Tenants of the vineyard

Preached on the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 22A), October 8, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Psalm 19
Philippians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46

The Grapes of the Promised Land, by Sadao Watanabe

One of my favorite saints is Monica, a north-African woman and the mother of Augustine. She’s one of those saints who fades a little into the mist, since she lived so long ago – she died before the fifth century, in 387. But her son wrote vividly about her, in a way uncommon at the time: in our own literary era we are surrounded by countless biographies and memoirs, but Augustine arguably invented the genre of autobiography himself, in his Confessions, and in that work he writes about his mother.

Augustine writes that when Monica was much younger, she was caught drinking more than her share of the community’s wine. (This explains why she is appreciated by many as the patron of alcoholics.) But she went on to lead a life of sobriety and powerful Christian piety, and she sustained a vigorous, collaborative relationship with her son. She was an assertive, determined mother who had found his early life of youthful misadventure gravely disappointing; but later on, as he matured, she passionately supported his vocation as a Christian theologian. 

When I read about Monica, I think I recognize the person behind the icon. She is driven, successfully overcoming her personal demons and building a virtuous life. She watches and follows her son closely, perhaps comically so. But she takes faith – both hers and her son’s – quite seriously. If she does a thing, she does it fully. She wept bitter tears when Augustine, early on, told her he was not Christian but Manichaean. Nevertheless, she persisted, following him to Rome and then Milan, enlisting the help of Bishop Ambrose. And finally, after seventeen years of resistance, Augustine submitted to his mother’s influence, and to Holy Baptism. His grief in the wake of her death helped inspire his great autobiographical and theological work, the Confessions. Augustine had a powerful mother.

And now I hope I can hold your attention, if (I fear) not all of your respect, as I confess to you that another Monica also captures my imagination. She is a character in a 1990s television situation comedy. This Monica famously has five friends, and her role in this gang of six is the overachiever. When one of them worries desperately that he and Monica will lose a contest with the others, she says, “You’re on my team. And my team always wins.” In my imagination, this Monica believes that she will be loved only when she succeeds. She sets extremely high standards for herself, and she is not sorry about that. Her personal drive is central to her identity, her understanding of how the world works, even her spiritual life. Her driven nature solves many of her personal problems, much like Saint Monica, who overcame an excessive love of wine seemingly with the sheer force of will.

So yes, if you haven’t yet guessed, I have some of both Monicas inside me. I love to work hard, and succeed in that work, and this drive to succeed is haunted more than a little by my own personal history. I enjoy my life, but I take my work – and my faith – quite seriously. I can sometimes even slip into what our Lutheran friends like to call works righteousness, the spiritual belief that I only get what I earn. This isn’t true, I know. As we just heard, Paul firmly says in his letter to the Philippians that he has no righteousness of his own, but can only claim his belonging with God through faith in Christ.

In fact, Augustine himself argued against Pelagius that humans cannot achieve their own salvation, and beat him so soundly that only Augustine’s side of that story survived antiquity. (History is written by the winners – by the Monicas.) But Augustine is right: My inner Monica needs to hear from other dimensions of my identity, to check and relieve her. “Yes, Monica,” I might mumble to myself, “we could have handled that better. But we still learned something, it’s not about perfection, and others have to do their part, too.”

Yet I appreciate Monica’s role in my life, in my psyche, as much as I appreciate other parts who have wisdom that is foreign to Monica. Like you, I have different psychological parts, with different strengths and weaknesses.

And so I must watch my inner Monica carefully when she hears today’s Parable of the Wicked Tenants. Monica hears this parable and immediately says, “Yes! I was right! The landowner likes good tenants; and the landowner rejects the bad ones. I can earn love!”

But of course that is not the point of the parable. And before we get to the parable’s actual point, we should pause and note well that the parable is also not about one other thing: this is not a story about Christians replacing Jews in God’s sight. This has been a tragic misinterpretation of the parable down the ages, that the wicked tenants of the vineyard are the Jewish people, who are then judged and cast out of God’s merciful presence, replaced by Christians. We say a firm No to this lazy and anti-semitic interpretation.

The parable is actually about faith and love. More on that in a moment. But first, let’s be sure we understand what God’s “vineyard” actually is. What is, in this parable, God’s vineyard? Well, in the book of the prophet Isaiah, chapter five – the text that the first hearers of the parable would immediately have recalled – in that text, the vineyard was the house of Israel and the people of Judah. This is why the religious leaders, when they were puzzling out what Jesus meant, drew the correct conclusion that he was attacking them: they were the caretakers of – the tenants of – the vineyard of Israel. We, in turn, can appreciate in this parable that we have inherited, along with our Jewish cousins, the vineyard of God’s blessings first given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

But we are also free to expand our understanding of the vineyard as God’s merciful presence in this good yet troubled faith community, this good yet troubled neighborhood, our good yet troubled households, our good yet troubled friendships, even our good yet troubled inner selves. All of these can be part of the vineyard as we understand it.

And again, the parable is about faith and love, in God’s vineyard. The wicked tenants are not incompetent, or at least that’s not the sin that leads to a damaged vineyard and their own ruin. And so my inner Monica must be corrected: God does not call us into God’s vineyard because we’re good at everything we do. I don’t have to be the perfect son, the perfect husband, the perfect recovering alcoholic, the perfect priest. Saint Monica’s own son disabuses me of that self-centered heresy. 

I need only say Yes to God’s call that I practice the faith, and do the hard but joyful work of love, here in God’s vineyard. God wants justice in God’s vineyard, and justice is present in communities of faith and love. God wants justice, not perfection: we will mess up, but God is in the repairs we make after we readily admit our mistakes. God wants justice, not strict rectitude: we can not only mess up, we can be irreverent, we can play, we can even be silly and frivolous at times, and God is in the deepening bonds of friendship we form as we work alongside one another in the vineyard. God wants justice, not a narrow, anxious sorting of good guys and bad guys: we’re all good and successful; we’re all corrupt and prone to failure; and God is in the efforts we make to learn and grow, to repent and reform, to acknowledge our eternal dependence on God for all the good things we share freely around this Table.

This month at St. Paul’s, we are taking up once again the financial stewardship of this vineyard, our parish home. It is time to set a budget for the new year, judging as wisely as we can how best to manage God’s blessings for the life and health of all people whose lives we touch in our ministries here – whose lives we change, whose lives we save, with God’s help. And so I want to hurry to get ahead of any Monicas out there who assume that this is a test or a contest, that it’s about performance and perfection. Financial stewardship is never, ever about that.

It is only about faith and love, faith and love, faith and love. Now, we want to do a lot of things in the new year: we’d like to welcome an assisting priest onto our staff; we’d like to fully fund our music ministry, particularly our four choir section leaders; and we’d like more administrative support in a busy time when we’re undergoing major renovation while doing the usual hard work of our urban mission. Running a vineyard like this in 2024 is just generally a costly endeavor. 

But none of this is ever about being the best giver, the best volunteer, the best staff member, the best lay leader. Pledge an annual gift of ten cents if you like: that’s lovely, as long as you do this with faith and love. Volunteer just an hour a month if you like: that’s great, as long as you spend that hour in a labor of faith and love. Come to church to say your prayers just two or three times all year if you like: that’s profound, as long as your prayers are from your good heart, informed by your sharp mind, and sung to God on behalf of your neighbor.

When we work together in faith and love, God’s vineyard will flourish, and the harvest will yield abundant food for all who hunger.

War broke out in heaven

Preached on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels (transferred), October 1, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

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

Archangel Michael, by Ivanka Demchuk

“War broke out in heaven.”

Well, I certainly am glad to hear that. It is time. There are many dragons, about and abroad, and we are at war with them.

For this war, we will need powers. Four powers, by my count.

First, we will need to be mighty in battle: perhaps we don’t need to be physically strong (though for some of us, perhaps we do: sometimes fighting evil requires physical stamina). Whatever our health and abilities, all of us will certainly need courage; strength of character; a willful determination to take up the conflict with our dread foe, to endure, and finally to overcome. In all of this, we call upon the Archangel Michael to empower us: we hail him as the strong warrior who slays the great beast, the one who defeats the accuser, the one who wins. 

Second, we will also need to be happy warriors, mighty in hope, strong in spirit, glad bearers of the Good News. These are desperate times; that is to say, these are times when despair threatens us almost as much as those who menace the world with their misdeeds and malign intentions. We need the Archangel Gabriel to fill us with hope, to make our hearts glad, even to say to us, “Rejoice, favored ones!” just as they said one day to a young woman in Nazareth. We hail Gabriel as the one who greets God’s people with the Good News, the one who lifts up our hearts, the one who rejoices, the one who teaches us to sing, the one who trains our souls to magnify the Lord and our spirits to rejoice in God our Savior.

