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.