"Superheroes Are Everywhere, Even Inside of You!"

November 10, 2024, 5:00pm sermon, preached he Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27B) by Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D.

Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17; Mark 12:38-44

Every person’s life tells a story. Every life. And the stories a community, a people, hold on to and tell and retell shape the lives of generations to come. Sacred stories. Like the story of Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi.

Now this evening, we heard just a snippet of the end of that story. We would have heard more last Sunday if the Feast of All Saints hadn’t taken precedence over the readings for the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost. Let me fill in what John Sutherland read to us a bit.

It’s a story of two women in a deeply patriarchal culture with virtually no rights and no way to provide for themselves without male next-of-kin: fathers or husbands or sons. It’s a story of insecurity. Food insecurity. Financial insecurity. Social insecurity.

Naomi was an Israelite woman back in the time of the judges – before Israel was ruled by a king. Naomi was married and had two sons. In a time of famine, the four emigrated to the neighboring, but foreign country of Moab in order to survive. Then, Naomi’s husband died – but she still had her two sons to support her. And they eventually married Moabite women named Orpah and Ruth. But then the sons also died. Leaving Naomi and Ruth and Orpah on their own as widows – threatened with being destitute. Naomi decided to go back to her extended family in Israel and told Orpah and Ruth to return to their own families. Orpah did, but not Ruth. She clung in love to Naomi, saying: “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16).

Back in Israel, Bethlehem to be precise, Ruth – now she’s the immigrant! – takes bold and creative advantage of a little codicil in the law of Moses that prohibited Israelite farmers from harvesting their fields all the way to the edges. They were commanded to leave the corners and the windfall for foreigners, widows, and the poor to find some way to try and survive. And so Ruth followed the women of a man named Boaz to glean the grain that they had dropped or overlooked. When Boaz heard about Ruth’s care for Noami her mother-in-law, and his kinswoman, he gave Ruth additional barley for bread and invited her not just to glean the scraps left behind, but harvest as much good grain as she needed (2:1-23). And you heard the end of the story. Boaz marries Ruth, granting both widows security. And Ruth has a son, named Obed, to Naomi’s great joy.

+++

The story of Ruth and Naomi hardly feels ancient. It could have come right out of the newspapers of November 2024 and from our television and computer screens. To make that connection, I want to read you a children’s book, published five years ago, that tells the story of another woman, a woman of color, daughter of immigrant parents. Kamala Harris and her book Superheroes Are Everywhere.

[Now if you had been in the upstairs worship space at St. Paul’s the evening of November 10, you would have seen me step from behind the lectern, put a chair in front of those gathered in the pews, sit, and read the book like an elementary school teacher, showing the pictures on each page. Here, instead, I’ll just list the superheroes Kamala discovered across her lifelong search, and encourage you to find the book and read it – maybe read it to a child, or read it as a child: Her mom. Her sister Maya. Her dad. Her grandparents in India and Jamaica. Her best friend in kindergarten. Mrs. Wilson, her first-grade teacher. Her neighbor down the street, Mrs. Shelton. Aunt Lenore, Uncle Sherman, Aunt Mary, and Uncle Freddy. Her aunt Chris, who like Kamala attended Howard University; her mom the scientist, Uncle Balu the economist, Aunt Sarala the doctor, and Aunt Chinni who works with computers. Lawyers Kamala looked up to: Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley, and Charles Hamilton Houston. All the people she worked with to help kids as a lawyer and U.S. Senator; and the amazing kids themselves. Superheroes Are Everywhere, by Kamala Harris, illustrated by Mechal Renee Roe (New York: Philomel Books – an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2019).]

Kamala Harris’ children’s book concludes with what she calls “The Hero Code” (pages 27-28):

“Do you want to be a superhero?

It’s easier than you think.

The first thing to do is raise your right hand and say the words on the next page out loud.

If you want to wear a cape while you do this, you can – but you don’t have to.

I PROMISE TO:

• make people feel special

• be someone people can count on

• help people be brave

• stand up for what’s right

• be a best friend

• be a good teacher

• be kind

• explore with my friends and family

• study and work hard

• protect people who need it

• make a difference when I can

I promise to be the very best me I can be!”

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This evening – surrounded by the many insecurities of November 2024 – I want to add a few promises to Kamala Harris’ hero code. I hope they might be our promises, not just as individuals but as a community, as we hold on to and tell and retell the sacred story of Ruth and Naomi.

Like those two poor widows – both foreigners in their own way:

We promise to endure.

We promise to claim our God-given dignity and agency.

We promise to harvest the gleanings from around the edges of our patriarchal and racist and homophobic culture for the flourishing of all God’s children.

For, remember, Ruth was King David’s great-grandmother. Her story continues in his life. And, twenty-eight generations later, David’s story and Ruth’s story and Naomi’s story lived on in Joseph and Mary and Jesus, the Anointed One (Ruth 4:17, Matthew 1:1-17).

Pastoral Reflection in Response to the 2024 Election

Dear friends,

My heart is heavy with grief and exhaustion. But my job is to preach the Good News, the Gospel, God’s glad tidings of justice and peace. 

I'll get to that, I promise. But we can’t just jump to the cheerful things. This is a profoundly frightening time. Many, many people are in danger as a result of our national election. And of course it’s not just the election. We are facing so many overlapping crises right now. We are worried for the safety of women, persons of color, and transgender persons. We watch with outrage as warfare kills innocent people. We can’t even trust that our kids are safe from deadly violence in the classroom. And of course, through all of this, we feel traumatic anxiety about climate change and extreme weather.

I sometimes feel like I’m suffocating under heavy blankets of fear, anger, and aching sadness. And not just today, not just last evening: I’ve awakened in the wee hours quite often, for many years now, worried about all that’s happening, all that could happen.

In times when I’m feeling deeply discouraged, I think about my mother, when she was dying of cancer, holding out hope for healing, for recovery, for the tumors to go down and the illness to go into remission. I remember her saying, several times, “Maybe I’m just whistling in the graveyard.” And yes, given that she did finally die of her illness, if she was only hoping for a physical cure, this was a false hope.

But I also remember that my mother did not die in despair. I remember that she did, finally, have a more nuanced and genuinely hopeful understanding of her illness, and her grim prognosis. She understood that healing and curing are not the same thing: that one can die of an illness with serenity, with peace, and with confidence.

My mother prayed fervently for healing, and healing came to her, even though a cancer cure did not. She wasn’t “whistling in the graveyard,” a cynical term to describe false hope. She was singing in the graveyard. Yes: this I believe; this I know. 

Here’s where I start my own song in the graveyard of this troubled world: I think of our tweens and teenagers at St. Paul’s, serving as leaders in our Neighborhood Action ministry, asking intelligent questions, pointing the way to a collaborative, intergenerational community of faith. In a time and place where this may seem impossible, one of our youth has become the driver of church attendance in their household, so that they can serve yet again in our companionship ministry alongside our neighbors who seek safe shelter.

Another tween here at St. Paul’s is a lector and an actor, a curious soul with intelligent questions about God, about suffering, about the meaning of biblical parables. His smile lights up a whole room as he joins us in delightful, creative ministry. Know this truth: these young people have a community that nurtures and supports them, and makes them ready to enter, and improve, this world.

Then I think of their parents, and all parents at this parish we love. Most of these parents fight chronic exhaustion to do all they can for their kids, and at our church they find some relief — relief given to them by all the rest of us.

Then I think of our elders, full of years, discerning their shifting roles and identities as they gather here year by year to say their prayers. And then it all comes together, for me: I sing in the graveyard of our fears, the graveyard of our anger, the graveyard of our aching sadness: I sing with resurrection joy about the intergenerational community of faith God has given us. This is the source of authentic hope for me in these terrible times: God’s answer to a collapsing world is communities with people of all ages, working together, praying together, serving together, singing together.

It has always been like this. The first Christian communities lived in a shattering time of oppression and state-sanctioned violence. Most of the New Testament was written amid the ashes of Jerusalem, sacked by Rome without mercy. In the accounts and letters of our forebears, we see their worries about chaos and death. We hear their concern that Jesus wasn’t coming back as quickly as they expected, as the first and second generations were beginning to die. “Where is our hope?” I hear them saying — I hear them crying out. 

Their hope comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth, and that hope comes alive in their intergenerational house churches, their fellowship, their breaking of the bread and their prayers. They eventually changed the world for the better, much better, simply by coming together and forming the world they wanted to live in. God’s answer to a collapsing world is a community of faith. And then another community of faith. And then another. And then another, until they circle the whole world.

But I need to say one more thing about our faith — about Christianity. The first Christians lived in a world where their faith was universally unknown. (It wasn’t even yet called “Christianity”!) They were a tiny sect in a backwater of the empire. But in our time, people cause great damage the world over by misappropriating Christianity for partisan political ends. They weaponize our faith, perversely using it to terrify and harass trans kids; to rationalize violence; to separate families and deport migrants; all while paying no heed to the devastation of the land, rivers, and seas. They call themselves Christians, but they ignore Jesus when he says, “Put your sword back into its sheath!” They ignore God when God reminds the people that they should welcome the stranger, for they themselves were strangers in the land of Egypt.

And so we have more than one mission. Our primary mission, given to us by God, is not to win elections, but to cultivate this intergenerational community of faith for the health of our members, and for the health of our neighbors. But a second mission is this: when we stand here, in this corner of God’s good world, and preach Christ crucified and Christ resurrected, we reveal to the world an authentic Christian community. We reveal to the world the Body of Christ as allies of all in harm’s way, as partners in action and contemplation. We reveal to the world a just and peaceful future, over and against the bitter disappointments of our stormy present. We reveal to the world the true meaning of the cross of Christ. In all we do here, together, we are evangelists: we proclaim truly Good News.

Paul, our patron, wrote more than once to the church in Corinth, in Greece. We have his writings collected in two letters. Paul is often impatient with the Corinthians, who found it all too easy to give in to the way of the world: in the world around them, the Corinthians saw injustice and inequality, and their own meal practices started to devolve. Wealthier, better connected people sat in better seats; a pecking order developed; they often lost sight of God’s mission to change and save the world, one community of justice at a time. Paul encourages them, but he also upbraids them, takes them to task. He reminds them that the mission is difficult, but it truly does transform the world. In his second letter to them, Paul writes this:

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies [2 Cor 4:7-9]. 

You and I, we’re the clay jars Paul is talking about. We are mortal. We are vulnerable mammals on a planet that, against all odds, somehow supports life. But the treasure of God’s kingdom is stored inside us, between us, among us. And so, as we move forward into the fray, into the arena, we surely are afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down; but we are not crushed, not driven to despair, not forsaken, not destroyed.

“We carry around the death of Jesus,” Paul writes. That is, we are acquainted with death; we are companions of the dying; we are friends of the refugee; we are visitors of those on death row; we are often found comforting the sick in hospitals and sharing soup with unhoused campers. We Christians are well acquainted with death. In this sense, what happened yesterday does not come to us as a surprise. So goes the world.

But we also reveal the life of Jesus. Always with God’s help, we change this old world. We take our part in making it new. Oh, dear friends, how I love you. How deeply I want to embrace all of you, encourage you, buck you up, send you out. And there will be time for that. Feel your feelings today, drink water, breathe. But let’s keep coming back, okay? Come back to help our kids grow up with authentic hope. Come back to receive the wisdom of our elders. God is with us, and God gives us extraordinary power, visible in our bodies. And this — this gathered community of saints — this is our song of alleluia in the graveyard of this troubled world. May the Holy Three bless you and keep you.

Father Stephen

Which wolf is which?

Preached on All Saints’ Sunday (Year B), November 3, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44

A portion of the Communion of Saints tapestry at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles.

“Any [fool] can burn down a barn.”

This is a line from a movie, a quarter century ago. “Any fool can burn down a barn,” says a presidential candidate in the film, “Primary Colors,” a fictional take on a national election, nineteen-nineties-style. (Elections were different back then… but also not all that different.)

I have often recalled this movie line in the past few weeks and months. We’re on the brink of another critically important national election, another civic event with countless innocent lives hanging in the balance. In this time of polarization and catastrophic warfare, it’s easy to conclude that there are two kinds of people, two ways of being, two basic human natures. You can either be a wise person who builds barns, or you can be a fool who burns the barn down.

Now, of course, I want us all to be barn builders. But it’s much more complicated than a good/bad, wise/foolish, angel/devil binary: Each of us has the capacity for both: We all know how to build things up; we all know how to burn things down. Our behaviors and choices are usually a confusing, confounding mix. There is a battle raging inside each one of us: our essential human nature, made in God’s image, wants to build things up, but our broken, self-centered, ‘shadow’ self wants to burn things down. And our spiritual lives often determine who prevails.

This basic idea has often been expressed with a different, well-known metaphor, attributed to a Native American tradition, perhaps from the Cherokee: that within each of us live two wolves, a wolf that strives to be good, compassionate, and constructive; and a wolf that encourages evil, selfishness, and violence. Who wins? That’s easy: the wolf you feed.

But before we casually (or piously) reject the life path of burning down barns (or feeding our inner evil wolves), let’s consider the upside. Indulging your inner barn burner — letting yourself be a Big Bad Wolf — this comes with a pretty attractive upside.

If you prefer burning down barns and then choose to run for public office, it’ll be your race to lose. Sixty or so hours from now, most of us will be refreshing our screens anxiously, hoping to learn who will prevail in the political sphere. I want the builders of barns to win, of course: the optimists, the conscientious ones, the morally awake ones, those who make their share of mistakes but try to learn from those mistakes, those who really want to improve the state of the world and save innocent lives, even if they don’t always succeed.

But I know that if someone tries to build things up rather than burn things down, they’ll probably be the underdog. Constructive, restorative victories are all too rare in this burning world. For one thing, the choice to build is daunting. Builders have to do serious, difficult work. They’re held to higher standards. It can be hard to inspire people to do the right thing. (Many of our forebears in the faith whom we honor today were martyred for their trouble.) And — real talk — it’s also hard to resist giving in to your inner barn burner, your inner bad wolf. Sometimes the so-called “good guys” will feed that wolf, despite their essential good nature.

We human beings generally have a much easier time cutting things down, dropping things, burning things, than we do improving things, taking care of things, building things. I’m reminded of something a friend once told me. He was quoting his grad-school professor, the microbiologist Dara Wegman-Geedey, who said, “Entropy never sleeps.” Entropy never sleeps. Over time, everything — everyone — inevitably degrades, decomposes, falls apart. (“Heaven and earth will pass away” — that’s how Jesus puts it.) Tearing down, or just letting things collapse, is always easier than building up. Falling down — entropy — is an inherent quality of the physical universe we live in.

This means, of course, that choosing the honorable path is not just hard; it’s also not reliably fun. If you’re a “burn it all down” kind of person, then you’ve got fun on your side. It’s thrilling to be a heedless iconoclast. Nobody expects you to behave well. As a barn burner, you’re free to do whatever you like, whatever the consequences. If you want to burn it all down, you’re likely looking forward to the electoral chaos coming our way.

And yet we persist: we try to be builders. We gather here to praise one particular builder: Jesus of Nazareth. Scripture tells us that Jesus was the son of a carpenter or stonemason, making him literally an expert in the building trade! Faced with the untimely death of his friend, Jesus restores life: he builds; he pushes against entropy. Lazarus comes out of the tomb. Now, admittedly, Lazarus is still wearing his burial clothing, a sign that death will still come for him (“Entropy never sleeps”), in contrast to the risen Jesus, whose burial shroud is found neatly folded, back in his empty tomb. But even though death still lurks in his future, Lazarus is raised and restored. Jesus builds him up. 

But the raising of Lazarus isn’t ultimately about the resuscitation of a corpse. It is a sign of our shared identity as members of the Body of Christ. We are builders. We practice being constructive. We choose the life-restoring path. And we have a word for those who are noteworthy in this shared effort. Now, every single human person is made in the image of God, and every single baptized Christian is a fully qualified member of Christ’s Body. And, we have a word for those among us who, well, are kind of crushing it: we call our best builders saints. 

But, with respect, I want to clarify the idea of “saints.” Let’s be careful about this. Again, there are not simply builders and burners, saints and sinners. Each one of us carries both saint and sinner within ourselves. When we revere saints, we’re simply appreciating that though they are just like everybody else, a saint summons their better self more reliably than most of us. A saint directs most of what they say or do toward God. That’s all.

In the Godly Play liturgy, our children hear a definition of prophets that might work for all the saints: a prophet is someone who “came so close to God, and God came so close to them, that they understood what God wanted them to say or do.” So: you can be a saint. You are a saint! You have power within you, power given by God, power to build. Isaiah is singing to you, to all of us, when he says that God prepares a feast on the mountain, a feast that will swallow up death forever. That mountaintop feast is not dinner at an exclusive country club.

This morning, God will add yet another saint/sinner to our number, another being who houses two wolves, another builder and a fallible human who could choose to burn it all down. His name is Malcolm James, and he is two months old today. Hidden deep inside little Malcolm is immense capacity, massive potential. And before we baptize him in the name of the Holy Three, we will take responsibility for this powerful being, at the early dawn of his life.

We will promise to raise Malcolm together, even as his parents remain at the center, building a home to feed, clothe, and nurture him. (Ian and Jenny surely are notable, praiseworthy builders of barns. Saints, that is.) Malcolm will turn to them, but also turn to all of us, and learn from all of us, about both the builder and the burner within himself. He will need our guidance about which wolf to feed. And we will meet this need by feeding Malcolm from this mountaintop Table, where God only serves food that the good wolf finds appetizing and nutritious, and the bad wolf finds poisonous and disgusting. “My flesh is food indeed,” Jesus says, but that food nourishes only our best selves.