So: we need courage, and we need gladness. And third, we need the power to heal, to bind up wounds, to care for the injured and the dying and the dead, to console those who mourn, to mend the deep tears in the fabric of our communities. These are grievous times. We need the Archangel Raphael to heal and console us, and to form us into healers and counselors, too. We hail Raphael as the one who stirred the healing pools of Bethesda, the one who imparts God’s power to relieve suffering, the doctor and the nurse on the battlefield where good overcomes evil.

So: we need courage, gladness, and the power to heal. And finally, fourth, we need the power of wisdom, the tremendous, dazzling power of insight. In matters of wisdom we hail the Archangel Uriel, known among the hosts of heaven as a wise, brilliant elder. Uriel’s name means “the Lord is my light,” or “God is my flame,” evoking the flame of a lamp that enlightens God’s people, illuminating our path, guiding us out of the cave, dispelling the gloomy clouds of ignorance. In this time of epistemic closure, when everyone is sealed inside information bubbles (and disinformation bubbles), reading the news from outlets that never challenge our pre-existing beliefs, Uriel opens minds, Uriel poses unsettling questions, Uriel surprises us with new perspectives, new takes, new ideas. We have been wrong about so many things, down the ages. What might Uriel teach us next?

Courage and strength: Michael;
gladness and hope: Gabriel;
healing and recovery: Raphael;
wisdom and insight: Uriel:
four powers, four archangels.

Yes, this is what we need as we take up the battle, as we wade into war.

Now, we praise the Prince of Peace, and when we gather to say our prayers we often emphasize gentleness and lovingkindness in our reflections on the nature of Christ, on the Dominion of God, on our calling as God’s good and self-giving people. So maybe all this war talk is bumping on you; maybe it is bringing you up short.

But consider this: yes, we praise gentle Jesus, the Good Shepherd; but we also praise Jesus who cleansed the temple with righteous anger; we praise Jesus who ran low on patience, finally, with his followers when they continually failed to understand his identity and mission. (“You faithless and perverse generation,” he rants in a moment of exasperation. “How much longer must I be with you?”) The risen Christ converts our patron Paul by knocking him off his feet in a blaze of glory, and his presence with the disciples in their locked room is frightening. And so, inspired by his fearsome strength, the first members of the Jesus Movement bravely took up the battle against evil, accepting their fate as martyrs, as witnesses, as those who were willing to confront the powers of the world.

I can find no good use for Angels, therefore, except to fill our quivers with arrows, to fill our hearts with confidence, to train us as doctors who tend the wounded, and to sharpen our minds to meet the baffling challenges of these hard times. 

Without these powers, Angels devolve into knicknacks, into the fey subjects of saccharine poems, into faintly comical characters in whimsical movies. They become fluffy pillows in a time when we need spiritual weapons. This is beneath their dignity, and worse, it dishonors the Holy Trinity, the ultimate Source of all the powers we know, all the powers we are given, all the powers that come to our aid. So let the Angels rise triumphant in your hearts and minds; recognize them towering over you. This is how they appear in Holy Scripture: without fail, their presence is unnerving, even terrifying. These are serious times, but the strong forces of strength, goodness, healing, and wisdom are by our side; they ride out before us; they form our rear guard.

Our faith is like this: it is challenging, daunting, and frightening, even as it fortifies us. God stirs us to action, but that stirring is terrible, knocking us off our feet only to push us out from here in passionate, and compassionate, mission.

But maybe it is difficult for you to appreciate this — to appreciate the wondrous power of goodness, the fearsome glory of the Angels, the majestic might of God. Perhaps it is far easier for you to appreciate the terrible powers of evil; after all, they appear everywhere, and they seem truly awful. They are truly awful. You say there’s a terrible housing crisis, and I counter with “yeah, well there’s also the climate crisis.” You feel despair about racist violence, and I throw up my hands about our sclerotic political institutions while cities languish and heat waves oppress whole continents. It’s bad out there.

But it’s good, too, out there and also in here. Goodness is more powerful than evil, not less. Substantially more powerful. In fact evil draws what little power it has from the corruption of the good. The writer C.S. Lewis, a literary scholar and lay theologian in our own Anglican tradition, reflects on good and evil in a little book he wrote about heaven and hell called The Great Divorce. Here is what Lewis says: “There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to [God] and bad when it turns from [God]. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels.”

“It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels.”

And so as bad as things seem to be, and as bad as things actually are, all the worst forces in the world owe their existence to the good, which ultimately prevails. A corrupted archangel doesn’t stand a chance against a good one, as we see when Michael overcomes them in the final battle. Gabriel announces Good News that beggars belief – how can such good news stand against all the bad news we hear day by day? Yet Gabriel’s encouragement inspires a young woman to change the world just by saying “Yes” to her mission. She gives birth to God-with-us, and she sings our best song, the Magnificat, a song of triumph over the powers of evil. We can follow her path, here and now.

Raphael and all the forces of healing and health that flow around and within us may not save every life from disease, or fully close some of our deepest wounds, yet I have seen myself the immense power of God’s healing love when humans are experiencing extreme need. And finally, the wisdom of God, burning like the flame that blazes from Uriel, endures through every generation: ignorance will not endure; you and I can see to that.

So do not despair. Be of good courage. It’s bad out there, but we have help. And I have you; and you have me. All of us will taste death, but before and after that moment, for each and all of us, we will see the salvation and the power and the dominion of God.

Equality, equity, or liberation?

Preached at the 5:00pm liturgy on the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20A), September 24, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen. This was a short homily designed to prompt shared reflections from others in the assembly.

Exodus 16:2-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16

Jesus offers another parable today, a story that unfolds, sometimes unravels, curls in different directions, upends what we first think it means, provokes and prods us to look at something or someone in a new way. And then look again, in yet another way. 

Today we consider a series of economic transactions: a landowner (or better translated, householder) takes direct action in hiring laborers to harvest his vineyard. Right away this is odd for the first hearers of the parable: it was usually a paid manager – middle management – who did this kind of hiring work. But the householder is not only taking over the hiring job, he’s finding time throughout his presumably busy day to return to the marketplace to hire more workers.

The workers, in turn, are not described differently except in one respect: they don’t all succeed in getting hired in the morning, when the best jobs are available and the chances are highest to earn a full day’s wage. The householder returns at nine, twelve, three, and five o’clock. Each time he finds more workers who hadn’t found work, and brings them onto his vineyard.

The workers aren’t described as failures, and in fact when we say in English that they stood “idle” all day, we’re once again translating in a sloppy way. It’s more accurate to say that Jesus imagines them standing in the spot at market where they could get hired, that’s all. Maybe it’s nearly a full-employment economy. In any case, they’re not better or worse than the all-day workers, they’re just less successful in attracting an employer, for some reason.

Things get interesting when it’s time to pay the workers. The householder directs that they line up, and be paid in the order of last hired to first hired. This is provocative: it ensures that the workers who toiled all day will see that everyone is receiving the same wage. What’s the householder doing? Trying to start a fight? But I think this is clever: only when everyone can see a new thing happening does the power of that new thing really sink in.

And the new thing is equity. Not equality, equity. As many of you surely know, these are different concepts. Equality means that everyone gets the same thing no matter what, and a casual glance at this parable might lead us to say that it’s a fable about equality, since after all, everyone gets the same coin. But of course not everyone worked the same amount. Not everyone was as lucky in finding work. Maybe one of the later workers had trouble getting to the marketplace because they were caring for an elder. Maybe one of the early workers had a home-field advantage as a longtime citizen of the town. Whatever happened at the marketplace, everybody got hired at the time they got hired, and everyone got the daily wage.

You’ll find in your bulletin a couple of images you may have already seen floating around the internet. The first image explains the difference between equality and equity, revealing that when equity is practiced, no matter your size or ability, you will receive a bicycle that works for you. In the second image, you see the same idea in the varying levels of assistance offered to those of different heights, ensuring that everyone can see the ball game, even the small child. 

But look at the fourth frame of that image, the one titled “liberation”: rather than stacking crates to be sure everyone can see over the wall, we just remove the wall itself. And that, in my hearing, is where this parable is taking us. That is the Kingdom of Heaven; that is the Way of the Cross; that is the Good News proclaimed by Jesus. In a community of liberation, the householder is good, giving freely and working through the day to employ his neighbors in the job market; the workers all do their part, at varying levels of availability and ability; and at the end of the day, everyone receives enough. Everyone can buy groceries for their families for the next few days, and the vineyard has been fruitful for all.

What do you see, or hear, or wonder, as Jesus tells you this parable?

Everyone receives enough

Preached on the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20A), September 24, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by the Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Exodus 16:2-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45
Philippians 1:21-30
Matthew 20:1-16

Vineyard, by Maria and Miro Kenerov.

My father is a member of the Silent Generation, born on the high plains of southwest Minnesota in the mid-1930s. So as you might expect, he is an eminently sensible person. But at Christmas as I was growing up, my father allowed himself to be generous and enthusiastic. 

Because they had seven children, my parents proceeded carefully when it came time to purchase Christmas presents. I remember a formula, something like this: one large gift for each child, two more medium-sized gifts, and a few small, stocking-sized treats. In the seventies my parents got into making banners for church, and my father was inspired to create seven banners for Christmas morning, each bearing the name of a child. And so, when it was time for us to thunder down the stairs, we would descend upon seven piles of gifts, each one marked with an identifying banner.

