"I love you."

Preached on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, the Baptism of the Lord (Year C), January 12, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 43:1-7
Psalm 29
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

The Baptism of Jesus Christ in the Jordan, by Jerzy Nowosielski

Ten and a half years ago, on a warm evening in Seattle, late in the evening — I know it was late because it was already dark, in June — I walked around Queen Anne Hill. This had been a sad and traumatic day for our city. This was the day when Seattle Pacific University suffered a mass shooting. 

The neighborhood was quiet, but before long I noticed the smell of fire in the air. I turned onto West Fulton Street between 8th and 9th Avenues West, and saw leaping flames. Someone’s house was on fire. But maybe it wasn’t their house — I couldn’t be sure. It might have been a shed out back. But if so, it was a big enough shed to cause an impressive, unnerving fire, with large bright flames and billowing black smoke. (I can’t even begin to imagine the size and heat of the fires in southern California that have destroyed thousands of houses, businesses, schools, and churches.)

“Oh, Seattle,” I remember thinking, I remember feeling, on that warm, weary June night. “Oh, Seattle,” I said to myself, “Oh, Seattle — rest now. You have had a terrible day.” I breathed quiet prayers for our beleaguered city, torn badly by a violent shooting, vulnerable to devastating fires, heading into another anxious summer in this era of climate catastrophe. I’m sure I was projecting, at least a little, but Seattle felt feverish, even somehow sweaty, that night, the way you feel when you just can’t rest. Your bed sheets are wrinkled and clammy, the fitted sheet keeps slipping off the corner of your mattress, the air in your room is stagnant and ten degrees too warm, you have a dull headache and you just can’t rest. (Have you been there?) “Oh, Seattle, rest now,” I chanted again.

And that was ten years ago. Thousands of mass shootings ago. Hundreds of wildfires ago. Three national elections ago. Russia had annexed Crimea that February, but was still eight years away from a full invasion of Ukraine. A month after my nocturnal walk, Israel launched an attack on Gaza in retaliation for deadly violence perpetrated by Hamas. (The more things change…)

Since that restive summer, our city has confronted several more crises, including of course the pandemic, which coincided with — and exacerbated — the housing crisis that devastated this neighborhood, the crisis that now drives and shapes our mission here.

Oh, Seattle, rest now.

But Seattle can’t seem to rest. Yet here we are, all of us, you and me, gathered in this restful, quiet, sacred space between a curving pool of water and a live-edge wooden Table. We gather here week by week, and we say our fervent prayers. Oh, Seattle, we pray. Oh, Ukraine. Oh, Gaza and Israel and Lebanon and Russia; oh, Egypt and Syria and Turkey; oh, South Sudan and Sudan and Nigeria; oh, England and Canada and Haiti and Ecuador and America. How can we help you rest?

The sacred space between a pool of water and a table. This is where we pray. If you listen carefully, the pool may remind you of a river. When you practice silence and stillness in this sanctuary, I hope you can hear the living water.

This living water evokes the curving banks and treacherous rapids of a great river, and we listen to the sound of this water in the middle of a city that rises at the edge of the Salish Sea. We say our prayers just a few miles from several rivers, especially the Cedar River and Tolt River, which serve as life-giving watersheds for all the living creatures here. These rivers carry just a tiny fraction of the precious little fresh water that supports life on this planet. (Oh, humanity: do you know that only three percent of the water on this planet is fresh, and much of it is locked away from us in glaciers and ice caps? Oh, humanity: do you know that less than one percent of the water on this planet is available for our use, for our sustenance, for our survival?)

And so we stand close to this living water, and we praise a Savior who stepped into this water, into the flowing river we call the Jordan. He submitted to the water; he acquiesced to baptism; he condescended to dwell with us in this precarious, sleep-deprived, traumatized, overheated, thirsty, restless world.

Oh, Jesus: we praise you.

As Jesus prayed in the water (take note! just like us at the edge of this pool, when he is on or near water, Jesus prays) — as Jesus prayed in the water, the heavens opened. The heavens opened. Usually when we say the heavens have opened, it’s a figure of speech that means a storm has rent the sky. Think of the heavens opening and pouring a drenching rain down upon us. (Oh, Los Angeles: may you be blessed with opening heavens!) One time while I was running around Queen Anne Hill, the heavens opened and I was soaking wet, and as I (somewhat foolishly!) ran down the hill of 10th Avenue West not far from my house, I suddenly was literally up to my waist in a flash flood of water! That’s what we usually mean when we say the heavens have opened.

But this time, at the river Jordan, when Jesus is praying, the heavens open and drench Jesus and all the people gathered around not with a downpour, but with the thunderous sound of God’s voice. Was it a thunderclap? I think we can imagine that to be so. God thunders with a voice that shakes the wilderness, and makes the oak trees writhe, and strips the forests bare. God speaks in a deafening opening of the heavens, and speaks directly to Jesus. And here is what God says:

“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Jesus is soaking wet with these passionate words. 

“You are the Beloved,” God says. “The Beloved.” The thunderclap, the devastating thunderstorm, the flash flood of God’s awful voice, speaks love to Jesus. Not condemnation or judgment; not even good tidings or joyful greetings. Just love.

God thunders down from the heavens to say “I love you.”

And this thunderclap is but an echo of another “I love you” from God, an “I love you” we heard again this morning in the reading from the prophet Isaiah. With the voice of the prophet God tells the people that God loves them. 

Love comes down. Love pours down. Love feeds the watersheds and fills the bays and lakes and rivers. Love showers us until we are soaking wet with it, and can’t help but share that same love with one another.

But this is a problematic metaphor. We live in times when we long not for beautiful metaphors, but for literal rescue, for the literal sound of God’s voice, for the prophet to mean it literally, when speaking for God, that “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.”

And did you catch just now that in the prophet’s voice, not just fire but water cuts both ways? The water that supports life also drowns; the fire that warms and enlightens also destroys. In this time of deadly floods and terrifying fires, we cry out in vain for God’s literal, concrete presence and power in all of these overlapping catastrophes, begging God to give rest and safety to Seattle, to our loved ones, to our neighbors, to war-torn nations, to ruined cities, to ourselves. 

But then we remember that extraordinary person in the river Jordan, the One who stands prayerfully beneath the opening heavens and hears God speak love in a voice that splits the flames of fire and shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. This person goes on to found a community of love, the community that rises up even here, on another continent, many distant centuries and cultures away from that clutch of people at the edge of the Jordan.

And this community of love shows us, finally, how God defeats floodwaters and wildfires, even if they literally overwhelm — or even kill — us. Soon we will take a green branch and fling water over this assembly, a ritual that ‘opens the heavens’ right here in this room, showering everyone with God’s love, God’s “I love you.” And week by week this assembly learns the Way of Christ, who gave away everything, even his own life, in a flood of love for his friends. 

Are we safe from floods and earthquakes, from hurricanes and wildfires, from war and violence, from ignorance and malice? No. After all, we praise God’s Beloved One, who lived among the poor and the oppressed, who knew hunger and thirst, who was tortured at the hands of an authoritarian government, who finally died and was buried.

And yet, showered with the thunderous love that raised Jesus to life, we who are vulnerable to suffering and death are safe, we are beautifully safe, we are blessedly safe: we are safe from isolation and loneliness, we are safe from nihilism and despair, we are safe from anything that threatens in vain to break God’s loving hold on us. This love sends us powerfully back into this burning world, back to lend our aid, back to embrace and encourage the victims of disaster, back to guide our neighbors to safety, back to rebuild a better, safer, lovelier world, with God’s healing power and God’s abiding love.

In a few moments, as the drops of living water fall on you, I hope you will hear the thunderclap directly above you, that magnificent voice that says to you — to all of us — “You [all] are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”

What Is Your Epiphany?

Preached on the Feast of Epiphany (transferred), January 5, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.

Isaiah 60:1-6
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12
Psalm 72:1-7,10-14

Three Wise Men, by J C Leyendecker

Some time ago I encountered a man who related a dramatic story about his life. It starts in a dark place. He described himself as a law-abiding citizen, and faithful in his religious community. In the time of his life in which this story takes place, his country seemed to be torn apart by different political factions, and some people seemed to be taking advantage of the situation by spouting blasphemous things. You could say ideas are just ideas, but this man saw that some ideas are more dangerous than others, and he saw some people spreading ideas that could lead to further division in the country, and beyond that, great violence and suffering.

He once had occasion to help, in his small way, make a difference in his community. He was able to serve as a witness in the trial of one of the people spreading dangerous ideas. Now, he was respected among his fellow citizens, and when he spoke, they tended to listen. With his help, the criminal was found guilty, and was executed, which sent a message to all those like him that there was indeed a limit to what you could get away with in a civilized country. So far so good.

Here is where the story takes a turn. This man, this faithful, law-abiding citizen, had an epiphany, which is why I am telling this story. Today we celebrate the Epiphany. The word epiphany has at least three, related, definitions. The first is the most general: a sudden revelation or insight. That’s it.

The sudden revelation or insight that this man had was that he had been wrong about the criminal. Some time (I don’t know how long) after the execution, the man realized that the so-called criminal had not, in fact, done anything wrong, or at least certainly not worthy of death. Imagine with me how he must have felt, realizing suddenly that he was at least partially responsible for the death of an innocent person. I have not knowingly been in that situation myself, but I imagine that it must have been shattering to this man, to his sense of himself as faithful and law-abiding. He had been party to the law being used wrongly. His faith taught him to tell the truth, and he had been party to what he later realized was a lie.

What was he to do? Nothing he could do would bring back the man who had been killed. This is where the second definition of epiphany comes in. It adds some specificity to the first definition: a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being. So it’s still a sudden revelation or insight, but now it is specifically about the divine. In the depths of shame, in the pit of this man’s realization of his crime in helping to put an innocent man to death, in his insight into his role in a state-sanctioned murder, God manifested to him. He had thought himself faithful in his religious community, and in many ways, he no doubt had been, but now he was gifted a revelation of God that broke open all his assumptions about himself and the world around him.

Now to hear him tell the story, the manifestation of God came first, and his sudden realization of his sin came after. I hope he will forgive me for switching the order around a little. I do this because it is my opinion that self-realization of sin and manifestation of God are, for many of us, a bit of a chicken and egg thing. Sometimes it can be hard to tell for sure which comes first. In any case, this man had now experienced two of the three definitions of epiphany: a sudden realization or insight, but also one that includes a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being.

He now was at a crossroads in his life. He knew that what he had done in the past was wrong. But he was still part of his society. He was still, to his neighbors, the same faithful, law-abiding citizen. But inside he had been transformed. He now had a choice. On the one hand he could lay low, certainly not participate in any more trials like the one before, but also not say anything to anyone that might change what they think of him. He could just keep quiet, keep his head down, do no harm, but also not speak up about what was going on politically around him. On the other hand, he could speak up about what he had done wrong, he could again be a witness, but this time a witness in defense of those being wrongfully imprisoned and executed.

This is where we encounter the third and final definition of epiphany: the manifestation of Christ.

By now I expect that many of you, perhaps all, have guessed the name of the man in question. His name is Paul, the patron of this house, and the man executed, Stephen. I know that we will remember the conversion of St. Paul later this month, so we will hear this story again. But I hope you will indulge me, because it is my opinion that the story of what Saul did, and how Saul became Paul, and then what Paul did, is a story worth retelling over and over again, and especially today, Epiphany.

The specificity of Epiphany being about Christ is important. This is because it could be easy for us to say, we are Christian, here we are in a church, we’ve just been celebrating Christmas, so of course what we do is about Christ. But those are just words. Christ is not a passive element of our existence. Christ is a transformative divine presence in our lives, in fact, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, Christ is the definitive presence in our lives.

This is why the epiphany of Saul made clear his choice. Saul’s epiphany was not just any sudden revelation or insight, nor even of just any divine or supernatural being. Rather, Saul’s epiphany was of Christ, and Christ’s transforming action in Saul’s heart led him to not lay low, but to get up, and speak up, and change the world. Paul worked tirelessly from the time of his epiphany to save the lives of people like Stephen, in whose death Saul had participated.

As we heard in the Letter of Paul to the Ephesians, he calls himself “the very least of the saints.” He knew his past had not been erased. But that did not stop him from accepting, as he says, “the gift of God’s grace,” so that he could become a servant of the Gospel.

There is more to the story of course. Saul is struck blind. Christ speaks to him. His epiphany is as dramatic as any. But epiphany does not require that drama, not really. We have access to epiphany all the time. It is in our Baptism. If you don’t remember your baptism, that’s okay; epiphany is available to you every time we renew our Baptismal vows. And epiphany is available to us every time we celebrate the Eucharist.

The question for each and every one of us is this: what is your epiphany? We all have the potential for epiphany, because we have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit. God is always speaking to us, not just on the road to Damascus. God is always doing God’s part of epiphany. Are we ready to receive revelation, insight, and not just any revelation, but that of Christ, whose presence in our lives promises to transform us?

In hindsight, Paul’s conversion may seem a foregone conclusion. Who is Paul if not St. Paul? But Saul had a choice. Remember, there are plenty of people in our Scriptures who receive revelation, and reject it. Or Saul could have called himself a Christian, gone through the motions, but not become an evangelist. That’s not necessarily bad, but it wouldn’t have been what God called Paul to do.