But it's complicated, this inner battle we’re fighting, individually and together. Our duty to Malcolm James is not only joyful, but also daunting and difficult. Again I say, even in a healthy community of faith, there aren’t just good guys and bad guys, saints and sinners. It’s messy.

And this messy but joyful struggle brings me back to Tuesday’s election. I feel strong hopes and fears about what will happen, much like everyone else. But I confess this, too: In recent weeks, I have often nursed a fantasy that if my favorite candidates win, I will yell in triumph at the TV. “Ha ha!” I will shout. In the fantasy I even gloat a bit: I call the vanquished politicians “losers.”

But if I indulge this fantasy, I will, alas, be feeding the bad wolf. Gloating is not what my best self does, even if I tell myself that my winner’s high is felt on behalf of the last and least, those who stand a better chance of surviving when the builders of barns prevail. We always have all we need to cultivate our inner saint, our true self who sees the good in even the most atrocious human being; and yet we always feel the temptation to tear down, to burn down, to destroy. Sometimes that destructive, retributive impulse feels so good, we can hardly believe it is the wrong path. 

This inner struggle we share is expressed well by two characters in a mystery series I love. Mercifully, in the final week of this seemingly endless political season, Louise Penny published her nineteenth mystery novel, distracting me from doom-scrolling when I needed her the most. And two of her characters took up this very topic: the saint and sinner within, the two wolves battling it out. And here is what they said about how difficult and confusing this battle can be. (Again, note well: the good wolves flourish when we’re surrounded by our companions in the faith!)

The two characters, French-Canadian homicide detectives named Armand and Jean-Guy, are talking about a villainous criminal they need to find, and in their conversation, they reflect on the complexity of human morality, in this conflict-ridden world: 

“‘We need to find [the bad wolf]. We need to stop him,’ said Jean-Guy. ‘Or her,’ said Armand, even as he [felt] his own [inner bad] wolf lift its head. ‘But there’s also a [good] wolf,’ [Armand continued.] ‘We need to find him too.’ Jean-Guy considered before saying what he was thinking. But finally, he spoke. ‘Are we so sure which [wolf] is which?’”

***

Notes

1. The actual word in the film, Primary Colors, is not “fool” but “jackass,” which I judged to be over the line for a sermon.

2. In the original text in the novel, The Grey Wolf, by Louise Penny, Armand “saw” his own wolf. In a sermon in which the quotation is taken out of its context and received aurally by a congregation, I judged “felt” to better communicate the author’s meaning.

3. In Penny’s novel, the two wolves are described as grey (good) and black (evil). In a sermon preached to a congregation that hasn’t read the book, I don’t want to identify the color black with evil: this is a controversial image, and could distract listeners who worry that this metaphor is racist, whether or not the writer was conscious of this problem, and whatever the writer’s motive. (I am entirely certain that Penny does not equate the Black racial identity with evil!) To use this quote in a sermon, I needed to modify it in this way to prevent any misunderstanding.

Are you ready to take the plunge?

Preached on the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost (Year B), October 20, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Martin Pommerenke.

Job 38:1-7
Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45

When the Ten Heard This They Began to be Angry, by KPB Stevens

One way to render the answer Jesus gives to James’ and Johns’ sophomoric desire for ranking in today’s Gospel is as Eugene Peterson transliterates it. In his version of the Bible, The Message, Jesus replies, “You have no idea what you’re asking... Are you capable of being baptized in the baptism I’m about to be plunged into?”

What a question for us today.

I’m a person that loves being beside and in water. The chaos and beauty of the tumbling waves speak to my soul. I love the image here of plunging.

What if we translate Jesus’ question like this: Are you powerful enough to be plunged into the plunging of my own doing that I will be plunged into? It’s a question for them and for us about whether they really know what’s coming and how they will respond.

When I think of this question, I remember back to June of 2020. I was standing on South Beach in Point Roberts. There on that early spring day in the warmth of the sun glittering on the water, I looked across the sea to the San Juans and beyond.

It was 2020, and I had come to the water to ask what had become of me and of the world.

The three months of what felt like unfathomably long pandemic isolation, necessary as they were for the health of everyone, had bent even the strongest spines. Mine too. I think the epidemic of loneliness that plagues our society became far worse for the very fortune ones able to continue working - and working from home at that.

In June of 2020, when the isolation orders had lifted, I was changed. We all were, and yet there was still a sense of confusion and unknown. We were on the edge of a new world. We knew we’d be plunged into something.

Standing there looking out - finally, after months stuck in Renton, I was on the shores of my home village. I wondered what would would happen with me, my seminary studies, my call to the priesthood, even my own long-term relationship. Had I fled back to my gorgeous place just to watch life and everything fall apart?

Standing at the edge of the sea became for me a lived metaphor for looking out with melancholy across the abyss of crisis.

Yes, I had come to the water because I’d already been plunged into a plunging that was somewhere between my own doing and someone else’s. I was looking to find identity amidst chaos. So I had come home, I had come to the sea, I had come to the water.

I had come to the water to ask, What has become of me? What would become of me? Of us? Of it all?

In their own way, James and John in our story today are facing their own existential crisis. They too, had come to the water - had come to crisis, for this is what the water is: roiling, fearful, hope. I think it no accident that Jesus speaks of baptism and plunging.

We might dwell awhile on the question James and John asked: let each of us sit, one on the right hand and on the left in your glory. Behind their request of Jesus they’re asking, what will become of us?

They’re so like us now, aren’t they? These hot-headed brothers - Jesus calls them “Sons of Thunder.” In crisis, they’re asking which one of us rivals will sit sit on the right - the dextrous, grabby side that gets stuff- and which one one on the left - the aristocratic side that gets to have choices.

Mark’s Gospel is all about power and authority. In their ask, James and John are exercising a kind of interpretive power that comes from framing a question. They’re asking Jesus not just to rank them ahead of the other disciples, even ahead of Peter, but to decide between them as brothers.

They’re trying to get ahead so they’re ready for what’s coming. Because Jesus had just reminded them again that the end is coming. For the third time, he told them plainly that he is going up to Jerusalem to be humiliated and killed.

Can we cut them some slack? They were facing a time of serious unknown, just like we were in June of 2020. A vague sense of worry and hopefulness all mixed together. Maybe in denial, certainly in anxiety, they asked Jesus about their ranking try to get ahead of what was coming, to get a handle on things.

Jesus doesn’t take the bait. He never does. Instead, he has them face their identity crisis squarely: who do you think you are, desiring this plunging of mine?

Have they forgotten? Jesus has just said he’s going to die. Do you really want a piece of this action? A slice of what I’m choosing? Jesus asks.

Are you ready to take the plunge?

When we come to the water, when we are in crisis, on the brim of chaos and hope, we ask ourselves if we are ready to be immersed into life’s wild, restless sea, as a hymn goes. We bravely wonder what will happen if it all falls apart. Jesus, give us our identity, tell us who we might be. This is the longing behind their desire, and ours, to be ranked.

We, like those brothers, think in our anxiety that when we know the ranking, when we do the ranking, we’ll have a better handle on what’s coming. Before we will be plunged into the plunging.

When Jesus asks them if they will join him, in being plunged into the deep end they say, “We are able. We have the power.” But what kind of power?

Our culture is a juridicial one that wants to rank each other amongst the good and bad. We all want this. To know our place in the pecking order. The tough times are when the clever ones climb the most.

Some of our feelings today are not unlike what I imagine James and John felt. Election Day is coming. For many of us, it’s a hazy time of dread. The rhetoric has gotten more hateful. We’re anxious, even fearful. And like James and John, we’re zealous about it all.

This week, Bishop Phil echoed what Father Stephen has already urged us to do - to vote - to participate in this process. This ranking, this choosing, is a necessary thing in the mess and scariness we’re biting our nails about.

Among those to be ranked are some who want us to go back to a time of greatness. Others would have us question who those times were great for. It’s not a partisan question to ask: what kind of greatness are we ranking? Will we choose to rank with the greatness in mind that is Jesus’ way?

Now, some of us are children of rage, like those brothers, those “sons of thunder.” Righteously angry, or just plain angry, many of us when facing crisis say the same thing. We have the power. For those on the margins, this can be a rightful claiming, a self-empowerment that demands what has been denied them.

For those of us like me who are traditionally-abled, cisgender white men, the claim “we have the power” is as true as it is dangerous.

So - Jesus warns us that those who want to be first will become slaves of everything. We who have the power become trapped in a self-created web of subjugation. When we dare to crave power, we manipulate and injure all the living to maintain it.

The way of Jesus, though, is that of servanthood. We have an icon of this in the Church: deacons. Deacons show us that making our own selves - and America - great again is about being humble servants.

Servanthood isn’t about being subservient. Deacons kick tail and take names, reminding us that stewardship is the only way to greatness. A stewardship that surrenders to the plunging, surrendering to God in it all.

Servants, deacons, show us by their lives that to really be Jesus followers, we have to give it all up to God, because all of it was made by God, belongs to God, and returns to God.

Is this time in your life like mine in June of 2020? Are you, are we, at the edge, in the sun, looking out at the abyss, into crisis? Like James and John, I wonder, and maybe you wonder, what has become of me, what has become of us, even as we have no idea what is coming.

Like them, we have a song we sing at water’s edge. A song many of us who grew up evangelical know well. It was written by Marsha Stevens of BALM - Born Again Lesbian Music. When we’ve come to the water, when don’t know who we are, we may feel abandoned, and unknown, so we sing to Jesus:
You said you’d come and share all my sorrows,
You said you’d be there for all my tomorrows.
But I’ve come so close to sending you away.

But our Savior says to us:
Come to the water, stand by my side
I know you are weary, you won’t be denied
I felt every teardrop, when in darkness you cried.
And I strove to remind you that for those tears I died.

Have you, like me, come to the water? Thirsty and longing and wistful, because we are not the same people that we were, because we wonder what has become of us after we’ve gone through it all?

Standing at the sea, looking out at the beautiful terror, the abyss, maybe we realize we have come to the the river. The Jordan river.

So we renew our baptismal vows, even amidst anxiety: we will be the church, resist evil, proclaim the Good News, love our neighbor, strive for justice and peace, respect the dignity of all the living.

Yes, we have come to the water at this time and this moment. Do we have the power - Jesus power - to be plunged into the plunging done by and to ourselves?

We who follow Christ know that we have already been baptized into water that is dangerous, but water we can be saved from - not by our own faithfulness, but by the faithfulness of Jesus. This is an alien power - for the power is not ours, but Christ’s.

Christ says to us today that true power at the edge of the abyss doesn’t come from where we think. It doesn’t come from tyrants, but from the one who made himself the least, whose death and resurrection we have been plunged into. We have come to the water, and with Christ at our side, the vista of crisis before is as lovely as it is broken and unknown. Christ gives us his power to be servants, to be deacons.

Let the water of the abyss, the vista of the unknown, the roiling waves of melancholy crisis remind us of our baptism. We’ve already been plunged into what saves us. Plunged into this water, we have given up being the first, we have become great, we have the power.

What Must I Do?

Preached on the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost (Year B), October 13, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.

Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22:1-15
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31

Such is the Kingdom, by Daniel Bonnell

The gospel passage today is about money. We’ll get to the money part. But first, we need to talk about the powerful emotions that are driving the encounter in this gospel.

A man ran up and knelt before Jesus. This is not a casual encounter. This is not a theoretical conversation about socioeconomics. This is also not a trap conversation, the kind of encounter in which a group of religious specialists try to trap Jesus into saying something that will get him into trouble.

Instead, this encounter is sincere, heartfelt, deeply personal, and urgent. This person runs to Jesus, and kneels, and asks his question. This behavior should remind us of the people who run to Jesus begging him to save a family member who is dying. This man who runs up and kneels before Jesus needs something. What he needs is a matter of the utmost importance, for him, and as we will see, for us.

The question he asks is this: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”, or more literally, “the life of the age.” This distinction in translation is important because the phrase “eternal life” implies that this question is only about the future, maybe about some sort of life after death. It may mean that, but I propose that it does not only refer to the future in this case, but is also about the present.

Later when Jesus is talking only to the disciples, he says that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” It is important for us to remember that the kingdom of God means, first and foremost, not some future reality, but the here and now relationality between people. The kingdom of God is how we are called to be with each other today, not after we die.

The kingdom of God is not some reward for people who scored just enough points in the virtue game. The kingdom of God is about relationship, with God, and with each other. This is why the kingdom of God is always already now and is constantly inbreaking, or rather, why we are constantly encountering ways to access the only true reality of this Cosmos, which is the loving relationality that Jesus calls the kingdom of God.

So when the man runs up to Jesus and kneels before him, and asks his question, he’s not asking only about the future, if indeed he’s asking about the future at all. This is not a question about how to get into heaven. This question, and the heart of its urgency, is about how this man can be in relationship with Jesus. This question is about how this man can be a part of this wonderful thing that is going on, this new beloved community growing up around Jesus.

Jesus’ initial response is so gentle. He lists the major commandments that have to do with relationships between people. “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.” These, by the way, are not unique. These are the basic rules for any and every civilization. These are the foundation of human society that survives. Frankly, it should be unremarkable to follow them. They are stuff of minimal, basic decency.

What is remarkable is what happens next. Jesus, who knows the innermost chambers of this man’s heart, looks at him, and loves him. This man runs up and kneels, and asks his one question of God incarnate, and Jesus looks at him, and loves him.

Hold on to this moment, this extraordinary tableau. I sometimes live in this moment. It is as if the whole Cosmos holds its breath, time slows to a near stop, and the eternal story of the longing of the created for the Creator, and the love of the Creator for the created, unfolds in this moment.

And the tragedy of this moment, from the point of view of the man, is that he has asked a question of the one person on earth who will unfailingly tell him the truth.

The question, remember, is this: what must I do to inherit the life the of the age? What must I do to be in relationship with you, Jesus? What must I do to be in right relationship with God? Not because I want to know how to survive some cartoonish examination by St. Peter in front of pearly gates. No, this man, and I with him, long for our beloved, for God. It is, more than anything else in this existence, a matter of life and death, because it is about more than this body–it is about the life of the heart that longs, the heart that loves.

The answer to the question is this: remove all that separates from God. Remove all that distracts from God. And at the top of Jesus’ list of things that separate, distract, prevent us from being in loving relationship with God, and with each other, is wealth. Over and over again in the gospels Jesus teaches us that wealth is a barrier to life—not the basic, rudimentary life of human society that requires only that we don’t regularly kill or steal—but a life of flourishing in the love of God, the life of the age, the kingdom of God.

For two thousand years, Christians, and especially clergy folk like me, have worked very hard to soften this teaching. There is some good reason for this. Part of my job is to look out for everyone in this parish, including people who may be wealthy compared to other people. I am supposed to stand up here and deliver a sermon that illuminates the good news. On the surface, it seems that unless I soften the message about wealth, I’ll fail in my job to be pastoral toward people with wealth.

But I believe that to soften the message about wealth in this gospel passage is to fail. Jesus, looking at the man, loves him. Jesus sees the longing of the man, and tells him the truth about how to achieve the thing he desires. Jesus is giving the man, giving us, what we need to hear.

We need to hear that wealth separates us from God, and from each other. We need to hear that it is hard for people with wealth to be in truly loving relationship with the people around them, or, I should say, us. I am a homeowner in this city. While I have had periods of my life in which I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay rent, or how to replace clothing that was falling apart, or whether I had enough change to buy my next meal, I’ve never actually been in danger of being without shelter, clothing, or food.

Given how many people are barely staying alive, including in this city, including on this block, by any reasonable measure, I am wealthy, and always have been. I am the man in this gospel passage. I don’t know all of your individual stories. Maybe you’re also in this gospel passage, maybe not. But if you are, like me, wealthy enough to not worry about the basics of life, then I think you and I are suffering.


But I think this suffering is so common, so expected, that we have learned to pretend that it’s not really suffering. I can tell myself that I am just living the best I can in economic systems I can’t change. I can tell myself that this is the way of the world, and I just have to make my peace with it.

But I challenge us to consider, if the world is unchangeable, then what was the Incarnation for? To not take this gospel passage seriously, to me, is like saying that Jesus just needed to show up to announce that we should say some magic words like “I believe that Jesus is my Lord and Savior,” and then we just have to survive this world until we die and the magic words act, like a password, to get us into the heaven club.

If that were the case, then when the man ran up and knelt before Jesus, why didn’t Jesus tell him he could keep his wealth, but perhaps give a little more to the poor from time to time, but that what he really needed to do was to say the magic words “I believe in Jesus.”?

So. The good news is that Jesus looked at him and loved him, and told him the truth. Jesus shows us the way. We might not like the way. We might not like the truth. It might be most inconvenient.

In my own case, I’ve heard this gospel before, and I haven’t followed the directions. I am guessing that is true for some of you too. I believe with all my heart that this means that I decide, day after day, that my wealth is more important than being in better, more loving, relationship, with God, and with you. And I am sorry for it. When Jesus tells the man the truth, he is shocked and goes away grieving. I sometimes am shocked by this gospel, and go away grieving.

The good news is that relationship need not be binary, either perfect, or nonexistent. I fail to follow Jesus as much as I could. Yet I believe that Jesus nonetheless looks upon me and loves me. Jesus on the cross looks at stubborn, selfish, me, and still wants to be in relationship with me, with all of us.

For those of us who intend to keep hoarding more resources than we need, I believe that in this time before we decide to follow Jesus better, we can be mindful of how our wealth can distract, and separate us from God, and from each other.