My father’s good holiday spirit flourished within this orderly system. The gifts he and my mother chose were generous, often quite thoughtful. It was all abundant and delightful.

But the piles of loot were always, always as equal as possible in size, value, and quality. One year, my brother John received only a box of wires, but it was a joke; they had not given him nothing by comparison to everyone else, but rather these wires were part of a new stereo system. The machine itself was offstage, the better for a big, exciting reveal.

Even now, when my father is securely retired from Santa duties and all of his children but one are older than fifty, even now I feel that old Christmas morning excitement. My husband is generous, too, but it isn’t his gifts (as good as they are) that add sparkle to Christmas morning every year. It’s just the lifelong effect of being treated well enough, cared for well enough, loved well enough. My parents expressed their love in different ways, and sometimes our family had serious problems, but always we seven children could trust that we all belonged, that we all had everything we needed. We had enough.

Every once in a while I would wonder if my parents were anxious about equality when they assembled the seven sets of gifts. Did they worry one of us would feel resentment, discovering that the others got bigger or better gifts? Perhaps. But for all the fact that we siblings would often compete with each other in various ways, fierce competitiveness and anxious comparisons were not really central to our family dynamic. No one felt cheated. (Well I suppose I should speak for myself: if one of my siblings runs across these words, they might disagree. But I think overall we all understood that love is an inexhaustible resource.)

And that is how we are taught to behave here at church, here in this assembly, here in what we like to call the Body of Christ. No one gets more when they work harder; no one loses out when they arrive late; everyone has enough. If this way of running our household of faith were defined in economic terms, it would not be a capitalist system, where the market governs everything: in a capitalist system, if I don’t produce a good crop of heirloom tomatoes, I can’t sell it at the market, so I have less money. No, here at church I get enough, I am taken care of, I receive abundant blessings, no matter whether I can produce anything valuable.

But this is not a communist system, either. Sure, the Christian community described in the Acts of the Apostles sounds fairly communist, what with everyone “holding everything in common,” but in today’s parable there is one landowner (or one householder, to translate the Greek word more accurately), and this one householder is hiring and paying everyone else.

And speaking of that householder, the householder is not God, despite the fact that many down the ages have interpreted the parable in that way. God is present in and among everyone in the story, and of course as Christians we are trained to recognize God not only in the rich and the powerful, but also – even especially – in the least among us. So God is found among the workers who came near the end of the day; and God is found in the hard labor of those who worked in the scorching heat. God is also quietly present alongside their roiling resentment, a latent power that can open their hearts, releasing them from anger.

The parable, then, is not about how God gives us all that we need no matter how much we work (even though, yes, God does do that); no, the parable is about how we are called to do good things with our abundance, good things for all in our midst. You yourself may be the householder in the story, or you’re a worker hired at one or another time of the day. Whoever you are, the parable is about the choices we make with all that we have been given.

As I listen to this parable, I wonder if I am one of the coins. Perhaps I am a denarius, placed into the hand of someone who’s been working all day in the scorching heat. If I am a coin, then I have intrinsic value; I can empower a family of that time to eat for a few days; I am useful to someone, even someone who is burning with resentment because they feel cheated.

And maybe, if God is in the story as a specific character, God is in the land itself, verdant and fruitful, a source of nourishment for everyone. I like this take, because even if we don’t learn anything from this story – even if we abuse the land, fight among ourselves, hoard our treasures, and resentfully micromanage our affairs on an eternally anxious mission of fairness, with everyone receiving only what they earned – even then, God as the land itself remains available to us, a silent teacher, inviting us to listen, inviting us to open our hands in both need and generosity, inviting us to share.

Finally, I invite you to rest for a while with the image of a coin, particularly the denarius, one of the coins from the world of Jesus and his friends. I’ve had the privilege of holding a denarius in my hand, because our member John Proebstel owns an impressive collection of historical coins. They are tiny, these coins, and they of course were not minted in a modern, automated factory, so they are not perfectly circular. They’re more like a small, flat blob of precious metal, stamped with the bust of the emperor, etched with a few other markings. 

If I worked in the householder’s field and got in line to be paid, no matter how long I had been working, someone would drop this little blob into my hand. Can you think of another place where you get in line and receive a little blob of material, the same amount for everyone in the line? Of course it’s right here, at this Table. You come up the aisle, take your place at the rail, and I tear off a small piece of bread, trying (with mixed success) to give everyone the same exact size.

Now, this is not fair. It is not equal. It’s just not right! After all, some of you work many hundreds of hours a year for St. Paul’s, and others walked in the door for the first time this morning. Some of you are cradle Episcopalians, others are agnostic and not even sure you want to join us as members of our community. Some have generally avoided getting into serious trouble, and others have arrest records. Lots of us have sped in traffic, parked illegally, cared not at all about our carbon footprint, lied to our loved ones, cut corners. But not all of us have done those things! Yet everyone receives enough.

Why come up here and get a little blob of bread and a tiny sip of wine? It’s not a proper meal, even though we call it that, and we call this a Table for a feast. We do this to remind ourselves that every single one of us receives from this community the abundant blessings of God, no matter what. God is in and among all of this: in our good and generous actions, in the work we do in the vineyard of this neighborhood, and of course in the little blobs of bread, the Body of Christ. 

So come on up. It’s not a capitalist system, or a communist one. It’s not fair, it doesn’t make good sense, it’s not reasonable. It’s more like a generous parent who works in the wee hours of Christmas night to show all the children of the household that they are loved, they are lovable, they matter. Come on up. Come and receive. Come and feed. Come and share all these good things.

Forgiving the executioners

Preached on the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 19A), September 17, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Exodus 14:19-31
Psalm 114
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35

Forgive Thy Brother, by Scott Erickson.

Eight years ago, on a day in June, a shooter slaughtered nine people who gathered for Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, also called Mother Emanuel Church. The violence was racially motivated. It was an act of atrocious evil. The person who did it was clearly damaged, seemingly beyond repair, and though our faith teaches us that every human person can be reached, it is hard to imagine how the humanity of this killer could be recovered and rehabilitated.

During the shooter’s bond hearing, several family members of the victims told the shooter that they forgave him. Now, why would they do this?! What could it even mean, that they forgave him? This was their faith in action, but their choice to forgive may seem almost obscene. The killer was not repentant. The crime was a hate crime, committed by a white supremacist. But they forgave him. In doing so, they echoed Jesus himself on the cross in Luke’s Gospel, where he prays to God, asking God to forgive the executioners. Why?! Why pray this?

Well, Jesus gives us some wisdom about forgiveness in today’s Good News. He opens up the topic, and helps us understand how forgiveness works. Yes, forgiveness is something we practice when a person has been wickedly violent, as in the Mother Emanuel shooting. But forgiveness is something we work on at lots of levels. One person forgives another; one group forgives another group (think of South Africa, after Apartheid); and we even are encouraged to practice forgiveness in our resistance to the whole unjust global economic system. It’s not accidental that we talk about “forgiving” student loans, nor is it accidental that Jesus, in his teaching about forgiveness, tells a parable about debts owed by people in a cruel imperial economy. Forgiveness is a tool that helps us repair all kinds of things, from our whole capitalist system of oppression all the way down to your broken heart.

But here’s the thing about forgiveness: if you forgive, whether you forgive someone who harmed you, or you forgive a debt owed to you, the act of forgiveness never denies what happened. It just changes our relationship with what happened, and frees us to create a new future. You don’t have to worry that if you offer or accept forgiveness, someone is ducking responsibility, or weaseling out. When we forgive, we are liberated from miserable (and sometimes self-centered) anguish about injustice; and with God’s help, we find that we are more than our mistakes. We are more than even dreadful, tragic mistakes, from personal injuries all the way up to racist systems like Apartheid and dehumanizing capitalist systems that damage countless humans, and the earth.

And yet, for all the fact that forgiveness is so useful and lifegiving, we (much like Jesus and his companions) live in a time of widespread unforgiveness, of unending conflict that leads nowhere, a time when it’s all too easy to assume that life is just a zero-sum game. If I admit I did something wrong, then I lose to you, who did not do that thing. Or I lose face. Or I’m just a loser. And if I forgive a debt you owe me, I’m a different kind of loser, because in our unforgiving economic culture, a culture that commodifies human beings – “you are what you own,” our culture says – my wealth is diminished shamefully if I don’t grab everything I can. 

There’s a better way. Jesus frames it in a parable, a story that shifts our perspective, and opens our minds to a new insight. In the parable, someone who had been forgiven fails to understand the liberating gift that he received, and therefore fails to share that same liberation with a person who was in debt to him. He reveals in his actions that he simply doesn't get it. He doesn’t understand that even though he is one of the victims of the cruel economy, he all too willingly participates in it. He doesn't understand that forgiveness is about justice.