So I repeat the question: what is your epiphany, and when – not if, when – Christ calls you to transformation, how will you respond?

Omit needless words

Preached on the First Sunday after Christmas, December 29, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Psalm 147:13-21
Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7
John 1:1-18

Festival of Lights, by John August Swanson

“Omit needless words.”

This is the greatest commandment in “The Elements of Style,” a little guidebook for writers by William Strunk and E.B. White.

If you want to be a powerful, effective writer, then heed Strunk and White’s instruction: Omit needless words.

The rule elegantly obeys itself. It requires only three words to teach writers the power of brevity. 

I first read Strunk and White as a creative-writing student at Sibley Senior High School in Mendota Heights, Minnesota. Our teacher was David Coleman, an Irish scholar of mythology and drama. Mr. Coleman nurtured my first attempts at writing things worth writing. His assignments were deceptively simple: “Write a paper about an interesting person,” he would assign us. And: “Write a paper about an interesting experience.”

We spent the class doggedly weeding needless words from our gardens, while cultivating and pruning the needful words. “Do not say that something is very good,” Mr. Coleman taught us. “‘Very’ is a weak word. The thing is good, or it is not.” And he taught us not to fill our written confections with empty calories such as “I think that…” or “I believe that…” “If you didn’t think it,” Mr. Coleman would say, “then you wouldn’t have written it. Just say what you think. Show, don’t tell.”

Words are powerful. As the prophet Samuel came of age, growing steadily into a clarion voice of God’s Word, we are told that the Lord “let none of Samuel’s words fall to the ground.” Words can fall to the ground — that is, they can be wasted or lost, cast aside, ill-chosen, or ignored. They might just be weak words, filler words, words like “very.” Or they might be destructive words, words meant to injure, striking the ground with dreadful force.

And this is the graver sin. Sometimes I write too many words in a frivolous way — I have written a sermon or three that could have helpfully been edited down by several dozen — several hundred — words. But it’s even worse if I use words to cause harm, to tear the fabric, to plunge the sword. 

Words are powerful.

The fourth evangelist, whom we call John but who might have been as many as three different people, was an eyewitness to the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. He (or she: we aren’t completely sure about their gender) knew well the power of words. John takes up words, and the singular Word — capital W, logos — as a key way to understand who Jesus is, how Jesus relates to God, how Jesus is God, and ultimately how God, through Jesus the Word, creates. “In the beginning was the Word,” John sings. “The Word was with God; the Word was God.” And here’s the money quote: “All things came into being through the Word.”

All things came into being through the Word.

God creates through the Word. God is Word; God is with the Word; and God also speaks the Word, out and into the universe, bringing all things into being. We can better understand these heady concepts if we appreciate the power of words, and how their power deepens — for good or for ill — when we craft them into a message. God shared with us God’s own power to create with words. And we are also able to twist that power into a weapon.

For nearly every week over the last two years, I have written what we call The Weekly Word, a short article that anchors our weekly newsletter (sometimes not so short: I will forever be a student of the laconic Mr. Coleman!). Maybe you pass over this article week by week, or you briefly scan it to glean an idea or two about how things are going at St. Paul’s. The Weekly Word is not literature as much as a brief note in a periodical. But perhaps you can at least appreciate that The Weekly Word is but one example of the many ways words create St. Paul’s; the ways words shape our community; the ways words guide and form us in faith.

But there are other, painful examples. Have you ever written an email and then sorely regretted it? If we had a show of hands on that, I would raise my own hand high: oh, the suffering I have caused myself and others by quickly pressing ‘send’! If you’ve ever said or written something hurtful, then you likely have felt that sickening, futile desire to take those words back. But you can’t. The power of words deepens when we release them. Words create. And sometimes they create something new by destroying something, or someone, else.

We email a lot in our church life. We converse a lot. We trade thousands of words a day, as we work here and play here; as we live here and die here.

And so we should pay attention to words, here in this congregation of faithful souls, we who, in that font, are drowned as many, then raised as one; we who are gathered around this Table to be strengthened for mission. We choose words, many words, countless torrents of words, to shape our prayers to God. And many of these words are chosen for us, whether we like them or not. And we argue about words. Tell me: what is your least favorite sentence or phrase in our thick, word-stuffed Prayer Book? I bet you have at least one.

Here’s mine: I strongly affirm our faith, but I worry quite a bit about the words of the Nicene Creed. I wish we weren’t required to recite the Creed every Sunday. The Nicene Creed is mystifying and upsetting; it parses words (what is the difference between “begotten” and “made”?!). It confuses, or disturbs, or even enrages us. (What do we mean by “virgin”? And how can we square that with the startling, prophetic proto-feminism of the New Testament? And does the Spirit proceed from the Son? Yes or no? How can we decide that question when we barely understand the esoteric concept of “Trinitarian procession” itself?) All these words! If they create, they sometimes seem to be creating a big, upsetting mess.

And John the evangelist, for all their elegance in the sublime words of the Prologue, which we proclaimed today as our Gospel: John does not follow the “less is more” wisdom of Strunk and White. Jesus in John says substantially more words than he does in the other three Gospels, teaching and praying at great, exhausting length. The Word, in John’s telling, seems never to stop talking.

But those words, numerous and exhausting as they may be, sound a deep bell in our hearing. John’s words work on us; they move and shape us; they form us in faith; they bind us as one, as Christ’s Body.

”The light shines in the darkness,” John sings, “and the darkness has not overcome it.” Another translation has the darkness failing to understand light. These powerful, consoling words can stir us to action in this benighted world, so full of suffering and so impoverished of good, strong words of authentic hope.

But the song continues. “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” John sings. Another translation has the Word becoming flesh and “moving into our neighborhood.” Our neighborhood is plagued by inequality, by indifference, by human anguish; but God is with us.

And then: “From the Word’s fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” Another translation has grace “following after” grace. So we receive the grace of hope, but that is quickly followed by the grace of the realization of that hope: by God’s faith we have found housing for several of our neighbors; by God’s hope we have incorporated nearly two dozen children into our community; and by God’s love we have established a legacy of faithful stewardship here that will nourish our great-grandchildren.

And so we rejoice. We may have plenty of words to injure one another, to break our bonds of fellowship, to destroy all that is good and great in this world; but we have even more words, countless words, the fullness of the Word — the Word by which God mends this world, and repairs our relationships, and builds a home for our descendants to live in peace.

Do you have a favorite word that speaks of God, a favorite phrase that proclaims God’s Good News, a favorite paragraph or poem that creates a new thing in this universe? Maybe your favorite is in that Creed I find so troublesome. Maybe your favorite is in a hymn you sing from the depths of your heart.

My favorite creative word — my favorite needful word, my favorite word that speaks of God, my favorite word that creates something new in the universe — my favorite word is Reconcile.

I invite you to wonder about your favorite word, your needful word, the word you love most among the words that bring forth something new from the chaos. And I promise, as long as I know you, I will never omit your needful word from our common prayer. I will sing it right along with you, by your side, for many long days.

Invitation to Rest

Preached on Christmas Day, December 25, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.

Isaiah 52:7-10
Hebrews 1:1-12
John 1:1-14
Psalm 98

Detail from Nativity, by John August Swanson

I invite you to rest.

Whatever is happening in your life, in the past year, or the past month, or yesterday, or even this morning. Whatever you expect to happen this afternoon, or tomorrow, or next week, or next month, I invite you to rest.

For the next half hour, together, I invite us to rest in the Christmas season. I invite us to rest with Mary and Joseph and Jesus — poor, maybe sometimes on the run, of a people oppressed by empire.

Perhaps that doesn’t sound very restful. So let me be more specific. I am not inviting you to a rest in physical, financial, or political security. While I do wish those things for you, and for all, I am not naïve about these things. I read the news. I walk this neighborhood. I have some idea of the sorrows and suffering in this very room, past and present.

And yet, I invite you to rest. I am inviting you to a spiritual rest in Jesus, and more specifically, in Jesus the child, Jesus the infant. I am inviting you to a rest in Jesus at his most vulnerable, with the possible exception of his last hours on the cross.

This invitation to vulnerability is surely paradoxical. I propose that this paradox is part of the mystery of the Incarnation. In the coming weeks and months we will hear all about the life of Jesus. As we do every year, we will hear about Jesus the miraculous, Jesus the wise, Jesus the shepherd, Jesus the Son of God who always seems to be two steps ahead, to know unknowable things, Jesus resplendent in glory, “full of grace and truth.”

But this morning we encounter Jesus the infant, Jesus the vulnerable, Jesus decades away from the wedding at Cana. And the astounding, surprising, perplexing Good News of Christmas is that even in the vulnerability of Jesus the child, we are invited to a spiritual rest.

This is because the spiritual rest to which I refer is not freedom from circumstances that worry us. It is rest from our illusions that we are in control. We aren’t. Whatever control any of us thinks we have over our lives at any time, it is passing, illusory, a castle in the sand. The truth of our existence is that we are all vulnerable, about as vulnerable as Jesus the child, all our lives.

I grant you that many of us do a fair job of keeping up the pretense of control, of knowing what we are doing, or at least looking like it for a moment or two. But if you’re like me, it is incredibly hard work to keep up that act.

I am inviting all of us, for the next half hour, to drop the act. I propose that we agree all together, right now, to stop pretending to each other, and most of all, to ourselves, that we are not vulnerable.

And then, I am invite us to rest in our collective vulnerability, in the faith that Jesus is Emmanuel, God-with-us. Jesus is not just a man born two thousand years ago, half a world away. Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one, and Jesus is also the Logos, the Word of John’s Gospel. Jesus is the vulnerable infant, and Jesus was in the beginning, was with God, and was, and is, God.

Jesus is the navel, the spine, the beating heart of all the Cosmos, for all time and beyond time. And we are members of the Body of Christ; we are connected, even in this moment, with God in time and beyond time. We can access at all times and places the infinitude of God, through Jesus, and yes, through Jesus the vulnerable child.

God does not need us to be strong to connect. God is with us at all times, and it is a well-attested phenomenon that we are often best able to realize our connection with God when we are vulnerable. Sometimes the changes and chances of this weary world forces vulnerability upon us. But we can also access that vulnerability anytime we want, by doing the spiritual work to let go of our ego, to let go of our illusion of being in control.

This Christmas season I invite us rest in the will of God. You might well ask me, okay, what is the will of God? As always, I have two answers for that. First, I am trying to discern that myself, to listen, in prayer, to hear the will of God. So in that way, I don’t know any better than you. Second, the life of Jesus teaches us that the will of God is most often that we care for each other.

This immediately creates another paradox. If, as I propose, the will of God is that we care for each other, that may not sound very restful. But remember that I am not inviting us to a rest from labor, or even from suffering. I am inviting us to the spiritual rest of doing God’s will above our own. Caring for each other, as best as I can tell from the Gospel, is the surest way to rest in God’s will. 

Caring for each other does require us to be vulnerable. It works both ways. To care for someone else requires, at least for a moment, to stop obsessing about ourselves, and that can be vulnerable. To be cared for requires us to admit that we need help, and that is most certainly to be vulnerable.

But that is the invitation – to rest in the knowledge that we are vulnerable, that we need help. And it is important to rest in the sure knowledge that however vulnerable we are, we are still, in the midst of that vulnerability, capable, and called to, care for each other.

I received a wonderful gift yesterday, on Christmas Eve. I met a neighbor here at the church who has been going through some very hard times. Yet her face was shining with light, in the midst of her troubles, because earlier in the day she had met a man who asked her if she wanted to hear some poetry. She had said yes, and then he had gifted her with what she described as excellent poetry. She didn’t memorize it, so couldn’t share the poetry itself with me, but what she could, and did, share with me, was her gratitude for the gift he had given her. She then gave that gift to me, by radiating joy. I was awash in her joy, and it was the best Christmas gift I could imagine.

I believe that the source of her joy was her experience of that connection, that love between people that can happen anytime, anywhere. I suspect she might agree that she is vulnerable. Her circumstances are still extremely challenging. Her connection with the poet didn’t solve her worldly problems. Nor did the joy she gave to me solve mine, nor can my joy solve yours.

But in that moment she and I shared, she and I found rest. That is the rest I wish for you, and for all, this Christmas morning, and as often as you can manage it henceforth.

As we turn now to our prayers, and then gather around God’s table, I hope you can find some rest, in the faith that God is with you, God is with us, God carries us, and always gives us the strength and courage, if we dare accept it, to be vulnerable before God, and each other.

Alone but not lonely

Preached on the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ (Christmas Eve), December 24, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-20

Detail of Nativity, by John August Swanson

It’s dark. It’s glam. It’s sad.

It’s Christmas.

I have remembered this line from a television sitcom for twenty-three years. It was spoken by the actor Parker Posey, guest starring on “Will and Grace,” a show about a gay guy living with his straight woman friend. Back then, it was a major step forward for gay characters simply to appear on prime-time television, so progressive fans of the show put up with the fact that the queer characters never so much as held hands. They were the most chaste gay New Yorkers imaginable. And of course transgender identity – even the existence of transgender persons – was barely mentioned, let alone explored. 