I see people at St. Paul’s working on this mindfulness all the time. I am so glad to be here, to struggle with this gospel alongside you. To the extent that I allow unjust economics systems to persist, pretending that I can do nothing to change the world, I beg for God’s mercy, and, frankly, for yours.

"Blow on the coal of the heart, my darling."

Preached on the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Year B), October 6, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Job 1:1; 2:1-10
Psalm 26
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16

Jesus Loves the Little Children, by Ann Younger

I speak to you as any foolish woman would speak.

That’s right. I’m standing next to the wife of Job, right at this particular moment. I stand next to her in defiance of her suffering husband’s dismissive remark. He snaps at her, saying, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak,” and I’m on her side. She seems to find the problem of innocent suffering intolerable, and if God doesn’t answer for it, then she is not about to just shrug her shoulders and say, “Thy will be done.”

Girl, same.

It’s all too easy for Christians, it’s easy for all people of all faiths, or no faith, to minimize the problem of suffering. But our tradition offers authentic empathy, too. C.S. Lewis, the Anglican scholar and theologian, reflected memorably on the awful pain of human grief, and how that pain deepens when it appears that God is absent, or uncaring. "Meanwhile, where is God?” Lewis wonders. “...Go to [God] when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.”

That’s rough. But it feels real. It’s an authentic human experience. It’s the cry of Jesus on the cross: “Why have you forsaken me?” We may cry out, too, as we grapple with the injustice and suffering that seems to cover the face of the earth, in Gaza and Lebanon and the West Bank, in Israel and Iran and Egypt, in Ukraine and Russia, in our routine school-shooting tragedies, in the storm-ravaged towns of western North Carolina, at every hospital bedside, along every dangerous highway, in the private agony of an addict, in our endless partisan Gotcha! politics, in states that make health care for women illegal: enough. Where is God?

We need a good answer.

Just yesterday I told one of you that my emotions these days are right below the surface. They feel like they’re up in my neck, awfully close to coming forth from me at any moment. My companion said he understood, and that he thinks it’s because of the state of the world. Many, most, maybe all of us are up to our necks in passionate feelings about all that’s going wrong, about unchecked and unending human suffering. (And not just human: yesterday, in the Blessing of the Animals, we talked about the suffering of millions of animals.)

So I say again: let’s get a good answer, an answer to the question: Why suffering? 

That’s the whole book of Job — that question. Why? And Job will haunt us with this question throughout the month of October, four Sundays in a row. This is right and good: Why suffering? may be the human existential question. I will turn to two sources for an answer.

But before I do that, I need to wade into a conversation that seems to be about something entirely different. I ask your patience while I seem to change the subject. I promise: I’ll bring us back. To aid our contemplations on suffering, I invite you to come along with me, and together we will listen in on an encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees. They’re not directly wrestling with the problem of suffering, but the problem of innocent suffering lurks beneath everything Jesus says and does. And so, yes, it can be found in this encounter.

The Pharisees — good, upstanding religious leaders — are testing Jesus. They want to trap him by asking a question about divorce. If he takes a hard line on the topic, he could end up like John the Baptist, who was beheaded after criticizing Herod for marrying his brother’s divorced wife. Like their question to Jesus about taxes, the Pharisees try provoking him about divorce, to put him in danger with the Roman authorities. 

Jesus avoids political controversy, at least for now. (Lethal political controversy is in his near future, in Jerusalem. But for now he’s safe.) Nevertheless, like John the Baptist, Jesus does take a sharp and radical position on the topic of divorce. He seems to be saying that divorce is never acceptable, ever. I say that he only “seems” to be saying this even though the text appears to be firm on this point, because it’s all too easy to misunderstand the text as rigid religious dogma. And that’s not what this is.

Unfortunately, that’s how it has been read, down the ages. Church leaders have misinterpreted this text to be a firm rejection of divorce, for any reason. They are ignoring what’s going on in the world behind the text, the world of Jesus and his followers, the world of the Pharisees, the world of the ancient Roman Empire. It’s always hard, even impossible, to understand a distant time and place, but let’s do our best. Jesus is taking a strong position on divorce because in his day, divorce usually harmed or even killed the woman in the couple. (It would gravely harm the couple’s children, too, and in this encounter Jesus quickly moves on to affirm the dignity and value of children.)

In short, Jesus strongly condemned divorce because divorce in his culture caused unjust human suffering. See? I told you: the problem of innocent suffering lurks beneath everything Jesus says and does.

But unjust divorce can cause damage beyond the couple and their children. If a man is divorcing his wife in a strongly patriarchal culture, he can damage his entire community, a close social network of kinship and cooperation. Remember that the Gospels are written by and for whole communities. Jesus, in his words about divorce, is teaching a communal ethic. If a personal choice would be unjustly harmful to our whole group, then we should pay attention to that, too, and not just the impact on one household. We should take our decisions quite seriously. Jesus is stern, then, about divorce: he’s not at all casual on this issue, or any issue that could harm someone. But he’s not saying that divorce is wrong in all times and all circumstances. That would be an ahistorical and simplistic interpretation. I encourage you to let it go.

And, again, we do not live in the time of Jesus of Nazareth. In our own time and place, we know that divorce is sometimes quite just, even essential; and we know that divorce can sometimes be abundantly beneficial to the person in the marriage who has less power and fewer resources. And we live in faith communities that are healthiest when every member of that community can freely make ethical choices that honor the well-being of everyone involved, taking to heart all the nuances, all the complications. Jesus is not about hard, flat rules, then or now. Jesus is about justice and ethics, with the most vulnerable members of our community at the center.

In other words, we should interpret the teaching of Jesus on divorce with our hearts first, and our heads second. Jesus does not establish legalistic, rigid, dogmatic rules. Jesus bonds us to one another in love. Our faith tradition does not ban divorce, but it does wrestle with it, as a discernment of the heart. What solution reduces suffering? What decision protects the vulnerable? We relieve human suffering — particularly innocent human suffering — when we discern all these difficult questions with our hearts.

And this brings me all the way back to poor Job and his exasperated wife. As we’ll see in the coming weeks, Job and his friends try to make sense of innocent suffering by using their heads: they try to reason their way to the answer. Maybe Job isn’t so innocent after all. Maybe his children sinned. Maybe Job should repent of his sinfulness, and all will be well. All of these answers fall flat.

The answer comes from the human heart. The dean of my seminary, Ian Markham, published a little book a few years ago, a book with the title — wait for it — “Why Suffering?” The whole book tackles the question before us today! Here is what Ian Markham says about suffering, a problem that requires an answer from the heart:

“The Christian ‘answer’ to suffering is not [a] head [answer]. …The Christian ‘answer’ [to suffering] is Good Friday. It is an answer that says this: you need to know that the Creator of the universe has been where you are. The Creator knows what it is to suffer. The Creator understands that despair. …We are being invited to trust. We are not granted the gift of seeing exactly why suffering is necessary, but we are invited to see that the Creator God who is responsible for this universe has tasted suffering and is involved in the hurt and pain of this universe.”

Once more: “[W]e are invited to see that the Creator God who is responsible for this universe has tasted suffering and is involved in the hurt and pain of this universe.”

But please take note: this ‘heart’ answer to suffering — the idea that God in Jesus tastes our suffering and is involved with us in the hurt and pain of this universe — this answer does not glorify or justify suffering itself. Jesus becomes human to relieve suffering. Jesus takes on suffering to destroy it. We should avoid two easy but dreadful mistakes: we should never assume Jesus makes hard, flat rules; and we should never conclude that God endorses or recommends suffering. These are heresies.

Jesus is not a grim enforcer of angry rules. Jesus is the dead and risen innocent at the center of our faith. And by teaching us how to form a new kind of community, an ethical, thoughtful, heart-centered community, a community that places its most vulnerable members at the center, Jesus teaches us how to bear suffering together, and relieve suffering together, as loving companions. Innocent human suffering is met by, treated by, and finally healed by human love.

I’ll close with one more take on the wife of Job, who speaks not with foolishness, but with an understandable human desire for relief, for healing, and for an answer or two. Archibald MacLeish wrote a play called “J.B.,” a modern take on the Job story. The character J.B., of course, is Job. In the play, his wife is called Sarah. At the very end, J.B. has survived all of his sufferings and his life is back on an upturn. But he is feeling badly shaken, still plagued with the eternal question, Why suffering? Sarah’s answer is not a ‘head’ answer, not a neat, systematic formula that explains everything. She offers her husband a ‘heart’ answer to this awful, nagging, infuriating question.

“It’s too dark to see,” J.B. tells Sarah, speaking literally and figuratively, both. (They’re in a dark room, but his mind is still darkened by his anxious thoughts about his trauma.) “It’s too dark to see.” The stage directions then say this: “[Sarah] turns, pulls his head down between her hands and kisses him.” And then she says, “Then blow on the coal of the heart, my darling.” 

“The coal of the heart…” J.B. repeats back to her, wondering.

“It’s all the light now,” Sarah continues.

“Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in churches are out.
The lights have gone out in the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we’ll see by and by …

“We’ll see where we are.
The wit won’t burn and the wet soul smoulders.
Blow on the coal of the heart and we’ll know …
We’ll know …”

This Is Our Time To Act

Preached on the feast of St. Michael and All Angels (transferred), September 29, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.

Genesis 28:10-17

Revelation 12:7-12

John 1:47-51

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Michael and All Angels. Which means that today we are celebrating something mysterious. It is mysterious because we at once seem to know a lot about angels, and very little. Angels are well attested in Scripture, including by Jesus in today’s Gospel passage. But what are they?

The mystical theologian of late antiquity whom we call Pseudo-Dionysius writes this about angels in the treatise called The Celestial Hierarchy: “…it is they who first are granted the divine enlightenment and is is they who pass on to us these revelations which are so far beyond us.”

Angels are messengers from God to us. That’s what the word “angel” means. It simply means messenger. But not just any messenger. An angel is a messenger specifically from God, passing on to us revelation of the will of God.

In Hebrew Scripture, angels tend to show up when it is time to confirm covenant with God. In the reading from Genesis this morning, Jacob dreams about angels at the moment that God confirms for Jacob the covenant made with Abraham and Sarah and Isaac. We may recall that when Abraham and Sarah encountered angels it was also an occasion for the confirmation of the promises of God. But this confirmation seems always to shake things up, to invite us to shift our perspective, to challenge our assumptions.

When ‘Jacob woke from his sleep [he] said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!”  He did not know it. This is what I mean when I say that an interaction with an angel can shake us, in a good way. Jacob learned that night something new about God, and about the place where Jacob was.

‘And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”’ Imagine being in a place that you do not expect to be the house of God, and receiving, in a vision of angels, the good news that where you are is the gate of heaven.

It is common to refer to a church as a house of God. I like to follow Paul, and the Gospel of John, in the idea that we as the Body of Christ, become the house of God. If a church is a house of God, it is because in it are people who bear the image of God, and who are doing their best to pay attention to God, to listen to God.

I like to think of the Eucharist as a gate of heaven, the fulcrum of the Cosmos. Jesus says to Nathanael, and to us, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

I believe that when we together celebrate the Eucharist, and enter into the mystery, trembling, maybe with a little bit of the fear of Jacob, maybe a little bit with the glad astonishment of Nathanael—I believe when we enter into the mystery of this sacrament together, we are encountering the awesomeness of a time and place when God is with us, in Christ.

And I believe that it is possible that there may be angels “ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” when we gather to offer our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

Angels are messengers of God that confirm our covenantal relationship with God, and in the Gospels, confirm Jesus as the Son of God, the Logos, the Christ. And in confirming Christ, angels confirm Christ in us. But angels can only do so much. They are messengers. They are not God. They are not Jesus the Christ. Nor are they us.

In the reading from Revelation, Michael and other angels do a lot. They engage in an epic battle. It conjures extraordinary scenes of beings of awesome power, beings that in many ways, to echo Pseudo-Dionysius, are “so far beyond us.”

If we are not careful, we could interpret this to mean that angels are taking care of everything. Sure, we should do the usual things of loving God and loving neighbor, steadfastly following the Way of Jesus as best as we can, together, but perhaps in the end, at the time of this epic battle, we are mainly spectators, watching the angels do their thing.

Not so. Notice that in the reading, after the battle between the angels, the decisive defeat of the Accuser comes through the action of people. Let’s hear this part of the reading again: ‘Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming, “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser of our comrades…” —“comrades” here means followers of Jesus, confessing Christians— “for the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. But they [the comrades, Christians, us!] have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death.

People, us, conquer the accuser by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony. We are to conquer the accuser through Christ. We are not bystanders in this struggle. We do not only tremble. We also act. Jacob, once he collected himself, renamed the place he was as a place of God. He confirmed his covenant with God. Jacob heard the message of angels, and he acted.

In Revelation, the followers of Lamb witness the work of angels, and they act. We, here today, set aside time and space to pray, to consider together the mystery of the angelic order. Today we bear witness to the ministry of angels throughout Scripture, and throughout the history of the traditions of the Church. And directly pursuant to our witness, comes our action.

This is our time to act. The angels have done what can. They have conveyed the message, the good news, that our God is in intimate, faithful, covenant with us, and that Jesus Christ is indeed the Son of God, and that we are to listen to him, and to follow him. We are to love God, and love our neighbors as ourselves.

Let us gather at this table today in a spirit of action. The heavens have opened, the trumpets resound, and Christ wins the victory over despair, over the Accuser, over death itself. We are not bystanders in this, but are to participate, here and now, in Christ’s victory. Let us share the bread, knowing that the Lamb has poured out his blood for the reconciliation of all, and be courageous in our testimony, to each other, and to all the world.

Jesus said to her, "I AM the Life"

Preached at the Requiem Mass for Tracy Steen, Saturday, September 28, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.

Wisdom 3:1-5, 9
Psalm 139:1-12
Revelation 21:2-7
John 11:21-27

Jesus said to her, “I AM the Resurrection and the Life.”

I want five more minutes with my father. I just need five more minutes. Now, I am relieved to say that we really are at peace, me and my dad, following his death last November. My wish for five more minutes is not debilitating, not terrible. But I just want one more chance to say a few good things to my father. And while we’re on the topic of personal grief, I would need many more minutes to catch up with my mother, to meet her now, now that half of my own lifetime (and counting) has unfolded after her death. My mother never met Andrew. In certain important ways, she never met me.

Jesus does not directly speak comfort to me in these reflections of mine about my departed parents. Jesus doesn’t speak simple comfort to any of us who are grieving today for our departed brother in Christ, Tracy. Jesus simply but complicatedly says this to us: “I AM the Resurrection and the Life.” He does not say, “Oh, you’ll get your five minutes, and more, with your beloved dead.” And he certainly does not say, “Oh, there is no death; death is an illusion.” We Episcopalians say — and will say this very afternoon — that in death “life is changed, not ended,” but that’s as far as we’ll go on minimizing the sting of death.

It’s understandably not far enough for many people.

There is a poem that sometimes appears in our popular culture when someone dies. It is a favorite in funeral parlors, or on the back of memorial prayer cards. This poem was written nearly a century ago by Mary Elizabeth Frye, no doubt with the heartfelt intent to bring comfort to the grieving. It goes like this:

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you wake in the morning hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there, I did not die!

I say this with true respect, but as a follower of Jesus, and as a leader of a spiritual community that follows Jesus together, I, and we, must set this poem aside, firmly, as outside our tradition. We must say No to these soft sentiments, however well-intentioned they may be, and we must assert that they carry in them a terrible falsehood, the notion that those we love but see no longer “did not die.” They did die.

Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from death, but not before Lazarus is confirmed to have died four days before. (Four days was understood in that culture to be one day beyond the soul’s ability to linger in the body of the deceased.) And whatever the condition of Lazarus at any point in the story, Jesus himself weeps in sorrow and in fury before the plainly factual triumph of the Power of Death, and the anguish Death causes in us. Jesus knows the bruising, piercing sting of death. And the sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha — they would also have no time for Mary Elizabeth Frye’s reassurances. No.

“If you had been here, my brother would not have died!” Martha says. Later on, Mary says — Mary cries out — the same thing. This is a lament, but also a rebuke. And Jesus doesn’t defend himself in response to Martha. He does not deny either part of her complaint: she’s right — he wasn’t here; and she’s right — Lazarus did die. True, and true. He simply says, “Your brother will rise again.” 

But Martha, brave Martha, good Martha, exemplary Martha, a saint who in my book is a patron of all who grieve: she misunderstands Jesus. “Your brother will rise again,” he says, and she assumes he’s talking about the far future; not about today, but about someday. “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day,” she says, and in my hearing, she’s almost, almost rolling her eyes. (That’s just in my hearing! It’s just how I would say it.) “I know, I know, I know,” I might say, when I’m deeply upset about something, and a friend is reassuring me that it’ll all work out in the end. In our psychologically-minded age, we could hear Martha indirectly telling Jesus here that he’s just not validating her feelings; he’s not validating her perspective; he’s not validating her. “Your brother will rise again.” Okay, yeah, sure. Aren’t you just saying, Jesus, that I’m overreacting, that I need to calm down?

No. He’s not saying that at all. And however Martha felt in that moment, and whatever the motives of her misunderstanding, and if she was making the mistaken assumption that Jesus was just offering soft comfort in a hard time, like that old saccharine poem denying the reality and finality of death, Jesus responds to her “I know, I know” statement with this startling declaration: “I AM the Resurrection and the Life.”