If we are forgiven for offending or hurting someone, or if we are forgiven a debt or otherwise freed from economic injustice, then the forgiveness we receive releases everyone involved from the burdens of injustice, and empowers them to extend outward the liberation they now enjoy. As we go forward in other relationships with other people, we remember the forgiveness we received, and we remember in particular that it was a tremendous gift.

All of this requires a significant amount of faith, and it takes a lot of hard work. So let’s return to Charleston, South Carolina, and reflect again on the extraordinary forgiveness offered by the families of the shooting victims.

I believe these family members offered forgiveness to the shooter because they did not want to carry the heavy albatross of rage and resentment; they did not want to return evil for evil; they did not want to take up the weapons of death as the shooter had done. Their act of forgiveness lifted those burdens, freed them from those prisons, and offered that same gift to the shooter, someone all too easy to throw away, someone all too easy to dismiss as a monster, someone the state has abandoned as just another throwaway creature on death row. And again, again I say, what that shooter did remains an evil atrocity. That will never, ever change. His soul may be redeemed and for all I know he may one day reach heaven as a magnificent, redeemed saint of God; but he will still be guilty of his actions on that terrible day.

But with forgiveness, those actions don’t have to be the final chapter of the story. Later chapters in the shooter’s story could find him forgiving those who damaged him so much that he became a racist killer; or they could find him making restitution – never enough, never, ever enough, but restitution nonetheless – to the families, to that church community, to Charleston, to all people of good conscience everywhere.

But there’s a larger, economic reality operating here, too, and the families’ choice to forgive the shooter disrupts larger systems of injustice. Everyone in this story – the shooter, his victims, and their families – is living in a system of oppression propped up by human avarice and ignorance. Racist shooters are made, not born. The mercy these extraordinary families offered to the shooter could redeem the slaughter by encouraging further acts of justice and reconciliation, and if so, this would be the exact opposite outcome from the one the shooter had hoped to inspire: he had wanted to start a race war. Their brave choice to forgive could save a generation of people from hatred and violence. It could inspire more and more people to question and push back on systems that damage white people and people of color alike. Forgiveness doesn’t guarantee this happy future for anyone involved, but it makes this future possible. Refusing to forgive forecloses that future. Genuine forgiveness – actual, difficult, wrenching forgiveness – gives us hope.

And if the shooter never repents, what then? Perhaps the victims’ families will look or feel foolish. But I don’t think so. They still have been relieved of their burdens. Forgiveness can still do its good and saving work in their own lives, and with all who hear and respond to their story of remarkable wisdom and courage.

And so we work at this. We wrestle with it. We wonder if the unrepentant should be forgiven, and if so, we wonder how we would do it. And we sometimes despair at the staggering challenge of disrupting unjust systems. But recall again that Jesus prayed for forgiveness, with gentleness and humility: note that when he says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” he doesn’t forgive the executioners in that moment; he asks God to forgive them. So perhaps that’s an early step for us to follow. We could pray, “O Lord, help me, I cannot yet forgive. God, forgive them.” Or we could pray, “O Lord, help us, for so much is wrong in the world. God, strengthen us.”

And so we practice forgiveness, Sunday by Sunday. We open the holy book, and what we read there inspires us to pray for the whole world, including all the violent offenders and wrongdoers, all the oppressors, and all their victims. Then we ask God to forgive us; and then we share the Peace, an ancient ritual of reconciliation that makes us both ready and willing to sit at this Table together, offenders and victims alike.

We help each other, day by day, always with God’s presence and God’s power. We help each other forgive our siblings from our hearts.

Christ is in the conflict

Preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18A), September 10, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen

Exodus 12:1-14
Psalm 149
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20

Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Yes.

Where two or three are gathered to break bread and give thanks, celebrate a new birth, or observe a rite of passage, Christ is among them. Where two or three are gathered to “tend the sick, soothe the suffering, bless the dying,” Christ is among them.

All true. All good. And often we say the “two or three” phrase when there are just a few of us at a service, or just two or three of us tackling a big project. It’s a way to encourage ourselves that Christ is here, whether we’re a big happy group or a small clutch of die-hards. We’re not wrong about that.

But what Jesus really means is this:

Where two or three are gathered to confront a wrongdoer, Christ is among them.

Where two or three are gathered to grapple with a painful truth, Christ is among them.

Where two or three are gathered to draw a sharp boundary, even if that boundary separates an unsafe person from the community, Christ is there among them.

People join a faith community for lots of reasons. There’s good music, splendid icons, intricate liturgical movements — the aesthetics of faith. There’s deep silence, solemn prayers, intriguing insights — the profundity of faith. There are companions, friends, pastors — the consolation of faith. 

But Jesus shapes a faith community that goes further, and painfully so. Christ is among us when we gather, but he is among us as a prophet. Christ provokes. Christ confronts. This is the challenge of faith.

In 2020, this parish readily responded to the pandemic catastrophe, closing our doors and setting up online worship. That was good and right to do, and we are taking our time as we carefully re-open. But St. Paul’s took up another task in 2020: that was the year when Mr. George Floyd was murdered, and we focused more intently on anti-racism efforts. We would do well to renew that work now, since it’s all too easy to let things like this slide. And if we confront and challenge ourselves to do this, Christ will be among us.

We also acknowledge clearly, in our bulletins, on our website, and soon on a plaque in our entryway, the fact that our church stands on stolen land. We give thanks for the Coast Salish people, especially the Duwamish, including all of their descendants who continue to form a living, marginalized community in this region. We give a modest amount each year to Real Rent, a program that financially supports the Duwamish, and we work year by year on mitigating the damage humans have done to the land itself. All good. We should acknowledge the first peoples to live here, and we should steward the gifts of creation for everyone’s benefit. But where we push ourselves even further to atone for the atrocities of both past and present, with the knowledge that this work is never done — where we push ourselves to do more, Christ will be among us.

These examples — protecting those vulnerable to the ravages of disease, confronting our participation in white supremacy, building our allegiance with our Indigenous neighbors, caring for the earth — are all beyond reproach, and plenty difficult. If we stopped here, that might feel like enough. It is a lot. But today’s Good News from Matthew goes even further.

It gets personal. It reads as something like an instruction manual for correcting a particular person in the community who has misbehaved in some way. The person is someone who “sinned against” the community. What is this sin? It could be any violent or dishonest act of course, like assaulting someone or stealing from the common treasure. But it could be other things. Perhaps the person has forgotten the mission of the community, or even turned against it. Perhaps they have betrayed the community in another way: misrepresenting it to others, maybe, or somehow letting the group down. There are plenty of historical examples of heretics being confronted by the faith community: we might do well, in this era of abundant tolerance for individual beliefs, to point out when someone’s theology is harmful. (For example: telling a grieving person that “God has a plan,” so therefore they should not grieve. Please don’t say that to anyone.)

So, it’s personal: A particular person needs to be confronted by another particular person. Others are brought in if that fails. Finally the whole community takes up the issue, and if the person can’t be, or doesn’t want to be, reconciled, then they are set outside the community. Now, this is not as harsh as it may sound. When Jesus says, “Let such a one be to you as a Gentile or a tax collector,” that can sound in our ears like a pretty nasty rejection. Except that Jesus ministered to non-Jewish Gentiles, and he ate with tax collectors. He means that the person is no longer in the community as they had been, but they still receive the community’s positive regard, and may even stay in some form of relationship. 

But notice how, again, this is awkwardly, painfully personal. Our faith doesn’t just challenge us to work on complicated abstract issues of justice and peace — though it certainly does do that. Our faith also challenges us to enter into constructive conflict with one another. If I mess up, if I do the wrong thing, if I betray or harm the community, someone should confront me. In our Episcopal structure, that someone should probably be the senior warden, if the rector is the wrongdoer. But it could be someone else, really anyone else. I hold a powerful position in this community, and therefore the ethics of our Christian identity compel me to listen humbly to any human being who is concerned about me. 

And these ethics apply to all of us. If you say or do something harmful, you should be confronted. Someone in this community should engage you in a “crucial conversation,” as they’re called in a popular book from the business world. That book’s title is Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. There are plenty of other resources. Our own diocese has created materials to help church leaders, lay and clergy alike, learn how to handle conflict. There are many skills to learn, but remember: it’s not just about skill-building. It won’t work unless we consciously choose to be brave.

But we also consciously remember once again — with relief — that where two or three are gathered, Christ is among them. We confront one another as Christ would confront them. Jesus challenged his peers, sometimes with quite a lot of heat — “You blind Pharisee!” we hear him yell a few chapters later in Matthew’s Gospel. He cleansed the temple with a whip. And yet those are examples of Jesus confronting the privileged and powerful, and in Matthew’s same Gospel Jesus describes himself as “gentle and humble in heart.” In John’s Gospel he confronts his companion Peter after Peter’s threefold denial of him, and the confrontation is upsetting for Peter, but Jesus does not raise his voice, and he reminds Peter that he is being reconciled to the Jesus Community not just for his own sake, but so that the “lambs,” the “sheep” — the vulnerable ones in the community — might be fed and tended.

