God believes in you. You are a divine messenger in God’s graceful story of salvation.

The open hand

Preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20C), September 21, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Samuel Torvend.

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Psalm 79:1-9
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13

Olive oil painting, by Giorgio Gosti

To grasp the significance of this seemingly odd parable of Jesus, it will be helpful to see the world in which he lived. For instance, rich land owners lived in cities: they constituted what we might call the millionaires and billionaires, the wealthiest 1 percent, of ancient Palestine at the time of Jesus. In turn, the landowners hired managers to supervise their land; in this case, property devoted to olive trees and wheat fields. The manager lived on or next to the land. And those who worked the land – that would be poor laborers, poor peasants – lived in the nearby village. 

Rich landowners became rich without lifting a finger through the manual labor of village peasants whose work produced the harvest of olives, olive oil, and wheat to be sold in the cities. The manager was paid for his work in the form of a percentage of what the peasants harvested. And the peasant laborers retained at best 10 to 20 % of the produce, a percentage that meant they would never escape poverty: their children and their children’s children would be consigned to harsh labor as well. To say the least, village laborers viewed absentee landowners as corrupt and greedy individuals who cared nothing for the harsh conditions of labor and poverty in which they worked.

In this story told by Jesus, the manager was accused of mishandling the owner’s  land, a squandering of property or produce with no details offered. By law the owner could do one of two things: he could take the manager to court and demand full repayment for the losses incurred or he could have the deceitful manager imprisoned. In both cases, the manager’s malfeasance would become public knowledge and ensure that the manager was never hired again: a man consigned to the lower status of a laborer or a homeless beggar. But the owner does the unexpected: no court hearing and no prison. He simply dismisses the manager privately – in what was an astonishing act of mercy. 

Jesus then notes that before the laborers could know of the misconduct of the newly-dismissed manager, he – the manager – seeks to have friends who will assist him now that he is no longer working for the owner. He does this by decreasing the amount of oil and wheat owed by the laborers thus allowing them to retain for their own use two staples of the Mediterranean diet: bread and olive oil. For the impoverished peasant laborers who lived hand to mouth, this, too, was an unexpected act of generosity, an act of mercy that would prompt incredible celebration in the village: an unexpected windfall, we might say.

Thus when Jesus says, “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth,” he is not suggesting that his followers engage in deceitful financial practices – though let me add that the history of Christianity is filled with people have done so – but rather encourages his followers to recognize what is at the heart of his story, his parable: two people who did the unexpected; that is, two people with terrible reputations who could have made life miserable for others but instead acted with mercy, with generosity. 

This, I think, is a troubling story: a troubling story for you and me, for we live in a culture that encourages us repeatedly to protect, to hold on to whatever money, wealth, or treasure we have earned or inherited. And thus as wages stagnant, costs rise, and the American middle class begins to evaporate, there emerges the fear little different than what this manager experienced some 2,000 years ago: the fear of becoming poor, of living in a lower status than one hoped for. And so the urge to close one’s hand around what one has – little or great – becomes quite strong. 

Indeed, it was the closed hand that appeared in statues found in medieval churches: the closed hand tightly grasping a bag of coins, a sign of being closed off to others, of demonstrating one’s concern only for oneself and no one else. It was the open hand that was praised as the sign of virtue for the open hand signified the person who saw money or produce as something to be shared. Rather than protected or hoarded, money or produce exists to be shared; that is, being generous is the virtue, the capacity that illuminates one’s care for others, even those who a society or family or political party might say are supposedly undeserving. For no one is undeserving of life, are they?

The open hand is also the hand that can receive from another, that signals the soul willing to admit its dependence on another. And so I wonder if you’ve noticed that we do not take or grab the communion bread or wine cup but rather open our hands – the small hands of children, the wrinkled hands of people my age – to receive the precious treasure of the Lord’s body and blood. And I wonder if you’ve noticed that each person receives the same amount regardless of gender, race, or social status. Here, again, it seems that generosity is extended to all, not just the few, not just the so-called privileged. Indeed, there is an economy at work, flowing from this table: an economy in which goods – food and drink – are shared equitably; a generosity that does not ask anyone to prove their worthiness before receiving; an economy so different than the one in which we are forced to live in which a few have more than enough, and the many have little. 

In his contemplation of the significance of the Mass, the Holy Eucharist, the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote this: “Not only bread but all things necessary for sustenance in this life are given on loan to us , given because of others and for others, and to others through us.” 

Dear friends, I say, let your open hand at this altar table lead you – lead you out there – into a world of profound need waiting for your generous spirit. 

Hello, you

Preached on the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 19C), September 14, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Stained glass window at St. Jacob’s Lutheran Church in Anna, Ohio

“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?”

Jesus advises the shepherd to just… leave the ninety-nine — to leave them in the wilderness. “They’ll be fine,” he seems to say. 

(Will we? Will we really be fine, out here, in the wilderness, while our shepherd runs off to find whoever that was who got lost?)

I realize I’m making an assumption at this moment that most all of us identify with the ninety-nine sheep who are not lost. And maybe you object: “I’m plenty lost,” you might be thinking. If so, that’s fair. In fact, I think we’re all encouraged to identify with anyone in this miniature parable, and tomorrow, we can identify with somebody else.

Some days you’re the one lost sheep (which means the shepherd is out looking for you). Other days you’re the shepherd trying to hold the flock together (which means you have to make some very hard choices, triaging the needs of people in your care). And then there are your days as one of the ninety-nine: you’re still where you were last year, or last decade, out here in the wilderness, with dozens of others. If you are one of the ninety-nine, what do you need, out here? I have some ideas.

A certain member of our parish likes to do a light, affectionate shoulder bump with me when we see each other on Sundays. We’re both typically distracted by many things, but this parishioner chooses the better part, coming over for an affectionate little bump with another one of the ninety-nine sheep — with me.

Hello, you.

This is definitely something we need out here in the wilderness, with the shepherd having gone off who knows where.

The wilderness: it’s not only a terrible, deathly landscape with little water, spiky succulents, and venomous snakes. Of course it is that: The wilderness holds up well as a metaphor for our world right now, news cycle after dreadful news cycle. But the wilderness is not only that. 

The wilderness is also where God’s people became God’s people. Our faith descends from desert nomads who wandered around the Sinai peninsula for two generations, often at least feeling like they were sheep without a shepherd. They wandered so long that no one who escaped bondage in Egypt was still alive when God’s people arrived at Canaan. It was rough out there, but the wilderness was formative: it taught God’s people what they must do, and what they must not do. It taught them who they were. The wilderness was a crucible for God’s people.

We melt precious metals in a crucible, refining the metal while it’s in liquid form, burning away all impurities. I’m backing into a mixed metaphor, so bear with me, but the wilderness gives God’s people a crucible experience. The wilderness gives God’s people a crucible experience. They are in the hot seat; They are under fire; they are confronted and even overwhelmed with stinging nettles, punishing heat, hunger and thirst, war with neighboring tribes, the bite of desert beasts. How will they come out of that, in the end? Who will they be, after all that?

When we are beset on all sides by hardships and disappointments, by painful disillusionment, by heartbreaking loss and bewildering change, how will we, finally, turn out? Who will we be? The crucible is devastating. But it is formative!

When the Israelites were in their wilderness crucible, it got bad enough that they wished they could go back to Egypt, where they had no freedom or dignity, but at least they had hot food. If we could go back a decade or two, or three, when the world made more sense (at least to people with lots of privileges), maybe most of us would jump into that time machine. But like the Israelites, we can’t. We have to trudge on.

And our shepherd leaves us here in this mess, going off on her absurd search for the one who is lost!

But we are not left on our own with nothing. Good shepherds wouldn’t do that. My friend Arienne Davison, the priest at St. Paul’s in Bremerton, says it this way: Arienne says that when Jesus tells this mini parable, his first audience would have understood that the ninety-nine sheep had the Torah to shepherd them while their actual shepherd was away. The Torah: the fundamental teachings of their scriptures. The Law, as Christian Protestants, echoing St. Paul, often like to call it. If we’re out here without a shepherd, we still have our shepherd’s holy book. We have our traditions, our stories that tell us who we are, our rituals and routines, our ethics, our consciences. 

So we know, out here in this wilderness, that we must care for the widow and the orphan — “widow and orphan” is biblical shorthand for vulnerable folks in our group, vulnerable because they’re young, or old, or otherwise in need of skilled, intentional support and protection. We know that we must visit our sick and those among us who are dying. We know that we must attend to the remains of our dead. We know this because the bible tells us so.

And we know that we must be good neighbors to all who bump shoulders with us out here, even those with whom we strenuously disagree. That includes those who claim the label “Christian” but badly misread the Gospel, and twist it into a tool of oppression. We don’t have to like those folks, but out here in the wilderness, we know — whether our shepherd is here with us or not — we know that we have ethical obligations even to them.

But we know some good, reassuring things too, as we circle around one another on this hillside while our shepherd runs off to God knows where in search of… who was it again? Well anyway, it was someone important to the shepherd. We know some good, reassuring things too.

We know that children are here, and also on the way. I scooped one of them up the other week, and I blissed out because that individual is so uniquely who he is, so particularly wondrous and hilarious and delightful. We know that newcomers are here — new sheep. Our shepherd knows that we know that it is not only our duty but also our delight to bring them into our community with attention, gratitude, and affection. So while our shepherd is away, she knows we’ll care for them.

And we know our assignment. Being among the ninety-nine isn’t only about survival, about the flock taking care of itself and respecting its neighbors as a way to simply stay alive, to remain a healthy flock. It is about that, but we aren’t just here to be here. We have a mission. 

This week I’m talking to the vestry about a proposal that St. Paul’s join Sound Alliance, a community-organizing nonprofit that helps faith communities but also other businesses and organizations — among them, the Plumbers and Pipefitters union, Local 26 — learn the basics of advocacy and action. Think of it as our flock hooking up with other flocks, out here in this wilderness, to take action for peace and justice in this harsh landscape.

So. Inventory: We have the Torah, and the Gospels. We have our traditions, rituals, and routines. We have delightful (and also sometimes challenging) children, and we have elders full of years, full of insights, full of love. We have our sick friends, and the remains of our departed friends. And we have a mission, a purpose that draws our attention beyond this desert hillside to notice other flocks, other herds, other villages. (And yes, other enemies, too.)