“Your brother will rise again.” “Sure sure, of course, he’ll rise again someday.” “No, Martha. I AM the Resurrection and the Life.” “Okay, well, that’s good to know. Thank you for your words. Thank you for coming to pay your respects.” “No, Martha. I AM the Resurrection and the Life.”

The Resurrection and the Life. Resurrection and Life are different things. “Resurrection and Life” is yet another biblical coupling of similar things or ideas, like “powers and principalities” or “your rod and your staff” or “patience and steadfastness.” Resurrection and Life: aren’t they the same thing? Yes and no. 

Yes, Resurrection and Life flow into and out of one another: you could express them in one idea, like this: we are raised up in life by Jesus. But no, they are distinct. God in Jesus resurrects all creation to abide with God; but the abiding itself is what Jesus means when he calls himself “Life.”

Life, for us mortal humans — Life is abiding with Jesus. Lazarus is raised to life by Jesus the Resurrection. But then Lazarus rejoins his sisters and their community; he rejoins them in the Life of abiding with Jesus. We see Lazarus a bit later on, when a woman anoints Jesus with precious oil. We can imagine Lazarus among those, like the Beloved Disciple, like Mary Magdalene, who rested their head on the chest of Jesus, with astonishing intimacy.

Life is abiding with Jesus. “I AM Life,” Jesus says. (I momentarily clipped out “the Resurrection” from his statement so that we won’t lose “Life” in the glare of the vivid notion of Resurrection.) “I AM Life,” says Jesus. And Life is abiding with Jesus.

Our brother Tracy understands this. Tracy does not take his life for granted. He doesn’t take leading a life for granted, either. (It’s one thing to appreciate the simple gift of life, but it’s a separate blessing to lead that life, to embrace it, to seize it.) Tracy did this, and does this even now. Tracy cherished his life after he came so close to losing it in a shooting: he appreciated the fragility of life in this perilous world. But Tracy also savored life with his friends on this wondrous planet, a world chock full of fascinating cities and beautiful places and lovely people. 

Tracy’s good friend Ruth remembers that Tracy would arrive early at St. Paul’s when we held a monthly community dinner for this neighborhood. He would do all the things volunteers did for that dinner: not just cook the meal, but dine with the guests; not just dine with the guests, but help with cleanup. Tracy understood the ethic of that ministry, which was grounded in the truth that Jesus did not feed the hungry, he ate with them. (He abided with them.) But Tracy took it all one step further: he arrived early to work in our labyrinth garden, collecting flowers for the dinner tables.

In all of this, Tracy abided with Jesus: Tracy rested his head in tender intimacy with Jesus, because Tracy cared for everyone Jesus loved. Tracy cared for the guests at the dinner, but also the cooks and servers and the cleanup crew. Tracy cared for everyone seated at the tables, delighting them with the beauty of flowers; but he also cared for everyone at St. Paul’s, all of us who say our prayers next to, and inside, this garden, right here. 

And so we grieve. We grieve Tracy’s departure from our midst. Tracy has died. And in our grief we might want to cry out to Jesus, “If you had been here, our brother would not have died!” And if that is our lament, then in Jesus we have found a companion — The Companion — who understands our complaint even better than we understand it ourselves. “Tracy will rise again,” Jesus then says. And we’re tempted to reply, “Of course, of course, we know, we know.” Big deal. But then Jesus cuts across our dismissal, and says again, says always, in words that ring through the universe: “I AM the Resurrection and the Life.”

“I AM the Resurrection and the Life.” Tracy has died, but even now Tracy abides with us in the Community of the Risen One. Even now our garden — trapped beneath a giant construction crane — our garden vibrates with the joy that Tracy cultivated there. Even now, this neighborhood is changed and gladdened by Tracy’s ministry, and by ours.

Jesus does not say, “Do not grieve.” Jesus is not such a heretic. We may grieve all we want. Our grief is just another color, just another fragrance, in this ever-growing garden of Resurrection and Life.

Welcoming the Child

Preached on the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Year B), September 22, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D.

Mark 9:30-37

Beatitudes Cross, created by the children of St. Paul’s

Mark the Evangelist – Saint Mark, not me – Mark is a storyteller. The first Christian to compile a narrative of Jesus’ adult ministry of words and deeds, his passion and his death, and the promise of risen life in him. Better: Mark the Evangelist is a weaver, skilled at repeating and intertwining different story lines, different colored threads to create a vivid and intriguing tapestry.

Picture two green threads running down the fabric of Mark’s gospel. Two stories of Jesus, his hometown, and his family. Reminding us that Jesus himself was both sibling and child. The hometown folk take offense at Jesus and his family comes to restrain him, worried that he has gone out of his mind. Who are my mother and brothers, Jesus asks? And then, looking around the circle of strangers crowded into the house with him, answers: Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.

Mark also tells a pair of stormy sea stories. Blue strands. Jesus stills the storm. Jesus walks on water.

Not one, but two stories of Jesus feeding hungry multitudes from just a few loaves and small fish. Brown threads woven into the gospel tapestry.

Three bright red strands run across the fabric the other way. Stories of children in great peril. Their parents begging Jesus to help, demanding even. Jairus the synagogue leader’s twelve-year old daughter at the point of death. The Syrophoenician woman with her demon-possessed child. And a man whose son has been tormented and kept from speaking and hearing since childhood by an unclean spirit. Jesus responds to all three with words and deeds of healing.

And Mark weaves in heavy purple threads. Three of them. The repeated story line of Jesus teaching his disciples that he must undergo great suffering, be rejected by the leaders of his own people, and be killed, and after three days rise again. We heard the first of these proclamations of the passion, of what it truly means for Jesus to be God’s anointed, in last Sunday’s gospel reading, and the second this morning. The aftermath of the third awaits us next month.

But what knots all these narrative strands together – green, blue, and brown; red and purple – are two golden stories of Jesus welcoming children into the intimate circle of his followers. Welcoming the child as a human being who has much to teach all of us adults about the kingdom of God.

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The story lines of the passion and the child get vividly braided in today’s reading from the gospel of Mark (9:30-37). Jesus and his disciples are passing through Galilee on their way back from Caesarea Philippi where Peter confessed Jesus to be the Messiah but mistook the meaning of his confession. So, for a second time, Jesus tries to teach the disciples that he will be betrayed into the hands of the political and religious authorities, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again. And, for a second time, the disciples fail to understand what Jesus is saying. Instead of being torn open in costly love, as Father Stephen put it in his sermon last Sunday, instead of embracing the cruciform truth that we lose to gain and die to live, they argue with one another about who is the greatest. Who’s number one? The strongest. Most important. Always victorious. Never a loser.

When they get back to Capernaum, and when Jesus catches wind of what they had been arguing about, he sits the twelve down, sits down with the twelve to set them straight about true greatness. Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all. Then Jesus took a little child and put the child in the center of the circle, and taking the child in his arms said to his disciples: whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the God who sent me.

The interweaving of silence and speech, speech and silence here intrigues me. Jesus doesn’t want the public, the crowds, to know about their journey through Galilee because in private – just among themselves – he breaks the silence about his impending passion. He speaks of dying and rising out loud and openly to his closest followers. They fall silent – they did not understand and were afraid to ask. Later, in the house, Jesus continues to speak directly to the twelve: What were you arguing about on the way? And they remain silent, even though they had had plenty to say earlier, when they argued who was greatest. Jesus talks about first and last and servant of all and then puts the child among his disciples. A silent child, for the child never speaks. Nor does Jesus speak to the child, but rather to the so-called adults in the room. Jesus doesn’t even speak about the child. Instead, he simply welcomes the child into the circle. Welcomes the child to speak silently to the twelve. To teach them using non-verbals.

But why? And how? Why allow or even invite a child to teach adults? How does a person speak non-verbally? What should we make of Jesus’ invitation to listen as adults to the silent eloquence of children? What might we, sitting in something of a circle of our own this September Sunday morning, learn from Jesus and the child?

Jerome Berryman has responses to these questions. Berryman created the Godly Play program of children’s Christian formation used by many churches around the world, including here at St. Paul’s. He passed away in August – and so my words offer a brief tribute to him.

Although he used to joke that Godly Play is more fun to do than to talk about, Berryman does write that by teaching children Godly Play lessons, the adult storytellers become “genuinely mature human beings.” That Jesus put “the silent child, the other ‘text’” – beyond words and concepts – “in the midst of the disciples to teach them and us about the kingdom of God.” That Jesus’ goal was to welcome the “child’s ability to teach adults about their own maturity.” That to put into practice a theology of childhood is nothing less than the project of “perfecting and saving humanity.” That – quoting theologian Karl Rahner now – “a child of God is an adult who approaches life with radical openness.” In fact, Berryman makes what he calls “the silently eloquent ‘discourse on true greatness’ by the child” in our gospel reading from Mark central to his own theology and practice of children’s formation.

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Berryman’s words ring true. So true. The children of St. Paul’s have taught me all this and more over the past twenty years. For Jesus has placed children in the midst of our circle. Better: Jesus comes among us as the child. Here’s a tapestry of things I’ve heard them say, along with what I learned.

Once, at this communion rail, I served a child the chalice – maybe the first time they tasted wine. They puckered a little and smacked their lips and said: “Mmmmm…, spicy!” My learning: something’s wrong if our sacramental life as a community – baptism and Eucharist, marriage and ordination, and the rest – is bland, flavorless, inoffensive.

Another time, a new family came forward to receive communion and a parent worked hard to get their child to kneel on one of those cushions. But the child pushed back with: “I don’t know about kneeling!” What messages do the non-verbals of our liturgy send? For our postures and gestures may speak louder than words. How do we both welcome newcomers and old-timers alike with our body talk and still keep asking questions about why we do what we do?

Years ago, after I told the lesson on Jesus’ Parable of the Leaven, I asked the first to third grade Godly Play group: “I wonder if you have ever come close to something little that caused such a big change, like the leaven hidden in all that flour?” A child replied immediately: “Human beings. We’re so small, but with global warming we’ve caused big changes to the earth.”

And just last Sunday, I had the honor and felt the heavy weight of trying to share with the current Godly Play circle the story of Cain and Abel. A lesson created by our own BJ Ohlweiler, the one who has welcomed more children and their wisdom for more years than any other adult around St. Paul’s. BJ frames the story of Cain killing his brother Abel as what happens when we choose not to honor the image of God in others. As we wondered about the story, one of the children put on their best theologian hat and taught us all that the image of God looks different on each of our faces – and that by being ourselves, by looking just like ourselves, we reflect God’s nature.

But, I need to remind myself, the child Jesus placed among his disciples two thousand years ago and places among us today can be a silent child, who teaches nonverbally. As Jerome Berryman also writes: Adults learn not so much from what children say, as from how they are. Not “what they say,” but “how they are.”

I’ll never forget the time a parent served as lector at St. Paul’s 5:00pm Sunday mass with their several-month old baby gently but securely held to their chest by one of those soft sling and strap contraptions. The child did contribute to the reading some sounds of their own. But mostly, they just were. It was strangely moving to see a little baby in such an adult context. Something about embodiment and juxtaposition. About living scripture out, even the hard readings with their sharp edges, or just the weird ones. I couldn’t help noticing in the icon that stands behind and to the right of the lectern downstairs where adults read scripture, that Blessed Mother Mary presents her infant Jesus to us face outward, while the other baby in the room that evening faced in toward their parent. We all need to snuggle into a loving, protective, and supportive human being even as we turn to look out at the world around.

Or the three-year old a few weeks ago who, after receiving communion and lighting a candle at our upstairs image of Mary and baby Jesus, walked alone (with Mom watching), all the way from west to east along the communion rail, using those kneeling cushions as a path of pilgrimage – touching the long wooden rail with their hand as they passed by and then continued up the side aisle that looks out on the Bolster Garden where our dearly departed have been put to rest. The child tracing for us the mysterious thresholds of life and faith. The child vulnerable and receptive. Playful and creative. Able to improvise with what’s right in front of them, at their fingertips and under their feet.

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Some of you may have seen it coming, but how could I end this sermon without a few Godly Play-style wondering questions?

I wonder what you do not understand about Jesus and the kingdom of God but have been afraid to ask?

I wonder how you might welcome the children in and around your life more fully, welcome back, perhaps, something of your own childhood, and allow the child to teach you to become a fuller human being?

And I wonder what it would feel like to have Jesus take us, each and every one of us children, into his arms?

Resources

As background to the Gospel of Mark as a tapestry of interwoven stories. Jesus and his family – Mark 3:19b-22, 31-35 and 6:1-6 (green threads). Two stormy sea stories – 4:35-41 and 6:47-52 (blue). The feedings of the five thousand and the four thousand – 6:30-44 and 8:1-10 (brown). Three children healed – 5:21-24, 35-43; 7:24-30; and 9:14-29 (red). Three proclamations of Jesus’ passion – 8:27-9:1; 9:30-32; and 10:32-45 (purple). And the two golden stories of Jesus welcoming the child/children – 9:33-37 and 10:13-16.

Jerome W. Berryman (1937-2024) and Godly Play. The first volume of the curriculum books lays out the theology and practice of the whole enterprise. All my quotes come from: The Complete Guide to Godly Play, volume 1: How to Lead Godly Play Lessons (Morehouse Education Resources, 2002, 2006), pages 108, 116, 119, 120, 124. Berryman refers to Karl Rahner’s essay “Ideas for a Theology of Childhood,” in Theological Investigations, volume 8 (Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1971), pages 33-50.

You lose

Preached on the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Year B), September 15, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Proverbs 1:20-33
Psalm 19
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38

Christ and his disciples, by Dan Comaniciu

“[Jesus] rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’”

What are divine things?

What are human things?

I will start with some human things, and hopefully a new understanding of divine things will emerge from them.

Here’s a human thing: I am setting my mind on candidates up and down the November ballot. So far, I feel good about my decisions. I’m supporting a growing slate of candidates not because they have all the right answers or do all the right things, but because I am persuaded that they are the candidates who will listen to friend and foe alike, and who will submit to accountability in moments of failure or wrongdoing. They are far from perfect and will always need loyal opposition, but I am confident that the world will be a healthier place if they’re in the city hall, the courts of law, the governor’s mansion, the halls of Congress, and the White House. If they lose, I will be deeply disappointed. In one case, I may feel utterly devastated.

But this is a human thing. Jesus did not endorse my candidates. Jesus endorses no candidates, no governments. Jesus rebuked his friends when they imagined him as a political savior. I may feel crushed if my candidates lose, but Jesus — Jesus is not about that. Jesus doesn’t speak to this concern of mine, at least not directly. 

Now, “human things” are not necessarily bad things. They are not unimportant things. God made humans in God’s image and likeness: God surely understands that we humans will set our minds on human things. (And please, please vote! Voting is a powerful expression of our faith.) But God in Jesus directs our attention ever higher, eternally beyond the level of electoral politics. God in Jesus directs us to divine things, which are both more fundamental (meaning: closer to the bone), and more ultimate (meaning: of universal importance).

But this is a hard teaching. Consider these other human things, lovely things that I very much don’t want to disregard: I love my husband and our home and our dogs. I love friends, and I especially love a positive, conflict-free friendship. I love St. Paul’s and dream about our future here, every day — really: every day. I want to care for my family and my church. I want to repair relationships when they break. I want everything I know, everything I touch, to thrive, to be good, to be sound and whole, peaceful and joyful.

And yes, of course, these are human things, but surely you agree with me that they are good things! I wrote a book about the joy of repaired relationships! A religious, theological book! Jesus surely is not opposed to any of this. And God dwells humbly in and with all of these things. My marriage: God dwells there. My dog walks: God inspires every step of those walks, even the ones when I have a short temper about dogs being dogs, stopping constantly for who knows what, setting their minds on canine things. When I simply vacuum my house or pick up litter around the church, God’s creative energy flows through me. These are all good things. But … they are human things, and Jesus rebukes Peter for setting his mind on human things.

So: let’s ask the question and let’s get a good answer. It’s actually two questions: If the human things are often good and worthy of our attention, worthy of us “setting our minds” on them, then one, why does Jesus rebuke this; and two, what are divine things?

Here are my answers. First, Jesus discourages us from setting our minds on human things because they all too easily distract our attention from one ultimate concern, one divine thing that transcends everything, something beyond all of our strivings, our passions, our commitments, our vows, our friendships, our financial priorities, our possessions, our careers, our homes, this building (this beloved building! oh how I have set my mind on this lovely human thing, and fully intend to continue doing so!) — Jesus wants me, you, us to set our minds on something more fundamental, more ultimate. 

And second, this is the fundamental, ultimate thing; this is the divine thing: Jesus wants us to set our minds on being torn open in costly love. 

We are to set our minds on being torn open in costly love.

Consider again what Jesus says, calling the crowd to get close so that everyone can hear: “He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.’”

So it works like this. If I set my mind on the human thing of electing a good political leader, that is a good and productive thing to do. It’s even something my Christian faith inspires me to do. But I am not really following Jesus until I allow the things that that good leader cares about — and the things I care about — to tear me open, to nail me to a cross. I’ve had arguments with people about the ideas and issues that drive my political involvement. The divine thing that fires those arguments is my willingness to enter that fray even if it tears me apart.

So: What do my candidates stand for? Lots of good things, but in my particular journey of faith, Jesus cares ultimately about what I stand for — what I stand for so strongly that I would be willing to die for the cause.

Jesus cares, in turn, for what we stand for, all of us together, here in this Christian community. What will we all, collectively, stand for, even if it nails us all to the cross? Remember, he called the whole crowd together for his teaching on this. He wants us all to set our minds on the divine things.