So we do not just push each other around. We don’t indulge ourselves in careless conflict. We discern together. We work on this together. When the time comes to confront someone, we do it with great care and emotional maturity; we do it in the name of Christ.

Paul reminds us today of God’s command that we love one another. “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”: this is a summary of all the ethical obligations of our faith tradition, all of which are grounded in our love of God with heart, mind, and all our being. We love God fully, and this readily forms us to love one another fully, including and especially when we are in conflict, remembering that all human beings are made in the image of God.

And so it is, friends — and it is in this precise way — that I love you. I love you. I love you so much that when it is necessary, I will tell you the hard truth; when it is incumbent upon me, I will confront one or more of you; and when you have the need, always I will listen when you have something difficult to say to me about something I have done, or something I ought to have done but did not do. This is how we practice the love of Christ in this beloved community.

And so we gather now around this Table, and as one of our Eucharistic prayers says so well, we gather to eat together “not for solace only but for strength, not for pardon only but for renewal.” We gain strength and renewal at this Table, strength and renewal to do the hard work of profound love that anchors us firmly in the reconciling presence of Jesus Christ.  

Bind and release

Preached on the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16A), August 27, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 51:1-6
Psalm 138
Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20

Jesus said, “Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you release on earth will have been released in heaven.”

To bind and to release: these are judgments God empowers us all to make. To bind and to release: these are privileges we all share in God’s sight. To bind and to release: it may sound harsh, even alarming, but we are called to think critically, and to act in ways that say yes to some ideas and no to others; yes to some practices and no to others; yes to some people and no to others. And heaven will follow our lead.

Now, the Church rightly worries about hospitality, about being warm and welcoming, about inclusion. All too often we haven’t worried about that enough, and people have been badly hurt. Many people who call St. Paul’s their spiritual home have been rejected by other churches. Andrew and I were not married, at least as far as the Episcopal Church was concerned, until 2016. By that time, we had been a couple for seventeen years. They say that America is never more racially segregated than on Sunday mornings, even though the early Christian Church was beautifully diverse. Christian churches participated in the genocide of Indigenous persons and the suppression of their cultures. Women and all who do not identify as cisgender male have been locked out of church leadership for centuries, even though Mary Magdalene was seen as equal to Peter among the first apostles, and even though wealthy women often bankrolled the first-century Jesus Movement, leading and managing the house churches, almost certainly presiding at the Eucharist. For the sake of countless people, I say yes, enthusiastically yes, the Church should worry about inclusion.

And yet, Jesus said, “Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you release will have been released in heaven.” We are called to make judgments, to think critically, to say yes and to say no. And this inevitably will lead to us closing the door, not only on ideas, but even, sometimes, on people who hold closely to those ideas.

There’s an old story about a parish administrator at an Episcopal Church who decided to reorganize the parish library. As they worked, the priest wandered through the library and saw that the shelf labeled “Anglican Theology” was empty of books. The librarian had merely moved them aside as part of a larger relocation project, but the priest laughed and said to the librarian, “Good one.” Anglican Christians are famous for not holding to a particular theological stance or ideology. We are open-minded, open-ended, hopefully open-hearted. We like “yes, and” rather than “either, or.” The great value of this is that we can imagine new possibilities; we can hear the Good News of Jesus Christ anew every generation; we can be adaptable, even spontaneous; we can be lit on fire by the elusive and unpredictable Holy Spirit.

But there’s a downside. We can too easily let our flexibility and open-mindedness allow us to stop thinking at all. We can decide that not deciding is a good decision. We can glibly say “We love the questions!” and conclude that there are no conclusions. Our faith can fade from a mystical journey into a vague, agnostic mist. Creator, Jesus, Spirit: who are they, really? Trinity? Oh, that’s just a big mystery. Finally we are left with a friendly spiritual community that doesn’t really believe in much, and doesn’t really do all that much. In the end, we may be warm and welcoming, and that can be pleasant, but into what, exactly, are we welcoming people?

And so we are right to discern, first, what and who we will bind. St. Patrick sings, “I bind unto myself the blessings of the Trinity.” We bind ourselves to the Trinity: our theology is essentially, vitally Trinitarian. Among other things, this means we are always, always communal and collaborative in all that we do. We rarely do just what I alone want, or what you alone think is right. We listen to one another, to our tradition, to Holy Scripture, to God. Once again I point to the Trinitarian understanding of our faith articulated by Roman Catholic theologian Michael Raschko: “Where[ever] the Holy Spirit moves at the will of the [Creator], the Word of God becomes incarnate in history.” Again, “Where[ever] the Holy Spirit moves at the will of the [Creator], the Word of God becomes incarnate in history.”

And so we are not just free-wheeling Holy Spirit enthusiasts: for us, the Holy Spirit moves at the will of the Creator, at the will of the One who saw the suffering slaves in Egypt, and by the Spirit sent Moses to draw them out. And we are Christologists; we preach Christ crucified: therefore, for us, the movement of the Holy Spirit is always shaping us into a cruciform life, a cross-centered ministry. This means our spiritual life together will always cost us a lot, as we pour ourselves out in service with self-giving love.

We bind ourselves to all of that. Therefore, we release — we say No to — cost-free, easy spiritual paths. “We thought we could find an easier, softer way,” as it says in the AA Big Book (Alcoholics Anonymous is non-sectarian, but an Episcopal priest helped guide its design and formation) — “We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not.” This means we as Christians, alcoholics and non-alcoholics alike, walk the harder road of cruciform servants baptized in the name of the Trinity. And so we release — we say No to — the easier path, and bind ourselves to people we don’t like, people who have been thrown away by the larger culture, people who offend our sensibilities, people who don’t look like us, people who have made bad decisions, people who scare and provoke us, people who remind us of our own frailty, our own fallibility, our own vulnerability, our own mortality. 

This past Friday I just wanted to come into the office, but one unhoused person flagged me down to tell me about another unhoused person’s need for a bus ticket to Spokane. I am baptized in the name of the Trinity; I am living a cruciform life: I had to respond. But I felt tired; and I admit I sometimes feel irritated that nine times out of ten, I can’t just walk into my workplace in peace. I admit — I confess — that I sometimes imagine ways to sneak in the back way, unnoticed. But I had to respond. Even if this person might be scamming me, might be dangerous, might really just want something to fuel his fentanyl addiction, who knows, I had to respond.

Well. Here’s what happened. I approached him and identified myself, and told him I understood he wanted a bus ticket. I pulled out my wallet, where I had some cash from the discretionary fund. “Oh no, don’t give me money,” this person said. I really, really just need you to buy me a ticket.” Wow. Just — wow. I was surprised, and pleasantly so. He explained that he had just been in jail for a DUI, and he needed to get to Spokane to get some things prior to his next steps seeking housing back here. I remembered my own DUI history (as a cruciform Christian, I bind myself to the accurate memory of my own wrongdoing, and I release all fantasies that put me above any of our neighbors). I went inside, bought the ticket online, and came back out. “It leaves at 11:50,” I said. “Oh that’s quick!” he said. “Let’s go!” But at that point, I gently released this neighbor. I had another appointment and couldn’t just drop it to drive him to the bus terminal. “No, I can’t take you,” I said. “You have bus fare?” He did. Our relationship ended with a half-hug and a brief unspoken but heartfelt prayer.

In all of this I am not even a little distinguished or noteworthy. I’m just like all of you, all of us. (And it was your donated money that paid for his bus ticket.) We are bound to one another, and we release all claims of superiority over one another, or over anyone we meet. This is how we build our cruciform community in Christ.

And so we release — we let go of; it’s even right to say we reject — all inferior forms of Christianity: the ones that count the cost; the ones that preach the heretical “prosperity Gospel” where God blesses good people with health and wealth, and punishes the sick and the poor; the ones that offer easy and safe answers; the ones that support the principalities and powers of this world; the — I’ll say it again — inferior forms of Christianity. Jesus stands today at Caesarea Philippi, a monumental location that was erected to glorify the Roman caesar and his local collaborators, and he confers upon Peter our forebear (and through Peter, Jesus confers upon us) the power to bind to ourselves — and to God — certain practices, certain things, even certain people. We bind our neighbors to God forever. And Jesus confers upon us the power to release — to reject — those practices, those things, even those people, who stand against the creative power of the Holy Trinity. Now, God will always preach to everyone, even those most desperately estranged, so even as we say No, God will, in God’s time, do everything possible to get even Judas Iscariot back to Yes. Maybe God will do this through us, in due time. But for now, we release them.

Bind and release, bind and release, bind and release. I bind myself to you today, you the baptized people of God, you the Body of Christ incarnate in this place. And I release on your behalf, and alongside you, all that damages God’s dominion, God’s Church, God’s people. This is heady stuff. It is sometimes off-putting. But ultimately it is profoundly joyful and good, because this Rock on which Christ builds the Church is also the mountain where God will prepare a feast that nourishes all people and swallows up death forever.