But we also, finally, have each other. Off goes the shepherd, off to find — sorry, who was it again? — oh right, it’s your lonely friend who’s isolating in their condo, and you’re the shepherd right at this particular moment. (A little over twelve years ago, the shepherd left the flock to come after me.) Anyway, off goes the shepherd, we know not where, but we have each other.

I can’t tell you how important that little shoulder bump is to me. I’m out here in this wilderness, and it’s scary. It’s awful. Things are blowing up everywhere. If the shepherd in the story is Jesus, well, I love Jesus and I know Jesus loves me, for the bible tells me so, but honestly I don’t always sense that Jesus is right next to me. I find him in the broken bread — I really do! — but to be precise, Jesus the shepherd returns to our flock when you and I share that broken bread, together.

So as scary and awful as things are, I’ll be okay.

I have you.

"I'm ready"

Preached at the Liturgy of Holy Eucharist with the Rite of Commendation for Thomas Brewer, September 13, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 23
Romans 8:14, 34-35, 37-39
John 19:41-42, 20:11-18

Now there was a garden in the place where Jesus was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

It was all very practical, very straightforward: They needed to bury their friend, and there was a new tomb right there, in the garden, at the foot of the cross.

A garden is a lovely place to lay a friend to rest, even a troubled garden that grows alongside a cross, which is an instrument of execution. And our garden? Our garden is every bit as practical and straightforward as the Easter garden: our garden, the Bolster Garden, is just down here, hugging this building. You can reach it by walking around a lovely rocky hillside covered with lilac and hydrangea and azalea bushes, with day lilies and ferns and rhododendrons. The remains of many dozens of our beloved dead are also resting there.

Now, the Easter garden, the one in Jerusalem, was next to the place where Jesus was crucified, as we just heard. And so our Bolster Garden, in turn, is next to this place, where we gather beneath this carved cross of the Crucified One, this place where we break the fragrant bread in remembrance of the Risen One. And when we break the bread, we recognize the risen Jesus among us, with us, around and between and through us.

Right here, next to this garden.

Today we are laying Tom to rest in our Bolster Garden. And as Lincoln might say, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. We are right to lay our beloved friend to rest in this place where death meets life, in this place at once dreadful and beautiful, in this place both heartbreaking and joyful.

For Tom is our friend, and close friends share both joys and sorrows. But also — Tom himself has tended this garden. He would come during dry spells to water the plants. Tom was a regular. And now he will rest beneath the plants he loved, cared for, nurtured. Meanwhile, we will love, care for, and nurture Tom’s remains, and we will care for his happy memory.

We will look for Tom, prayerfully, every time we gather with the Communion of Saints at this table. We will wait for the day when Tom joins us not just at this foretaste, this bite of bread and sip of wine, but at the great mountaintop feast, the feast where we all eat food and drink well-aged wine, and everyone has enough. And while we enjoy that feast together, with Tom in our tangible midst, God will not eat the food or drink the wine: God will swallow up death.

But even then — even at the mountaintop feast on that great gettin’ up morning — even then, I expect Tom will be quiet and kind, modest and receding. In his last days Tom had trouble with crowds of people: they would startle and overwhelm him. But then, don’t we all feel that way, often enough? It makes sense especially now, when the world feels so relentless. A few years ago, on a sitcom that imagined the afterlife, one of the characters described planet Earth in this way: “Earth stinks, y’all. It’s hot and it’s crowded, but also somehow cold and lonely.” Hot and crowded, cold and lonely.

Tom felt that; Tom lived here. Tom knows what it is like here, where our beautiful gardens grow in such a hot and crowded, cold and lonely world. And Tom had an answer for all of that, for all of this. Tom offered a solution to the heat and crowds, a solution to the cold loneliness: Tom taught us to respond to the hard world with the gentle (yet fierce) kindness of a gardener.

“I’m ready,” Tom said to me, with quiet tears, as he sensed he was near the end. “I’m ready.” How could he be ready? I think I know the answer.

Tom the gardener has grappled with life and death, all in the same garden. I am not a gardener but I am married to one: I am more comfortable here in this room where the cross is, while Andrew is more comfortable in God’s garden. But I can readily see, even from here, how gardeners learn the lessons of life and death as they turn the earth in their hands, trim back the lilac, and dead-head the rosebushes. 

I can readily understand how Mary Magdalene saw the risen Jesus and mistook him for a gardener: even as the awful wonder of resurrection was confusing and overwhelming her, Mary immediately saw in the risen Jesus a gardener’s wisdom: here is someone who knows about both life and death. Here is someone who bridges life and death. Here is someone through whom life triumphs over death.

Gentle and kind Tom received this gift from God in lavish abundance: Tom knew how to bring life from death, and he knew that because he understood and did not shrink from death. When Tom was lying in great weakness, ailing in that hospital room, and said, “I’m ready,” he was speaking the truth, with authority: This life-dealer whose gardening skill brought so much beauty into the world — this good servant of God knows about gardens… and he knows about the graves that hallow those gardens.

We lay our beloved friend to rest in this garden as the first hints of autumn are quietly appearing. All the dazzling spring blossoms are long gone. The lilac needs trimming. Through the long winter months, for several years now, I have seen Bolster garden descend into death, into sleepy oblivion beneath the grey and drizzle. There is a sad and even holy beauty in our garden during these deathly seasons. And there is always, always the color of forest green. Every November, at All Souls, we all troup down to Bolster Garden to remember all of our beloved dead. This year, on All Soul’s Day, Tom will be fresh in our minds and hearts. 

But then, of course, life returns, with dazzling glory. The hydrangeas and rhododendrons throw wild riots of color. The blue spring sky smiles on Bolster Garden again, and we might be tempted to mistake the risen Jesus not for the gardener, but for the whole garden itself. 

Tom has taught us to understand this rhythm, these seasons. Tom has trained us to accept the cold drizzle of death alongside the abundant life-giving warmth of the summer sun. Tom is a master of calm acceptance, of creative patience, of quiet observation and skillful caregiving. Tom teaches us what it means when the scriptures tell us that God swallows up death forever. 

I want to learn Tom’s ways, our lovely Tom, our good and kind Tom. I want to learn from someone Mary Magdalene would readily see as a master of life and death — she only needs to look into his kind eyes to see that. I want this for us all. I want, for us all, the gift of Thomas Brewer, the gift of a saint of God who looks directly at both death and life and says, with full assurance of God’s promises,

“I’m ready.”

The historical Paul

Preached on the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18C), September 7, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Rev. Samuel Torvend.

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 1
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

Woodcut Print by Sister Mary Grace Thul

By the beginning of the second week of the semester, my university students are well aware of the fact that if they commit the cardinal sin of the academy, their names will be written in the book of the damned – that being the cardinal sin of plagiarism – of using someone’s else’s research and writing as if it were their own. For the simple minded, we call it cheating. One student, a young man who flaunted my attendance policy and showed little interest in the course, turned in a midterm essay of such brilliance and superb writing that I asked him to see me. Thinking he would be congratulated for his wonderful work, he smilingly entered my office. He beamed brightly when I told him that I marveled at his essay; that is, until I showed him the copy I had made of the lengthy paragraph he wrote with his own hand on the second week of the term – a paragraph of monumental incoherence, botched grammar, and poor spelling. I then asked him how he had made such amazing improvement in a scant five weeks. Well, to say the least, the jig was up. He was caught and, thankfully, repentant with the promise that there would be no more plagiarism.

Such was not the case in the ancient world of Jesus and Paul. To copy someone else’s work or to use their name as one’s own was a common and legal practice. And so we know now from the labor of biblical scholars that the historical Paul, the Paul who experienced a conversion on the road to Damascus, established Christian communities, and was martyred in Rome, the historical Paul created only seven – seven – letters that were included in the New Testament, the letter to Philemon, our second reading, being one of them. Other authors, writing after the death of Paul, claimed Paul as the author of their letters – letters that either revised or contradicted the writings of the historical Paul. These writers knew of Paul’s fame and thus wanted to capitalize on his fame by using his name even as they endeavored to tone down or reject what was his revolutionary teaching. 

For instance, in the historical Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he clearly states that in Christian baptism, the patriarchy of his culture is washed away: women and men are fundamentally equal in Christ, something unheard of in the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean in which a woman was viewed as property or was considered a second class citizen who had to obey her father, husband, and son. But there is more. At the end of his letter to the Romans, the historical Paul spends considerable time praising women as leaders in the Christian movement: praising them as apostles, as preachers and evangelists, as church planters, as hosts for the Christian community and thus as leaders at the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist. I mean any Roman male, raised into the gender roles of imperial society, would be utterly horrified by this practice and view it as either foolhardy or subversive. As one Roman governor said of women leaders and their Christian congregations, “they are a contagion that needs to be confined and cured before it spreads any further.” 

And yet if we read the first letter to Timothy, said to be written by Paul but actually written by an author upset with the historical Paul, we hear these words: “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” (2:11-12). Well, let’s be clear: an apostle, an evangelist, a preacher, a church planter, and a presider at the Lord’s Table is not going to be silent and submissive. Thus, we discern in this letter to Timothy, written fifty years after Paul’s death, considerable anxiety over Paul’s clear intent to subvert an established cultural bias and practice. But to do this – to question and then disregard what served the desires of elite males – would lead to skepticism, intolerance, why even death. And so we discern in Timothy’s letter a profound anxiety concerning women in positions of leadership. Not so with Paul.

But this was not all. Jesus and Paul lived in the imperial Roman economy: an economy dependent on slave labor. Indeed, every city in the empire had a slave market and by some estimates twenty percent of the population was enslaved. Writing in the late 50s, some twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, Paul asks Philemon to release Onesimus, a fellow Christian and a temporary associate of Paul, from the bonds of slavery. Clearly Onesimus was owned by Philemon, but for the historical Paul, there can be no slavery among Christians for this demeaning and deathly practice was and is washed away in the waters of baptism. “I appeal to you on the basis of love,” writes Paul, to release Onesimus who Paul refers to so tenderly as his “own heart.” NO to slavery, writes Paul, for slavery is the objectification of a human being created in the image of a loving and liberating God. 