All of the human things — our families and friendships and homes, our vocations and possessions and public elections — they matter deeply to us, but the divine thing for Jesus followers is our willingness to be torn open in costly love.

And at the very same time, we must recognize — with sober humility — that many of God’s people, a majority of God’s people, do not enjoy a choice in these matters. They are nailed to the cross whether they choose it or not. One of our siblings in Christ — their name is Phelps — reminded me this week of the book by theologian Howard Thurman called Jesus and the Disinherited, which focuses on the identity of Jesus as one whose “back is against the wall.” We can recognize our Savior most powerfully in the witness of persons of color, living in a racist world, with their backs against the wall. The anguish of coping with racism can all too easily tear them apart, inside and outside. Racism can exhaust their minds and bodies, and finally defeat them with fear, hatred, or the daily acts of strategic deception that they must employ to simply survive.

Thurman affirms that the disinherited in our world can only be saved by love, love that they choose to put into practice, even and especially for their oppressors. But this is not cozy love — this is costly love. It is an excruciating experience, this immense effort to love an enemy, particularly an enemy with substantially more power, more money, more health, more privilege. Like James Cone who recognizes the cross of Christ in every lynching tree, Thurman is not naïve about the difficulty of the Way of the Cross, particularly for the oppressed and the disinherited. Love leads the victim of racism to resurrection, but not before it breaks the person — breaks them open. This love is truly an awesome challenge.

But we do not lose heart, no matter who we are, no matter how many — or how few — privileges we have. Back to that human thing I mentioned: my thoughts and feelings as I prepare to vote this November. If all my candidates lose, and I am setting my mind on divine things, then however sad or discouraged I feel, I will still be here, my heart open — broken open — and my mind and body ready to lift the heavy cross. The Jesus Movement never endorsed the empire or the local political leaders; they just did the hard political work of building Christian community at great personal cost to themselves. They entered the arena — and for them, the “arena” was often a literal arena with animals who gored them in a martyr’s death. They stepped into danger to speak the hard truth.

Even something much smaller than the political sphere — a marriage, say, or a friendship; a vestry, or a ministry team — even in these smaller spheres, we are called to take up our cross and follow Jesus. We are called to lovingly speak the truth to one another, not counting the cost to ourselves. One couples therapist and writer calls this the “crucible” of a relationship. I recall a mother-daughter relationship in an old movie where the mother says, “Go ahead and say it. You think I’m an alcoholic.” The daughter pauses, then replies, “Okay. I think you’re an alcoholic.” In that moment of truth, the daughter goes through a crucible that destroys her smaller self in order to build a braver self, a better character.

We lose to gain; we die to live. Jesus goes to Jerusalem knowing full well what could — what will — happen to him in that dangerous political tinderbox. He is arrested, he is nailed to a cross, he dies. This death inspires a movement that sets its mind on divine things, on losing to gain, on dying to live. And so justice and righteousness rise up on the face of the earth. Christ is resurrected. When we pass through the crucible — crucible: a word related to crucifixion, excruciating, cross — we take a terrible risk, but love grows; we lose personal safety and easy serenity, but justice flourishes.

In a film that came out in 1972 — long ago: I was just two years old — Robert Redford plays Bill McKay, an idealistic young lawyer, the son of a cynical old politician. Bill disrespects his father, a former governor who played by the world’s rules at the cost of his own character, who set his mind on human things. Bill McKay, a hopeful activist, dreams of a better world. Then, a political operative approaches him and pitches the idea of running for the U.S. Senate against yet another cynical, morally compromised politician.

Our hero is torn. He is definitely intrigued by the possibility of a wider arena for activism, for principled leadership, for real change that benefits actual people. But how can he avoid becoming just like his corrupt old dad, just another political animal, just another cynic?

The political operative shows him how. He pulls out a matchbook and scribbles something on it, then hands it to Bill McKay. He tells Bill he can say anything he wants. He can say the right thing and the good thing, no matter how people respond. In every way that counts the most, he can achieve all that he longs for most deeply, as long as he remembers this one thing. And here is what the political consultant scribbled on the matchbook:

“You lose.”

One tiny seed

Preached on the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18B), September 8, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23
Psalm 125
James 2:1-13, 14-17
Mark 7:24-37

The Great Faith of the Syrophoenician Woman, by Susan Feiker

One of the members of our parish has a terrific job title. This is my opinion of course, and you may disagree. When I told him one time that I love his job title, he seemed unsure how to respond — I think he’s just a self-effacing person who hasn’t really dwelled on the idea that there are “terrific job titles,” so my comment may have caught him off guard.

But even if you haven’t ever focused on the topic, I’m sure you can think of some grand job titles: Chief Justice of the United States; Supreme Allied Commander, Europe… Or how about this whopper: Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy, Metropolitan Archbishop of the Province of Rome, Sovereign of the State of Vatican City, Servant of the Servants of God. That’s all one job title. 

(By the way, my favorite part of that particular title is — no contest — “Servant of the Servants of God,” a job title we all receive as baptized Christians. You — you are a Servant of the Servants of God. Your baptismal certificate is your business card.)

But even Pope Francis, in my view, must tip his miter to our sibling in Christ, Ian, whose job title is … wait for it … Director of Fights and Intimacy. Ian works in the theater as an actor and director, and I just can’t get over this title he sometimes holds: Director of Fights and Intimacy. 

I learned all too recently that there is a need in the world for a Director of Fights and Intimacy, but when I think about it, of course we need a director of fights and intimacy! The actors in any performance will need help choreographing their fights, but also their intimate scenes. How can they really fight well, and embrace well, and make it all work for their audience? More crucially, how are fights and intimacy woven together, informing and enlivening each other? The best arguments are ones between intimates, and the best intimate friendships can be invigorated by healthy conflict. A director focusing on fights and intimacy can help actors bring it convincingly to life on the stage.

This weekend, our friend Ian is busy: he and Jenny and Toby are welcoming the newborn Malcolm James into their family. But if he ever has extra time in the future, I might ask him to block for the stage today’s Gospel encounter near the coastal city of Tyre, in southern Lebanon. Tyre is where Jesus chooses to go for a break, to get away from it all, and fails in his attempt. Mark the evangelist tells us that though Jesus attempted to get some time for himself, “he could not escape notice.” (The burdens of fame…) A certain woman is among the horde of people trying to get close to this preacher and healer.

Mark says this woman is of “Syrophoenician origin,” that is, from the region in west Asia that today we call Syria; and Mark makes sure we know that she is a Gentile, that is, not a member of the Judean or Galilean groups who welcome Jesus as one of their own. (Matthew’s Gospel calls her a “Canaanite” woman, an anachronism: “Canaanite” was already an outdated term by this time.) But whatever demonym you prefer for her — Canaanite, Syrian, Phoenician — she is probably close to home, here in the region of Tyre. Still, through the eyes of Jesus and his friends, she is an outsider, a foreigner.

But this foreign woman is probably not indigent, not desperately poor. We don’t know this of course, but her confident action on behalf of her daughter, and her success in getting her daughter the help she needs, suggests a person with resources, maybe even an educated person, though that would be rare for a woman of that time. In my imagination, she looks sharp in a fine silk scarf. Whatever her status or background, she is ready to fight for her daughter, and draw Jesus into a powerful, and powerfully intimate, encounter. She has crossed a cultural border to confront this visitor from the south, and he has literally crossed a border to encounter her on her turf: this intimate fight takes place across a border.

Across several borders, actually: not just the political borders of their respective homelands, but the border of culture, and perhaps the border of language; the border of gender, and perhaps the border of socioeconomic status. (She may be wealthier than Jesus…) There are several lines in the sand beneath and between these two.

There was wider conflict along this border in that time of human history, and it has only worsened in our day. Southern Lebanon is in the news, at the northern border with modern Israel, a borderline of entrenched fighting. This region knows great conflict and devastating warfare.

And yes, Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman do fight. She punches her way into his world, into his private quarters, into what he had hoped would be a quiet afternoon. She begs him to heal her daughter, and in this begging she echoes all of the laments — all of the ‘rage prayers’ — of Holy Scripture, all the times when the people of God cried out in despair, wailed in agonizing fury, pleaded with God for mercy, begged God for healing, reconciliation, restoration. It takes courage to do this, to push your way into someone’s face on their day off and beg for your child’s life. Her motive is heartfelt, but this is confrontational: she is fighting.

And of course his reply to her is … well, it is wretched. Jesus seems to be voicing awful prejudice and intolerance in his reply to her plea. “Let the children be fed first,” he says, “for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Make no mistake: this is, on its face, a dreadful thing to say. “Dogs” in their day were not pampered and adored, like our beloved pets. Dogs were street animals, feral by definition, filthy, usually covered in sores, infectious, scavenging rotten food from the gutter. You’re from where again? Syria? Oh, well then you are no better than a dirty dog.

How might our friend Ian block this scene, so far? I haven’t asked him. But if it’s me, I might have the woman not on her knees but standing upright, shoulders forward, her body weight lurching toward Jesus, her eyes wide in surprise after he coolly, archly delivers his devastating line. 

As I imagine blocking this scene as a drama on a stage, it’s at this point that I want to soften Jesus, if only because I don’t want anybody’s Jesus to be a hard pill for oppressed persons to swallow. I want Jesus to be enlightened and loving, but not just because I’m a cis white guy who loves happy endings: I want Jesus to be an icon of acceptance, representation, and allyship for all of us, for everyone. I don’t want persons of color or really anyone to have to explain to our Savior why he’s causing harm!

But the text of this encounter doesn’t really support that impulse of mine, at least not yet. The woman is assertive, perhaps even aggressive in her urgent need, and Jesus replies with a devastating retort. I think we need to let that be what it is, at least at first: take it in, friends in Christ. In this moment, Jesus is being wretched.

And it is the woman who carries him, and with him, all of us, out of that wretchedness. Her reply is savvy. She is game for the fight. She is undaunted.

The best we can say about Jesus in this encounter is that he saw a worthy adversary, and beckoned her to rise up to meet him; that he threw down with her, jousted with her, deliberately provoked her. We can also notice that behind this story is the first generation of Jesus followers wrestling with the idea of letting Gentiles cross the border of their Jewish community. This story stands on its own as Good News about Jesus, but it also echoes an early intimate conflict among the people we call our forebears in Christian faith.

But finally, ultimately, however we read Jesus, and whatever the historical background behind the scenes, we are left with a shocking, riveting story of intimate conflict at a border; and we are invited to let that story form us in faith. We meet Jesus at the borders in our lives, the tense and often dangerous edges of our comfort zones, where “homeland” and “foreign country” touch.

As I said a moment ago, this particular border is still a war zone on the map, in a region wounded by many — all too many — war zones. A bit further south, of course, is the modern border of Israel and Gaza. That is yet another borderline of bitter conflict that has endured for centuries, all the way back to the age when the Philistines — who give us the term “Palestinian” — lived along the Gazan coast and battled the Judean kingdom of Saul and David.

I want to take us from Tyre down to that border further south, and close with a poem composed by a modern sister of the Syrophoenician woman, a woman of our own day who has spent months pleading across the border between Israel and Gaza, begging for the life of her son, a hostage in Gaza. Her name is Rachel Goldberg, and she learned last week that her son Hersh was killed.

During the attack on October 7, Hersh had bravely grabbed hand grenades to throw them out of harm’s way, and one exploded in his hand, blowing off his arm. He was then held captive, and his parents, Rachel and Jon, have been working tirelessly to secure his release. But — like so many people on all sides of the war, and all around the world — Rachel and Jon have also demanded an end to the war, and justice for all innocent people.

Unlike the Syrophoenician woman, Rachel and Jon had to bury their child. But they and many others continue to lament this horrible war, and Rachel’s poem still can be heard over that terrible border. Rachel is crying out to a mother — to all mothers, to all parents — suffering in Gaza. She is trying to clasp their hands in an intimate conflict that pulls all people of conscience into the fray. I pray that everyone caught up in this conflict, and all conflicts, will find the restoration, reconciliation, and healing that Jesus and his worthy adversary experienced, long ago. 

Here is Rachel Goldberg’s poem:

There is a lullaby that says your mother will cry a thousand tears before you grow to be a man.
I have cried a million tears in the last 67 days.
We all have.
And I know that way over there
there’s another woman
who looks just like me
because we are all so very similar
and she has also been crying.
All those tears, a sea of tears
they all taste the same.
Can we take them
gather them up,
remove the salt
and pour them over our desert of despair
and plant one tiny seed.
A seed wrapped in fear,
trauma, pain,
war and hope
and see what grows?
Could it be
that this woman
so very like me
that she and I could be sitting together in 50 years
laughing without teeth
because we have drunk so much sweet tea together
and now we are so very old
and our faces are creased
like worn-out brown paper bags.
And our sons
have their own grandchildren
and our sons have long lives
One of them without an arm
But who needs two arms anyway?
Is it all a dream?
A fantasy? A prophecy?
One tiny seed.

"Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

Preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 17B), September 1, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Kevin Montgomery at 5pm Mass.

The Song of Solomon is by far the most sensual book of the Bible, glorying in vibrant imagery and metaphors that delight the eyes, the ears, even our touch and smell and taste. “Song of Solomon” is actually a misnomer. The better title is “Song of Songs,” meaning the greatest of songs. The great 2nd century Rabbi Akiva likened it to the “Holy of Holies,” the locus of God’s presence among the chosen people. 

At the heart of this collection of poems is the power of desire, the kind of love that yearns for another. It’s not just emotional but visceral. It’s not general but particular. You might even say it’s scandalous in its particularity. At the surface level here, we have two lovers delighting in each other when together and yearning when apart. Each one speaks to or about the other (with the woman perhaps speaking more). She hears the voice of her beloved as he approaches. He calls to her to pass beyond the walls that enclose her and be with him.

Imagine ourselves in this as if God is calling to us as his beloved. God does not stand far off waiting for us but bounds across the landscape to us. "Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.” In Hebrew it’s the same word used when God told Abram to leave his home and travel to a new one. Except that here it’s not to an unknown place where there ends up being conflict, hunger, wandering. Instead, it’s a world of life abundant with flowers and birdsong and fresh fruit. A world not of violent dominance but mutual love and affection.

What’s amazing here is not that God calls to us as a lover. What’s amazing is that in this song we respond wholeheartedly to that call. We long to hear that voice with every fiber of our being. Without our beloved we feel something missing in ourselves. The chambers of our heart resonate with the voice in that divine song. We know without a doubt that our deepest longings are fulfilled in him. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you,” writes St. Augustine.

But if only that were the case in our lives. Who among us can say that we fully long for God? Who among us totally trusts the voice that calls us and then follows it? At some level we feel something is missing. Instead of turning outward toward the voice, we curl in ourselves and perhaps even cease to hear it altogether. Yet we still yearn for . . . something? Perhaps we think more stuff will fill the lack. Or we seek fame or social favor, believing the adulations of others will satisfy our need for love. Most of us, I think, want to do good, to be good; but what is the good? Even when we do the right thing, the reasons almost always have at least some bit of not so right mixed in there. Maybe we do hear the voice, but it’s muffled and incomplete.

"Arise, my love, my . . .”

For whatever reason, something within the heart just seems off. I might also compare it to trying to grow flowers, but they don’t seem to bloom just right. Or perhaps grape vines that produce fruit that’s always just a little bit sour. Well, it pains me to say it, but I alone can’t fix it. In the collect for today, we asked God to graft in our hearts the love of his Name. Well, maybe it’s in accepting that graft that we can begin to turn that desire toward what, or rather who, will ultimately satisfy it. We didn’t hear the Epistle reading tonight, but in it James tells us to welcome the word implanted into us. And that word is the voice of our beloved. As we learn to listen to it more and more, we begin to do more than just hear it but to actually follow it. It becomes more and more a part of us, and we even join in the song ourselves. And singing with joy, we see the garden of delight around us, growing the fruit that nourishes us. We ourselves even become the fruit that nourishes others. So let us accept the love that God grafts in our hearts that we may more fully hear and heed the voice that calls, “Arise, my love, my fair one.” Then let us pass beyond the walls that enclose us and come away with our beloved.

Arise My Love, My Fair One, and Come Away

Preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 17B), September 1, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.

Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

'Arise my love ... and come away...', by Cláudio Pastro

The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills.
My beloved speaks, and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

These verses are from our first reading, from the Song of Solomon. There is a long tradition in both Judaism and Christianity of reading this book of love poetry as an allegory for the mystical relationship of our loving God with us, God’s beloved people, individually as well as collectively.

I invite you this morning to join me in letting that sink in for a moment. What if we wrote love poetry to God? What if God wrote love poetry to us? Let’s enjoy those verses again, with this in mind.

The voice of my beloved God! Look, God comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved God speaks and says to me, and you, to each and every one of us: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

The verses continue with images of springtime and bounty: flowers and blossoms, fruit, and fragrance. The time of singing has come.

We are reminded of this agrarian imagery in our collect of the day: Graft, as a gardener might – graft in our hearts the love, the love of your name. Increase, as in a bounteous harvest, increase in us true religion. Nourish, as with warm sun and cool rain, nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit, the fruit of good works.

Can you feel the warm sun and the cool rain, the nourishment of God’s love, and the fruit of that love in your heart?

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

But come away from what? In these verses the lover visits the beloved who is behind a wall. The question then, is what is our wall? What wall is keeping us from following God, from answering God’s call to us?

I expect each of us might have our own answers to that question, our own wall we have built between us and God, or perhaps a wall someone else built, and we inherited, or adopted, and haven’t had the courage yet to topple.