Bitter Tears

Preached on the Feast of St. Mary, the Virgin (transferred), April 20, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

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

The Seven Sorrows of Mary, Mission Dolores Basilica, San Francisco, California.

It’s okay if you aren’t feeling it.

It’s okay if you aren’t over it.

It’s okay if there’s no blood going to it, no power, no light, no delight.

It’s okay. Mary can carry all of your sadness, all of your frustration, all of your anguish. Mary can carry all of your grief into the heart of God.

Mary: the name has a few meanings, but one meaning of Mary is “bitterness,” referring to the hard life of the Israelite slave Miriam (Miriam is the Hebrew origin of Mary). And the “bitterness” in Mary’s name perhaps also refers to the burial spice myrrh, a word with which Mary shares a syllable. Miriam was the sister of Moses, and though we hear her triumphant song of liberation at the shore of the Red Sea, she had been a slave—and she remained a woman in a man’s world—so she knew all too well the bitter experiences of life.

Andrea, a member of St. Paul’s, introduced me to a First Nations translation of the New Testament, a translation that reads Holy Scripture through the cultural lenses of many North American Indigenous peoples. In that fascinating version of the Christian scriptures, proper names like Luke, Paul, and Mary are changed to their meanings. Luke is not called Luke; he is called Shining Light. Paul is not Paul; he is Small Man. Mary the Lord’s mother, in turn, is called by the name Bitter Tears, while Mary Magdalene, honoring both the complexity of the name Mary and the distinctive calling of the First Apostle—she is called Strong Tears.

But back to Mary as Bitter Tears: This works, for me, as a name for the Mother of God. In a Catholic tradition that has grown up around her, the faithful pray to Mary our Lady of Sorrows, we pray to Bitter Tears, whose heart was pierced not one but seven times. Bitter Tears was pierced with grief when—

• She and Joseph fled with their newborn child into Egypt;

• When old Simeon, in the temple, told her the cost of her choice to give birth to Jesus—that her own soul will be pierced;

• When she and Joseph lost Jesus in that same temple, when he was a precocious tween;

• When she encountered her son on his path to the cross;

• When she watched as he died on that cross;

• When she watched as his body was taken down from the cross;

• And finally when his body was laid in the tomb.

And so Bitter Tears is here for you if you aren’t feeling it, if you aren’t over it, if there’s no blood going to it, no light, no delight. We need not, in fact we should not, practice a falsely cheerful emotional perfectionism in our lives of faith. The other day I read about how the island of Maui, like so many other places, is plagued by gross inequity in housing. Many native Hawaiians have been forced to leave the state altogether because they simply can’t afford to live there, while tourism business captains reap millions from that vital but complicated industry. All this was true before the devastating wildfires that killed hundreds and destroyed Lahaina. I thought to myself, “Everything is bad, everywhere. Everything is just … bad.”

Now, that’s quite gloomy, and there is good news in the world. And, most vitally, there is the Good News of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, Good News that was announced to Mary his mother, to Bitter Tears herself, and to Strong Tears, and to Shining Light, and finally to Small Man, Paul our patron. Mary was present, the evangelist Luke records, on the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit set the Jesus Movement on fire with a thrilling sense of purpose, with a joyous—if excruciating—mission that sears and sends us even now, right here, in yet another city plagued with chronic bad news. This is all to the good! So when we pray to Bitter Tears, to the One Whose Heart Holds Seven Swords, to Mary the Mother of God, to Our Lady of Sorrows, we do not give in to nihilistic despair. That is not what Mary’s bitterness is about.

It’s just that Mary knows. She understands. She gets that we sometimes don’t feel it, we sometimes aren’t over it, we sometimes don’t feel blood going to it, we sometimes don’t see the light, we sometimes don’t feel delight. It’s okay. She gets it. And she leads us in the work of doing something with grief, of taking our grief and fashioning it into a lament—a prayer that carries our grief into God’s heart, where it is transformed into energy that heals the world.

Mary today is still a woman of sorrows, because she never got over the death of her son, even now, when both are resplendent in glory. How could she? He came back resurrected, not resuscitated, which means he was radically different, forever a stranger as well as a son, a foreigner as well as a friend. He was not resurrected to return to the same life he led before his death. And that previous life wasn’t all that delightful for Mary, either: the Gospels tell us that she was frustrated with him, sometimes even disappointed by him. And no parent who watches their child die can (or should) get over it, no matter what happens next. 

But this is profound good news for us, Mary’s bitterness, Mary’s grief. It means we too can bring our grief here, and not do anything to squelch it once it’s here. We don’t have to fix it, let alone deny it. We don’t have to cover it over, or pretend it’s not important. Mary can carry all of your sadness, your frustration, your anguish. She can carry all of your grief into the heart of God.

In the Mission Dolores Basilica in San Francisco—Dolores, a name that means Sorrowful One—Mary, her heart pierced with seven swords, looks down from the ceiling. You can see a photograph of this on our bulletin cover. They placed her up, high up, in the center of a burst of cosmic light. We often imagine Mary as the woman in the Revelation to John who stands on the moon, wearing a crown of stars. Or we recognize her as Our Lady of Guadalupe, again standing on the moon, but this time wearing a star-studded gown. The cosmic Mary, the Queen of Saints: she underlines for us the human instinct to see motherhood, birth, parents and children, infusing the whole universe.

After all, we say that stars are “born,” and further that they are born in “nurseries”; and these days astronomers are excitedly telling us that the JWST telescope is taking “baby pictures” of the universe—images of the universe in its first few hundred million years, which we playfully call the universe’s “childhood.” It is odd to imagine a cosmos as a “child,” and odd to imagine a nebula “giving birth” to a star, yet we do this. Yes, this is partly because of our self-centered imagination as earth-bound mammals, but there is wisdom to be grasped here. We are onto something. We are conscious of God’s generative, loving power that, well, gave birth to the universe, and continues to do so. We are insightful when we see that creativity is maternal, paternal, parental. God is our Mother, yet so is the earth herself. And Mary—she, too, participates in the parental creativity of God. 

And, like all mothers, like all parents of all genders, Mary quite naturally suffers deep sorrow. This is not maudlin or melodramatic; it is part of her parental wisdom. To give birth, or to create something, anything (I am not a parent, but I am a godparent, and I do create things): the work of creation is painful. Mary’s parenthood begins with a desperate flight—the flight of a refugee—to a foreign land; she then hears a dreadful prediction of her own suffering; a few years later she briefly loses her son in the temple, foreshadowing her ultimate loss of him in his cruciform mission; and finally she witnesses his death and burial. In all of this she is a parent, not a potentate: to create is to accept a terrible form of powerlessness. We cannot control or fully protect those to whom we give birth. Whomever—or whatever—we create is released into the universe, free, unpredictable, vulnerable.

And yet, today we hear Bitter Tears, like Miriam before her, singing a song of triumph. And note this well: she sings of triumph that has already happened: God has already lifted up the poor and scattered the proud; God has already filled the hungry and shown strength with God’s arm. It is Mary’s capacity for grief, it is the size and strength of her good heart, that empowers her to carry this profound wisdom about the universe, wisdom that sees beyond linear time, wisdom that sees how all things are culminating in God’s triumphant light. Bitter Tears is not glib; she is nobody’s fool; she does not promise the moon, even as we imagine her standing on it. Grief in the heart of Our Lady of Sorrows becomes a source of fierce wisdom and fearsome strength. She is fortified by her mature, intelligent, courageous response to the swords that pierce her painfully. Bitter Tears is brave.

And she, in turn, pierces our hearts, pierces them until they break, and break open, in compassion for all who suffer, for all who grieve, for all who weep. Bitter Tears is a prophet of God, among her other identities and titles, and she says to us what old Simeon said to her. She says it with faith, with love, and with a ferocious determination. She says it to send us from here, our hearts breaking but strong; our minds pondering but open; our bodies broken but strengthened. She says to all of us, to each of us, these terrible yet oddly joyful words, words that ring through the whole cosmos:

A sword will pierce your own soul, too.

God is scary

Preached on the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord, August 6, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Exodus 34:29-35
Psalm 99
2 Peter 1:13-21
Luke 9:28-36

Moses and Aaron Reveal the Ten Words, by Gilliam van der Gouwen.

One day, when I was a young kid in southwest Minnesota, I was down in the basement of our house, and I was playing with fire. I held a piece of paper against the exposed coils of an old-style space heater, the kind where the red coils were easily accessed through a thin wire casing. The edge of the paper glowed with a new fire, and the fire licked around the paper until I successfully blew it out. The whole experience was vivid with sensory details: brightness, heat, curling ash, the acrid yet pleasant fragrance of the flame. 

Then I heard a rustling and turned to my right. There stood my mother, watching me silently. I felt a flood of fear.