And yet if we read the letter to the Colossians, a letter thought to be written by Paul but in fact written by another author toward the end of the first century, we hear this: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything” (3:22), a clear rejection of the historical Paul’s insistence on freedom from slavery.

Now we might imagine that the concern of the historical Paul to end slavery at least among Christians is a thing of the past. It’s illegal, is it not? And yet – and yet – the exploitation of human beings is far from ended. Seattle is a major center of human trafficking on the West Coast. Many of the clothes and shoes we wear are produced in overseas sweatshops or by Los Angeles garment workers who are paid less than the minimum wage. And then there is debt bondage: the use of high interest rates to  keep one in perpetual servitude to a predatory lender. And this summer, a Midwestern congressman introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to loosen child labor laws. In all seriousness, the promoter of the bill said this: “I want young kids to experience the reward of hard work.” 

Dear friends, the historical Paul is the patron of this house, this  parish. His searing critique of cultural patriarchy, slavery in many forms, and economic injustice forms his legacy, a legacy of which you and I are the inheritors, a legacy that flows from the waters of the pool that marks the entry to this house. Thus, to dip our fingers in that pool and trace the sign of the cross over our hearts is to renew our commitment to live into that legacy in a time, sadly and tragically, marked by cruelty and corruption at the highest level of government. And yet here, in this place, we may join Paul in his prayer: Refresh our hearts in Christ! Yes, refresh our hearts in Christ, confident that we share in a power greater than any predator, any tyrant. Yes, I say, let us touch that loving, life-giving, and liberating water and let it then flow through us into God’s wounded yet beloved world.

I could use a miracle right about now

Preached on the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16C), August 24, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Rev. Stephen Crippen.

A hallway of Mary Washington Hospital, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Photo by The Rev. Dana Caldwell.

I could use a miracle right about now. How about you?

Would you like a miraculous healing? If so, I hear you. Just last Monday a longtime friend of mine told me that her husband is suffering a resurgence of cancer; and here at St. Paul’s we have a long list of people in need of physical healing. How about we just magically take care of all that?

But resuscitation from death is another miracle I’m interested in, like the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Now, I know that the raising of Lazarus is a deeply symbolic story that taps into mystical truth, not concrete, scientifically observable truth. And I know that mystical truth — the truth we discover on our journey of faith in God — is in many ways more important and more valuable to us than the facts we might learn from a news report. And I know that if the raising of Lazarus actually had been a literally factual story, nobody asked Lazarus how he felt about having to die twice. I know all of that. But I’m still a fan of literal returns from the grave. In fact, I would like to order, let’s see, one two three four five… How about ten of them, just to get started?

Or how about a political or electoral miracle — who’s with me? If we could only magically, I don’t know, change the district maps in all fifty states so that everyone gets equal representation, I would love that. And I confess I have some dark dreams about magical justice being served on politicians who invade countries and kill or starve innocent people. So, about miracles: I’m a fan. And like many of us, I harbor compelling daydreams of miracles as magic, miracles as wondrous supernatural fixes that we so desperately need in this war-torn, grief-infused world. 

But the miracles we encounter in Holy Scripture are, at once, both disappointing by comparison to magical events, and more valuable and inspiring than the kind of magic we would experience in a fantasy world where all of our problems just go away. So let’s delve more deeply into the initially disappointing, but ultimately inspiring miracle stories in the Gospel, the Good News, of Jesus Christ.

Today we hear about a miracle in the healing category, an encounter in which Jesus lays his hands on a woman suffering a spiritual ailment with physical symptoms. In our time, we would probably just diagnose her with osteoporosis. After eighteen years of painful bone fractures that stooped her over, she now stands tall. (Sidebar: eighteen years: this is a nod to the eighteen people, mentioned earlier in the chapter, who died in a freak accident. At this point in Luke’s narrative, eighteen means a lot — a lot of victims of accident; a lot of years to suffer chronic pain and limited mobility. Think of it this way: oppressive injustice these days is eighteen times worse than it would be in a peaceful, ethical, comfortable era of history, if such an era has ever occurred.) But back to the healing miracle: this woman can look across at people now, not just strain to look up to them. She can raise her eyes to the stars.

She was already in the synagogue, mind you. This is not a story of synagogue exclusion. She is a woman in a patriarchal culture, but she belongs in the synagogue. She is bent over with a physical ailment, but she belongs in the synagogue. 

But she is not reliably seen in the synagogue. Luke is careful to write that Jesus first sees her (seeing her is, all by itself, wondrous) and then touches her with his healing hand. We can relate to overlooking this woman. Real talk, all of us, from time to time, look over and around people, for one reason or another. This woman is bent over, and she’s been that way for years and years. Does she matter? Is she a leader? Is she interesting? Is she gifted? We might never know, because she’s all too easy to overlook.

Years ago, the priest Pete Strimer (may his memory be a blessing) gave me some advice. “When you look out at the congregation,” he said, “Try to see who isn’t here.” This is a step further than the prophetic act of Jesus seeing the bent-over woman. Father Pete suggests an even higher standard: train your eyes to learn the miraculous skill of seeing who isn’t here, particularly those who aren’t here because they lack a certain privilege, or because they know they aren’t really welcome.

But, again, maybe it’s just disappointing, the idea that it’s wondrous, perhaps even a miracle simply to notice someone who, in our stratified, judgmental culture, is all but invisible. It’s understandable to want more drama, more magic in miracles: the disabled man gets up and walks; Jesus rubs mud into their eyes and they see; Lazarus comes out of the cave. It’s not enough, for many of us, to say that these are just stories and parables, that they are symbolic vignettes that are written not because they literally happened, but because we’re supposed to learn something meaningful about Jesus.

We want more.

We can almost get there when we point to stories of wondrous healing that happen in our own time. I have one from my days as a chaplain at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, Virginia. A young man was found at the bottom of a swimming pool, having been under water for maybe ten minutes. He arrived at the trauma unit as good as dead; but he woke up. This is a true and startling story of wondrous recovery. The patient himself interpreted it as a second chance in life, given to him by the Holy One. 

But what about the many hospital patients (and their survivors) at Mary Washington, or at the University of Washington, who tell distinctly different stories of loss and grief? Why does the patient in, say, room 1502 get a second chance, but 1504 and 1506 do not?

And anyway, we all know better: life is hard; if magic is more real than a children’s fantasy story, it is not reliably, predictably real for us. I will not see my parents again in this life. I bear a few psychological wounds that I sense will never fully close. I will never preach to you the lie that what hurts your heart today can magically go away, if you just pray hard enough. That is an emotionally abusive thing to say to someone.

But we can say — we can clearly say, this:

If miracles are wondrous, restorative events that can hardly be believed, then our lives are full of them, and we are all empowered to perform these wondrous acts in our ordinary lives. This week, one of our pastoral caregivers visited a member of the parish who was experiencing severe physical pain. The visit was ordinary: a rung doorbell, an embrace, a gentle conversation, a prayer, and that was that. But the visit somehow relieved much of the pain. Is this a miracle? Well, no: if miracles are magical healings, that didn’t happen. But, yes: if miracles are unexpected — and sometimes unbelievable — occasions of God’s grace, then this counts as one, and everyone in this room, and in the hospital, may experience it.

Note well: the synagogue healing in Luke we hear today is more like this kind of healing encounter than a story of magic. When Jesus called the woman in the temple to come over to him, he didn’t then wave a wand or chant a spell. There was no flash of light, no theatrics or drama. He simply saw her, noticed her, and invited her to come to him. Then he gently put his hand on her, and told her that she was “set free” from her ailment. Not magically healed; not wondrously zapped into robust health. Free. He proclaimed freedom: freedom from isolation, from being ignored; freedom from never being touched with care by another person; freedom from a constant downward gaze.

This is all extraordinary. Yet it all happens within this physical, tangible universe. When we pray together here, and break bread together here, we do not escape the world and its many heartbreaks. My mother coped with lifelong chronic pain — at one point, in her late thirties, she was bent over and bent sideways. The man I cared for in Virginia who recovered from near-drowning did not return to a problem-free, risk-free, pain-free life. And in all of our contemplations, we must remember the danger — even the wickedness — of ableism, the idea that physical health is a sign of God’s favor, or the idea that physical limitations or physical disease is a sign of God’s judgment, or evidence of a personal failing. No. No, no, no. 

The woman in the synagogue: nothing was wrong with her, in her essence. She had every right to be where she was, and everyone knew that, for there she was in the synagogue, and no one was moving against her. She did not need a magical healing that would change her body into something everyone else prefers. And she was not deficient in God’s sight, for any reason.

But Jesus did wondrously relieve her of isolation and loneliness; and he relieved her of the physical impact of that loneliness, which had deepened the severity of her osteoporosis. And he demonstrated that meeting this woman’s needs mattered more than the community’s need to do other important things on their holy day. 

All of that is wondrous, miraculous: it is news of a difference; it is surprising. In that place and time, it was shocking. Perhaps the woman herself found it almost impossible to believe. Her body responded, at least for a while, with increased ability. Raised up and rescued from isolation, she praised God, joyfully. She truly had a most miraculous day.

Here we are, on another holy day, and while it is not Saturday and we are not Jewish, our rituals on the first day of the week descend from those at the synagogue of that ancient unnamed woman. We are about to pray for everyone in need… indeed, for the whole world. To pray for them, we must notice them: we have to see them. And then, later, we will embrace each other in a sign of the risen Lord’s peace. We will touch one other in a healing, restorative way. 

I am convinced that more than a few of us are desperate to receive these mercies.

See and touch; pray and embrace: are not these ordinary, easily overlooked things actually, well…

miracles?

"You must have been so scared"

Preached on the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin (transferred), August 17, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 61:10-11
Psalm 34:1-9
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 1:46-55

Our Lady of Sorrows, by Christine Miller

Hail, holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, your eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile, show us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

Long ago now — in the mid-nineteen-eighties — my father, on a whim, bought a used dark-green Saab coupe. I remember it wasn’t expensive. But it was news of a difference. My dad always bought Chryslers, usually a Dodge van or sedan. The Saab was a lark, a fun step sideways for a straight-laced, silent-generation father of seven who sat on the state appellate court and pledged to his Lutheran church and generally did things conventionally.