But “Will and Grace” had this terrific line, and they gave it to the dry, droll Parker Posey. She played a tough, uncompromising manager at Barney’s department store, and she was reviewing a store window that Grace had decorated for the holiday season. Grace’s window featured crimson trees, sad people in festive masks, and images of haunting characters from some of the darker Christmas stories and films. And this was the hard manager’s take on Grace’s work: “It’s dark. It’s glam. It’s sad. It’s Christmas.”

And Christmas is dark. The twinkly lights only accentuate the darkness. They would not twinkle without it. Barbara Brown Taylor, the Episcopal priest and spiritual writer, devotes a whole book to the spirituality of darkness, a book called Learning to Walk in the Dark. She confronts one of the great but terrible experiences we have in the darkness, both literal and spiritual darkness: in the anxious world of a dark night, we often fail to discern the presence of God. In the depths of night, we can sometimes only sense a great absence, a void. If anything is present, it is something (or someone) that terrifies us. If God is present in the night, God is utterly, forbiddingly mute and invisible. Even Jesus cries out in the night of his painful death, a cry of dereliction thrown at a silent God: “Why have you forsaken me?”

Taylor does not shrink from this nocturnal human experience. But neither does she allow God’s perceived absence to plunge her into nihilistic despair. She closes her book about spiritual (and literal) darkness with an essay about her choice to go for at least one day and night without electricity or human connection, in a twelve-by-twelve cabin in the woods.

Taylor knows that before light bulbs, humans had as much as fourteen hours to sleep, stir to half wakefulness, sleep again, half-wake again, and so on, back and forth, riding the different states of consciousness that our species has evolved to survive on this spinning planet. Taylor says, “In prehistoric times, this rest state may have provided a channel of communication between dreams and waking life, supplying rich resources for myth and fantasy. It may also explain why so many biblical stories are powered by big dreams… [Today,] the long hours of rest before, during, and after sleep are gone, along with the state of consciousness that went with them – the collateral damage of a world in love with light.”

Spending a night in that lonely cabin, Taylor confronts terrible – and terrifying – inner demons, and she bursts into tears of relief and wonder when the pre-dawn skies begin to brighten. Her night is terrible, but it is not bereft of holiness, purpose, or hope.

Surely the Bethlehem birth of Jesus is a story written down by a community that knows about long nights, literal and otherwise. The skies are torn open in the middle of the night, and the light shining at the wrong time terrifies night-shift field workers who had been tending their livestock, mucking out stalls, just going about their hard work. And a woman gives birth – without a doula, without clean water, without a spinal block – inside what was probably a shallow cave, much like Taylor’s cabin in the woods. When it’s dark in a cave at nighttime, it is really and truly dark.

The darkness of human despair, the darkness of a human womb, the darkness of a graveyard shift for people almost out of hope: here is where, finally, a supernova – a great, new thing – explodes with blinding light. Right here, right now, in the wee hours, where God’s perceived absence is most devastating, heart-breaking, and soul-crushing: this is where the light shines.

But God appears as an infant screaming in the night. This is not a pleasant sound, though it may at first be a relief to hear because the baby’s yell confirms that he is healthy, he is alive. God appears first to us as a newborn in the nighttime: not a wise, wizened wizard; not an enlightened and serene sage; not a wily, wonder-working witch. No, in the dead of night, God appears as a senseless, needy infant. In the darkness of our night, God is clothed in – God is found in – a profoundly vulnerable, unnervingly weak, impossibly tiny person.

God is found, then, in the most vulnerable humans in our arms, in streetside tents, in the emergency room, at the graveside of someone they love. And God is found in the tiny child inside you, too. We are taught rightly to search for the adult Christ at Christmas, and to be sure, we will meet him soon: in a couple of weeks Jesus will appear at the river Jordan, for his baptism and the beginning of his ministry. But the first piercing burst of light, the first dawning of God’s presence and power in the dead of night – we may not discern it until we turn quietly, in the shadows, toward the youngest, most frightened, least verbal parts of ourselves. The scared child inside you: God is found there.

Behind the workaday, frantic, light-drenched world of bustle and business, of strain and stress, my inner child longs for God. Does yours? My youngest and most vulnerable part wants to be held, held tight, loved, cared for, kissed gently on the forehead.

And this is sad. My inner child is often sad. If God is found in the most vulnerable among us, then God is immersed in sadness. Again, quoth Parker Posey: Christmas is sad.

For the last two years I’ve gone to a holiday show at ArtsWest, a playhouse in West Seattle led by one of our own parishioners here. ArtsWest created a new tradition called “Snowed In,” a play about a clutch of friends charged with writing, rehearsing, and performing a Christmas play. “This is pretty meta,” one of them says: it’s a play about people writing a play.

“Snowed In” reliably opens with an upbeat number, lots of dancing, much joy, many smiles. But both times I attended this holiday production, I wasn’t in the mood. I arrived there more than a little drained by all that’s going on in our world, and all that’s going on with me. As delightful as things are here at St. Paul’s (and truly I tell you, there is much cause for rejoicing here), I sometimes feel emotionally exhausted. Now, I don’t expect a playhouse to open their holiday show with a doleful scene of gloomy actors, sulking through their task of creating a cheerful Christmas play. But – let’s just say I feel tremendous relief when they finally get to the part when one of them sings “In the Bleak Midwinter,” that soulful, sad carol we just sang a bit ago, with earth frozen hard as iron, and a new mother quietly kissing her child.

Recently, in a room at Harborview, I visited with one of our unhoused neighbors. (Our own Neighborhood Action ministers secured safe housing and health care for him.) He has lain on his back on this block for a decade and a half, sweltering under the heat in the summer, fighting off frostbite in the winter. (He lost four toes in that battle.) And here we were, chatting in a warm room. He was clean and dry, and in good spirits.

I even had the absurd thought that our newly-housed friend has healthy skin. I almost asked him, “So, what are you using? Just pore strips? Whatever you’re doing, it’s working.” I see Christ in that sad yet cheerful face, that weathered yet surprisingly healthy face, that face of someone profoundly, devastatingly vulnerable, and yet one of the hardiest survivors I’ve ever known. Sometimes the glow of Christ’s presence truly transforms a human face. 

It was so good to see him warm, and dry, and nourished. Yet he still faces an uncertain, anxious future, and he still wanders mostly alone in a nocturnal wilderness of dual diagnoses, scarce health care, and an indifferent, often hostile city.

Our friend in Harborview is a biblical lament in human form: he is Lazarus beneath the rich man’s table, the Son of Man with nowhere to lay his head, the wandering people of God in the wilderness. He is our inner child externalized, our shared vulnerability incarnate. He is God’s people wondering how they can sing a song in a foreign land, how they can nurture hope in a night seemingly bereft of God’s presence. 

So yes, Christmas is sad. I’ve been your pastor for two years now, and I tell you, there are several sadnesses here. I can feel them. They run in our blood. We carry sadness from forty years ago when we buried so many people who succumbed to complications from AIDS. We carry sadness from the present time as we minister alongside the unhoused, beneath a heaven torn apart not by angels but by atmospheric rivers of rain. 

This is my second Christmas with both of my parents dead and buried beneath the iron-hard earth. I’m sad about that, even as I know that it’s not even remotely newsworthy: every single one of us feels the sadness attendant to death, attendant to love. To love is to feel sad, for all whom we love must die.

But all this sadness, all this darkness – in the face of it all, I come back to “Snowed In,” that play about friends and friendship, that fun and funny trifle about the joy and sadness of the holidays. After they sing “In the Bleak Midwinter,” the friends reflect on how sad songs like that make us feel. In their telling, sad songs of the season help us feel “alone but not lonely.” Alone but not lonely. And that is Christmas night. Mary had Joseph and Joseph had Mary, but each was existentially alone in the night, alone with their differing duties and burdens, alone with their fears, bone-deep alone in their perception of God’s absence. Yet they were not – they are not – lonely. We sing our sad songs together, even if the night haunts us one by one.

And so, finally, because it is dark and sad but also bright and hopeful, Christmas is, yes, glam. There is an elegant sheen on everything. We may think of superficial glamour, of course: splendid wine-colored dresses and black-velvet jackets, or a tony holiday cocktail party where you devastate everyone with your sharp silver necklace. (Girl, you’ve got the neck for it.) 

But Christmas is glam in a deeper, more useful way. It’s not at all about the holiday parties attended by the one percent, while the world burns. Our mission here, our ministries here, our purpose in this life, our future as God’s people, your individual future as one conscious, anxious human being – they all shine with God’s nighttime presence. By the light of the star that guides ancient sages ever westward, we glimpse the harrowing beauty of God’s birth into the awful vulnerability of human life, God’s birth into each and every one of us – we who are existentially alone.

Each of us is alone this Christmas, in this night. But as we gather at this entrance to the dark, sad cave of God’s birth among us, I pray that you and I, that all of us, will be alone – but not lonely.

Visitations

“Visitations”

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

5:00pm Sermon

The Fourth Sunday of Advent (Year C)

Psalm 80:1-7; Luke 1:39-55

December 22, 2024

Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D.

A Beatles song says it well:

There are places I’ll remember

All my life, though some have changed.

Some forever, not for better;

Some have gone and some remain.

All these places had their moments

With lovers and friends I still can recall.

Some are dead and some are living,

In my life I’ve loved them all.

Familiar places. Moments – those dates on the calendar we’ll never forget. Names and the people who wore them. The stories their lives told.

My mother died on December 22nd – this very day six years ago. At 7:01pm Central Time. Oh, that’s right now! December 22nd: the same day she gave birth to my youngest sibling, fifty-eight years earlier.

I wasn’t in the room at the skilled nursing facility in Kansas when my mother died. But thanks to my sister and her smartphone, I was able to see Mom’s face from faraway Seattle as she lay in bed earlier in the evening. I read the 23rd Psalm to her, along with Psalm 103 and a prayer that begins, “Eternal God, you call us to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown.” She mouthed silent words in return. Then, I watched over her for a little while from my sister’s chair across the room.

In 2018, December 22nd fell on a Saturday, not Sunday like today. I didn’t sleep much that night. Instead, I looked at lots of old family photos. Somehow, I managed to get up the next morning – the Fourth Sunday of Advent – and set out on my short journey to attend the 9:00 o’clock mass here at St. Paul’s. I came alone because Debra had just finished her first week of radiation treatments following surgery for breast cancer. I sat over there, in that place in the corner, near mother Mary and baby Jesus. It was a different icon back then, but I wanted, I needed, their company in my grief and loss. Desperately.

People called my mother Betty, but her name was Elizabeth. And the gospel reading I heard that Sunday morning after my mother’s death was the one Fr. Phillip just proclaimed. The story of Mary’s visitation with her relative Elizabeth and how the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaped for joy at Mary’s greeting and the coming of the baby in Mary’s womb (Luke 1:39-45). How could I not hear my life story woven into the stories of pregnant Elizabeth and Mary, unborn John and Jesus? Pregnant Elizabeth and unborn Mark? This evening, however, I find myself carrying these familiar stories and names and moments and places differently. Holding them, embracing them, anew.

+++

I wonder why Mary chose to visit Elizabeth. Why did Mary travel so far in such great haste? From Nazareth up north in Galilee all the way to the Judean hill country – south of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Over eighty miles. On foot? On a donkey? Did Mary travel alone? If not, who accompanied her? Why with haste? In those days, we’re told, Mary set out on her journey. Those days: the days immediately after angel Gabriel announced the startling news to Mary that she would bear a child even though she was a virgin. Immediately after that same angel announced that, despite decades of barrenness, Elizabeth had also conceived a son and was in her sixth month of pregnancy. Did you catch that? Gospel writer Luke dates the annunciation to Mary from time of the angel’s earlier visitation with Elizabeth – not the other way around. Why did Mary stay with Elizabeth so long? The verse following the end of our gospel reading says: “And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home” (1:56).

Mary needed something from Elizabeth. Mary wanted something from Elizabeth. Desperately.

Maybe Mary was surprised by the changes in her body. Maybe they frightened her. Maybe Mary found herself utterly alone as the gossip about her pregnancy outside of marriage spread and the other villagers began to shun her. Maybe Mary was shamed and felt ashamed. Maybe she worried how, worried if, she – a woman, young and unmarried – could provide for a child. Would Joseph her betrothed even stay with her throughout an unplanned and problematic pregnancy? Would she and the child become an intolerable burden on her family’s financial resources and social capital? Maybe Mary simply despaired at the thought of bringing a child into the world – into this world. Israel defeated and occupied by the Roman empire. A people empty and adrift. A world of overwhelming cruelty and sorrow.

Why Elizabeth? Well, she was older than Mary and she too was expecting a child – although she was experiencing pregnancy for the first time. Whatever the reason, Mary came to the right place. She found in Elizabeth a mansion prepared to welcome her. Not only did the unborn child filling Elizabeth’s womb leap for joy, but Elizabeth herself was filled with the Holy Spirit and stepped right into the role of a prophet in Israel. Elizabeth serves as Mary’s forerunner, preparing the way – just as John, Elizabeth’s son, later prepares the way for Jesus. Mary felt herself and her unborn child honored instead of shamed. Praised by Elizabeth, not blamed. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord. As the angel Gabriel had said earlier to Mary – but about Elizabeth’s pregnancy: Nothing will be impossible with God.