She quietly but firmly told me to go upstairs, and I remember sitting in the living room while my parents calmly asked me what I had done, and why. They were reasonable, sensible, appropriate. In fact it’s possible my father wasn’t even there: memory is tricky; if he was there, he was like Aaron, the brother of Moses – immensely important, but quiet. My parents gave me some basic reminders about the dangers of playing with fire.

All was well, but I felt shaken, because in that terrible moment when she confronted me, my mother’s face was not that of a friend, or at least an easy, consoling friend. Her face seemed to shine with fire.

Fire burns everywhere in this story: the literal fire of the space heater of course; my mother’s fiery expression; and, most vitally, the fire that burns in the human conscience – the searing sense that one has done the wrong thing. The only way my mother can be fearsome in that situation is if we both believe that there are good behaviors and there are bad behaviors, and I did one of the bad ones. If I had been a different kid, one who was less in touch with the rules, one who was more foolhardy, brazen, oppositional  – then my mother wouldn’t have frightened me so much in that moment. “Whoops,” that other kid might say, “I’m busted.” That defiant kind of kid could have even tried to bluster his way out of it. “Come on!” he might say breezily to his mother. “It’s no big deal. Chill, mom.”

But my mother had great power. She was just the type of person who would return to the camp after a mountaintop encounter with God, her face shining with God’s searing justice, God’s terrible righteousness, God’s bone-rattling, awful awareness of everything those foolish people did. My mother – who never permitted us to call her “Mom” – she was, well, Mosaic. She was, like Moses, a leader of her people, a friend of God, and so, in her own way, she bore on her face God’s own terrible power. Perhaps you know someone like this in your own life. Perhaps that person is you yourself. It is not always easy to know such a person, yet I hope you do.

There is one surprising reason why, throughout Holy Scripture, the most common greeting we hear from the Angels – from God’s messengers – is the command, “Do not be afraid.” They tell us not to be afraid, again and again, not because of all the dreadful things in this world: suffering, illness, violence, oppression, failure, despair, death. No, God’s messengers repeatedly say “Do not be afraid” because God is terrifying.

Now, we speak of God as Love, and we are right to do so: Augustine teaches that the Holy Trinity is the Lover, the Beloved, and Love itself. And the Church these days is preoccupied with hospitality, again with good reason: all too often, the church swings its door shut in the faces of queer people, persons of color, differently abled people, neuro-diverse folks, those who suffer addiction, those who commit crimes, unhoused people, low-income people, children, youth, sole parents, elders, and others. We are right to imagine Jesus as our open-minded, open-hearted friend, our shepherd and exemplar, the One whose burden is light, because his burden is always shared. We are right to recognize Jesus as the Gentle One who saves us from the terrible sin of distorting the Body of Christ into an elite club of insiders.

But – though God is Love, the God of Love is terrifying. Holy Scripture faithfully records this truth. The psalmist sings that God rides upon the clouds of the storm; that the voice of God makes the oak trees writhe, and strips the forest bare. God is terrifying because Almighty God knows us, and Almighty God is close to us. 

I learned as a couples therapist that there are two ways to distance yourself from someone you love who upsets you: you can reduce how important they are to you, or you can reduce how close they are to you. But God denies us the ability to do either of these things. God knows us intimately, having created us by breathing God’s own Spirit into us. So I can present a public face, but God will always know the real me, and therefore God will always remain ultimately important to me. (“Where can I flee from your presence?!” the psalmist cries.) Like my mother standing in that basement doorway, God sees, God knows: God is often described as fire, or fiery; and it is God’s fire that burns in the cauldron of the human conscience.

And God, in turn, is forever close to us: in our most joyful moments of liberation and celebration, yes, but also in our most vexing crises, in our deepest grief, and in the hour of our death. God’s Spirit moves vitally in the anxious heart of a parent, and God’s Spirit moves playfully in the curious, questioning heart of their child; God’s Spirit blows powerfully through the crucible moments of youth and midlife; God’s Spirit breaks the lock of the offender’s jail cell; God’s Spirit confronts the wrongdoer with the truth; God’s Spirit animates the doctor as she gives her patient a grim prognosis; God’s Spirit moves warmly along our arthritic bones; and God finally meets us at our end. God is transcendent, yet immanent; God is ultimately important to us, and devastatingly close to us. Everything and everyone else is trivial. 

And so, perhaps we can empathize with the friends of Jesus who were knocked off their feet with terror at the sight of him blazing in glory on the mountain. Jesus, the New Moses, was not just their soft friend, not just the warm rabbi who practiced radical welcome in his ministry to the outcasts. He stood before them in might, and he was glowing. 

Or was he glowering? There is always a terrible ferocity in God’s glory. We rehearse this truth in our best stories, the ones with the kindly old wizard with twinkling eyes who transforms at the time of crisis into a mighty, fearsome wonder worker. Saint Nicholas wasn’t just a genial grandpa who gave treats to kids: he is remembered for his harsh rebukes, his bracing exhortations. Jesus is not just my reassuring friend: he is also the Stranger, the deeply unsettling Risen One, not a ghost, but also not simply a relatable human companion. “Simon, son of John,” Jesus intones in a post-Resurrection breakfast, and immediately Peter knows he’s in trouble: his three denials of his Lord are now going to be repaired, painfully, by this terrifying Stranger.

We pray to this Stranger, to God who is Fire, to God who shines with terrifying justice – we pray in many ways. One way is through visual images. We write icons to guide our prayer, and engrave images to grasp (at least in our imagination) the fierce glory of God. On today’s bulletin cover you will see that our copy machine cannot do justice to an engraving of Moses as he shines with God’s light. You’ll find a better copy of this engraving in the narthex, and those of you on livestream can see it now. I am struck in this image by the curious expression on the shining face of Moses: he seems almost glum. Or he’s just grim, gritty, grave. His human face seems blunted by the light of God. His physical body recedes behind the light.

And here, just below me, you will find an icon of the Transfiguration, written by Kristina Prokhorova in 2003 for our own Steven Iverson and Ralph Carskadden. I encourage you to take a closer look when you come up for Communion, or after mass. I am drawn to the terrified eyes of the disciples in this image. One of them has covered his face in his hands, making room for only one eye to peek out. 

All this terror, all this fearful squinting and trembling in God’s presence – this is not about the humiliation of the human person. It is paradoxically about our restoration in dignity and gladness as God’s people. We fear God not because God is unjust, let alone unjustly violent: we fear God because God who is Fire burns away the worst in us to reveal the best in us, and that is scary. We fear God because God who is Love is found beside us in our most desperate hours of need, and that is sobering. We fear God because God who is our Friend is the one friend we need the most, the Friend who knows us best and remains unnervingly close, and that is good news – but it is harrowing.

Do not be afraid. God is terrifying, but God is just, God is good, and God is with us as we descend from the Mountain of Transfiguration, together, shining with God’s light, burning with God’s wisdom, warmed with God’s searing love.

And as we descend the mountain together, I have to say: you may not realize this, but you are shining with God’s own light – as we all do. And so you, too, are a little scary.

Who is the baker?

Preached on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, July 30, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Laurel Tallent.

Genesis 29:15-28
Psalm 105:1, 7-11, 45b
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Kneading Dough by Julie Lonneman

For the past few weeks we’ve been hearing Jesus describe the “secrets of the kingdom of heaven” as he puts it earlier in the chapter, through these parables:  it’s like a field that gives life to both wheat and weeds, it is a careful and  attentive sower, it is like mustard, which is itself a weed that would disrupt a field  of wheat but would give safe harbor to the birds, it is a tiny amount of yeast  worked into 60 pounds of flour, it is a net that catches fish indiscriminately, it is a  precious thing that is hidden, that is found, that is bought for a steep cost.  

In these parables, what I hear is the the kingdom of god is being turned this way  and that, to see what angle will allow it to fit into our minds. Kind of a “pivot!  Pivot!” Moment (the only reference to Friends I recognize). Which of these  stories will click, and allow Jesus’ disciples and crowds that transient  transcended moment of “yes. I get it” before it slips from our grasp again.  

Last week, Stephen alluded to the agrarian audience that Jesus was speaking  to. I imagine that agricultural similes like the parable of the sower and the  parable of weeds among the wheat hold nuances that we don’t have access to  in our current context, and maybe that’s why Jesus takes parable after parable  like rabbits out of a hat for the other non-farmers around him: “Oh, this one isn’t  landing for you? How about this one? It is important to me that you understand  what we are building together."

In the statistics courses I scraped through I was introduced to the aphorism “all  models are wrong, but some are useful” by statistician George Box. Any  statistical model we came up with in my working group could never fully capture  whatever relationships we were trying to define between ADHD and writing  scores. These parables could never capture the entire nature of the kingdom of  heaven, but some of them are useful. They can hold our attention, they can  make God feel closer to our day-to-day or a part of the work we are familiar  with. They can snaps that light of insight for a second. They can be something  that makes you wonder.  

I wonder which disciple resonated with each parable, and I wonder about the  specific shade of meaning they garnered from them. I wonder how they would  articulate that meaning.  