And one day I foolishly, ridiculously rolled that Saab on its side and into a ditch. I wasn’t even supposed to drive it. I called and asked him if I could, and he said “No, I’ll be home soon, sit tight,” but I went ahead and drove it anyway, to take my friend to a nearby restaurant to apply for a job. She and I walked the rest of the way to the restaurant and I asked to use their phone, and I called my father. I told him what happened.

“Oh damn it, damn it, damn it,” he said. I started to say “I’m sorry” but he cut me off. I think he asked if I was okay, but everything was a miserable blur after his initial outburst. He was a decent man and a good father: he did care that I was okay. If he didn’t ask, well… Oh, he probably asked.

The cute green Saab was totaled. I have a memory that it had cost only three thousand dollars, or something, so it wouldn’t have taken much to total it. In the next scene of the drama, I’m sitting at the kitchen table, tense, defeated, guilty, ridiculous. My father is pacing, maybe muttering, mostly just going about his evening, and going through the motions of scolding me. My dad wasn’t a scold. He didn’t shout. Silent generation, remember? Endurance is their watchword.

But my mother was sitting opposite me at the table. She looked at me. Then she said, “You must have been so scared.” I burst into tears. “I really am sorry,” I wailed. “I know,” she said. “He’ll be alright. You’ll be alright.”

Being my parent was a hardship for my dad that day, and for that, he truly has my empathy. And I’m forever grateful for his lifelong, nonviolent, powerfully ethical management of his anger, and his disappointment. None of us revisited this misery after that day. The world turned. We really were alright.

But I had something more, something precious, something invaluable: I had, for the rest of my life, the memory of my mother’s mercy, my mother’s lovingkindness, her chesed, to borrow the Hebrew word. “You must have been so scared,” she said. Behold the brilliance of this line: It was not a question — questions are stressful when one is in crisis. It was pure empathy, applied like a balm to my open wound. The healing began immediately, on contact. I was a poor banished child of Eve, sitting there at that kitchen table, and my mother was the Blessed Mother. I was not praying to my dad for forgiveness (even then I knew better than to ask for forgiveness when the offense was so fresh). I was not praying to God, either. My soul was just crying this out into the universe: “I want my mommy.”

And my mother heard that.

And now here we all are, here in Seattle, some forty years later, a world — a universe — away from that dumb kid who wrecked his dad’s inexpensive car. Maybe some of us are wrestling with guilt about one thing or another. Certainly many of us are despairing about something. A majority of us, I know, are reeling with grief here at this church, in the wake of the deaths of two companions whose souls magnified the Lord, companions who brought forth beauty in this place, companions who were lightly funny and fiercely kind. There is a stinging, pulsing anguish here, for many of us. And those who never met John or Tom are likely carrying into this room other wounds of the heart.

Yet today, I say with bracing joy, today it is Mother Mary herself who sits opposite the table, not my parents’ kitchen table in suburban St. Paul Minnesota, but this Table. Mother Mary herself gazes at us across this Table, and in my hearing she says, “You must have been so scared.”

And she says more. “You must have been so stunned, so wrecked, so aggrieved, so hurt, so confused, so mad, so horrified, so broken by all of this.” 

And she says more. “You must still be reeling, still grieving, still panicking as you try to make sense of this heartbreaking world, as you try to make sense of how small you are and how great the troubles are. You must still be scared.”

She need not ask us even one question. Like my own skillful mother, Mary knows that questions are stressful in a crisis. And I suppose she knows all of the answers anyway.

We craft beautiful prayers to speak — to sing — deep longing to Mother Mary, the Mother of God. We approach Our Lady of Sorrows with solemnity, knowing that she understands our grief; she has felt our fears. She never got over the death of her son. How could she? Our Jewish cousins would call her a shakula, a mother whose child has died. You can only befriend a shakula; you can only draw alongside them; there are no questions; there are no words. Yes, he was resurrected, but he came back different, and he came back belonging to the whole universe.

A shakula may understand the Christian Gospel that Christ trampled death by death, and bestowed life to everyone in the grave; yes, yes, we are Christian: we proclaim this Good News. But we don’t escape the scorching reality of death, even if it’s not the end of our story. We feel the great tear in the fabric of community when someone we adore departs from our immediate midst. Our beloved dead gather with us here, at this table, maybe on either side of Mother Mary herself. But that does not magically ease the pain of their departure from one of these benches, next to you, next to me.

But being with the grieving, being with each other — it can be healing. It is a balm. When we make art of Our Lady of Sorrows, like this icon, or, even more vividly, when we imagine seven swords rending her heart, we begin to find our way to consolation, wholeness, and hope. Sorrowful Mary carries grief right into the heart of God, right into the community of the Holy Three. And there, awash in divine love, that grief is redemptive, transformative, creative. It binds our hearts but also opens them, in mercy, to the grieving person on our right and on our left.

We live in a serendipitous, phenomenal, unpredictable world of shocking accidents and piercing grief, and so we are heartbroken. But our heartbreak is hallowed, it is harrowed, by the Risen One, the Risen One who still bears five grievous wounds on his hands, feet, and heart.

So go ahead and gaze at Sorrowful Mary, as she reaches toward you in mercy. Go ahead and ask her to help, hold, and guide you in these fraught and frantic days, when our hearts ache so badly. As for me, I may say just one thing to the Mother of God, the one robed in stars who stands on the moon, the Queen of Saints herself. But before I tell you my prayer to Mary, I’ll say in my own defense that like most of us here, I have grown to adulthood and grappled with hardship. I am not a child, or a fool. I know well the cost of love. And I know well that the mercies we receive from the Blessed Mother, and from her wounded and risen son — I know that these mercies must be shared by us in acts of liberation that lift up the lowly and send the rich empty away. I know all of this.

But Our Lady of Sorrows understands how young and small we sometimes feel, as the world breaks our hearts. We don’t need to pretend in her presence. And we shouldn’t submit to the weakness and cowardice of cynicism. We should choose instead to be bravely honest, and courageously vulnerable, as people of faith, people of hope, people of love. So I may say just one thing to the Blessed Mother, one thing that will restore my strong heart, focus my good mind, and sustain, for me, a ministry of mercy in my one small life. I know that she will hear me, and respond gracefully, when I pray this to her:

I want my mommy.

Jesus is a thief

Preached on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14C), August 10, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Rev. Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

Lantern for a Long Night © Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com

“Know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

Jesus is … a thief.

Maybe it’s difficult for many of us to imagine the Son of Man, the Risen One, Jesus the Good Shepherd, as a thief. Just a few moments ago, we imagined God as a caring parent (“Have no fear, little flock”), and then we heard about Jesus as a loving master, happily coming home from a wedding party. (Of course, the master image is more complicated: a master — loving or not — can’t be a master without slaves.)

But then Luke the evangelist sharpens the imagery even further: Now Jesus is … a thief, arriving unexpectedly in the wee hours, not unlatching the door but breaking in. 

This is a warning. Jesus is challenging us to get ready, to be ready. He’s confronting us with the dangers of complacence. He’s not kidding around: “Listen! I’m like a thief in the night,” he seems to be saying. We might feel an instinctive resistance to this comparison: we love Jesus, you and I (or at least most of us try to), and if you ask me, I find it hard (maybe impossible) to love someone who gives me a jump scare and takes all my stuff.

A few months ago we suffered a robbery at St. Paul’s. A thief came in the night and took our copper downspouts on the south side of the office building. It had already been a long two and a half years, disruption everywhere, noise and dust and commotion and seemingly endless complications in our effort to refit this mission base. That morning was a new emotional low for me. I didn’t reflect on the metaphorical insights of “God as thief.” I confess I didn’t (at least in the moment) pray for the thieves. I tried to remind myself that this is just a building, and that if we’re not careful we could fashion our possessions into idols. But I mostly just got mad. I fumed, helplessly. Then we installed new, less attractive downspouts, and moved on. And no, that theft doesn’t even register, even a little, on the long list of outrages plaguing the planet right now. “Come on, get over it,” I told myself. And so I did.

But now I can reflect. Jesus as… thief. God as… thief. That God or Jesus is unpredictable, even dangerous, coming by night to take things from us: there is something here. There is something to this idea.

If Jesus is a thief, then he likely takes from us things we don’t need, or worse, things that damage us the longer we hold on to them. What do you hold onto that might damage you, or diminish you? It’s easy to get materialistic, particularly in an anxious time, and those objects, or those mutual funds, can become like household gods, little idols. So Jesus the thief tells us to “make purses that do not wear out,” that is, set our hearts on our deepest commitments, our deepest values, and our deepest passions. Self-giving love — Jesus takes up that theme, once again. Self-giving love: when I give away what I would rather hoard, my treasure is stored in a flourishing community, and my heart soon follows.

But Jesus the thief may be pickpocketing a few other things, too, when we’re not looking. He might take from us a cherished belief, an old attitude, or a prejudice. I have most of the privileges that make life easier here on Earth, and while I’ll keep many of them all my life — I can’t divest myself of white privilege — Jesus steals from me the easy comfort of ignorance. The more we learn about privilege and power, the harder it gets to ignore how we benefit from it while it harms and even kills others.

But let’s reflect on all of this a bit more. I suspect this idea, this metaphor, this image — Jesus as thief – makes more and more sense to us as we get older. I am well into my fifties, and I’m discovering that certain things have gone missing, or have just fallen away. Things like the ease of sleeping through the night, or remembering why I came into a room. Illness, particularly later in life, can feel like theft, like a thief coming in the night and taking pieces of a person away.

I’ve long feared that I might have a crisis of faith when I lose physical abilities, because my spiritual practices are been centered on physical wellness and fitness. But nowhere in the Bible do we read that God favors the physically fit, or that as long as you’re young, hale, and hearty, God smiles on you. And we definitely never read in Holy Scripture that we will retain all the blessings of this life. Quite the contrary: Jesus is reliably found breaking bread with those who live on this earth but do not walk on it, and those who see into the souls of their neighbors but can’t physically see anything at all. Jesus is particularly concerned with those who are rejected from their communities or from the temple because they don’t meet a rigid standard of health or ability.