+++

I can’t help wondering what psalm Mary might have been singing to herself on her long journey to visit Elizabeth. Could it have been one of Israel’s songs of lament – given Mary’s fear and surprise, loneliness and shame, worry and despair. Could it have been Psalm 80, the psalm we prayed together this evening?

Restore us, O God of hosts;

show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.

O LORD God of hosts,

how long will you be angered

despite the prayers of your people?

You have fed them with the bread of tears;

you have given them bowls of tears to drink.

You have made us the derision of our neighbors,

and our enemies laugh us to scorn.

Restore us, O God of hosts;

show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved (1-7).

If so, if this was Mary’s psalm, then her lament turned toward God, when sorrow and despair tempted her to run away. We remember Mary singing her own song, that most familiar song: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for you have looked with favor on the lowliness of your servant. You have lifted up the lowly. You have filled the hungry with good things (Luke 1:46-55).

But here, for me on this December 22nd, is the most stunning new insight into all these familiar stories and names and moments and places. Mary sings her song of rejoicing not in response to Gabriel’s annunciation but to her visitation with Elizabeth. To be sure, Mary’s response to the angel was one of trust and willingness, but hardly joy: Here I am the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word (Luke 1:38). The Magnificat, instead, is Mary’s joyous response to Elizabeth’s spirit-filled, prophetic words. In fact, there are even a couple of ancient manuscripts of the gospel of Luke that attribute the Magnificat to Elizabeth; and name Elizabeth as the singer of the words: My soul magnifies the Lord. Even if we don’t choose to go that far, I can imagine Mary and Elizabeth singing the Magnificat as a duet.

And if a duet, then why not a congregational song – one we all can join. In this place. At that altar where we bring our gifts, even our bread of tears and the bowls of tears we drink. We bring them and pray that they will be transformed into the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven and the Blood of Christ, the Cup of Salvation. We are mansions prepared by the daily, weekly, yearly visitation of Christ. Not empty and adrift, but full of those good things. For nothing will be impossible with God.

Resources.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “All My Life,” from the album Rubber Soul (EMI Records, 1965).

For the prayer “Eternal God, you call us to ventures…,” see Book of Common Worship: Daily Prayer, Presbyterian Church (USA), page 39.

The words around “daily visitation” and “mansions prepared” come from the collect for this Fourth Sunday of Advent (Book of Common Prayer, page 212).

The world has already come together

Preached on the Fourth Sunday of Advent (Year C), December 22, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Micah 5:2-5a
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-55
Psalm 80:1-7

Windsock Visitation, by Br. Mickey McGrath

Today’s Good News includes a happy reunion of two of our matriarchs in the faith. But this delighted meeting of two pregnant women got me thinking about two more matriarchs, Sarah and Hagar. 

Sarah is the savvy wife of Abraham, famous for being startled and then amused by the ludicrous promise that she could have a child in old age. Sarah found that idea so ridiculous that when it finally happened, she named her child Isaac, a name that means “Laughter.” 

Soon after she gave birth to Laughter, Sarah wasted no time expelling the household slave Hagar and her illegitimate son from the family compound. Abraham had slept with Hagar (at Sarah’s suggestion!) to hedge his bets on God’s promise of a son by Sarah. (It’s highly doubtful that Hagar had much of a choice in this matter.) Hagar had duly given Abraham a son, who was named Ishmael, a name that means “God will hear”. But with Isaac’s arrival, the clock was ticking loudly for Hagar. She and Ishmael had to go. 

But take note: after they are ejected from Abraham’s household, God takes care of Hagar and Ishmael, in the wilderness. True to Ishmael’s name, God hears them in their time of great need. But to Sarah and Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael were first instruments they could use, and then dangerous inconveniences. 

My friend Arienne Davison, a priest in our diocese, offers a helpful perspective on this story of household conflict. (Arienne calls it “a fleshy story about cultural differentiation.”) Sarah was a woman in a strictly patriarchal culture, and so it fell to her to transmit that culture to the next generation. She ejects Hagar and her son not because Sarah is a jealous, small-minded villain, but because in a real sense it is her job to do this. God cares for the rejected Hagar and preserves her son’s life, but it would have been hard for Abraham and Sarah to do that, given all the constraints of their time and place. God is present and powerful in all cultures, but God is also bigger than our human cultural constructs and rules. 

And now, today, people of faith in Arab cultures claim Abraham as their ancestor through Ishmael; and people of faith in Jewish (and later, Christian) cultures claim Abraham as their ancestor through Isaac. It’s a difficult, frustrating schism in the family of Abraham that has had disastrous results down the ages. 

But at the dawn of this age – our age – in a rural backwater and among unrenowned hill people, two more mothers discover that they have the power to come together, rather than break apart in a painful schism. They don’t heal (or at least they haven’t yet healed) the great rift of Isaac and Ishmael, but they offer a new pattern to people of faith, a new way of being, a new way of relating. And because their story is told by Luke, that wonderfully skillful and lyrical evangelist, we get to enjoy intimate, vivid portraits of these women, and we even get to hear them sing songs of love and triumph; songs of freedom and justice. 

Mary goes “with haste” – she is in a big hurry – to the hill country in Judea, from north to south, and visits her cousin Elizabeth. Why is she in a hurry? I’ll assert that she bears in her body the immediacy, the urgency of God’s incarnation: God in Jesus arrives in our lives with haste, coming to us soon, very soon, rushing into our sphere of suffering with healing and release, with comfort and gladness. 

And Elizabeth erupts in joy when her younger cousin arrives. Elizabeth doesn’t get a full song – a full aria – in Luke’s beautiful songbook. (That honor goes to her husband Zechariah, her cousin Mary, the Bethlehem angels, and old Simeon in the temple.) But Elizabeth does get a recitative, 

as it were. (A recitative is a brief, sung recitation of dialogue that moves the

story along.) If Luke’s Gospel were an oratorio or opera, Elizabeth’s brief song is the recitative that sets us up to hear Mary’s Magnificat aria. 

Elizabeth prepares us for Mary’s good news. “Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit,” sings Luke, “and [she] exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” 

Let’s look at this recitative more closely. Why is Mary blessed? Is Elizabeth singing that Mary is blessed because she believed God’s promise? (Great is your faith, Mary! You’re blessed!) Or is Mary blessed by the fulfillment of the promise itself? (It worked out like you believed it would, Mary! You’re blessed!) We’re not quite sure what Elizabeth means because in the Magnificat, Mary sings of God’s triumph in the past tense. God has already knocked the mighty from their thrones, and fed the starving multitudes. God has already reversed the world order. And Elizabeth’s syntax matches Mary’s: the Lord’s mother is blessed because she believed (past tense) that there would be a fulfillment (past tense). They’ve already won, these two! Nailed it! Much winning! 

And this is all so joyful. Instead of the old-world structure in which two child-bearing women can’t help each other, can’t lift each other up, can’t even dwell under one roof, now they come together with gladness. Elizabeth is the older mother who is giving birth to the less-important child – she already knows that Mary’s child will outshine her own – but she greets her more fortunate cousin with uncomplicated joy. The last time something like this happened in the Bible was when the older brother Aaron embraced

and supported his younger brother Moses, letting go of his own ego, his own agenda, maybe even his own dreams. 

This is all so lovely. From even before his birth, Jesus teaches us that we need not adhere to the old ways, the old divisive ways, the old schismatic ways. Now of course, we sometimes still harbor ill will toward one another. We occasionally nurse resentments. But anxious resentment is wretched and destructive. Anxious resentment breaks us apart; it tears at the fabric of community. Resentment is a great enemy, and Saint Elizabeth teaches us to let it all go, to release it. It sounds like she didn’t even resent Mary in 

the first place! Be at peace. You need not compete with your neighbor, and you’d likely lose anyway. Don’t worry about it. In the new world brought into being by the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, everyone is on the same level, valleys filled, mountains knocked down. Your children don’t threaten mine. We multiply our joy by freely sharing it with one another, with our community, and with the stranger at our door. 

But hold up: let’s go back a step. Let’s talk about that past-tense bit. Maybe Elizabeth just got carried away, but did I really hear her sing that Mary is blessed because she believed the world would be changed, and therefore the world has already changed? And then, in Mary’s aria, is she really singing that it’s all done, mission accomplished, poverty is no more, all is well? Are they out of their minds? Are they fantasists? Are they high on hormones? 

No, they’re onto something. Consider this: the whole story of Mary and Elizabeth was written down by a community that already knew that both of their sons would be executed by the state. They already knew that Jerusalem would be flattened by the imperial army, just a half century or so after this happy Judean baby shower. Mary and Elizabeth aren’t fools, any more than Sarah and Hagar were. All the women in these stories know

what the world is really like. (And that includes Hannah, yet another matriarch. Mary’s Magnificat is in many ways a reprise of Hannah’s aria.) 

The world may be a big, awful mess – we Christians are not naïve about that – but our matriarchs teach us that the Resurrection has already routed the evil powers of the world, even if it takes millennia for that routing to fully manifest itself. Are you lamenting the state of the world? (If not, I wonder if you’re paying attention.) It’s bad out there. But Saints Mary and Elizabeth teach us that the grace and the triumph of the Incarnation is right here, growing inside us like a leaping baby. 

I’ll give you a strong, good example. I met with Phil LaBelle, our new bishop, this past week. I like him a lot. Phil is from the east coast: he has not yet been to 15 Roy Street; he does not yet know St. Paul’s. I filled him in. I told him that when I got here in late 2022, I couldn’t find even one area of ministry that was not in need of development in the wake of the pandemic. I told him that I have counted no fewer than twelve urgent projects in our Buildings and Grounds Ministry. I told him that while every congregation around the world suffered greatly in a time of plague, St. Paul’s had one or two additional difficulties to handle during those years, including having a front-row seat for the exploding housing crisis in our restive city. 

But then I told Bishop Phil that we have rushed back joyfully and ferociously, determined to regain our place on this street corner, delighted to relaunch our vital mission in this neighborhood. I told him that as bad as things got, our parish had strong vital signs and strong faith. We nourished prophets and evangelists here. We empowered witnesses and servants. We cultivated justice and peace in this Resurrection garden. We’ve already done so much. God has already accomplished so much, in and with us.

And the holy Child of God’s abundant presence is already kicking joyfully inside us, foretelling a bright and graceful future. 

Is the world falling apart? Yes, it seems so. But here, right here, just here, the world has already come together. God has already helped us, in remembrance of God’s mercy, according to the promise God made to our ancestors, to Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, to Mary and Elizabeth, and to their descendants forever.

Rejoice

Sermon, 5pm, given by Kevin Montgomery

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle

12/15/1/2024, 3rd Sunday of Advent

Five Angels Dancing Before the Sun, by Giovanni di Paolo

Rejoice in the Lord always! Again, I say rejoice! . . . But what if I don’t feel like rejoicing? How can I do that given the state of the world, of this country? I’m angry, I’m sad, I’m afraid. The world seems to be falling apart, and so am I. Who are you to tell me to rejoice. . . Well, you’re right. Who am I to tell anyone that? The last thing I want to do is to say to someone, “Don’t let it get you down. Look on the bright side of things. Cheer up.”

Anyway, where does Paul get off saying this? Well, Paul’s life wasn’t exactly sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows. He’s writing this letter from prison. During his missionary journeys, he faced stonings, beatings, imprisonments, shipwrecks, and eventually execution. But all through this letter to Christians in Philippi, he says he rejoices, he gives thanks for them. Maybe he understood something a lot of us don’t. One of those things is that joy is not simply a feeling. It’s not, “Oh, I’m feeling happy today.” That’s great, but you might not be feeling happy tomorrow. Heck, in an hour you might be feeling angry, sad, afraid, all of the above. It’s more of a state of mind, a place where we can rest and find strength as we move through life.

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” Joy is very much tied up with thanksgiving. In Greek the words even come from the same root. Think about it. We’re thankful for the times when we experience the feelings associated with joy. And when we begin to focus on that thankfulness, we start to become more aware of it; and it even starts to change our brains. It trains the neural muscles, you might say. That’s not to say it’s always easy. There are times in life when things seem so overwhelming that it’s hard to find things to be thankful for.

That’s when I try to remember that we worship a God who’s not a general principle but one of scandalous particularity. A God who literally had skin in the game. Jesus was incarnate as a particular person, in a particular time, in a particular place. So let’s bring ourselves to the concrete, even mundane moments of life. I think back over the past few weeks and give thanks for my job, for the great team I work with, for the person who said how much she appreciated me showing her where everything was when she started on the job. I look at what’s going on here at St. Paul’s. A new roof! Work being done on plumbing and electrical systems. More accessibility on the horizon. I guess you can even give thanks for that yawning abyss out there as a sign of what’s happening and what’s to come. A couple of weeks ago, we baptized two new members into the household of God. Even in the hard times there can be joy and thanksgiving. It’ll be five years since I last celebrated Christmas with my mother. I miss her so much. We all do, but I give thanks for all the time we had. Even when things were rough, I knew I could ask Mama for prayers. Of course I’m a big believer in the communion of saints; so I still can. And I know that we’ll all see each other again in the resurrection. I heartily rejoice in that.