Jesus in today’s Gospel lists several intentions of the human heart that can build or maintain that wall between us and God, and between us and each other: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away from these intentions.

Well, that is sometimes easier said than done. Although, I find it rare that people willingly choose evil before the good, at least to start. Usually something happens that drives people to desperation.

Take the beginning of the Gospel passage, for instance.

Right away it is important to recognize that it’s problematic in terms of a legacy of anti-Jewish sentiment in Christianity. Modern biblical scholarship teaches us that the writer of the Gospel of Mark seems to lack comprehensive knowledge of the full variety of 1st-century Jewish beliefs and practices about food and washing. So when we hear in the Gospel generalizations such as the phrase, “all the Jews,” we are probably not hearing the whole truth. This is important because generalizations like this are too easily used to justify oppression.

So let’s be clear. As best as historians can tell, there was in Jesus’ time considerable variety in Jewish ritual practice, and interpretation of, and adherence to, Mosaic law. It is not appropriate to interpret Jesus in this Gospel throwing out Jewish law, or disrespecting the work of his fellow Jews to live into the covenant with God. If anything, Jesus seems pretty consistent in his critique of hypocrisy of any kind, not just that of certain Jewish religious authorities, and of putting human-devised traditions above God’s commandments which can be summarized in the love of God and love of neighbor.

Instead of getting caught up in the details of who is allowed to eat what and when, I encourage us to hear in this text an echo of trauma and fear coming out of an early Christian community grappling with its identity as something other than Jewish. That phrase is important: something other. Early Christians like the community out of which arose the Gospel of Mark, sometimes felt like the other. And sometimes our Christian spiritual ancestors did what many people do when they feel traumatized: they took their hurt and their fear of being treated as other, and passed that trauma on to someone else, in this case, as is too often the case in Christian history, onto Jews, treated here as a monolithic other.

I do not believe that Jesus was in the business of othering people, of building walls between an us and a them, between an us and an other.

Arise, my love, my fair one and come away.

Yet rather than toss out some of the language and ideas of this passage of the Gospel of Mark, let’s recognize the human limitations of our ancestors, and recognize our own limitations, and learn from this, with gentleness and compassion.

Let us admit the times we are hurt and afraid, and might react by pushing each other away. Let’s admit the times we might seek to belong in an us that is defined by not being them, the other.

I hear Jesus recognizing an attempt by some of his fellow Jews to build walls between themselves and his followers, and I hear Jesus inviting them, and us, to look beyond these walls we build out of hurt and fear, and see each other as God sees us, as beloved, every one.

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Let us come away from our walls. We don’t need them.

For God so loved the Cosmos that God came down from heaven: God was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Virgin Mary, and became truly human. Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. See, the love of God for us is so great, God overcomes every barrier, crosses every distance, in God’s reaching out to us in love.

Arise my love, my fair one, and come away from your fear, for now the winter of death is past, the rain of sorrow is over and gone. Jesus, who for our sake was crucified, suffered death and was buried, on the third day rose again, and flowers appear on the earth, and oh, the time of singing has come.

The time of the singing of angels has come, the time of singing of every stone, every grain of sand and every star in the heavens, and every plant and animal, and every one of us has come. Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, Heaven and earth are full of your glory!

Let us accept God’s invitation to all of us to come to God’s bounteous table to be nourished with all goodness of God’s love for us, so that we may go forth with the holy Name of God grafted in our hearts, that God may bring forth in us the fruit of good works.

Oh, my fellow beloved, let us with joy hear together our loving God calling to us:

Arise, my love, my fair one, come away.

The Life of the Age

Preached on the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16B), August 25, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.

1 Kings 8:1, 6, 10-11, 22-30, 41-43
Psalm 84
Ephesians 6:10-20
John 6:56-69

Psalm 84, by Christa Rosier

“…the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

When Jesus says this he is referring to himself. But biblical scholarly consensus is that in the context of the Gospel of John, Jesus is also referring to the Eucharist. The one who eats this bread, the bread here at this table, that we will consecrate in a few minutes, the one who eats the Eucharistic bread will live forever.

This is good news. It seems to me this is big news. I would imagine that if we were to head out to the street right now, and start calling out to people we see declaring that inside this building we are serving bread that will allow the one who eats it to live forever, we would get some attention.

I can picture it: “We have the bread of eternal life! Get your bread of eternal life here! Free eternal life, step right up, come on in!”

What is odd is that this is not new news. This has been the big, good news for two millennia. You’d think this church, and every eucharistic church, would be packed every Sunday, and plenty of other days each week too.

Unless people don’t quite believe that these words mean what they sound like they mean. I am guessing that when most people hear the phrase “eternal life,” they think of getting more of the life they have. More time. More years, many more years of life. Maybe it’s a kind of afterlife, maybe it’s an extension of this life, but one way or another “eternal life” usually means more time, lots more time.

Well, I think the evidence of two thousand years is that participating in the Eucharist has not resulted in very many people living longer lives, much less eternally longer lives.

This gets to the heart of the matter for us, and for the disciples in today’s Gospel who were complaining about Jesus’ teaching. His teaching can sound, on the surface, to people today as it did to people then, like he means that believing in him and eating the Eucharistic bread will give us something we think we want, which is more time to live. When it doesn’t turn out to be what he means, people then, and I think people now, can become very unhappy.

There are a couple reasons for this.

First, it’s good to remember that Jesus was not the first divine human on the scene. There are plenty of stories in world cultures of Gods becoming human, or humans being the children of Gods, and everything in between. But Jesus was a new kind of divine human, in a way that electrified and inspired some, but also in a way that disappointed very many, and I think that this is still true.

Other divine humans tend to be super-heroic in some way. They are the sorts of characters that participate in epic battles that change the course of world history, overturn empires, punish evil and provide riches and power to the righteous. Compared to those characters, Jesus decidedly falls short.

He doesn’t overthrow the Herodian dynasty. He doesn’t smite the temple hierarchy, take power and riches away from the wealthy and give it all to the poor. He doesn’t march to Rome and slay Caesar in an epic showdown, Gladiator-style, of two men whose followers believe they are the Son of God.

Yet Jesus does some remarkable things. He says a few words and saves a woman from being stoned.  He washes the feet of his disciples and overturns conventional wisdom about honor and rank. He demonstrates humility, kindness, compassion, honesty.

All these things point to the second way that Jesus was, and is, a new kind of divine human in the world. He doesn’t fix the world for us. He shows us what we can do to fix the world ourselves. He shows us what we can do to fix the world ourselves.

Imagine for a moment that you are following Jesus two thousand years ago and you are hoping he is going to fix the world for you, you might be disappointed when he doesn’t fix everything for you.

This is connected to the second reason that people found Jesus’ teaching difficult then, and can find it difficult now. The phrase “eternal life” is an English translation of the that loses some of the nuances of the original Greek that are important to understand if we want to fully appreciate what the Eucharist is about.

In this Gospel passage when we hear the words “eternal,” or “forever,” these are somewhat reductive translations of forms of the Greek word aion which also means “age.” So when Jesus says that the one who eats this bread will live forever, the Greek literally reads “the one eating this bread will live to the age.” And when Peter says to Jesus that he has the words of eternal life, the Greek literally reads “you have the words of the life of the age.”

In both cases, the word “age” is important because it means something more than time. When the Greek word aion and its forms are used in the Gospel of John, it means not just a period of time, but a way of being.

The life of the age doesn’t just mean life that extends beyond what we think of as expected human lifespans. In fact it may not mean that at all. The life of the age means life in the Age of God, and the Age of God is outside of time. The Age of God has existed from before time, is now, and always shall be.

This means that when Jesus says that the one who eats this bread will live forever, what he means is that eating this bread helps us access the Age of God, to access another way of being, that is, somehow, outside of time.

Eating the Eucharistic bread is not about getting more time in our lives, whether in this life or in some kind of afterlife. It’s not about getting more of this. It’s not about quantity. It’s about a fundamentally different kind of life.

This is because the life of the Age of God is not measured by time, but by love. As time is to our life, love is to the life of Jesus. Love is the measurement of life in Jesus, life in God.

So when Peter confesses that Jesus has the words of eternal life, Peter is confessing that Jesus reveals the truth about God, and our life in God, that that life is measured by love. And since love requires work on our part, work to overcome our pride and our fear, this can be a difficult teaching.

God gives us what we need for the work of overcoming pride and fear. God gives us the bread of life, which means that when we eat this bread, we participate in the life of the Age of God. When we eat this bread, we proclaim to ourselves and each other the Good News that our God is a God of love, and that as long as we are loving, we are tapping into an infinite source of life, immeasurable, and therefore unconquerable, by time, suffering, pride, or fear.

"No dame ever ran the Boston Marathon!"

Preached on the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin (transferred), August 18, 2024, 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 coffee-hour cake this morning featured an image of our Mary Shrine.

The amateur athlete Kathrine Switzer registered for and then ran the 1967 Boston Marathon. Her coach said he would help her run the race if she could complete the full distance in their training runs. But he warned her that, in his words, “No dame ever ran the Boston Marathon!” Switzer didn’t hide her female identity at the starting line, even wearing lipstick and refusing to remove it when one of her teammates warned her that she’d be ejected from the race. 

What happened next is told in a 2017 article on the CNN website: “A few miles in, [Switzer] saw a man with a felt hat and overcoat in the middle of the road shaking his finger at her as she passed. Then, she heard the sound of leather shoes, a distinctly different noise from the patter of rubber soles, and knew something was wrong. 

“[Switzer wrote in her memoir,] ‘Instinctively I jerked my head around quickly and looked square into the most vicious face I’d ever seen. A big man, a huge man, with bared teeth was set to pounce, and before I could react he grabbed my shoulder and flung me back, screaming, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!”

“The man was race director Jock Semple. Press photographers captured Semple’s contorted face as he grabbed at Switzer’s numbers while her boyfriend pulled Semple off her.

“[Switzer] ran from the scene bewildered. She ambled on for a few miles before her anger transformed into energy and she took off for the finish line. Dropping out was not an option…

“[Switzer writes,] ‘…I knew if I [dropped out,] no one would believe women could run distances and deserved to be in the Boston Marathon; they would just think that I was a clown, and that women were barging into events where they had no ability. I was serious about my running and I could not let fear stop me.’

“She finished the race in four hours and 20 minutes, but would later be disqualified and expelled from the Amateur Athletic Union.

“Support soon eclipsed the fallout and she became a celebrity.”

The CNN article concludes with Switzer reflecting on gender equality in sports, saying, ‘We’ve come a light year but we still have a long way to go.’”

Kathrine Switzer made history, but to do so, she needed to summon and sustain a conscious disregard for the rules. And here in the Episcopal Church, we don’t just support athletes who advocate for equality in public sporting events, we also are known for other types of rule-breakers who teach us things that some of the rule-followers among us are not yet ready to learn.

Do you want to make the Church better? Do you want God’s people to do a better job proclaiming the Good News of justice, peace, reconciliation, and resurrection? If so, you may need to break a rule or two.

Every year, here at St. Paul’s, we break one particular little rule, a rule that is found in the fine print of our Book of Common Prayer. Compared to Kathrine Switzer, and compared to a few other people I will speak about in a moment, this rule-break here at St. Paul’s is definitely a small potato. It’s really a tiny rule, the one we’re breaking. But it’s significant that we are breaking it, and it is significant why we are breaking it.

Here’s the rule we’re breaking at St. Paul’s. I’ll read it at some length, just to give you a feel for how the Church sometimes sounds when we are inventing rules. You’ll find all of this on page 16 in the Prayer Book:

All Sundays of the year are feasts of our Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to the dated days listed above [for example, December the 25th], only the following feasts, appointed on fixed days, take precedence of a Sunday:

The Holy Name [January 1]
The Presentation [February 2]
The Transfiguration [August 6]

The feast of the Dedication of a Church, and the feast of its patron or title [for us, that would be St. Paul], may be observed on, or be transferred to, a Sunday, except in the seasons of Advent, Lent, and Easter.

All other Feasts of our Lord, and all other Major Feasts appointed on fixed days in the Calendar, when they occur on a Sunday, are normally transferred to the first convenient open day within the week… With the express permission of the bishop, and for urgent and sufficient reason, some other special occasion may be observed on a Sunday.

If you still can’t work out what the rule is, much less how we at St. Paul’s broke the rule, you should congratulate yourself for being a socially well-adjusted person. We’re in the weeds here. This is the rule we’re breaking: We are not named “St. Mary’s Episcopal Church,” so it is irregular for us to transfer the August 15 Feast of St. Mary the Virgin to this Sunday. Transferring St. Mary disrespects the Sunday that got bumped, which was the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, which is one of the fifty-two Sunday feasts of our Lord Jesus Christ.

But we break the rule twice, most years! In late September, no matter whether September 29th falls on a Sunday, we transfer the September 29 Feast of St. Michael and All Angels to the last Sunday of September. This also is … irregular! And we don’t even ask the bishop’s permission!

Now, normally I wouldn’t bring any of this up in polite, mixed company. I don’t like having the weird fine-print eccentricities of the church on display in the front of the house. We’re hearing a lot about “weird” people in our national politics these days, and I don’t want us to look weird to newcomers, or to people whose eyes would understandably glaze over if I pulled out page 16 and all of its mind-numbing calendar rules. All of this seems to fail the “Who cares?” test.

But I like that we break this rule a couple of times every year, again for two reasons. First, we are breaking the rule. St. Paul’s is a rule-following kind of parish, so when we break a rule, it is news of a difference. This bit of inside baseball seems trivial, but it might be worth your attention nonetheless, because we rarely do anything around here without a good reason, especially when doing the thing means flying in the face of the tidy, complicated, sometimes beautiful rules and rubrics of our communion.

The second thing I like about this rule-break is that we are doing it for an excellent cause: to raise up a rule-breaking woman, St. Mary the Virgin; and then, in September, a host of rule-breaking gender-fluid Angels. Think of Gabriel barging into Mary’s hut, uninvited, and telling her that her entire rule-breaking pregnancy is not a life-threatening scandal, but God’s will for a renewed earth! Mary was in big trouble; Joseph could have followed the rules and “put her away,” essentially dooming her to a nameless, landless existence as a shameful outcast. But the Angels, God’s messengers, bravely equipped Mary — and Joseph — to break a few rules.

This brings me to other rule-breakers in our Church, who broke far bigger rules than a calendar instruction. Late last month the Church celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the irregular, rule-breaking ordination of the Philadelphia Eleven, the first women priests in the Episcopal Church. Their ordination inspired the ordination of four more women the next fall, and the change in our church canons at the following General Convention that affirmed the legal, regular ordination of women to the priesthood. Fourteen years after the Philadelphia Eleven were ordained, the first Black woman bishop of the Episcopal Church was ordained. 

This fall I’m working on hosting a screening of the documentary, The Philadelphia Eleven, if only to give you all the experience of watching the Right Reverend Barbara Harris don the bishop’s miter for the first time. Was the Church ready for this? No. Was it the right and good thing to do? Yes.

Then, in the 2000s, the Episcopal Church was confronted with yet another rule-breaker, this time the Right Reverend Gene Robinson, an openly gay and partnered priest who was elected bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire. We were most definitely not ready for that, and years of painful schism followed. We didn’t yet agree that it was within the rules to elect and consecrate Gene, our sibling in Christ. But it was time.

You could say that the rule-breaking part of all these stories is the least important part. The rules are … well, they’re outdated, right? That’s why we break them! Persons of all genders should be welcome in amateur athletic events (and professional ones too, for that matter). Persons of all genders and orientations, leaders in God’s sight, should serve God’s Church. So maybe we look at that persnickety page 16 of our Prayer Book and we just say, “Big deal.”

But the rules do serve one good purpose: they mark the baseline that God transcends, right in front of our eyes. The old rules bring into sharp relief the need God’s people have for continuing reform, for ongoing renewal. In Mary’s song of triumph, she lists all the ways the world changes when God’s people get into what John Lewis famously calls “good trouble.” We break the rule before the world is ready. That’s how we move forward.

I will give one of the rule-breakers the last word. She tells us why all of this rule-breaking is so important. The Reverend Carter Heyward, one of the Philadelphia Eleven, spoke at the funeral of one of her sister priests, the Reverend Alison Cheek. Mother Carter said this:

“I’ll remind you that Sophia is an ancient image of God, specifically the wisdom of God. It’s who she was, our Alison, ongoing source of Sophia wisdom. Alison would want me to insist that the Philadelphia Ordination was the wake-up call to get moving and to do what Jesus of Nazareth did — stand with the marginalized, and embody courage in the face of cruelty, and lies, and bullying, and violence.”

"The bread that I will give is my flesh"

Preached on the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14B), August 11, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35:41-51

Bread of Life, mosaic art by Jenny Earnshaw

I am married to a cook.

This is such a familiar, such a basic fact of my existence, I sometimes fail to focus on it. Andrew has been feeding me for nearly twenty-five years. Since the year 2000, for thousands of evenings, Andrew has prepared food for me to eat. On many Saturday mornings, he bakes biscuits.

I wash and fold all of our laundry; Andrew prepares all of our meals. This has been a clear, firm division of labor for us.

In my last call as a priest, I spent two evenings a week overnight on Bainbridge Island. A Grace Church family generously gave me their little above-the-garage apartment to use. It did not have a stove. All it offered was a toaster oven and a microwave. I would cook an Amy’s pizza, or reheat an entree from the grocery store. I fed myself in college-dorm fashion. My food had calories and nutrients, and often enough it tasted okay. But it was not two important things, two things Andrew’s cooking has become in our household.