Now, I don’t believe and would never preach that Jesus the thief takes our health from us as we age. God or Jesus does not take things from us to teach us lessons, or test our mettle, or make us stronger. That heresy is always close at hand, so be alert. But maybe Jesus the thief takes away our complacency about health, our easy assumptions about physical ability, our vain beliefs about personal strength. “God’s weakness is stronger than human strength,” Paul, our patron, teaches us. Maybe this is partly what he’s talking about.

Some of us who are still quite young might occasionally feel robbed, as well: you may feel robbed of your innocence, or your future. If so, I hasten to say that Jesus the thief is not the guilty party in all of these losses. Maybe, for younger people, Jesus the thief is present in quieter ways, in your deeper moments of reflection and insight. Maybe you feel powerless and frustrated, or not taken seriously, or desperate for security. You’re facing years of student debt, or forbidding housing costs, or a changing and shrinking job market, or the specter of rising seas and rising temperatures. If Jesus is a thief for you, maybe he steals a belief you may have had that you alone can solve these problems, or that you were invincible. Maybe he takes from you your easy but unfair judgments of the older generations! But hear this good news: Jesus the thief also steals loneliness: in all of these struggles, you are not alone.

So… Jesus the thief takes one thing or another from us: the idols or household gods of possessions or money that isolate us and damage our communities; our easy assumptions and our casual tolerance of evil and injustice; the worldviews, or the views of ourselves, that no longer work for us as we age; the basic belief that we’ve got this, that I’ve got this, that we don’t need one another, that we don’t need a savior and shepherd, a teacher and guide. In all of this stealing, Jesus is, well, a holy thief.

But there may be one more thing that Jesus the holy thief takes from us, and that is this: Jesus the holy thief steals from us our casual assumptions about himself, about God, about the Holy Three. We gather here week by week and praise the One God whose open hand showers us with blessings, and turns us toward one another in love. Yes. We affirm that God in Jesus says to us, “Have no fear, little flock,” and that Jesus the Good Master is warmly opening the door for all of us — particularly those we have harmed — to come inside where it is warm, and the table groans with food. Yes.

But Jesus the holy thief steals from us our limited, sometimes simplistic ideas about who God is, and what God does. God is not a cosmic problem solver, and we who preach Christ crucified know this well. God is not tame, or under our control; God is not predictable. But we keep coming back, we keep giving thanks, we keep saying Yes to the mission, even as we work to accept that God does not save us from everything, or explain everything; and accept that God may take from us things we treasure — all those easy assumptions and beliefs about ourselves and the world.

I want to close with a story about God that may not imagine God (or Jesus) as a thief, exactly, but certainly appreciates that God is always beyond anything we would call easy, or controllable, or tame. The Anglican writer C.S. Lewis, in his children’s stories, imagines God as an enormous and dangerous lion. A good lion, yes! But not tame, not easy. To be in the presence of God requires our bravery, and our humility. In one vivid scene, a girl named Jill encounters the lion when she is desperately thirsty, and the lion sits between her and a refreshing stream of water. These are children’s stories, remember, so it won’t surprise you that the lion is able to talk. When Jill encounters this enormous, dangerous, yet strong and loving beast, she grows up a lot in a few moments. She finds courage she didn’t know she had, the courage of the daughter of a holy thief. Here is the critical moment in their encounter:

“Are you not thirsty?” said the Lion. “I’m dying of thirst,” said Jill. “Then drink,” said the Lion. “May I — could I — would you mind going away while I do?” said Jill. The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience. The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic. “Will you promise not to — do anything to me, if I do come?” said Jill. “I make no promise,” said the Lion. Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer. “Do you eat girls?” she said. “I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it. “I daren’t come and drink,” said Jill. “Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion. “Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.” “There is no other stream,” said the Lion. 

Let's hold each other all night

Preached on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13C), August 3, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Hosea 11:1-11
Psalm 107:1-9, 43
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21

The Rich Fool and the Watchful Servant, by Nelly Bube

I wonder if the one vital thing you really need right now is to be part of a Minyan Tzedek.

‘Minyan’ is a Hebrew term for a sufficient number of people (historically, ten people assigned male at birth) to proceed with public Jewish worship. (For us Christians, it only takes two to make Eucharist. But there must be at least two.)

So that’s ‘Minyan.’ Next: ‘Tzedek.’ Tzedek translates as justice, fairness, righteousness, or integrity. I recall the days after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died: because she died on Rosh Hashanah, she was hailed as a Tzadeket — same root word as the one for tzedek. If you die at the Jewish New year, tradition says you must have truly been an honorable and just elder of the community. God kept you around for the whole year.

Now, put it together: a Minyan Tzedek is a gathering of righteous ones, or better understood, a gathering for righteousness, a gathering for justice.

Here at St. Paul’s we’ve recently formed a Minyan Tzedek we call the Community Action Working Group — a somewhat more, well, ordinary term. CAWG is their acronym. CAWG is a Christian gathering to be sure, but it is, essentially, a Minyan Tzedek, a gathering for righteousness and justice.

There are two reasons why I wonder whether joining a Minyan Tzedek like CAWG is the one vital thing you really need right now. The first, as you might expect, is that this world needs a lot more tzedek. Surely you agree. During these hot summer weeks, I am trying not to look away from the famine and slaughter in Gaza. We must not look away. But Ukraine is languishing, too: we must not look away. And immigration raids are plaguing this country: we must not look away. 

And this week the U.S. president fired Erika McEntarfer, someone whose existence I learned about just yesterday. We must not look away from that firing, either. Ms. McEntarfer was the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a nonpartisan office. Labor statistics matter. They are crucial. We need to know about the state of the economy. Livelihoods, and lives, depend on an informed and active electorate. We need more tzedek in the world, and not just in the big, terrible atrocities. Pray for Erika. Pray for statisticians. Pray for all laborers.

But there’s a second reason why I wonder whether joining a Minyan Tzedek like CAWG is the one vital thing you really need right now, and that’s this: the minyan itself is an incarnation of righteousness in the world. The minyan itself is an intervention. The minyan itself is changing the world, simply by existing. And being a part of that can change you, too.

Some of you may have noticed that over the past few years, I’ve turned again and again to Jewish sources of wisdom and insight. I do this because the Jewish people are our cousins in faith, and also our forbears in faith.

I do this as well because on certain issues — particularly Gaza and the massive trauma suffered by the Palestinian people — I want a Jewish perspective on the tzedek required right now, and I want to draw alongside Israeli and diaspora Jews who are standing in solidarity not just with their own kin, but also with their Palestinian neighbors and companions.

And finally I want a Jewish perspective because, again and again in the Hebrew Bible, we read that the answer to injustice can be found right in the center of the people’s faith tradition. The exile to Babylon was an historical cataclysm, a multi-generational human tragedy for the people who once formed the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The scattered exiles made sense of that trauma by reflecting on their faith. 

That’s what’s happening in today’s passage from the prophet Hosea, even though Hosea lived two centuries before the Babylonian exile, and was responding to an earlier historical catastrophe. The trauma of the fall of the northern kingdom was interpreted as a break in their relationship with God. But then God lovingly calls them back, even as God “roars like a lion”: “They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt,” the prophet sings, “and like doves from the land of Assyria; and I will return them to their homes, says the Lord.”

We Christians, in turn, also interpret traumatic loss through the lens of our faith. “Again and again you called us to return,” we sing to God in one of our Eucharistic prayers. We identify with the wayward and ancient Israelites. When Christmas approaches we take up Hebrew prayers of longing for God’s justice, for God’s dawning. And our Easter Good News is a distinctly Jewish-sounding anthem of redemption and new life that transforms the whole land into a verdant garden.

To gain a strong Jewish perspective on current crises, I have often turned to — and sometimes preached about — Sharon Brous, the founding rabbi of Ikar, a Jewish community in Los Angeles. This week I’m reading her book called The Amen Effect, where she lays out her central theological premise, the guiding principle of her vocation, the central meaning of her life: the deceptively simple idea that (and I’ll say this in my words) when we gather, God saves the world. 

When we gather, God saves the world.

Rabbi Brous begins her book with the fundamental instruction from her faith tradition that we show up for one another, for celebration and mourning alike. So when I read Rabbi Brous and then read today’s Good News according to Luke, one of the first things I notice is the solitude of the rich fool. In this parable, the rich fool stands in for anyone in our faith tradition who underestimates our mission, and misunderstands the purpose of life in God’s abundant presence. It’s easiest to make this mistake when you’re twisting in the wind, out there all by yourself.

Someone in the crowd had asked Jesus to mediate a dispute about a family inheritance, and Jesus tells this parable to raise the sights of everyone in his hearing: this movement isn’t about petty legal disputes with a winner and a loser. It’s not about possessions. It’s definitely not about the heretical “prosperity gospel” that distorts Christianity into a personal self-help tool, pray diligently enough and you’ll have physical and financial security for many long years of leisure. No. The Jesus Movement, again and again, calls for an outpouring of possessions and time, passion and energy, for the benefit of our neighbor.

But this is not merely an ascetic way of life, all of us penniless mystics eating bugs in the desert so that our neighbor has enough to eat. The Jesus who tells the parable of the rich fool in Luke’s Gospel is the same Jesus who shares nineteen abundant meals with his friends in that Gospel. Christianity doesn’t offer a method of spiritual self-mortification or severe self-denial. It is okay to save enough to retire safely, with physical and financial security.

The deeper teaching here is about the deathly poverty of solitude. It’s about the dread foe of loneliness. It’s about a focus on self that pushes others away. And so we might notice that the rich fool talks to himself in the parable. “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years,” the wretched, lonesome landowner says to himself. (He has no one else to talk to.) In his determination to preserve himself, he loses himself in objects and money, in lavish but lonely dinners for one.

And this is the one thing in the Hebrew Bible that God proclaims to be not good. Rabbi Brous writes about this in her book. In Genesis 2:18 God says, “It is not good for a person to be alone;” and in Exodus 18:17-18, writes Sharon Brous, “Moses is rebuked by his father-in-law, Yitro, for taking too much of the burden of leadership upon himself. ‘It’s not good, what you’re doing,’ Yitro says. ‘You can’t do this alone!’ This is astonishing,” Rabbi Brous concludes. “The only thing the Torah identifies as fundamentally not good is aloneness. Twice.”