But Paul doesn’t just say, “Rejoice.” He says, “Rejoice in the Lord.” For what can be more reason to give thanks than the Lord Jesus Christ, Immanuel, God with us? The one who has shared not just in times of celebration but also in times of suffering. The one whose Spirit brings us consolation amid our desolations. But not only do we rejoice in the Lord. We rejoice in the Lord. We are baptized into more than just an earthly community. We are all part of the Body of Christ. Yes, Jesus is in our hearts, but more importantly, we are in his heart. The more Catholic among us might even say we are enfolded within that Sacred Heart. There we find the peace that goes beyond anything we can understand or the world can give. Amid the turning of the wheel of fortunes and loss, amid the changes and chances of this life, we can rest secure and thankful in that peaceful center. So yes, be angry, be sad, be afraid; but still rejoice. Rejoice in the Lord. Again, I say rejoice.

I wonder how hungry they are

Preached on the Third Sunday of Advent (Year C), December 15, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Canticle 9 (Isaiah 12:2-6)
Philippians 4:4-7
Luke 3:7-18

One of our mightiest practitioners of gentleness.

“Let your gentleness be known to everyone.”

I vividly remember something said in a class at Seattle University, back in about 2010. The professor was Dr. Jeanette Rodriguez, a member of the religion faculty who specializes in U.S. Hispanic theology, liberation theology, and women’s spirituality. Dr. Rodriguez said that persons of color in this country are angry, they have every right to be, and people with white privilege just need to understand that fact, and accept it. 

I am about to offer a reflection on the spiritual practice of gentleness, but I want to begin here, with Dr. Rodriguez, and her good words. “Gentleness” as we understand it — “gentleness” as healthy Christian communities understand it — “gentleness” is not about protecting white fragility, or what people from my home state call “Minnesota Nice.” It’s not about everyone being sweet, brushing off disagreement, and delaying justice so that we all just get along. It’s most definitely not about oppressed persons grinning and bearing it. “Gentleness” is not passive; it is not reticent. Gentleness makes no peace with evil.

If gentleness has any value in our faith community, it may be tender, but it is also fierce, sober, and faithful. Christian gentleness is grounded in a prophetic vision of who God is forming us to be, and what God is sending us to do. Gentleness in our faith community requires a strong heart. Gentleness in our faith community demands courage.

Now, having said all that, gentleness can often feel tender. But even then, we are being gentle because we fiercely appreciate how important someone is. Two examples stand out: we practice tender gentleness when we are holding a tiny infant, and we practice tender gentleness when we draw alongside someone’s deathbed. We are gentle because these human beings are priceless, they are profoundly vulnerable, and they possess immense dignity, simply by existing. We do not want to hurt people with carelessness or negligence, or just plain klutziness. We are careful; we take care. And we just instinctively know that both holding a newborn and holding the hand of the dying are gentle actions that demand us to be brave.

There are other examples of tender gentleness, but again, don’t mistake the tenderness for weakness or frailty. We practice tender gentleness when breaking bad news, and we sometimes practice tender gentleness when we say a gentle but firm “No,” carefully setting a healthy boundary.

But whether it feels tender or not, our gentleness is fierce as we pray and work here, in all the corners and along all the edges of this mission base. Our gentleness is fierce when we approach someone we have harmed, seeking reconciliation. We approach them gently in our desire to avoid doing further harm, but we direct our fierce attention inward: we brace ourselves, bravely, to hold ourselves accountable.

We practice fierce gentleness, in turn, when we work hard to forgive those who have harmed us, and we practice fierce gentleness when we decline to forgive. Yes, you heard that right: Christians are not automatically required to forgive, no matter the circumstances. Our fiercely gentle community makes room for the complexities of wrongdoing and reconciliation. Are you not ready to forgive someone? Well, that probably makes good sense. Take some time. Pray alongside us. Discern your next steps. All of this labor requires fierce gentleness, toward others (including the person who hurt you), and toward yourself.

So: we practice gentleness both tender and fierce. But I have two more ideas about gentleness on offer today: our gentleness is sober, and it is faithful. (And of course, whether it’s tender, fierce, sober, or faithful, all the ways we practice this great spiritual gift overlap one another and flow into one another, so I encourage you not to worry too much about a detailed outline. Let this reflection flow over you.)

But onward to sober gentleness. Sober gentleness is clear-headed, conscious, and self-aware. We try to be gentle in a sober way whenever we make a careful assessment of someone, particularly someone who upsets us. We re-engage our neocortexes, using reason as our guide, to level out and inform our powerful feelings. Somebody opens our common fridge, let’s say, and eats my sandwich. I identify the culprit, but rather than berate them, I encourage myself to wonder how hungry they are. 

I actually have one more example from my time at Seattle University, this time to illustrate sober gentleness. A classmate arrived one day and told us that someone stole his bicycle. Everyone expressed the requisite outrage: “Oh no! That’s terrible!”. I remember feeling a vicarious desire for revenge on my friend’s behalf. I wanted him to find the thief and exact retribution. But he just smiled and said this: “Oh, it’s okay. I really think whoever it is must have really needed it.” At first blush this seemed absurd, even disingenuous. What a goody-goody nerd, this guy! But this classmate proved to be the real thing: he authentically made a judgment about the bicycle thief that began with compassion. Whatever the actual nature of the anonymous thief, and whatever their motives, my friend released himself from the prison of bitter resentment. He did this by practicing sober gentleness.

But sometimes we have more information about another person, information that tells us that the person truly did behave badly, or behaved in a way that disappoints or discourages us. Sober gentleness helps in this situation, too. Think back to a recent time when you felt disappointed by someone you care about. Notice how your heart might be soothed, and your mind eased, if you notice that disappointment, validate it, and then carefully release it. Someone may disappoint us, but the past can’t be changed, and this is not the end of our story together. Sober gentleness.

And finally we consider faithful gentleness, which I think is what Saint Paul was truly talking about when he told the church in Philippi to “let your gentleness be known to everyone.” The gentleness we receive and cultivate when we are together in Christ is faithful. That is, it forms us in faith, it directs us toward one another in faith, it builds up this community of faith.

At our best, we practice faithful gentleness whenever we enter this parish, seeking peace but also justice in all that we say and do here. But we also practice faithful gentleness when we leave this community. And surely we are all aware that each and every one of us will, at some point, take our leave of St. Paul’s, in one way or another. We remember only a few dozen names of many hundreds of persons who launched and sustained this congregation over thirteen decades; most of them have now died, or moved on. But I believe we can feel in our bones the deep peace and courageous fellowship they gave us, by living here and then dying here, by entering and then leaving, by their sustained record of gentle mission and ministry in this place. 

And in the fleeting few years we all are here, we practice faithful gentleness whenever we correct or challenge this community. Like any human organization, our parish needs continual correction and challenge, but we strive to do this work carefully, gently, faithfully. Our curate, Father Phillip, was talking with me this week, and said something striking: he said that he appreciates how, at St. Paul’s, we work on praying together without demanding agreement. This is faithful gentleness, and it’s a particular gift of most Episcopal and Anglican congregations: we pray together without demanding agreement. Often we fail at this (myself most certainly included), but this is our faithful ambition.

And of course we must practice faithful gentleness when we are working on a tough conflict. You know the classic movie scene when our hero puts their gun down, knowing that this brave action could lead to their own death. They put their gun down because they want to resolve their differences without violence. And that requires immense courage. “Put your sword back into its sheath!” gentle Jesus sharply says to Peter, in John’s telling of the arrest in Gethsemane. We rejoice in the Lord – we are all held in the peace of Christ – and so we bravely choose something much harder and scarier than grabbing a weapon: we practice faithful gentleness.

I have used this example before, but it bears repeating: in a favorite film of mine, an angry, inebriated mother is in a heated argument with her adult daughter. She finally gets at the hard truth between them. The mother cries out: “Go ahead and say it: you think I’m an alcoholic.” The daughter pauses. Then she says, with firm tenderness and fierce gentleness, “Okay. I think you’re an alcoholic.” Faithful gentleness.

But then we don’t need Hollywood to teach us about faithful gentleness. We have that rough, surprising teacher of gentleness, John the Baptizer, to lead us by example. Now, in today’s Good News, he begins by calling everyone a “brood of vipers,” a vat of snakes. That’s not … really all that gentle! But he says this in a bracing way, in a way that leads to a strong and constructive conversation about what the people must do to prepare for the dawning of justice and peace. Once again, Father Phillip raised an insight for my instruction. He noticed that soldiers – agents of empire whose profession is inherently violent – asked John what they must do, and John said nothing at all about taking up weapons or beating the bad guys. He cautioned them against extortion, against abusing their power. Faithful gentleness.

And in all of this, in this work but also this great privilege of practicing tender, fierce, sober, and faithful gentleness, in all of this we rejoice in the Lord, no matter what happens to us. We don’t just celebrate when everything is swimming along, and then despair when everything is falling apart; no, we cultivate a gentle practice of rejoicing always, in all the changes and chances of this life.

Finally, a bittersweet note: this week, our companion Nancy Finley, child of God, died in the peace of Christ. Nancy leaves a legacy of tender, fierce, sober, and faithful gentleness. But in Nancy’s hands, this gentleness takes on a delightful intellectual grace: “She had an inquiring mind,” said our companion Mark Taylor, reflecting thoughtfully on her death. Nancy asked questions, she explored multiple faith traditions, she laughed and loved. She practiced a warm but sharp, a challenging but encouraging form of Christian gentleness. And finally, like so many countless souls, Nancy left St. Paul’s with that same gentleness, witnessing to the nearness of Christ not only in our lives and our bright beginnings, but in our deaths and our solemn endings.

With our sister Nancy and all the saints, I bid you: Rejoice always. Again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.

Advent can hold it all

Preached on the SecondSunday of Advent (Year C), December 8, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Adam Conley.

Malachi 3:1-4
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6
Canticle 16

I had the pleasure of worshiping with you, beloved people of St. Paul’s, on the First Sunday of Advent. As I watched the Livestream last week from Sewanee, much of what Fr. Stephen said in his sermon resonated with me. He acknowledged the shock, fear, and grief many of us feel at the state of our nation and the world. I know the outcome of the presidential election terrifies many in this community, if not everyone. Of course, you are not alone. Millions of people around the country don’t know how to respond to what appears to be our democracy’s tacit approval of the politics of reactionary white nationalism and populist fear-mongering. And beyond our nation’s borders, but not without our nation’s entangled involvement, war-making, death-dealing autocrats seem to be winning the day.

Fr. Stephen offered an alternative from the doom-scrolling that some of us have fallen into. He found a way to take a break from planet Earth and float in the unconcerned vastness of interstellar space. How, with the click of a button, he could enter the galaxy thanks to a few well-curated and soothingly-narrated YouTube videos. I tried this out myself. It works! Soaring into outer orbit online is an excellent way to gain perspective. Time and space have different meanings when considered from the cosmos. Absorbing the stark realism of the universe is a strangely calming tonic.

But the greatest enjoyment I took from Fr. Stephen’s Advent sermon came by way of a happy accident at a very micro level. You may recall that one of the mental health break videos he described was about an asteroid that hit the Earth 66 million years ago. The impact formed the Chicxulub Crater in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America. When Stephen was recounting the storyof the Chicxulub Crater, my closed captioning setting thought he said, and I kid you not, “Chick-fil-A Crater.” I burst out laughing. The idea of a Chick-fil-A Crater sounds like a metaphor that has found its political moment, doesn’t it?

For years, I refused to cross the threshold of a Chick-fil-A fast food restaurant. Some time ago, Chick-fil-A stirred up controversy over its homophobic hiring policies. I considered myself part of a protest boycott, thank you very much. Same thing with Wal-Mart. I avoided shopping at Walmart as an enlightened and urbane sophisticate because I disapproved of how its business practices disrupted smaller communities, deliberately putting ma and pa shops out of business.

Guess what? My staunch political opposition to Chick-fil-A, Wal-Mart, and a few other places was challenged when I moved to rural East Tennessee. It’s not that my values changed so much, as I didn’t have the easy luxury of giving them that particular expression anymore. When I was doing my CPE hospital chaplaincy at a level-one trauma center in Chattanooga, the cafeteria boasted a Chick-fil-A franchise. When it’s down to lime jello or a spicy chicken sandwich. I am … conflicted.

What does all of this have to do with the season of Advent, you may be asking? Everything. Advent, you see, can hold it all, even if everything we hold dear seems to be slipping into a bottomless Chick-fil-A Crater. Advent is the story of Christ’s coming, in history, at the intersection of our everyday lives, and at the end of history. Advent is the promise, reality, and hope of God’s human incarnation. What can’t be held by that?

The author of Luke’s gospel animates John the Baptist’s ministry of repentance and forgiveness by borrowing proclamation language from the Prophet Isaiah. Luke casts John as Isaiah’s echo, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” And what is the prophetic message? “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill made low.”

I’m disturbed by these images at face value. As someone born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I can’t bear the idea of a flatlined landscape. Give me the majestic heights of the Cascade and Olympic mountains right up against the glacial depths of Puget Sound. I’ll take the rich variety in dramatic terrain; I love a topography of difference. And what’s all this nonsense about making the crooked straight? I mean, look at me.

But seriously, when has uniformity been a marker of God’s creation? It’s not, never has been, and never will be. What’s no less true is that reactionary white nationalism, fear-mongering, and genocidal war have no home in God’s creation. These are the mountains and valleys that must give way for the building of the Kingdom. Injustice, violence, and oppression don’t belong to the Advent of Jesus, yesterday, today, or tomorrow.