My humble solitary meals in that apartment — in contrast to Andrew’s cooking — were not eucharistia, and they were not koinonia.

Yes, I just dropped two fancy Greek words. But bear with me, and don’t worry: you probably already know one of them quite well. Eucharistia: that’s the Greek word for ‘thanksgiving,’ and it has arrived in English basically unchanged as the word Eucharist. Every week, you and I, all of us, longtimers and newcomers, elders and children and adults in midlife — all of us make Eucharist together. We gather at this Table, and give thanks to God. We celebrate eucharistia.

But eucharistia is not just a prayer of thanksgiving. It is that: after all, we say right up front, “It is right to give our thanks and praise.” But eucharistia is far more than a perfunctory “thank you.” It’s not, “Cool, yeah thanks bro.” Eucharistia is a full reorientation of our whole lives, even our whole identities, as Eucharistic people. We become God’s People of Thanksgiving. Gratitude shapes not just our attitudes and choices and behaviors: gratitude shapes us. When we receive and consume the Eucharistic bread every week, we become what we receive. 

The transformation may be subtle today, but noticeable when we look back over our lives and see how we have changed. I have been receiving Communion since 1984, when I was in ninth grade and my Lutheran parish led me through Confirmation and first Communion (quite late in life, by our standards here at St. Paul’s!). I’ve been a fairly faithful churchgoer for the last forty years, so maybe it’s fair to say that I have slowly been transformed into a Eucharistic person. I have my bad days; I don’t behave well in a sugar crash; I have a rap sheet of bad behaviors. But: maybe I’m changing. Maybe I’m becoming “Eucharistic.” I hope so.

How long have you been receiving Communion? Some of you may have been receiving it far longer than me. Others may be able to count your trips to this Table on one hand. However long each of us has received and consumed this bread and wine, this Body and Blood, our faith invites us to reflect on our identities, and how Eucharistia changes us.

Has the Eucharist gone to work on you? Remember, it’s often subtle. It can take a whole lifetime, and even as we prepare for death, we may sigh and wonder whether we really have lived lives of thanksgiving, lives marked by a sacrifice of praise. 

One way to notice Eucharistia is to see the Eucharistic effect on other people. Today is the second Sunday of the month, so I’m scheduled to walk with the St. Paul’s in the Neighborhood ministers — the SPiN walk. Often, when I go on this walk, I see Eucharistic people in action. I see BJ, our Neighborhood Action team leader, embracing neighbors with whom she enjoys powerful friendships. She chats them up, picking up threads of conversation that they have been sustaining for weeks, months, maybe years. She knows many of our neighbors, and not just by name: she knows their circumstances, their dilemmas, their regrets and griefs, their hopes and fears.

That’s a Eucharistic person.

But this example also illustrates the second fancy Greek word I mentioned a bit ago: koinonia. We can translate koinonia as “life in community.” We come here weekly to receive the Eucharist, allowing God to form us into Eucharistic people, and that inevitably, viscerally, essentially forms us into a community. As a priest, I am authorized by you, the Christian assembly, to preside at this Table. But I am not permitted to preside there if I am the only person in the room. That is not a valid Mass. If I came in here all by myself and spoke all the prayers, chanted all the refrains, held my hands in the orans position, said and sang and did all the correct things, nothing would happen. It would not be Eucharist. 

Eucharist only happens in community. Without koinonia, eucharistia does not exist.

And happily, I can gladly reassure you that koinonia is far easier to recognize than eucharistia. Life in community — which is formed around this Table — is here or not here; we can often tell. I’ve been to churches where koinonia seems absent, and those are hard, sad places. Pray for people who attend those churches. (Seriously: I bid you to pray for them.) Those churches are not just riven with conflict, not just depressed, not just angry or anxious. There is an aching absence there: the whole thing feels like a flat, false show. 

Churches suffering from that lack of koinonia came to my mind this week when I listened to a sermon preached by a Jewish faith leader, Rabbi Sharon Brous, the spiritual leader and teacher of Ikar, a Jewish faith community in Los Angeles that seeks to embody the best of Jewish identity and mission. Rabbi Brous was reflecting on stories of zealots two thousand years ago whose extremism led to famine and mass death. Standing inside the Jewish tradition, Rabbi Brous noted an ancient Jewish description of an extremist, one that she said describes the top Israeli government officials responsible for the devastation in Gaza. Jewish tradition describes violent zealots as “empty people who are eager only for war.” Empty people, eager only for war. That is who we risk becoming if we do not cultivate koinonia in this place.

And so I am here to encourage you by pointing directly to this loving, active, living parish: koinonia flourishes here. Koinonia infuses our gatherings. Sometimes it brings a lump to my throat, and I can hardly choke out my song of alleluia. Now, I am not naïve. St. Paul’s has a few problems. We don’t always, unfailingly treat each other with respect and care. We strain and even fracture the bonds of koinonia that God has woven here. We’re a human organization.

But we flourish nonetheless as the Body of Christ in this place. If my reception of the Eucharistic bread over forty long years hasn’t done enough to transform me, you all help by embracing me as your sibling. Whether you’ve received Communion for five decades or for the first time today, the power of your Eucharistic identity is contagious; it flows from you; it transforms those around you. Eucharistia and koinonia work together, they reinforce each other, they swirl together and lift us and change us and send us forth from here as Christ’s loving hands and feet.

And so we finally can begin to make sense of that strange, even bizarre thing that Jesus says about himself in the Good News according to John. Jesus says, “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” 

The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.

What an odd, startling, maybe even revolting thing to say! The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. We feed on Jesus, the Bread of Life. We eat our Savior. We take him into our very bodies — that’s how intimate we are when we keep koinonia with Jesus, and with one another. 

And this brings me back to my husband, the cook, who I suspect was a little mortified to know that I ate like a college kid whenever I was away for those solitary overnights on the island. Andrew is not, of course, Jesus. (Believe me; of this I am sure.) But his witness to us as a cook may help open up the image and meaning of Jesus giving us his own flesh to eat. 

Cooks — the good cooks, that is — give of themselves, with startling generosity, to nourish their companions. (Companion: a word that means “with bread,” or “breaking bread together.”) Andrew’s cooking has formed and shaped our marriage, every bit as powerfully as the thousands of times I have tri-folded our t-shirts and towels. These are costly labors of self-giving love. We have friends who cook and care for their companions with the same spirit. Our parish has bread-bakers, coffee-hour hosts, formation leaders, faithful staff professionals, vestry members, devout parishioners who evangelize simply by praying in the pews — all of these saints are “cooks” whose costly, self-giving love forms and shapes the koinonia that thrives here.

Christianity is not a fascinating little intellectual exercise. Christianity is not an entertaining little social club, or a sweet nonprofit charity, or a nostalgic family reunion. Christianity is not frozen in place: if this is a place where excellent cooks are at work, then the menu will change often. Christianity is not going to leave us unchanged, unchallenged, or untransformed. Christianity will not even leave us undamaged! The intimacy we share when we eat our Savior — the intimacy we share when we “cook” for one another — it can be dreadful, daunting, even devastating.

God gracefully breaks us to creatively transform us.

Eucharistia and koinonia. That’s what’s happening to us, week by week. That’s who we’re becoming, week by week. And this is how God heals and restores this whole wondrous world.

He was her man, and he done her wrong

Preached on the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Year B), August 4, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Christ Teaching at Capernaum, by Maurycy Gottlieb

Do you know the song, “Frankie and Johnny”? I would rather not sing it to you — the music of Jimmie Rodgers lies a bit outside our splendid Anglo- Catholic tradition, and outside my own stylistic abilities, and anyway I have no guitar up here with me, and couldn’t play it if I did — but I’d like to offer you a spoken sample. I think I can recite portions of “Frankie and Johnny” as a compelling story. Terrible, sad! But — compelling. Here goes.

Frankie and Johnny was sweethearts,
oh Lord how they did love
Swore to be true to each other,
true as the stars above
He was her man, he wouldn't do her wrong

Frankie went down to the corner,
just for a bucket of beer
She says, Mr Bartender
has my loving Johnny been here
He's my man, he wouldn't do me wrong

I don't want to cause you no trouble,
I ain't gonna tell you no lie
I saw your lover an hour ago
with a girl named Nellie Bligh
He was your man, but he's doing you wrong

Frankie looked over the transom,
she saw to her surprise
There on a cot sat Johnny,
making love to Nellie Bligh
He’s my man, and he's doing me wrong

Frankie drew back her kimono,
she took out a little 44
Rooty toot toot, three times she shot,
right through that hardwood door
Shot her man, he was doing her wrong…

This story has no moral,
this story has no end
This story just goes to show,
that there ain't no good in men
He was her man, and he done her wrong

Here ends the reading.

“There ain’t no good in men.” That’s a persuasive little argument, right there. Just look around. Look at all this mess. Jimmie Rodgers offers what sounds like a fairly reasonable take on human nature. And there’s a kind of safety in this argument, a protective shell you can huddle under, keeping you safe from crushing disappointment. Frankie’s on her way to the bar, telling herself that her man wouldn’t do her wrong, but if she really believes that, then why is she looking for him, and with a gun? She doesn’t trust him. Not deep down. Our girl is all too ready to find out that her man, he done her wrong.

But today’s Good News is for Frankie, even if it arrives too late to save her from killing Johnny, even if she can’t or won’t listen to it. Frankie, hear this Good News: your man was doing you wrong … but he can change. He can make it right. He can get square with you. 

He really can.

The prophet Nathan says so.

Nathan — a name from the Hebrew root natan, a word that means “gave” — Nathan gives King David a tremendous gift. Nathan isn’t packing a 44 in his tunic. He has something even more devastating: he comes to King David with the hard truth. He confronts his boss with the one thing David does not want to hear. And he persists until David confesses his terrible crimes.

In doing this, Nathan saves David from a terrible fate. David admits his dreadful wrongdoing — that he coerced a woman into having sex with him, a power move that she could not resist; and he then abused his power to have her husband killed in battle. David repents from all of this, and therefore, though his actions foreshadow the eventual collapse of the kingdom, David recovers. David improves. David is remembered now with honor, as a good king, a strong and inspiring servant of God. He did several people wrong, but that wasn’t the end of his story.

As for Bathsheba and her husband Uriah, David’s victims, they most certainly were not saved from a terrible fate, but this may be the most honest part of this awful story from the second book of Samuel: David’s moral journey doesn’t end happily for everyone, and so it rings true. We all know stories like that. Many of us have lived — many of us are still living — stories like that. But Bathsheba and Uriah, for all their sufferings, come first from God’s perspective. Note that the text says, “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord, and the Lord sent Nathan to David.” We praise the One God who sees the victims in a story of violence, the One who frees the slaves from a cruel empire, the One whose eyes are on the orphan and the widow.

I hope you can hear how extraordinary this is. Where else in ancient literature do we encounter the moral development of a privileged sovereign who abused and murdered his subjects, challenged and corrected by his god? This is news of a difference on the face of the earth: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob checks the privilege of human leaders. The Lord Almighty pays attention to the victims in awful human dramas. God cares about those who are last and least. And so God gives a privileged man a terrible, redemptive gift: the gift of a chance to repent, to confess, to make amends, and to evolve; the gift of a chance to be a better king, a better leader, a better person.

David accepts this gift, gracefully. His story of redemption shapes our own growth and maturity in faith. Every Ash Wednesday we sing Psalm 51, today’s psalm, a psalm of repentance attributed to David himself. What David did was terrible, and will always remain so. No feeling or act of remorse can fully undo bad actions. But the gift of a chance to confess, and to make amends: that ancient gift of God is evergreen. We will receive it yet again, today, when for the umpteenth time we hear these words: “Let us confess our sins against God and our neighbor.”

But the story of salvation continues, long after David dies in the peace of God. Centuries later, not far from the city where David once reigned, another figure emerges. For us who proclaim the mystery of Christian faith, this person is our prophet and priest and sovereign: this is Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Word of God, Jesus the Incarnate One who moves into the human neighborhood — including this neighborhood — and extends God’s invitation to us once again to repent, to confess, to make amends, and to evolve.

Jesus feeds the multitude in a wondrous sign of his abundant grace and power, and this feast on the hillside prefigures the Christian Eucharistic community, the community we form here, week by week, year by year. But he has more to teach that multitude, more for them to learn and to know. Shortly after the hillside feast, the crowd discovers that Jesus slipped away somehow, and they go looking for him. But when they find him, he upbraids them a bit. He says, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life…”

And so we watch as the crowd is corrected in their misunderstanding of who Jesus is, what Jesus is doing, what he’s all about. They underestimated him as merely a source of abundant food. Now, in their defense, abundant food is undoubtedly a good thing, and seeing Jesus as a food bank is a reasonable and understandable assumption for these hungry peasants to make.

But Jesus invites them into a deeper understanding of his mission, and their mission, and our mission. He is calling us all into a new community, a new Rule of Life, a new Way.

In the Jesus Movement, we don’t merely find food for ourselves. We don’t even settle for sharing food with our neighbors, as virtuous and essential as that is! In this movement, we abide with Jesus, in dreadful yet lovely intimacy. And whenever we abide with Jesus, we abide with one another, bonded forever as one human family. This family transforms the whole world into a just and peaceful home where God dwells intimately with God’s people. When we do all of this — when we study more carefully what Jesus is saying and doing, and envision the kind of world the Word of God is speaking into existence —  then we improve. We get better.

Take note: our SPiN walkers don’t just hand out food and supplies. They build lasting and collaborative friendships with our neighbors. Like King David, and like those hungry peasants who initially misunderstand Jesus, we deepen our understanding. We expand our skills.

There are several misunderstandings in John’s Gospel, stories of people who don’t get it at first, but then make progress, and get better in their practice of faith. The watching crowd at the temple misunderstands what Jesus is saying about the old temple, and how his own body will become the new temple. Nicodemus needs a minute to make sense of being “born again.” The woman at the well initially underestimates what Jesus means by “living water,” thinking only of her immediate practical needs. (She’s clever, though, and soon puts it all together.) And so on. People initially don’t get it.

Our forebears are models for us, models of improvement, of evolution. King David reforms. Nicodemus bravely acknowledges his ignorance and asks Jesus to enlighten him. The woman at the well is astonished and perplexed, but she figures it all out and runs back to her village with exciting news. Peter repairs his denials and goes on to found a whole new movement. According to the letter to the Ephesians,

“All of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God; [all of us come] to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”

So Frankie, oh Frankie, please put your 44 revolver away. Your man, he done you wrong. That’s the truth. But he can get better. And if you put your weapon down — and Frankie, I speak this truth to you in love — if you put your weapon down, you can get better, too.

Wheat ground fine by the lion's teeth

Preached on the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12B), July 28, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21

Jesus multiplies the loaves and fish, Jesus Mafa –  an initiative in the 1970s to help teach the gospel in Northern Cameroon

Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to [Jesus], “There is a child here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated.

Loaves of bread.

Loaves of bread made from barley flour, which even the poorest households in first-century Palestine could afford.

God’s dominion revealed to us in the distribution of cheap but good bread, broken skillfully, handed carefully from person to person, until everyone has eaten their fill.

God’s dominion as the breaking of bread.

God as Bread.

I can see it.

Bread is crusty. It can have sharp edges, especially when the baker scores it down the middle before putting it in the oven, or makes a cross cut for our Thanksgiving bread we share here week by week. I eat the top crust of crusty bread last, because it is crunchy and chewy, both, and I always save the best for last. So God is … crusty? Yes. And sharp. God is not just soft and tender. God is, in all times and places, not merely the best, but the only One, the One who knows us, the One who pierces us with awful yet graceful intimacy. And God endures at the last.

But bread is soft and tender, too. If it is baked just a little less than you think it needs, bread can come out perfect. God can feel — maybe even taste — this good. “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” the psalmist sings. 

Bread is fragrant. God is fragrant. Sometimes the smell of baking bread is so lovely it is maddening — that unmistakable yeasty smell, layered and strong. The psalmist sings of fragrances, too: “Let my prayer rise before you as incense,” we sing, usually around sunset, at evening prayer. My psalm would be, “Let my prayer rise before you as baking bread.” The Spirit blows where she wills, and when she blows, her breeze carries delicious smells of nourishment.

Bread can get moldy. If God is Bread, then God is home to — and God is food for — mold. God is that humble! God dwells that lowly, that meekly.

And there are countless different kinds of bread. Is God diverse? Well, God certainly creates in splendid variety: the air is filled with birds of every kind; the seas teem with fish of every kind. And so of course bread is dizzyingly diverse too. As we’ve seen, poor folk in ancient Palestine made their bread from barley, and so Jesus multiplied barley bread to feed the crowd on the hillside. But in my feast with Jesus, he multiplies loaves of focaccia baked at La Rustica restaurant in West Seattle. God creates in splendid variety: what bread does God multiply that feeds you? What bread delights you? How does God taste, to you?

And .. we punch bread. Well, we punch the dough, that is, as part of the rising process. If Jesus is the Bread of Life, can we punch Jesus? Yes. Yes we can. The risen Christ, still wounded yet rising up in life – he can take our punches. We — like so many prophets and singers of psalms before us — we get to confront and challenge God. We get to punch up.

But here’s the main thing, in my book, that makes “God as bread” so vivid and true: bread breaks.

On the evening of the first Easter Day, the Emmaus walkers recognized the Risen One when the bread was broken. And so, every week here at church, we break our bread with intention, holding it aloft for a time. When the bread is broken at the climax of our Thanksgiving Table prayer, we recognize Christ in our midst, and we acclaim that Christ appears in the breaking. The Body of Christ is, essentially, vitally, broken.