And this brings me back to CAWG, the Community Action Working Group, our own Christian Minyan Tzedek. CAWG may save lives before we’re done with our work. Some of us may get arrested for a good cause, protesting any number of atrocities besieging our nation in these hard times. But simply coming together as a group, as a minyan, is itself curative, prophetic, and powerful. And it’s not just CAWG. In fact, the Community Action Working Group is only one small extension of this Minyan Tzedek, this weekly gathering, this Eucharistic community of mission. Awash in baptismal waters and nourished by the Body and the Blood of Christ, we rise as one group, one people, united in mission, for the healing of the world.

But Rabbi Brous says it best. Here’s her take on the first and ultimate human gathering, the gathering that gave birth to all of our other gatherings. Sharon Brous offers us an insightful interpretation of the creation of Eve as a partner for Adam in Genesis chapter two. Here are her words:

“Even as God marveled at this wondrous creation, Adam’s heartache was something God could not abide. ‘I will make this one a partner,’ God proclaimed, an ezer k’negdo in the original Hebrew… and God set out to disentangle Eve from Adam. Only when they were severed into distinct beings were they finally able to find their way to one another of their own volition.

“Ezer k’negdo is usually translated as a helpmate, but it really means someone to help you (an ezer) by standing opposite you (k’neged lo). Someone to face you, even when everyone else looks away. Someone to turn toward you and say, ‘I am here. Tell me your pain.’ Someone to support, to challenge, even to confront when necessary. The anam cara, in Celtic wisdom. The soul friend.”

Brous continues:

“The Rabbis imagine the end of that sixth day of creation. After hours of naming animals and frolicking in the garden, the sun begins to set. Adam and Eve have never experienced night before, and Adam starts to panic. He wonders if maybe he did something wrong. As the sky blackens, his alarm turns into desperation. Could it be that the world is ending? Eve hears Adam’s cries and comes close, sitting down across from him (k’negdo). They hold each other all night long, weeping and wailing until — to their astonishment — the world does not return to null and void, and instead the first hint of a new dawn arises.

“It’s then that they realize: this is the way of the world.

“There are two important lessons here. First, you cannot escape the darkness. It’s part of the natural rhythm of the world.

“Second, perhaps the most important question we must answer in our lives is: When the night comes, who will sit and weep by your side? Who shares your worry? Who sees you?” (End quote.)

This is our reason for being here, you and I, all of us. Just this. We are here for one another, here to see, hold, and sometimes confront one another, for the healing of the world, as the sun descends and night falls.

If you’re willing, we can hold each other all night.

Building trust

Preached on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12C), July 27, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Hosea 1:2-10
Psalm 85
Colossians 2:6-15
Luke 11:1-13

The Importunate Neighbour, by William Holman Hunt

How do I know I can trust you?

How do you know you can trust me?

Building trust is difficult, particularly during these times when the advance of artificial intelligence coincides with open corruption in government, technology, and media; times when it gets harder to know what we know, and harder to trust what we’re being told.

Building trust can involve a lot of trial and error. If we must behave perfectly to build trust, then we will surely fail, because none of us is perfect. There is no such thing as a flawless parent, or a perfectly trustworthy friend, or a spouse who never, ever lets their partner down.

We don’t have to behave perfectly. But what do we need to do, to build trust?

A basic, simplistic way of understanding trust goes something like this: if I say what I’m going to do and then do it, I build trust with my neighbor. If an investigator asks you where you were when a crime was committed and you tell the truth, you deepen their trust in you as a reliable witness. And we can always work to restore trust in conventional ways: we pay back whatever is not rightfully ours; we own up to a mistake and apologize; in the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, we make “living amends” by leading a more honest life, day by day.

In fact, amends after a betrayal can surprisingly build stronger trust between two people than they would have had if their bond had never been threatened or damaged. Think of the Japanese craftspeople who practice kintsugi when they repair pottery: they restore the broken vase by joining the shards with bright gold, accentuating rather than downplaying the new patterns caused by a painful break. The vase is even more beautiful now. The break and repair are intentionally, beautifully incorporated into its history.

This all makes good practical sense. We build trust by engaging in ordinary trust-building behaviors, including the things we do to repair a break in trust. 

But I want to dig deeper. And to do so, I want to draw on the work of two ethical, conscientious researchers and consultants in the business world. (There are still some good guys around!) Their names are Frances Frei and Anne Morriss (who happen to be a married couple), and in 2020 they published Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. Frei and Morriss say that there are three basic ways we build trust with one another. They add that many, maybe most, of us are quite strong in one of the three ways to build trust, and weaker in at least one of the other two.

Here’s how it works. In the trust model of Frei and Morriss, I can build trust with you in three ways:

• I can build trust by being authentic: when you talk to me, you are talking to the real me. If authenticity is my anchor, the thing I’m particularly good at, then you can just tell, over time and in different situations, that you are getting to know the real me.

• Second, I can build trust by practicing empathy. If empathy is my anchor, then you can just tell that I don’t merely understand and support you, I care about you, and I care about your success. If empathy is my anchor, I am here to empower you, to lift you up, to encourage you. Empathy, according to Frei and Morriss, is not just a feeling, which is usually how we understand it (we might say, “Oh, I know how she feels; I’ve been there!”). Empathy in trust-building is more about support and empowerment.

• And finally, third, I can build trust by having what Frei and Morriss call logic. This can also be understood as competence. If your anchor — your strongest asset as a trustworthy leader — is logic, then others just “know you can do” the job, that “your reasoning and judgment are sound.” But logic isn’t only about the neocortex. To build trust, we need emotional intelligence. People tend to trust us if they are confident that we not only know how to do our jobs, but we understand the deeper dimensions, we have emotional intelligence, we get it, we’ve got this.

Authenticity, empathy, logic: this is the trust triangle, if you ask Frei and Morriss. I like this approach, because trust is rightly understood as a hard thing to build, a challenge that follows us through all our lives; and Frei and Morriss give us a compassionate, empowering, and also practical way to build trust.

But as we take up this topic, we do well to remember that we are Christians, and that as Christians we have particular lenses we can use to view trust and trust-building, lenses that bring into focus some things and blur or obscure other things. 

One lens we use to look at the concept of trust is the Hebrew Bible, and the more we read that bible — Christians call it the “Old Testament” — the more we read it, the more we hear about, metaphorically speaking, a troubled marriage. The troubled married couple is God and God’s people. Again and again, God is upset with the people because they are faithless, and the people are upset with God because God seems to have abandoned them.

In this proverbial marriage that spans centuries, we can recognize the painful themes of any relationship: betrayal, misunderstanding, broken promises, painful absences, dashed expectations. The people rage at God, and in our own Christian tradition, the central figure of Christianity takes up their cry on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” the humanity of Jesus screams from the cross, quoting Psalm 22.

But God expresses powerful anger, too. The people turn from God, again and again, finding almost anyone or anything else to fashion into a golden calf. At one point they demand a human king, so that they can be like all the other nations, and God takes offense at the idea. And then, as we follow the ages-long saga of this rocky relationship, we finally come upon the provocative prophet Hosea, whose book we opened and began reading a few moments ago. 

Hosea gets brutally direct with the marriage metaphor. It’s fair to say we can even hear misogyny in the prophet’s voice. If you haven’t already recoiled from the text, you might do so now, when I repeat a bit of it: “The Lord said to Hosea, ‘Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.’” This is not remotely my favorite metaphor, this image of a man married to a faithless, untrustworthy wife. You may be tempted to just discard it: surely there’s a better way for the prophet to challenge God’s people!

But our tradition invites us to keep this metaphor around, so let’s sit with it a bit longer. (Just a bit. Hang in there with Hosea for just a few more moments.) After consummating marriage with a faithless person, the prophet is to name his children terrible names, names that accuse the people, names that mean things like “No mercy!”. In our day, the prophet’s children might be given names that mean “God won’t restore the rivers you polluted,” or “God won’t forgive you for selling weapons of war that destroy innocent life.” This is rough.

But the more we sit with this troubling text, the more we can recognize all of this as a trust complaint: the people broke trust with God. “Why have you forsaken me?” the psalmist yells out to God. “What?! You have forsaken me!” God seems to yell back. The vase is shattered, and so far, the potter hasn’t pulled out the fine gold sealant that would restore what’s broken to something even more beautiful than the original.

For us Christians, that potter is Jesus Christ. The business consultants Anne Morriss and Frances Frei do not offer a Christian vision, and we should not expect them to do so. But for us, Jesus can be the One who builds trust with immense skill in all three dimensions: Jesus is authentic: he is who he presents himself to be; Jesus is empathetic: he is here for us, here to lift and empower and send us; and Jesus the Word of God is logic itself: the Logos, the creative Word through whom all things have come into being.

If we turn to Jesus as our master trust builder, then we need look no further than his counsel on prayer for a primer on building trust with one another, and with our neighbor. How should we pray? The answer of Jesus to this question is quite simple, but also riveting:

First, we pray with restored trust in God, whom we call “Father,” a familial name, an intimate name. The marriage metaphor is set aside in favor of something more fundamental, more visceral: Jesus calls God Father, and we in turn are invited to do so, evoking the basic, elemental trust that develops between a trustworthy parent and their beloved child. 

Then we affirm that God’s name is holy — an echo of the foundational trust that the one God established with God’s people at Sinai — and we ask that God’s kingdom come. Not our kingdom — God’s kingdom, God’s agenda, God’s presence, God’s justice, God’s peace. God’s trust. 

Then we ask for enough to live today, and enough to forgive today. You and I can only forgive each other if we have first received forgiveness from God. And we finally ask that God not “bring us into the time of trial.” 

“Do not bring us into the time of trial” can be a hard phrase to interpret. It doesn’t mean that we’re asking for a pain-free life. It’s more about not being abandoned during the hardships of life. “Why have you forsaken me?” wails the psalmist — and Jesus — in a desperate time of trial. When we pray for deliverance from this, we are reaching out in trust to God: please, God — please, Father — do not leave us. Save us from solitude. Save us from despair.

And then, tomorrow, we pray for these four things again: for God’s presence, and for our daily human needs; for God’s forgiveness (which we share with one another), and for salvation.