Yet even in the toppling of mountains and filling of valleys, God is making a new thing. Yes, Isaiah’s language is a metaphor for clearing obstacles to good news, but it has a more literal natural resonance, too. Look at the Chicxulub Crater. What was once a cosmic rock’s violent and annihilating crash site is now hospitable to over four million people. It is a land of diverse ecosystems, lush forests, mangrove beaches, and barrier reefs.

Advent can hold it all.

Before I ate my first Chick-fil-A sandwich or flummoxed my first Tennessee Wal-Mart cashier with a reusable shopping bag, I had an idea that I was going to find a field ed parish – field education is part of our contextual learning requirement – that had some combination of the program budget of Saint Mark’s Cathedral and the liturgical reverence and scrappy neighborhood engagement of St. Paul’s.

Ok, I knew I would never find another St. Paul’s, but I was just about to declare my intentions at a solid Chattanooga parish when Bishop Rickel foiled my grand plans. “Not a chance, Mister,” he said, or something to that effect. “You need a very different Episcopal church experience from what you already had. Go find a small, rural, conservative parish.”

If you say so, Bishop! I’m going to trust that Advent can hold it all. I listened to Bishop Greg, and at a deeper level, I listened to the Holy Spirit. I found a small, rural parish and kept listening. My field ed parish isn’t exactly conservative. It’s quietly queer affirming in a way you have to be in some pockets of the rural south. However, the most significant gift to my ministry in recent months is my relationship with a handful of conservative folk who joined the parish over the last year.

These are incredibly kind and gracious people who have fallen in love with the Episcopal Church. They are not anything like the MAGA stereotype, and yet I know that at least two of them voted for the “other guy” for president because they asked parish leadership if they would be welcome with their political views.

The meaningful answer to this question wasn’t anything we said as parish leaders. It was the welcome they received from parishioners over weeks and months. Ultimately, two new members chose to be confirmed, and another was baptized at the bishop’s October visitation.

Two of them attended a formation series I led over four weeks in November. About ten minutes into one of the sessions, a young trans man and his mother walked in, intrigued by the “Economic Justice in the New Testament” sign we had posted near the sidewalk advertising the series. They found the church, originally, because it is listed somewhere in a directory of affirming parishes. This young man immediately began to talk about his upcoming top surgery. I was not expecting this, especially in this part of the country. I was worried our visitor might soon feel unwelcome or unsafe. At the same time, I could sense one of our new members shifting uncomfortably.

What ensued was not the most smooth conversation in the world, but it was one for which everyone made an honest effort. This, I’m certain, was accomplished by nothing less than the grace of God working through the hospitality of humans. Two longtime members did a heroic job staying curious with our new guest while injecting a little variety into the conversation. All I could think was that every parishioner at that table, old and new, was actively living into their baptism. Whatever discomfort our new conservative members felt, they chose to stay at the table and listen. No one left the conversation.

I’m telling you, Advent can hold it all.

On a troubled planet, life rises up

Preached on the First Sunday of Advent (Year C), December 1, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25:1-9
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

A few of our children and youth sharing with us the burdens and the blessings of existence on this wondrous and troubled planet, December 1, 2024.

Recently I’ve been taking little mental-health breaks from the traumatic news around the world by watching YouTube videos about the solar system, about stars, about the natural universe. Guided by a soothing narrator and expert astronomers, I take serene trips through outer space to, say, Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, which has only thirty to fifty million years of life left, before the tidal forces it shares with its parent planet tear it into countless pieces. Mars will one day be adorned with a new planetary ring. 

I also watched a video illustrating the formation sixty-six million years ago of the Chicxulub Crater, when an asteroid slammed into what we now call the Yucatán Peninsula, ending the era of the dinosaurs. I marvel at the speed of death and destruction that circled the globe in the minutes and hours after that catastrophe.

But maybe that’s a little on the nose, that particular video. I don’t necessarily want to imagine the world as we know it coming to a violent end. And yet even that video offers a strange sort of consolation: after all, the biosphere recovered quite well in the following eons, and here we are. Our home planet has seen a lot of ecological “reboots,” if you can call them that, over millions of years. We humans ironically may not survive the Anthropocene Era, the age of the planet we’ve named after ourselves, Earth’s most ingenious and most destructive species. But whether or not we survive our own dubious adventures, the planet itself will be fine.

Earth will be fine, I should clarify, until our sun reaches the end of its life. YouTube videos about the sun are particularly intriguing. Did you know the sun contains 99.86% of the mass of the solar system? Stop your doom-scrolling for a moment and reflect on this with me. The planets and other orbiting rocks are just flecks of dust by comparison to our home star. Yet the sun is only medium-sized compared to the countless other stars, so it won’t be large enough to go nova at the end of its life. But it will swell greatly in size, likely bumping Earth into a wider orbit, after incinerating all earthly life.

Now, why is all of this comforting?! The videos all seem to follow a common theme of death and destruction! Well, for me, these dramatic yet serene videos are sage reminders that we live in a vast mortal arena, a universe of destructive change, but also creative change that occurs across incomprehensible lengths of time. Earth will someday lose its ability to support life, but not for hundreds of millions of years. Phobos will disintegrate, but humanity likely won’t live to see that. Even the sun is mortal, but now we’re talking about five billion more years. Sol — Sol, the serene name we give our sun — Sol will enjoy a long, relaxing retirement. And new stars are born from the remnants of dead stars. Astronomical realism is oddly soothing.

And so I listen with great interest when, in the Good News according to Luke, Jesus includes in his description of the end times this intriguing detail: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars.” There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars.

Like most human societies across history, the world of Jesus of Nazareth assumed that everything they could see, no matter how distant, was caught up in the drama of human cultures and conflicts. Red-faced Mars is the god of war; gorgeous Venus is the god of love. The sun rises at God’s command from a pavilion in the east; it does not shine in all directions, with puny Earth running in circles around it; no, the sun is just one of the great lights in Earth’s sky, placed carefully by God, for our lives, for our needs, for our days and our years.

And so it stands to reason, for the people of the first century, that if the world is coming to an end, so too will these great lights show signs of distress, signs of dismay, signs of despair. Human affairs have cosmic implications. We humans are universally important.

And Jesus then predicts the all-too-human response to the world and all the heavenly beings coming to an end: “People will faint with fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world,” he says.

In our age, even with our comparatively impressive understanding of the universe, our fears about the end of the world are hardly less intense. At Thanksgiving dinner this week, one of my friends said, “I wake up every morning with a pit in my stomach.” Father Phillip and I — and the whole Pastoral Care Ministry team — are spending time with many of you here who are trying to make sense of a world gone mad. And that’s both kinds of “mad”: the insane form of madness, and the angry form. Many of us are awakening dully to a gray, bleak landscape reminiscent of 2016 and 2017, when protesters flocked to airports to object to the Muslim Ban, and the nation was still absorbing the shock of the lethal, racist demonstration in Charlottesville. More than one of you has said to me that your country just isn’t what you thought it was.

This year has felt so apocalyptic for me that I felt palpable relief when I noticed the sun moving through its predictable course in the western sky. In high summer, the sun sets far north of The Brothers, the two most famous peaks in the Olympic mountain range. Now it sets south of Bremerton, and I had to wear a warm jacket on the day after Thanksgiving — just as I have done in past years — to hang icicle lights along our west-facing porch railings. Things are going kablooie down here, on Earth, in our human world; but the universe is still mostly the same. The sun is still mostly the same. The heavenly beings follow a billion-year-by-billion-year arc of time. So I breathe, in through the nose, out through the mouth; I relax, and my heart rate slows.

Jesus of Nazareth calls me, calls you, calls us all, into this practice of calm acceptance, this practice of stability, this practice of sober wakefulness, even if the sun goes kablooie right along with human affairs; even if an asteroid slams into our home planet; even if the moon falls apart. Even if it gets much worse, Jesus seems to be saying — even if the whole universe is coming undone — we should breathe, in through the nose, out through the mouth; we should relax; we should close our eyes, check in with our bodies, allow our heart rates to slow down.

And so we gather here, week by week, to do just that. We light candles — little suns, little explosions of light — and like our home star, we light the candles on a reliable schedule. When you arrived this morning, maybe you noticed that the candle by the baptismal font — the paschal, or Easter, candle — was burning. If you noticed, you likely thought nothing of it. (It’s just a candle…) But If you’re deeply familiar with our rhythms of Sundays and seasons, you may have wondered whether we lit it by mistake. We light the paschal candle at specific times, on particular days, and normally, the little “sun” of our paschal candle would be below the horizon, as it were, on this day, the First Sunday of Advent.

But this year, there is a sign in the sun, in the moon, in the stars! Today the paschal candle burns brightly (if off-schedule) to announce with gladness the unlikely news that we are baptizing two new Christians this morning, Salvador and Sebastián, two new leaves on the fig tree of our communal life, two new signs that the summer of God’s life-giving love is close at hand.

The paschal candle is first lit at the Great Vigil of Easter, that night brighter than any day, that night when the sky of our faith brightens with the good, glad news that “Christ has trampled death by death, and given life to those in the tombs”; that night when our most joyous song of Alleluia — ‘alleluia’ means “Praise the Lord” — rings out once again. We then light that candle through the fifty days of Eastertide, and light it again every time we baptize, and every time we bury one of our beloved dead. 

But today, outside the usual rhythm, with the little sun of our paschal candle shining like a beacon across the universe, Salvador and Sebastián will be baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ. They will join us in the troubled life of this world, life that is continually bordered by death, but life that rises up. They will share with us the burdens and the blessings of existence on this wondrous and troubled planet, this blue-green speck of grace that orbits our home star, so bright and warm, so full of years.

“Heaven and earth will pass away,” Jesus says, and he knows this even without the benefit of YouTube videos that trace the finite arc of even the longest-lived star. Phobos will disintegrate; great rocks will again find their way to Earth; the sun will burn itself out. But the Creator endures, Christ dawns, the Spirit descends. Our children are mortal, like all of us, but they have futures filled with promise, and today they are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.

And so today we light our lamps a bit off schedule, we stir the warm baptismal waters outside of the usual time, and we prepare the royal oil for anointing and the homemade bread for breaking, because the warm summer of God’s enduring, unending love is drawing near.

Taking care of the soil

reached on Thanksgiving Day (Year B), November 28, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Joel 2:21-27
Psalm 126
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Matthew 6:25-33

The Great St. Paul’s Abyss.

“Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things!” —Joel 2:21

Our forebears in faith are not above a little healthy anthropomorphism. They ascribe human qualities to rivers and trees, who clap their hands to praise God. They ascribe human qualities — or at least animal qualities — to mountains and hills, who skip like rams and lambs. The sea roars its praises to the Lord, and the desert lifts up its voice.

And so it should not surprise us that the prophet Joel is heard talking to the soil, to the earth, to the mud beneath our feet. Joel sings consolation to the people of God in the wake of a devastating plague of locusts that ravaged the land, causing terrible starvation and despair. The people had assumed that this was God’s punishment for their wrongdoing, and so, when the land was restored, they assumed it meant that they finally had been reconciled to God.

But again, the people were not alone in their rejoicing: the prophet bids the soil to rejoice, too. “Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice!” Then Joel sings to the animals: “Do not fear, you animals of the field!” he cries, “for the pastures of the wilderness are green; the tree bears its fruit, the fig tree and vine give their full yield.” Only then does Joel encourage the human population to rejoice, to sing in the rain, oh, the luscious, life-saving rain!

Here at St. Paul’s, we are drawing close to our soil, quite literally. We have carved in the earth a huge abyss, a gaping chasm where our east entrances used to be. I have just a slight fear of heights, so I startle myself whenever I look out the office reception door and look down at the immense hole in the earth, dug by our excavation team. We’ve actually been in the muck and mud of our soil for a couple of years now, as we’ve worked to repair and improve our buildings and grounds. 

Now that we’re once again in the rainy season, we have to obtain the city’s permission every single time we dig, so that they can be sure we’re not going to cause a landslide. We also have to negotiate with the city every time we want or need to do something with the trees on our property, particularly the sweet-gum trees on our north side, which are ailing and dropping large branches. We tend to the people camping directly on our soil along the eastern parking strip. This is not a safe place to camp: cars have bashed into our planters and frequently threatened to injure or kill Michael, and others. (Soon we will have to move the campers off the strip, because our soil there will be disturbed by extensive work on our electrical system.)

And there is of course the kingdom of rats that flourishes in our soil, and under our office building. When the excavators dug the abyss that will, this spring, host our new, universally accessible complex of entrances, ramps, stairs, and a new elevator, they discovered rat tunnels several feet beneath the surface. Our soil may be rejoicing at the thought of a new, safer, more attractive parking lot and entrance, but the rats are decidedly not among the creatures of God who rejoice at the renewal of the land.

All of this talk of soil, of caring for soil, digging in it, managing it, tending to the humans and the vegetation living on it —- it reminds me of a story about soil and faith that I heard when standing on the Haas Promenade, in Jerusalem. I wrote about this almost a year ago, for one of our newsletters.