God as Broken Bread.

I can see it.

Only by breaking the bread can we share the bread, and stop hoarding it. (God showered pre-broken manna upon the Israelites, but it would rot overnight, so they couldn’t possibly hoard it.)

Only by breaking the bread can everyone be nourished. (God in Jesus was known for countless meals with those who hunger, including Jesus himself, a famished peasant: he did not feed the hungry; he ate with them.)

Only by breaking the bread do we find the wounded but risen Christ in our midst.

And only by breaking the bread can we come to see how we ourselves — we who follow Jesus, the Bread of Life — we, like Jesus himself, will become broken bread for this hungry, this famished world.

But we live in such a famished world that we can no longer afford to confine the concept of “bread” to our creative metaphorical imaginations: the hungry multitude on the grassy hillside is all too literally real. In an article published today in the New York Times, journalist David Wallace-Wells wrote this: “It can be tempting, in an age of apocalyptic imagination, to picture the most dire future climate scenarios: not just yield declines but mass crop failures, not just price spikes but food shortages, not just worsening hunger but mass famine. In a much hotter world, those will indeed become likelier, particularly if agricultural innovation fails to keep pace with climate change; over a 30-year time horizon, the insurer Lloyd’s recently estimated a 50 percent chance of what it called a “major” global food shock.”

Harrowed by these fears in our existential age, we follow the One who literally gave food to hungry people in his effort to show us what the Dominion of God is like. And so we, in turn, literally feed people, at the center of our spiritual mission. (Notice our shelves full of food for our neighbors, in our entryway.) We are welcome to keep “bread” in our imagination as an image of Christ, but it is also our task, as followers of Jesus who fed the multitude, to become the barley, ground into flour for the substance of the bread, the substance of the Body of Christ.

“God as Bread” is not just a beautiful metaphor. “God as Bread” is a challenge, an exhortation, a sending of everyone gathered here to feed all who hunger, even at great cost to ourselves, against all of our instincts to hoard for a safe future. Jesus the Bread of Life joins the hungry multitude in their predicament, in their anxiety, in their vexing, spiraling crisis.

Here’s how Ignatius of Antioch, a first-century member of the Jesus Movement, says it: Ignatius says, “I am God’s wheat ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.” I am God’s wheat ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.”

We are invited to follow Jesus the Bread of Life, but this following is not simply walking behind a friendly sherpa up a twisting mountain trail. To follow Christ means to be ground fine and consumed like he was: to be torn open, to be crushed like dry grain.

And so we affirm, finally, that when Jesus is on the hillside, surrounded by hordes of hungry people, and says to his disciples, “Make the people sit down,” he is saying something startling, something daunting. “Make the people sit down,” Jesus says, just before he wondrously multiplies loaves of cheap bread into a mountaintop feast. But he hosts this wondrous dinner with the full knowledge that he will himself become that bread, torn to pieces, distributed up and down the hillside, consumed by pilgrims who are frantic with hunger.

And then, following Jesus, we fall into this pattern right behind him. Ignatius makes this plain: we are God’s wheat, ground fine by the lion’s teeth, to be made purest bread for Christ.

We allow our lives to be consumed in mission alongside God’s beloved hungry people. We allow our hearts to be torn open in compassion for refugees, for victims of war, for migrants at the border, for farm animals in tiny cages, for human persons in tents just outside our door, for this whole grassy hillside we call Uptown, for the grassy hillside of this whole round world.

God’s mission asks a lot of us.

But we have guides along the way, apostles who help us understand, accept, and finally join God’s mission. My husband Andrew is, like his namesake the apostle Andrew, one of those in our community who evangelizes by baking bread, by fixing dinner. Happily, it was his turn today to bake our bread. I say “happily” because whenever it’s Andrew’s turn to be one of the St. Paul’s “Flour Children,” our house is filled with holy fragrance. Our kitchen is adorned with luscious fresh-baked bread. It’s almost a shame that this lovely gift will be broken and torn apart, then chewed and swallowed, by all God’s hungry people.

But that’s how it works. That is our faith. Come on up, then, hungry pilgrims. Come forward to eat your savior, which will strengthen you to be torn apart and eaten, too. In all this tearing and eating, all the people of God will receive as much as they want, all that they need. All God’s people will be satisfied. But all along this difficult Way, up and down this grassy hillside, all of us who follow Jesus the Bread of Life – we will surely be ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.

Rest and Home

Preached on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11B), July 21, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.

2 Samuel 7:1-14a
Psalm 89:20-37
Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

“For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.”

For me, this passage is viscerally evocative. I can feel in my gut the rush, the coming and going, the getting things done, and all of it important, surely. I have lived this passage, so many times in my life. Perhaps you have too.

This is a bright, shining time in the Gospel of Mark. Two weeks ago we heard about the disciples being sent out by Jesus to proclaim the Good News. Today we hear about them returning, and telling Jesus all about what “they had done and taught.” Today’s Gospel passage is really two passages put together, in the middle of which is one of the times that Jesus feeds thousands of people with a few pieces of bread and fish, John’s version of which we will hear about next week. Today’s passages frame the feeding of thousands, and are themselves full of healing and teaching.

We get the sense that the whole countryside is on fire with the Jesus movement. There is good ministry happening, and there is a kind of breathless exhilaration to it all.

Maybe you came to church this morning to participate in some of the exhilaration that a very active life in parish ministry can bring. If so, you are welcome.

Maybe you came to church this morning because the rest of your life is already packed full of things that demand your attention, in a way that you might sometimes feel that there is so much coming and going that you have no leisure even to eat. Maybe in that case you came to church to rest, to be carried for a little while by the liturgy. If so, you are welcome.

And maybe you came to church this morning not quite sure why you came. If so, you are welcome.

However or whyever you came, I think our Scripture passages today have Good News for all of us.

For me, today’s Good News can be expressed in two words that run like a river through the whole Bible, and that bring life-giving water to us today. These two words are Rest and Home.

If you came looking for rest, then I hope you hear with me what Jesus says to the disciples in today’s Gospel: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”

If you came looking to do a lot of things, that’s great. I hope that in the midst of your generosity toward the church in terms of your time and energy, that you are also generous to yourself and hear what Jesus says: “rest a while.”

And if you are one of those people not sure what you want, I hope you too can hear Jesus inviting you to “rest a while,” because part of rest can be resting from the anxiety of not knowing what to do next. It’s okay to rest sometimes from feeling like you always need to know the answer, the when, the where, the who, the how, the why.

It’s okay to rest. It’s faithful to rest sometimes.

And I mean exactly what I say here: it’s okay. It’s not binary — rest is not always better than work. Sometimes it’s time pause a rest and get to work. But our civilization produces many messages that validate work at the expense of rest, and that’s when I think what Jesus says to the disciples is especially good for us to hear.

So far I’ve been talking about rest as it relates to physical and mental action, the sort of activity in which we are likely to engage in various ministries at church, in the administration of a household, at school, or at a workplace other than one’s home.

But there is more to rest, both in our lives, and, I believe, in our Scriptures today. This is spiritual rest — rest for the soul that is weary, wandering, weeping, or wailing.

And essential for rest is a safe place of rest, which is where our second word comes in: home.

By home I mean a spiritual home, a dedicated safe place in which to practice, together, the following of Jesus, the love of God, and love of neighbor as ourselves.

Maybe sometimes it is a physical place, such as church, right here right now. More than a physical place, though, our spiritual home is to be built and nourished within us. In the Gospels, Jesus and the disciples are often shown moving from place to place, without the kind of home-base, if you will, that we today might consider our parish church. Paul, in his letters, and in the Acts of the Apostles, is often on the move, also without a permanent home for long periods of time.

The fact that Jesus, the disciples, and Paul moved around a lot does not mean that in order to be good disciples of Jesus we need to be on the move all the time. Rather, we see in Scripture that a spiritual grounding, as sense of spiritual home, is not necessarily found in any one physical place, but is found in an interior foundation in that which is the ground of all being, the ground and source of all that is, seen and unseen, God.

Paul writes about our belonging to and in God. He tells the Ephesians, and it is appropriate for us to hear Paul saying this to us, as well, that we “are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom [we] also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.”

In Christ Jesus we are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God, and we are members of God’s household. This means that we have within us what we need to be at home. But that takes intentionality on our part. We find our spiritual home within only when we recognize and affirm our membership in the household of God, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone.

This also means that when we reside in our spiritual home, and take a spiritual rest, just as our home is in God, our true rest must also be in God. But God is infinite. We, who are finite, tend to need something a little more concrete to think and feel and do, to actualize a rest in God.

Thomas a Kempis devotes, in The Imitation of Christ, several chapters to spiritual rest in God. I recommend in particular Chapters 9, 21, 23, and 25. I’ll share a little from Chapter 25, which is titled “Where Certain Peace and True Progress Are To Be Found.” Kempis writes:

“Always attend to your own business and watch what you say and do. Direct your every effort to this end, namely, to seek only to please [Jesus] and desire nothing other than [Jesus]. Judge not rashly the words and deeds of others nor meddle in what does not pertain to you. The result will be that you will only rarely or infrequently suffer anxiety… “ Later, he continues:

“Spiritual progress and perfection consist in offering yourself, with your whole heart, to the divine will, and not seeking yourself in anything either small or great, in time or in eternity. Weigh everything in the same balance, and with equal serenity of heart offer thanksgiving to God in times of trial and in periods of prosperity.”

Simple enough - though perhaps easier said than done. If you by any chance are thinking right now that this so-called rest sure seems like a lot of work, yes. Thomas a Kempis is not suggesting a quick fix to our stress and anxiety, and I think he is right about this. What is offered, however, is the kind of rest that can come from the faith that God is faithful to us.

Note that in the Gospel Jesus calls the disciples to rest, but when he and they are followed by many people, Jesus does not cut short the disciples’ rest. Instead, Jesus “saw a great crowd; and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” Maybe the disciples went back to work at this point, but I like to think that perhaps they didn’t, that perhaps they rested exactly as Jesus instructed.

I encourage us to be thoughtful about when it might be time to rest, and to resist the temptation to cut short our rest to leap back into action. I am inspired by a quote I read this week in our book of the month, Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle. Boyle in turn is quoting Pope John XXIII, although he admits it may be apocryphal. Apocryphal or not, I think it’s appropriate here. Supposedly, every night the pope would pray the following: “I’ve done everything I can today for Your church. But it’s Your Church, and I’m going to bed.”

This week I hope we all continue to each day do what we can. And I pray that part of doing what we can is finding times and ways to rest. Here today let us take a little time, pause our coming and going, and take the leisure to eat together the bread of life, so that it may be for us the cornerstone of our spiritual rest in God, who is our home.

She despised him in her heart

Preached on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10B), July 14, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington, by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

2 Samuel 6:1-15, 12b-19
Psalm 24
Ephesians 1:3-14
Mark 6:14-29

 St. John the Baptist in Prison, Visited by Salomé, possibly by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)

As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.

She despised him in her heart.

Girl, preach.

Michal is a bystander, not meriting much more than a brief afterthought in the story of King David’s accession. But there she remains, in the story. If we don’t include Michal, we won’t have all the story we need.

I have often come back to Michal over the years, in my reflections. She is an aging member of the new king’s growing harem of wives, a has-been daughter of the deposed king, a bit player in a colorful royal drama that still shapes our worldview about leadership, government, humanity, and God.

King David is still leaping and dancing before the Lord, even now. King Charles the Third – consciously or not – borrows ideas and imagery from King David’s world-changing reign. And our own presidential contests carry many of the same dramatic themes forward in our own nation, as we all, like Michal, look out of our windows at our political leaders, and at all their friends and foes, with deepening dismay.

Yes, King David and Michal are still very much among us.

What is a king, or queen? What is any human authority figure? Is a human leader divinely ordained, if not actually divine? Maybe they take on, at the very least, a few attributes of the divine, as long as they manage to look the part, to have the requisite charisma, to be able to pull off an elegant, vigorous dance around the Ark of the Covenant. 

But no matter how attractive and alluring our human leaders might be, I wonder if you, like me, are drawn more powerfully to Michal the bystander, Michal the skeptic, Michal the disillusioned observer. She sees through David, and the intrigue of his court. She can predict the trouble that’s coming. She is nobody’s fool.

David claims to be God’s anointed one, God’s favorite, God’s choice; and in his dance around the Ark, David claims God’s power as his own. His dance is a political move, a bold claim, a striking and daring assertion. The Ark of the Covenant is a particular, tangible location of God’s cosmic presence and power. As such, the Ark is a lethally dangerous object, not a toy or a trifle. It represents for God’s people the ineffable, ultimate, beyond-the-universe power of the Holy One. Therefore, if you place the Ark in the center of your new royal palace, you are claiming to be God’s chosen one to reign over all the people of the land: the strongest warrior, the indestructible sovereign, the God-ordained human who reigns at the center of your world.

That’s a shocking thing to say about yourself, even if the personal world you claim to control is as small as your own little household, or your own little parish, or workplace, or neighborhood. And we can hear echoes of this shocking claim of ultimate power whenever our own political leaders say things like, “Only I can do this. I alone am the one who can do this.”

Naturally, given his many triumphs and successes, everyone assumes that David must be God’s favorite, God’s chosen. But David’s people are forgetting something important in this thrilling moment of his accession to the throne. The people are forgetting that God did not want the Israelites to have a human king. God reminded Samuel that God is their sovereign, and furthermore that human rulers do nothing but deprive the people of their crops and livestock and money, and even their spouses and children. 

Human rulers impoverish the people and damage the land. God is faithful.

Human rulers level forests. God nourishes and waters the land.

Human rulers degrade their subjects. God lifts up God’s people.

And so, though David seems invincible now, though David seems to be God’s chosen one, though David seems to be the answer, the only choice, the One, this is an illusion. The people, in elevating a human king, will come to grief.

Michal the bystander, perhaps knowing all of this (or at the very least, reminding us readers of all of this) – Michal despises David as he dances around God’s ark. She sees David for who he is: a fallible human being who claims ultimate power as his own.

And then, much, much later in the story of God’s people, there are a few more bystanders who attract our attention. These are the disciples of John the Baptist, looking on helplessly as their leader is executed by another foolish king as part of an evening’s entertainment. Don’t overlook the bystanders in this story of corrupt human authority: after John is beheaded, they quietly come to fetch his body for burial. This is a bold move. Coming forward is risky. It lets Herod’s stooges know that you’re an ally of the executed criminal. You could lose your head, too.

But these disciples share something with Michal, who looks knowingly out her window at the hubris of a new king. The bystanders in both stories have much to teach us.

How often do we find ourselves looking out windows, with growing dismay, as terrible events unfold? We want a ceasefire in Gaza; we want the Russian army to retreat; we want one political candidate or another to do this, or stop doing that; to step up, or step aside. We want massive corporations to stop devastating the face of the earth when we’re already worrying that our planet will become uninhabitable in our children’s lifetimes. We long for an end to factory farming, an end to white supremacist public policy, an end to misogyny and transphobia and — God save us! — an end to the slaughtering of children in wars abroad and shootings close to home. 

And of course the shootings don’t just endanger children. They endanger our own King Davids, and King David aspirants, as we saw just yesterday; and they endanger all whose job it is to protect them. When we look out our window, we have many disturbing scenes to contemplate.

We look out our window and despise in our hearts the forces of madness and violence. We look out our window as goodness seems to lose its head under the guillotine of human wickedness and human folly.

And so today we once again proclaim the Good News of resurrection — we truly do proclaim this Good News! — but we proclaim the Good News from Michal’s window. We proclaim the Good News from the shadows of Herod’s court, where John’s followers are lurking in fear, but also summoning courage.

We keep these bystanders in the story, as we catalog the long saga of human folly. The ancient Israelite scribes remembered Michal; the ancient Christian evangelists remembered John’s disciples. They handed these memories down to us. These savvy, brave, nonviolent bystanders have much to teach us.

First, they teach us to pay attention. Michal watches David with keen intelligence, foreshadowing the prophet Nathan, who later confronts the king in his wrongdoing, and sparks authentic remorse in David, who is rightly mortified by his own murderous misbehavior. Michal is the conscience of her people, tapped into the very wisdom of God, silently watching, skillfully observing. Pay attention, Michal teaches us.

Second, the bystanders teach us to remain faithful. John’s followers risk their own necks — quite literally. Their claim of his body is a courageous, prophetic act: they are defiant in the face of casual evil. No, they couldn’t save John from his fate, but their witness inspired generations of the faithful, and teaches us even today — living through our own time of madness and cruelty — to summon courage, to keep the faith, to work together for all that we know is good and right and true.

Additional biblical bystanders — the disciples of Jesus — attend to his remains when he suffers his own state-sponsored execution. They come to his tomb bearing spices: these are the myrrh-bearing women, the original Spice Girls. They are — like Michal, like John’s disciples — exasperated bystanders in a world gone mad. But they watch, pay attention, and remain faithful.

And finally they witness resurrection. 

We are God’s people; we are the Body of Christ; as such, we are, often enough, exasperated bystanders. We are, often enough, despising in our hearts so much human wrongdoing. But when we stay, and stay together, and pay attention, and remain faithful, and encourage one another, we then witness resurrection. We see God’s power rising up and defeating the terrible worldly powers of Sin and Death.

So come forward, I invite you, to this Table, this Table laden with nourishment for God’s faithful bystanders. Come with your prayers of lament; come with your rage prayers; come with your fears about all that seems to be falling apart around us. Come and take sustenance, take heart, take courage: we bystanders are here together. And together, led by the Risen One, we will overcome.