And then, the next day, we pray for them again. We can change up the words, of course: the so-called “Lord’s Prayer” is more like a prayer form, like the various and changing forms of our Prayers of the People. When he teaches us to pray, Jesus isn’t giving us a script. He’s teaching us how to build trust. 

In this confusing and duplicitous age, do we need anything else, anything at all, more than this?

Breaking the cultural code

Preached on the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11C), July 20, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Samuel Torvend.

Amos 8:1-12
Psalm 52
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42

Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, by Johannes Vermeer

For all intents and purposes, I grew up in a bed and breakfast. Given the considerable number of guests who came to our home, my sister and I were part of the staff. As they would say on Downton Abbey: we were in service as cleaners and assistant cooks. The range of guests ran from young women who were pregnant without marriage, young women kicked out of their parents’ homes to bishops who wondered how my father, a clergyperson, animated considerable growth in the California parishes he served. In all of this, our mother, a gracious host and an art educator, oversaw the household, the frequent changing of bed and bathroom linens, the preparation of meals, the detailed cleaning of the house, the care for our gardens, and getting up long before guests did to ensure that breakfast was ready. No paper plates and napkins here: only the good linens would do for young women pregnant out of wedlock as well as elderly bishops who frequently overenjoyed the lovely California wines they were served.

To say the least, this gospel reading was not one of our mother’s favorites, with Jesus apparently looking down upon the work it takes to welcome people into one’s home. “Oh right,” our mother would say, “lazy Mary gets the credit for sitting at Jesus’ feet with that adoring look on her face while Martha is sweating away as she prepares their dinner.” So troubling was the story, that I decided to rewrite and then frame it as a gift to Mom on Mother’s Day: "Lord,” said Martha, “do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." The Lord answered her, saying, “Blessed are you, Martha, for you care for many things, a faithful steward of all that God gives you.” 

The biblical scholars who have constructed the social world of Jesus, Mary, and Martha offer an interesting interpretation of this story. In the cultural and religious world of the Mediterranean, women did not sit with men to whom they were unrelated unless there were chaperones present. In that world then, every attempt was made to diminish the possibility of untoward behavior between unmarried men and unmarried women. The surprise of this story is that Jesus, Mary, and Martha break the accepted cultural code of who is an acceptable or unacceptable companion. 

But there is more. In Mediterranean cultures at the time of Jesus, women were not educated. Indeed, village women – the women with whom Jesus grew up and had interactions in adult life – were not considered capable of learning anything except the management of a household. The surprise in this story is that Jesus appears to be teaching Mary and thus rejecting a culturally accepted norm while demonstrating that women, no different than men, are capable of learning. Do we not recognize his disregard for established gender stereotypes? And might his disregard for such stereotypes call into question the stereotypes with which you and I have been raised: stereotypes that can box us and others into neat and manageable and frequently unhealthy categories that wash the life out of us and them? If anything, this gospel story is a word of caution that invites us to reflect on the often unconscious views we hold of others – views or categories or stereotypes that rob others of their rich complexity.

I think it's good for us to remember that Luke directs his gospel to a community of non-Jewish Christians in the Mediterranean world: a world in which the emerging Christian movement was a minority in a society, a society little different than our own that traded in harmful stereotypes every day. After all, do we not hear today from the highest levels of government that immigrants are nothing more than “criminals,” that trans persons are referred to as “corrupters,” that investigative reporters are “evil distributors of fake news,” that a bishop who pleads for mercy is nothing more than a “hardline hater”? Indeed, the news seems to be awash in these vile stereotypes that are not only insulting but also give permission for dishonorable citizens to engage in harmful activity, in violence. 

And so I say, how grateful I am that each year you and I renew a solemn baptismal vow to “respect the dignity of every human being.” To say the least, it is a challenging vow to internalize given the socialization we have experienced in the bias and discriminations of American culture. The temptation is ever present to respect the God-given and inherent dignity discerned only in those who think and act just like you and me: the person or group who reflects our concerns, social status, and identity. This is why I think the profession of this sacred vow invites you and me to live into it throughout a life-time. And live into to it we must as followers of Jesus Christ, the One who honored the image of God in the street smart hooker and the wealthy matron, the army officer and the insurgent bent on murder, the corrupt tax collector and the collector’s victim – the One who could see through identity and social status to the flame of dignity illuminating the souls of one and all. 

It's of interest to me – and I hope to you – that the Greek term in this story which describes Martha’s tasks is diakonia, a term that refers to the one who serves at table. What, then, was she busy about? Why preparing a meal for Jesus, the One who broke the cultural code that said some are acceptable at table and others are unacceptable by virtue of their questionable identity, social status, or lukewarm religious devotion. Her meal at table, dear friends, is an image of the little meal we keep at this table: this fragment of bread, this sip of wine. Believe me: there are moments when I think it is a dangerous thing to come to this table for the One who freely offers himself to us, who unites himself with our bodies, minds, and souls in the most holy Eucharist is the One who gives you and me the strength to respect the dignity of each and every one we will encounter in the days to come. The only question is this: will we receive him with thanksgiving? 

"In the throes of laughter"

Preached on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10C), July 13, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Amos 7:7-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37

Good Samaritan with a Lily, by Olga Bakhtina

The writer and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib published an essay in The New Yorker this morning. He wrote about an extraordinary, truly unbelievable experience he recently enjoyed. It happened on June 28, a couple of Saturdays ago, at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. That same evening, many of us were here celebrating the notable accomplishments at this parish over the past three years.

But the celebration in New York, at the Beacon Theatre, was vastly more important and wondrous, by several orders of magnitude. Ramy Youssef was there: Youssef is an actor, comedian, and producer. His presence alone enraptured the largely-Muslim audience. Their souls were soothed and delighted by his humor, and in his essay, Abdurraqib shared some of the inside-group humor that rallies and strengthens Muslims in this time of spiraling Islamophobia.

But surprise and delight stole across the room when the audience became aware of two more guests: Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York; and Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for more than three months. Khalil was released just eight days before this triumphant evening. His detention, in Louisiana, prevented him from witnessing the birth of his first child. Abdurraqib was struck by how young Khalil is — just thirty years old, he is a brand-new father who is only now learning how to hold his infant son. Abdurraqib also admired how quickly and fiercely Khalil resumed his public advocacy for Palestine, unafraid of government reprisals.

In his essay about that evening, Hanif Abdurraqib shared some of his favorite sayings, or Ahadith, of the prophet Muhammad. This is my favorite Hadith from among his favorites: “A Hadith that I love,” Abdurraqib writes, “[a Hadith] which underpins many of my actions, states that ‘the believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.’”

“‘The believers, in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy, are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.’”

Abdurraqib goes on to reflect on this Hadith: “I love the Hadith about a collective body because it is not just about pain—it is about sharing the full spectrum of human feeling. I am not drawn to action only because people have suffered or are suffering; I am drawn to action because I am distinctly aware of every inch of humanity from which suffering keeps people.”

“I am drawn to action because I am distinctly aware of every inch of humanity from which suffering keeps people.” I think what Abdurraqib means here is this: suffering keeps people from parts of their own humanity: suffering interferes with laughter and joy; suffering diminishes the human imagination; suffering bends humans low, sometimes quite literally, beneath a great burden of anguish, anger, and fear.

But even in the midst of suffering, humans do laugh; we do sing. And this night at the Beacon Theatre was a night of beautiful, curative comedy! Abdurraqib noticed the laughter of these famous and accomplished men, and it’s worth quoting him at length:

“It was a delight to catch a glimpse of [Mahmoud] Khalil in the throes of laughter. He laughed as though each laugh were a physical vessel urgently exiting his body, or a secret he’d held for so long that it had forced its way out. Khalil’s body jerked forward when he laughed — his laughter was more of a kinetic event than a sonic one. He rocked, he shook slightly, and he smiled wide. One seat over, Mamdani laughed, too, with a bit more volume; his laughter seemed to arrive less like a long-held secret than like an idea that he couldn’t wait to share. Most of the audience didn’t know [yet] that the two men were in the room, and because of this most of the audience missed out on the small miracle of watching them share their joy at the scene before them.”

If Muslim “believers,” as the Hadith calls them, are “just like one body,” then when one of them suffers, all of them suffer; but all of the emotions are felt this way, including laughter, sweet and salutary laughter. If one person laughs, the whole body of believers laughs. Of course many in the Beacon Theatre also wept, wiping away tears of surprise, relief, and hard-won joy. This was a nearly unbelievable inbreaking of hope, this wondrous event on a hot night in New York. Could the city of New York actually be poised to elect a Muslim mayor? Could the United States actually be raising up an advocate for Palestine who can inspire millions more, and finally throw off the dull and dreadful wet-wool blanket of bigotry and cruelty that still nearly smothers our Muslim compatriots and companions?

If so, then one strong way for all those here in this room who might have felt a little out of place at the Beacon Theatre that night — out of place not because we are not allies, but because we are not Muslims — one strong way for us to lock arms with our companions there is to affirm that our faith tradition also treasures teachings about the Body — the Body of Christ, the Body of this assembly, the Body of believers. But more crucially, our faith tradition extends our hand in peace to those who do not share our faith, and especially those who have been harmed by our faith — those who have been harmed by us.

This morning, we need look no further for this teaching than the wisdom we find in the deeply familiar parable of the man who traveled from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jerusalem to Jericho: this is a perilous road, both in our time and for those who first heard the teachings of Jesus. Jericho today is a city in the West Bank, in the middle of an inhumane conflict involving mass Palestinian displacement by Israeli settlers. In the time of Jesus, various factions turned the Jericho road into a dangerous path of violence. 

For help in our effort to open up this parable, and to push past some of the easier, more obvious interpretations, I like to turn to Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the Christian New Testament. Dr. Levine points to the fraught and complicated ethnic and cultural differences among the characters. The person who falls victim to robbery is traveling from Jerusalem: perhaps he is a faithful Judean man returning from pilgrimage at his holy city. The priest and the Levite are headed back to that city, presumably to take up their vocations in the temple. But if the robbery victim had been conscious enough to notice who was coming to his aid, he might have recoiled in anger and shock: it is a Samaritan. Judeans and Samaritans are geographical neighbors and ethnic-religious cousins, but they are not friends.