The story comes from Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, who lives in Chicago. He was in Jerusalem many years ago as part of an interfaith group that included the Dalai Lama. As they all stood on the Haas Promenade, which offers a magnificent view of the Mount of Olives, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and most of the Old City of Jerusalem, the Dalai Lama turned to Rabbi Poupko and asked, “What is the most important passage in your scriptures?”

Rabbi Poupko paused. “Is it the Shema?” he wondered to himself. Surely it is the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD alone.” But Rabbi Poupko quickly reconsidered and said to the Dalai Lama, “The most important passage in the Torah is in Deuteronomy 23: ‘You shall have a designated area outside the camp to which you shall go. With your tools you shall have a trowel; when you relieve yourself outside, you shall dig a hole with it and then cover up your excrement.’”

This response understandably gave the Dalai Lama pause. But Rabbi Poupko explained, in this approximate quote: “The Jewish people take care of the city. We put the drains right. We maintain the alleyways. We are physical and quotidian in our faith. Christians see Jerusalem as a spiritual home, but the Jewish people see Jerusalem as an actual city to take care of. Empires come and go, usually with great violence and destruction. Meanwhile, we take care of things. This is an expression of our faith.”

I love this story, but I want to correct Rabbi Poupko about one thing. Caring for the city, for the soil, is something we Christians, at our best, share with our Jewish cousins. (Well, in fairness, it’s more accurate to say that we received this ethic from them.) Our Muslim cousins, in turn, also share this virtue and express it in their fifth pillar, the pilgrimage. A major dimension of all the Abrahamic faiths is to take care of things. (It is a cruel irony, then, that all three religions historically have done great damage to Jerusalem, and to the Land of the Holy One.)

Now, we Christians place our hopes in life beyond death; we pursue justice and peace, globally and locally; we burn incense to accompany our prayers to the heights of heaven; yes, we do all of these grand things. But our faith is also expressed powerfully in the ordinary, daily work we do on the face of the earth to literally take care of things. 

And that is why, finally, Joel bids the soil to rejoice. The soil has been taken care of; it has been tended; it has been healed. The locusts have departed; the rains have returned. If the people believe that the earth was ravaged because God was angry at them, well, it appears God’s anger has dissipated, and all is forgiven. 

But please notice: there are really two things going on here, two things happening with the soil God made, the soil God renews, the soil God loves, the soil we humans say rejoices. First, God alone does a new thing with the soil — the soil of all the earth, including the little square of soil we steward here at St. Paul’s. But second, we also are doing a new thing with the soil. We are working it, blessing it with our labor. We are cultivating it, joining God’s creative task of drawing green and growing life from the earth. We are digging it and moving it so that everyone who walks or wheels upon it will be blessed with safety. So it’s two things: God gardens indirectly and humbly, laying down in serene quietude beneath and within and around all created matter, all the soil, all the rocks and trees, all the rivers and rainclouds, all the living cells of our own bodies. 

And we plunge our spades into the soil, digging and moving it, sometimes to plant a new flower bed, sometimes to lay to rest our beloved dead. We come here not just to pray in this sanctuary with our voices and our bodies; we also pray with our excavation equipment and tree trimmers and SPiN wagons and garden hoses and brooms and shovels and rakes. 

And for all of this we offer our thanks and praise. Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday, particularly in such hard times, when the land and the seas and the skies are all crying out in despair; when our human institutions are crumbling and our politicians dismay us with their violent and divisive words and actions; when we wonder how future generations will be able to live here as we do: We worry not just for their safety, but even for their basic ability to survive. 

But we give thanks nonetheless: we rejoice with gratitude for God’s presence and power that reverberates even in the soil beneath our feet, and fills our hearts not just with hope but with determination and resolve. We rejoice with gratitude for one another, here to help and support each other, to raise our children together, to care for our elders together, to cultivate the soil together. And we join the prophet Joel in calling upon all living creatures, and indeed all created matter, including the soil and sand and rocks; the rivers and the sound and the ocean; to rejoice. 

Rejoice, then, soil beneath our feet, soil first cultivated and cared for by the Duwamish, who are still here. Rejoice: for we’re all here, with God’s help, to lovingly care for you.

Christ reigns from the Cross

Preached on the Last Sunday after Pentecost (Christ the King, Year B), November 24, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.

2 Samuel 23:1-7
Psalm 132:1-13
Revelation 1:4b-8
John 18:33-37

Mary of Teck, the wife of King George the Fifth, was the Queen of the United Kingdom from 1910 to 1936. She lived just long enough to see her granddaughter accede to the throne in February 1952. Mary is portrayed by the actor Eileen Atkins in the popular Netflix drama, “The Crown.” Reclining in her bedroom, ailing from lung disease, Queen Mary teaches Queen Elizabeth the fundamentals of monarchy: what it is, what it is not, and what the young queen must do as she begins her long reign.

Elizabeth is concerned about her new role and her duties (or lack thereof) as the nation responds to a major crisis — a toxic smog that paralyzed London in December of 1952, leading to thousands of deaths. She wonders if, as sovereign, she is entitled to interfere politically to direct or contradict the elected government, which initially appears to be woefully unresponsive to the challenge. If the crisis is mishandled, isn’t she answerable to the public, just like her ministers? Shouldn’t she do something? And if she fails to act, shouldn’t she have to answer to her subjects for that failure? Queen Mary’s advice is to remain quiet, to do nothing, to simply stand stoically as an icon of divinely-ordained monarchy. Here is what this dramatic television show imagines that Queen Mary said to her granddaughter:

“Monarchy is God's sacred mission to grace and dignify the earth. To give ordinary people an ideal to strive towards, an example of nobility and duty to raise them in their wretched lives. Monarchy is a calling from God. That is why you are crowned in an abbey, not a government building. Why you are anointed, not appointed. It's an archbishop that puts the crown on your head, not a minister or public servant. Which means that you are answerable to God in your duty, not the public.”

In this imagined conversation, Mary is dry-witted and more than a little delightful. She wickedly disparages Prince Philip’s unimpressive royal pedigree, and generally comes off as someone with whom you’d love to ‘spill the tea.’ Who in human history would you want to meet, living or dead, if you could pick anyone? If this television show is anything close to accurate, I might sign up for a hilariously fun and naughty dinner with Queen Mary.

But, alas, the joke is on her. Her definition of monarchy as a sacred mission of God to benefit poor, ordinary, humble commoners falls apart when we actually take a good look at what God is really like. If the British sovereign truly is answerable to God (and, for that matter, if the American president, when taking the oath of office, asks for God’s help), they might be in for a shock. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not an impassive sovereign preening grandly above the “ordinary people” who are leading what Mary calls “wretched lives.” If human monarchs really answered to God, and if their understanding of God is Christian, then they would have to grapple with the person of Jesus Christ, whom we praise as God the Son. They would have to face the fact that Jesus comes among us not as a blue-blood monarch, but as one of Queen Mary’s common wretches.

And yet we close every liturgical year by praising Christ the King, in a feast created just a century ago to remind everyone in post-World-War-I Christendom that their true king is not the emperors they just defeated in war, not the crowned heads of Europe, and not the presidents and prime ministers of other victorious nations: their true king — our true King, the King of the whole universe — is Jesus Christ.

But Christ the King eternally eludes our understanding. He surprises us. He may also frustrate and even disappoint us. This King does not ride in the horse-drawn Gold State Coach with a proud and dry-witted queen by his side; he is a victim of state-sponsored execution. This King does not control all branches of government and shape the rule of law in his own image; he says nothing in his own defense when subjected to a sham trial. This King dominates by submitting, rises by dying. This King subverts the concept of kingship itself.

Meanwhile, a hundred years on, human history hasn’t changed much since the Roman Catholic Church dreamt up this feast. Authoritarianism is once again on the rise, worldwide, and incumbent political leaders are being voted out because they have failed to save people from economic upheaval, contagious disease, chronic warfare, cultural malaise, malevolent misinformation, and climate disasters. The people want a leader; they want a savior; they want a king.

But Christ the King won’t save the people from the perils of life on this planet; he endures those perils himself. Christ the King doesn’t take command; he comes among us as one who serves. Christ the King doesn’t behave like an inscrutable, remote British figurehead, but neither does he rush in to solve all of our problems. Christ the King is found among the ordinary people. Our Mighty Lord is an itinerant preacher, a countryside healer, a companion, a friend.

But Jesus as preacher, healer, companion, friend — that doesn’t quite describe him, either. It gets us closer, but it’s not quite right. Who is Christ the King? If he’s just a humble shepherd, I don’t think he will help us much in these hard times. He’s clearly not strutting above the clouds, crushing our enemies, putting everything right; but he’s not just our buddy. Christ the King is not our pal.

My friend Susan Cherwien (may her memory be a blessing) can help us understand Christ the King, understand him in a way that can be more useful to us, and in a way that can form us, and then send us to minister to our neighbors. If we truly understand Christ the King, we could go from here and actually make the world a little bit better. 

Susan wrote a poem about Christ the King, concluding every stanza with the image of Christ “reigning from the cross.” You can see it on your bulletin cover, and you can sing the poem a bit later in the service, at the Offertory. Christ the King reigns from the cross. But the cross is not a gleaming wall hanging or a glittering piece of jewelry. The cross is an instrument of execution. This idea might be more powerful if we imagine Christ the King reigning from a lethal-injection bed. Christ the King is found not comfortably seated in a plush throne room, but held painfully in a position of abject humiliation and defeat. Christ the King is the Lord of the universe, yet he can’t overpower a nurse in a white lab coat, preparing a lethal, heart-stopping sedative. And yet … Christ rules from that lethal-injection bed. Christ reigns from that cross.

A death-row inmate reigns as King; an executed criminal is our monarch. For this to make any sense, we have to let go of just one idea about kingship. We have to hold at least two ideas together. Christ the King does not solve all our problems or defeat all our enemies, nor does he reign as a serene head of state, holding court in a palace. But he is also not just our good friend. Christ looms over all creation, yet dwells humbly beneath everything and everyone. Both, and.

Susan Cherwien offers two pairs of contrasting, both/and images. She sings of Christ as our “heavenly foundation,” neatly joining an airy, ethereal image to an earthy, concrete one. But my favorite phrase in Susan’s poem is this: Christ the King is our “wounded intercessor.”

Wounded intercessor: this King does not sit serenely on a gilded chair, orb in hand; no, his hands are marked with the humiliation of a violent execution. And yet he intercedes for us, goes before us; he carries our own wounds, our own grief, into God’s heart. When we in turn pray for the whole world — which is something we always do whenever we proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ — we too are wounded intercessors.

We are not mighty lords or warriors able to slay the dragons of Sin and Death, yet in our wounded vulnerability we rise up, together, to stand alongside all who are wounded, all who are vulnerable, all who are cut down and defeated. We take our SPiN wagons around the neighborhood to hand out protein bars and blankets not because we are pampered bluebloods living in palaces, but because we all get hungry, we all feel cold, we all are anxious about food and health care and shelter.

The royal road of Christ the King is traveled by people who know themselves what it’s like to be hungry; to be huddling unprotected in a rainstorm; to hear the doctor say, “I have something difficult I need to tell you.” Because we know what it’s like, we can draw alongside others who are suffering. The throne room of Christ the King is filled with comfortable chairs not for the haughty Queen Mary, but for people who are on their feet all day, tending the sick and keeping vigil with the dying, people who know all along that they will one day need tending, and need their own deathbed prayers. When you intercede for the world, a few moments from now, praying for the church, the nations, this community, those who are sick, and those who have died, you can only say these prayers as one for whom we also pray. You can only pray for the world from your vulnerable place inside this world.

When we baptize, as we will do yet again next Sunday, we anoint the newly baptized with fragrant oil, a ritual borrowed from the coronation liturgy for kings and queens. But we apply the oil in the shape of the cross — we trace the shape of an instrument of execution on the foreheads of the baptized. This anointing is echoed every year, in the springtime, when we are all marked on the forehead with a cross of ashes, a reminder of mortality. Healing and illness; nourishment and hunger; shelter and homelessness; companionship and solitude; power and weakness; virtue and vice; success and failure; life and death.

Such is the Way of our King. Such is the Way of the Cross. Such is our life in the realm of our Sovereign, where we reach out to one another to share God’s Peace, embracing one another with wounded hands.

It is always the end of the world

5 pm Homily 11.17.24 given by Laurel Tallent

The Greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven, by Yongsung Kim

“Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” It is tempting to make our gospel message today about us. About 2024. Like Peter, James, John and Andrew, we are anxious to know when catastrophe will visit to destroy the institutions that are foundational to both our daily life and who we think we are. 

It is reasonable to assume that this message is about the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE, a recent or imminent occurrence for the author of Mark and its first readers. It is reasonable to assume that this gospel message is about us - as there are wars and rumors of wars, and all of the other things Jesus lists as but the beginning of the birth pangs. But to focus only on the disciples' anxiety, to focus only on the destruction of the second temple, or recenter Jesus’ words on us and assume we are their true recipient, undercuts the good news in this passage: The world is always ending. The kingdom of god is always imminent.

Beware! Jesus warns. Not of the wars and rumors of wars, not of the famine and earthquakes. Beware that no one leads us away, towards themselves instead of Christ. Beware of people who appropriate his identity, saying “I am He”.  As Mark tells the story, the disciples Jesus is speaking to haven’t come to understand his identity yet, the identity of Messiah that “I am He” might imply. So is this a warning only to the reader, who’s been informed of Jesus’ identity at the beginning of Mark? Is it a message to all the recipients, those sitting on the Mount of Olives, in these pews and every place and time in between, whether we understand or not?