But this encounter is more nuanced, and troubling, than a kind gesture shared between estranged neighbors. Amy-Jill Levine brings this cultural conflict into sharp relief for us. “To hear the parable today,” she writes, “we only need to update the identity of the figures. [Let’s say] I am an Israeli Jew on my way from Jerusalem to Jericho, and I am attacked by thieves, beaten, stripped, robbed, and left half dead in a ditch. Two people who should have stopped to help [instead just] pass me by: the first, a Jewish medic from the Israel Defense Forces; the second, a member of the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. But the person who takes compassion on me and shows me mercy is a Palestinian Muslim whose sympathies lie with Hamas...”

This breaks open the surprising wisdom that Jesus is teaching. Who is our neighbor? A person who comes to our aid. Okay, sure. Who is our neighbor? A person we approach to give aid. Yes, of course. Who is our neighbor? Sometimes our neighbor is the very last person we might expect to stop and offer assistance. Sometimes our neighbor is the one person we have identified as our enemy. 

Like most parables — like all parables — this deceptively simple story disrupts our expectations, disturbs our contented, self-satisfied takes, upends our understanding of the world around us.

But back to that glorious evening in New York, late last month. I wasn’t there, and in a real sense I did not belong there: Beacon Theatre on June 28th was a truly safe space for Muslim mourning, healing, bonding, laughter, and love. The parables of Jesus we treasure stand proudly alongside the Islamic Ahadith, and with our own voices, with our own votes, with our own faith, we can work ever harder to be allies for those in greatest peril right now. But there is a difference — a healthy, natural difference — between allies and members of an oppressed group. 

We can, however, hold another glad event, and in fact we do that week by week. We practice the celebration, over and over, knowing we won’t really get it all right until God’s dominion dawns for every single human person on Earth. We lay this Table; we pour wine into one cup; we break one bread into many fragments; we watch and listen to be sure everyone is nourished; we send the gifts out from here to those in our Body who can’t be physically present with us today. Week by week, we do all of these good things.

This meal is God’s balm for the wounds of this world, some of them inflicted by us, some of them inflicted in our name. This meal is God’s answer to that nagging question, “What can we do?” What can we do? We can feed the hungry world. We can run to the assistance of the ICE victim. We can relax and check our privilege when the person we never expected to help comes to our assistance. We can just keep at it, week by week, with God’s presence and power, until that weary road from Jerusalem to Jericho blossoms into a broad avenue of justice and peace.

Sweetheart, what is it? What's wrong?

Preached on the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9C), July 6, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

2 Kings 5:1-14
Psalm 30
Galatians 6:1-16
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Reap What You Sow, by Ernesto Ybarra

Every person contains multitudes. This is something of an axiom in current psychological circles. If you have a therapist, I imagine they’ve said to you at least once, “Which part of you thinks that?”. Your therapist is likely to ask this when you say something self-deprecating, or discouraging, or anxious.

Our vernacular language carries this belief about human nature — that we contain multitudes: “Part of me wants to get married,” you might say to yourself; “but another part of me wants to wait and see.” Each of us is an individual, yet there are smaller selves within each of us.

Some of our psychological “parts” are quite young, even pre-verbal. When something upsetting happens, one of our inner selves is triggered, urging us to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn. (“Fawn” is the impulse to charm or flatter someone you perceive to be dangerous.) When one of our internal parts is triggered, it’s usually because we experienced a similar trauma when we were much younger, and the current stressor reminds us of that old wound. The body remembers. A body part remembers.

But the modern idea of psychological parts has ancient parallels. Often when we encounter a troubled person in holy scripture, we’re told that they have “demons,” often plural. What is a “demon,” really, if not a part or a dimension of the self that is upset, or triggered? The healing in these stories is not a medical procedure as much as a form of psychotherapeutic relief: the triggered psychological part is soothed, and gently brought back into a relaxed state.

Centuries ago or just this morning, that process can be quite simple and straightforward, even though many of us experience persistent and recurring emotional distress. Sometimes, when I am under great stress, it helps to simply find a quiet room, sit in a chair, and say to myself — out loud — “Sweetheart, what is it? What’s wrong?”. I encourage the distressed part of myself to let me know what is upsetting them. I normalize, and validate, their subjective experience. I begin to breathe more easily. I begin to regulate my feelings, and integrate them once again with my thoughts.

But it’s always much easier to do this when we have help. One of the great atrocities of this past week is the provision in the omnibus budget bill, now signed into law, that deprives seventeen million people of Medicaid — bare-bones, shoe-string health insurance for those who are disabled, sick, or low-income — foreclosing their chance to receive even basic mental health care. Physical illnesses will go untreated, but mental and emotional distress will also proliferate across our troubled land, particularly in this time of massive, roiling, global distress. Fewer and fewer people will receive the help we all need simply to make it through the day.

Every person contains multitudes, but in these basic existential matters we are all quite simple, and quite similar. When we are in distress, we often just need a helping hand. We need someone to recognize our humanity, and reach out to us with compassion. That’s really it. None of us needs a miracle cure, or a so-called “Cadillac” insurance plan that meets our every conceivable need. But we all need help, to soothe the anxious and sad parts within us; to apply balm to our chapped skin; to turn the pillow just so and remain with us through the long night.

With all of this in mind, I now return your attention to the story of Naaman, an army commander, a man of war, a fearsome warrior. Naaman is in distress, in more than one way. Outwardly and most obviously, he suffers a skin disease, which in his time and place means that he is ritually unclean: he will not be allowed to enter the Temple. Skin ailments are a source of profound social shame.

But, just like you and me, Naaman contains multitudes. He harbors a skin disease, but he is also afflicted with pride, with stuffy and pompous self-confidence: maybe this pride, this inflated sense of self, was just one of his psychological parts, coping with a nagging sense of inferiority by whispering in Naaman’s ear that he is too good for common treatments, too good for medicines pedalled by some lower-class prophet or healer. In our day, Naaman would go to Swedish Hospital and demand a hospital room of his own, and the best specialists to review his case and administer state-of-the-art treatments.

And so Naaman balks after a common servant girl suggests he consult the prophet Elisha, and Elisha prescribes seven dips in the little, unremarkable River Jordan. There would be no theatrics, no dramatic invocation of the power of a fearsome god, no waving of the hands and complicated chants above the leprous wounds. Just a series of dips in a river at the edge of the map. 

But the good news for Naaman is that one or more of his internal parts manages to listen to the good counsel of his servants, who suggest that he submit to the humble — even humiliating — treatment, since he most likely would have endured a much more difficult treatment, had it been prescribed. “Fine,” Naaman seems to say, and he goes ahead and gets it over with. And he is healed.

But this is where things get interesting, and to fully understand the scene, we need to dip into the Hebrew language of the passage. Let’s go back a bit in the story, to the part where a young girl – a slave girl – steps in to suggest the treatment. In Hebrew, the term for “young girl” in the text is “Na’arah qetannah.” Na’arah qetannah. Nothing to see here, just yet. But then, later on, when the storyteller announces that Naaman has been healed, the text says that his skin was healed “like the flesh of a little child.” In Hebrew, the phrase “like the flesh of a little child” is “Kibsar na’ar qaton.” Na’ar qaton. That is, the same words that we heard for “young girl,” just in their masculine form.

What does this mean? It means that Naaman’s healing goes much deeper than the curing of his skin disease. The Hebrew Bible scholar Stephen Cook explains it this way. Dr. Cook says, “Naaman hasn’t just been healed. He [has] become humble, open. He’s been made like [the young slave girl]. The man of war becomes like a child. That’s not just about skin; it’s about the heart.” Naaman’s skin is restored, and the Hebrew word for ‘restored’ here is shoob – a verb that means not only restoration, but also turning, or returning – as Dr. Cook says, “a turning of the heart, not just the body.”

In our contemporary psychological terms, Naaman becomes emotionally regulated. His inner multitudes come back into balance. Some part of him was in distress, which expressed itself not only in a skin ailment but (even more powerfully) in his sour, self-righteous attitude. As the story opens, Naaman is on the extreme opposite end of the story from the young slave girl: he has all the privileges, she has none, or none but one: she can still speak, and shape events with her voice. But when Naaman goes through his healing experience, the two characters trade places. He submits humbly to a treatment – a common treatment, a humble ritual that the poorest, dustiest nomad in the land is entitled to perform – and he gets back in touch with his humbler self, his younger self, his more vulnerable self.

And we, you and I, all of us gathered here, we in turn are called to this same humility, this same vulnerability. We follow one who sends his followers into ministry with “no purse, no bag, no sandals.” They are utterly vulnerable to the hospitality – or lack thereof – of the hosts they encounter on their journey. This person at the center of our faith, Jesus of Nazareth, dies the humiliating death of a common criminal. And yet he rises, and his followers rise, and we rise, full of life and health and strength, like Naaman who emerges from the River Jordan with skin kibsar na’ar qeton, skin “like the flesh of a little child.”

So much is dreadful right now. And so many of the awful atrocities in this country are being committed by self-proclaimed Christians, if you can believe it, people who somehow have gleaned lessons from holy scripture that are entirely at odds with the Good News we actually find there. If we want to respond like mighty warriors, that would be understandable. If we want to rise up like battle-tested soldiers with an inflated view of ourselves, that would make sense.

But our Savior calls us to bathe in baptismal waters, waters that soothe our anxious inner selves, steady our angry hearts, and send us in mission like lambs in the midst of wolves. In this hard and humbling work, our vulnerability is our sword; our love for one another, and for the stranger, is our shield. Armed not with weapons of war but wearing tender armor kibsar na’ar qeton, we go forth from here as healers, helpers, allies, and friends of those in deepest need, those in dreadful peril.

Apostles Peter and Paul

Preached on the Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Apostles, June 29, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Rt. Rev. Phil LaBelle.

Ezekiel 34:11-16
2 Timothy 4:1-8
John 21:15-19
Psalm 87

St. Peter and St. Paul, by Vladimir Zunuzin

We need something else. We need someone else.

Preached on the Second Sunday after Pentecost (Year C), June 22, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Most Rev. Melissa Skelton.

1 Kings 19:1-4, 8-15a
Psalm 42 and 43
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 8:26-39

From Violence to Hope, by Polly Castor