Perhaps those who claim “I am He” will perform signs and wonders - markers that were demanded of Jesus as proof of his identity, demands that he grew to openly disdain. From Mark 8, just a few chapters before our reading: The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, asking him for a sign from heaven, to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.” Perhaps Jesus is warning us that the supply we demand will come: people with a remarkably similar message we can believe in, plus everything he doesn’t provide: wish fulfillment, definitive solutions, prophecy, confident predictions that affirm or soothe our anxieties about when and how destruction will come.

Jesus leaves no instructions to prevent the ever present end of the world, or bring it about more swiftly, or survive once it arrives. Jesus is not a solutions guy. Eternal God made flesh arrives on the scene and we, along with Peter, John, James and Andrew sit on a hillside watching the sunset and ask anxious questions. Hand-in-hand with our beloved, an endless life together stretching out before us, and we ask for a time table.

The world is always ending, so the kingdom of god is always imminent. We will always be at the cusp of “these things being accomplished”. There is no deadline, no moment of no return where our work ends. This is good news. 

It is endless work, but not constant work. Like Adam expelled from Eden, released to toil in the earth for his life.  Like my union rep, congratulating us on winning our union this fall, saying “You guys! You fought so well! This is the beginning of fighting this fight forever!”. Like God creating. We will rest, we will experience pleasure and be joyful.

The agricultural metaphors for the kingdom of God weren’t written for us, so our understanding is inherently limited. Who among us is a farm hand in Judea, and can understand the nuances these metaphors must contain? But I return to them because they describe the never ending, but always changeable nature of our labor. And they promise that we will eat and be fed as a part of the cycle. It reminds us that a purpose of our labors is to be fed and feed each other.

One I turn to often is Psalm 126 - “Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them” 

There isn’t a single harvest in our lives, is there? We weep with sorrow because our efforts for liberation seem hopeless. Every sowing feels insurmountable. It is tempting to turn to work that will feel more timely or provides the thrill of easy accomplishment, work that only looks like liberation. Work that will not feed us. But when we labor in the fields of the Lord, tilling through hardened hearts and our own bigotry, when we amend or burn what oppresses us and our neighbor, we WILL harvest, and rejoice and feast together, before we return to the field to sow another tenuous planting. The world is always ending, so the kingdom of god is always imminent.

The gospel today isn’t about you. But it is ALL about you. God’s gift of a son to Hannah is all about her joy and her security. God’s gift of a son to Hannah is so much more than Hannah’s joy and security. Even now, can we fully understand the meaning of Samuel’s birth on the cosmic scale? No. But we can look at our own children, nieces and nephews and grandchildren and connect with a sliver of the joy in Samuel’s birth, even without knowing what impact our little ones will have in this always-ending world.

This is How You Lose the Time War is an epistolary novel - we do love epistolary works here don’t we - that unfolds as a series of letters between two time-traveling agents named Red and Blue, who come from existentially opposed universes. They are at war, and leave their letters in surprising places throughout time and space, as their admiration of each others’ espionage turns to a star-crossed love story. In the end, the lovers are not saved by a resolution between their universes, a final act of war or a peace treaty. Neither universe wins, but our lovers might. In the final, not entirely resolved chapter Blue writes “There’s still a war out there, of course. But this is a strategy untested… suppose that we defected. Not to each others’ sides, but to each other? Shall we build a bridge between our worlds and hold it - a space in which to be neighbors, to keep dogs, to share tea. It’ll be a long slow game. They’ll hunt us fiercer than they ever hunted each other - but somehow I don’t think you’ll mind.

In our timeline, instead of committing our labor and thoughts to a definitive end of the world, and dwelling on when the kingdom of god will finally arrive, what if we create the space that holds both these things? It is always the end of the world. The kingdom of god is so, so close. 

I wonder what part of this gospel reading feels like it’s for you. I wonder which illustration - the agricultural metaphors, or an eternal love story, bring you joy. I wonder what you will do with that joy. 

Can we all agree that children should be kept safe?

Preached on the Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28B), November 17, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

1 Samuel 1:4-20
1 Samuel 2:1-10 (Hannah’s Song, in place of the Psalm)
Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25
Mark 13:1-8

Hannah at prayer, by Wilhelm Wachtel

“This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”

Since 2018, I have sustained a daily text string with three seminary friends — Sam, Claire, and Chip. Our foursome came together when we were summer chaplains commuting to Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Our bond deepened when we stopped for chocolate shakes at Arby’s on our way back to Alexandria, and then listened to “My Favorite Murder,” a true-crime comedy podcast. We are now, I think, friends for life.

Sam and Claire now have two children each: Sam is the father of Mac and Rixey; Claire is the mother of Ruth and Sophia. Chip and I are, well, “childless cat ladies,” I suppose.

This past week, the four of us texted about the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, whose episcopate was brought down by a child-abuse scandal. We are all Episcopal priests now, so naturally we have all followed this story, more or less, and have formed opinions about it. 

Our opinions align with what you’d expect: the end of a career is a tiny hardship compared to the crushing burden of trauma suffered at the hands of someone you had been led to believe was a spiritual teacher and guide. Abuse by clergy and lay faith leaders is a particularly vile form of evil. It wounds the physical body, the psychological mind, and the human spirit, all three. Welby’s resignation is a bare-minimum consequence, not because he committed the crimes, but because for eleven years he failed to do enough to effectively establish clear safeguards in church culture. He did not protect children on his watch.

Meanwhile, like most of you, I have been coping in recent days with our ongoing national political crisis in the wake of the election results. And — I have reflected on the fact that I know precious few people who approved of those results. Like most everyone in the United States, I tend to live inside an epistemic bubble, a shelter that repels information and perspectives that I don’t want. But our epistemic bubbles keep people out, too. We stay inside intellectual and informational treehouses that screen out disagreement — but also disagreeable people — at the foot of the tree.

Because I find myself in this intellectual and informational treehouse, I find myself responding to the election results with a true desire to hear what other people have to say, particularly people who voted for the other candidates, people who disagree strongly with most of my positions and beliefs, even people who consciously voted against my own full inclusion in American society. I fully understand that many of us want nothing to do with voters who seem — or simply are — hostile and dangerous to many of us, and many of the people we love. But I really, truly want to hear from them. I admit that I’m nervous about the experience, and may be asking for more than I can easily handle. But I find it genuinely unsettling that so few people in my life strongly disagree with me about anything.

But I don’t just want to become acquainted with people on the “other side”. (And while we’re at it, the notion of the “other side” is fictional: despite the red/blue binary encouraged by mass media, there really are not two sides; there are some 335 million unique Americans.) But as I was saying, I don’t just want to become acquainted with those who disagree with me. I want to find common ground.

Finding common ground: this is a good step forward in the work of connecting across differences and disagreements, but it’s not the goal. In one theory that describes how to reach beyond one’s own culture, finding common ground is called “minimization.” It’s when we look for things we have in common, things that we generally agree on, perspectives we all mostly share. We are practicing minimization when we sing the hymn, “In Christ there is no east or west, in him no south or north, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth.”

Again, minimization is not the goal. Ideally we will move into cross-cultural acceptance, and then multicultural adaptation, the two skill areas that are more advanced than minimization. But I believe minimization would be a tremendously helpful next step for many of us to take. And so I want to talk with people, and search for things we agree on.  Now, these are not persuasion conversations! I am not campaigning for my favorite candidate or party. I just believe that we will elect better leaders, and improve the world, if more of us can — at the very least — minimize our differences long enough to recognize and affirm shared agreement about core principles.

And here’s one core principle I hold, and one I discussed with my three seminary friends. It’s one I expect almost everyone holds. Here it is: Children should be kept safe. That’s it. When I am conscious and sober, when I am deliberately trying to lead my life the right way, everything I do is oriented toward the safety of children. Everything. 

Consider my job: rector of an Episcopal parish. Caring for children is a tent pole holding up my whole vocation here. I repeatedly encourage everyone here to do this: together, we all count our children, learn their names, befriend and support their parents, engage their imaginations, open their minds, stir their hearts, ensure their safe passage into and through our buildings, indulge their sweet teeth, advocate for their political interests, even (and especially!) read the Bible itself through the lens of children’s dignity, children’s safety, children’s centrality.

After all, this is what Jesus does.

When his friends are marveling at the great stones that form the Temple, Jesus feels called to lead them into a new enlightenment, a new understanding of their mission: this Temple, made with human hands, will be destroyed, and everything that makes their world sensible and sane will disintegrate. Jesus speaks to his friends in apocalyptic terms. But he then employs the metaphor of childbirth to teach them how to understand their frightening times. He compares their struggle to the birth of a child.

Children at the center.

But before we go further, a quick sidebar: when Jesus talks about the apocalypse, he may sound like the self-styled “prophets” in contemporary Evangelical Christianity in the United States, the pastors and faith leaders who are rejoicing in the wake of the 2024 election, saying that the results were “God’s will” for a world in great turmoil. If they actually studied the Bible, these false prophets would realize that Jesus talks about the end of the world from the rubble of the destroyed Temple, that is, from the social location where all political leaders and institutions have failed. Not just the leaders of the groups our group hates — all of them. God’s will cannot be discerned in election results, even when our favorite candidates win.

Jesus trains his followers to do the work of the Kingdom no matter what’s going on, or crashing down, in the world. Churches that openly campaign for a politician or a political party are not, by definition, Christian churches. When the disciples admire the stones of the Temple, then, they’re being distracted by human leaders, human promises, human illusions.

And so, even though most of us are understandably gravely disappointed by the election results — and this disappointment is understandable; it is even an expression of allyship with the very people Jesus embraced and healed and raised up — even though we are disappointed, when we excessively focus on political institutions and politicians, we are getting a bit off topic. I do not apologize for my political commitments, and I am a proud supporter of particular politicians; but I am also a Christian on a mission, and that identity endures no matter what happens on election night.

But — back to the main topic: Jesus intriguingly uses the metaphor of childbirth. In doing this, Jesus affirms the dignity and experience of women, which alone is surprising, for his time. But he also touches on the core principle I mentioned before, the one I texted about at length with my friends, the one that I want to use to build a bridge to political opponents: Can we all agree that “Children should be kept safe”?

That core principle shines through my reading of the words of Jesus when he’s talking about the collapsing world around him and says, “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”

“The birth pangs”: what a curious metaphor, especially from someone tradition tells us had no children of his own! But it’s not the only time Jesus talks about childbirth, and children. Elsewhere he describes the joy of a woman who, after giving birth, quickly forgets the depth of pain she just suffered. (Jesus didn’t know about the chemical changes in a new mother’s bloodstream, but he likely witnessed this phenomenon because, as the oldest child in his family, he probably assisted his mother when she gave birth to his siblings.)

And Jesus of course deliberately and directly centers children in his movement, to the surprise — and initial disapproval — of his followers. “Let the little children come to me,” he says. Children at the center. 

Children live at the center of the Jesus Movement. 

And this tracks with the Bible Jesus studies, the huge portion of our own Bible that we call the Old Testament. Children were a sign of God’s love for the people. Hannah prays not for the redemption of her people or nation, but for a child. And through the birth of her son Samuel, the people of God flourish again. So Jesus draws on a deep well of wisdom when he centers children in our spiritual life.

And so, even though we live in a time of deep, angry, often violent disagreement, can an overwhelming majority of us agree on this principle: “Children should be kept safe”? I believe we can. I want to talk to the “other side” people, many of whom claim to follow Jesus, just like you and me. I want to ask them about children.

If we talk to those who disagree, we could easily be frustrated, even enraged. They could get pretty mad, too. Imagine the reaction of social conservatives if I said that keeping children safe is more important to me than protecting unborn fetuses. I could wade all too easily into the abortion debate, and mansplain to my political opponents that the Bible affirms that life begins at birth. It would be all too easy to fight about abortion — to fight about lots of things — and forget the core principles we share. We’ll have to be careful, and stay focused. The time for vigorous, healthy argument will come. Right now, I want to discover whether we both agree that children should be kept safe.

And what does this have to do with the destroyed Temple, with the mission of Jesus, with the anxiety people of conscience feel in apocalyptic times?

It has everything to do with all of that! Again, Jesus centers children — and young people, and newcomers to the community — and affirms their centrality in the spiritual life we share. So what might be his response to shattered institutions and corrupt politicians? Keep the children safe. What’s his interpretation of a world falling apart? This is but the beginning of the birth pangs — that is, our catastrophic world is ground zero for God’s people to give birth to a new Kingdom, a new world, a new Way. 

Is that too ambitious for you? Maybe it sounds like a pipe dream, like impossibly making the lemonade of justice from the lemons of widespread corruption and devastation. If it seems unrealistic, fantastical, a ludicrous daydream, that’s okay. But even if you’re not ready to hold out hope for the rebirth of global justice and peace, you can join the Movement. Even if you are fighting tooth and nail just to overcome that awful, sinking feeling of despair, you can do something positive, something real, something powerful, while the world burns.

You can tend to the child closest to you. You can be with them, delight in them, learn from them, lead them, love them.

You can keep the children safe.

"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!”

+++

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.