As I was preparing this sermon, the parable that was useful to me - and I say  that because it was the one that held my attention the longest - was the shortest  parable, “the kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in  with three measures of flour until all of it is leavened”.  

First of all - tremendous amount of flour. This batch will feed a community, or a  family, no doubt. But if you’ve never mixed dough for a batch of loaves before -  it’s messy, what I would call “a sensory nightmare” of gummy wet flour patches and loose powder that would ruin the loaf if they aren’t mixed in. And you keep  going, mixing until the texture becomes smoother, but the smoother dough is  more difficult to work because now it’s stronger. It’s less messy but more  laborious the more water and flour mix together. And if you’re working with a  starter of wild yeast, you need to make sure it also disperses evenly into the  dough. It has a tendency to glom onto itself as a slimy ball of half-digested flour,  not mixing in smoothly unless you cut it in intentionally. So your work is paying  attention to “mixing” but “mixing” itself involves many smaller interventions.  

And beyond the effort of mixing itself, there is the uncertainty in measuring, or  more like feeling, how much progress you’ve made in kneading. Has the yeast  been distributed enough? Is the dough strong enough? Your first inclination that  your work was done adequately, that your dough was leavened, comes hours  after you’ve set it aside. I can hear the baker ask:  

When will this work be done?  

When will I know that I did it right?  

The last word of the parable assures us that this flour was leavened, the yeast  was spread. The labor was not in vain, the baker will accomplish her task, but it  is grueling and likely repetitive work. We can not take for granted that the bread will be leavened; we can not assume that the arc of history will bend towards  justice of its own accord.  

To me, the central theme of the parable is not the leavening. The central theme  of the parable is the baker’s effort to facilitate the leavening. 

But who is the baker in this story? I’ll admit that I wrote this homily almost all the  way through before realizing that I never questioned who I thought it was.  Having been raised on these parables as instruction for individual action, I easily  slip into the assumption that I am the one who must take up my dough and  knead, that I am the one who must sell all of their belongings for the singular  goal of possessing the kingdom of heaven. But is that how Jesus’ audience  understood it, and is that what Jesus was picturing? A single worker with an  individual prize? 

I strongly suspect that the answer is more collective, in partnership with the  Holy Spirit. No one of us is the baker, the merchant or the trespasser (man in the  field). But collectively we are.  

You know what similes and parables aren’t great at? Identifying specific action  items.

So I turn to the the epistle today, not for the exact directions I am looking for, but  for a little comfort, and a dose of inspiration; Likewise the Spirit held us in our  weakness for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit  intercedes with sighs too deep for words.  

You are not a lone baker, you do not do this work alone. We are directed with  sighs too deep for words, to build a kingdom that can not be described with any  number of pictures.  

I wonder which of the parables today resonate with you. 

I invite your reflections on this and any of our readings today.

I'd Call that a Bargain

Sermon given Sunday, July 30, 2023, the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12A), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church by Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D. for the 8am, 10:30am, and 5pm Masses.

Genesis 29:15-28; Psalm 105:1-11, 45b; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Hidden Treasure, by Lithuanian painters Eglė Dūdonė and Mindaugas Kučinskas

A 1970s rock song finally helped me bring the series of little parables in this morning’s gospel reading together with my life in the world the past month. I’d been wondering about work and the body (human bodies, yes, but also seeds and yeast and pearls and fish), wondering about lack of bodily autonomy and labor, but I didn’t know what to do with those ideas. The song is called “Bargain,” by The Who, and begins this way:

I’d gladly lose me to find you

I’d gladly give up all I had

To find you I’d suffer anything and be glad.

I’d pay any price just to get you

I’d work all my life and I will

To win you I’d stand naked, stoned and stabbed

I’d call that a bargain

The best I ever had

The best I ever had

Now it’s a rock song, so the bargain involves love of one human being for another; sexual desire, even. But that’s also what our reading from Genesis is about, isn’t it? Jacob works seven years for his kinsman Laban in order to marry Laban’s younger daughter Rachel, whom Jacob loves. The night of the wedding, however, Laban puts Leah in Jacob’s bed, and by having sex with her, Leah becomes Jacob’s wife instead of Rachel. What is this you have done to me, Jacob demands of Laban the morning after? Did I not serve you for Rachel? Why then have you deceived me? Sorry, Laban replies. I was just doing my country’s social and sexual business as usual: the younger daughter cannot be married off before the firstborn. But if you’ll serve me another seven years, then, in return, I’ll hand Rachel over to you as well. We’re told those first seven years Jacob worked seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for Rachel. Even though Laban robbed Jacob of his labor, and then doubled down on the theft, I think Jacob can still sing along with The Who:

I’d gladly lose me to find you…

I’d work all my life and I will…

I’d call that a bargain

The best I ever had

And there’s the connection with the third and fourth of the little parables Jesus puts before us this morning.

“The kingdom of God is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in their joy they go and sell all that they have and buy the field” (Matthew 13:44).

“Again, the kingdom of God is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, they went and sold all that they had and bought it” (13:45-46).

The song echoes the parables:

I’d pay any price just to get you…

I’d gladly give up all I had…

I’d call that a bargain

Parables and song ask questions of us: What do you most desire? For what would you sacrifice everything?

+++

Because “Bargain” is a rock song, we should expect words about love and desire. But other lines might surprise us. Like:

To find you I’d suffer anything and be glad

Or:

To win you I’d stand naked, stoned and stabbed

I’m not saying this is what The Who intended, but for us church folk how could such words not resonate with the Jesus story? But it’s this verse that most intrigues and entices me:

I’d pay any price just to win you

Surrender my good life for bad…

I’d call that a bargain

The best I ever had

The best I ever had

Surrender my good life for bad? Hmmmm… Let’s work with that a bit.

The Godly Play curriculum offers this tip to the adult storyteller who invites children to wonder and wander a bit with Jesus’ parables.

“Parables question our everyday view of life. They wake us up to see in life what we have not seen before. Parables question the status quo, the order imposed by tradition, power or class. That is why Jesus’ parables often got him in trouble, and why Christians ever since have sometimes redefined parables in ways that comfort us only rather than challenge us by disrupting our comfortable worldviews.”

I think that’s exactly what’s going on with the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast.

At first glance, both seem to be about little things that cause big changes, unobtrusive beginnings that have dramatic and unexpected effects. The smallest of all seeds grows into the greatest of shrubs. Even tinier cells of yeast leaven three measures of flour; the equivalent of sixty or seventy pounds, making enough bread to feed an entire village. But below the surface, there’s something else going on. Something disruptive. Something to make us uncomfortable.

The mustard plant in Jesus’ parable is not the one that provides the yellow condiment we squeeze on a sandwich. It was instead a huge, invasive weed – detested by first-century farmers because it took over their grain fields. Why on earth would someone sow the seed of such a plant? Counterproductive to human agricultural business as usual, but priceless in offering nesting sites for the birds of the air in an otherwise inhospitable environment, perhaps? God’s kingdom so small as to be almost invisible among the empires of this world and yet up to the huge task of nurturing life itself.

And the woman with the yeast. First of all, she’s a woman in a patriarchal culture. The phrase, she “mixed yeast in with flour” might better be translated she “hid yeast in flour,” until all was leavened. The same verb used in the parable of the treasure “hidden” in a field. First-century yeast was not neatly processed and available in foil packets. It would have been a little pinch of dough held over from the last batch of bread as a starter for the next. Probably smelly and a bit moldy. Leavened bread, like the huge number of loaves the woman’s dough would make, was considered impure and inappropriate for communal religious uses. Every taint of yeast had to be physically removed from every observant Jewish household before Passover. The yeast of God’s kingdom – its tiny, tiny bodies – are profligate, miraculous even in their work, their ability to feed a multitude of people. But they’re subversive of human religious business as usual.

This reversal of good and bad, insider and outsider, emerges as a distinctive theme throughout Matthew’s gospel. The powerful, the elite, the righteous (or self-righteous) find themselves on the outside of God’s kingdom, while a diverse lot of unlikely people are equitably included: lepers; a Roman centurion’s slave; Peter’s feverish mother-in-law; a demon-possessed man living among the tombs; Matthew himself, the tax-collector; a woman gushing with menstrual blood; and the desperate Canaanite woman advocating for her troubled daughter. However uncomfortable it might feel, Matthew invites his reader in the company of such folk, such outsiders, to surrender a “good” life – according to the metrics of social-political-economic business as usual – for “bad,” and call that the best bargain ever had.

+++

But still, you may be wondering, labor and lack of bodily autonomy? Where does that come from, Mark? Where does it leave us? Lead us?

Well, it’s already embedded in our story from Genesis. As women in the ancient world, Rachel and Leah lacked bodily autonomy. Jacob labors for Laban, not Rachel. It’s Laban who delivers Leah to Jacob’s marriage bed. Does Laban seek Leah’s consent? Hardly. What of Leah’s long labor over the years and Rachel’s? Leah bears Jacob six sons; she’s mother of six of the twelve tribes of Israel. Rachel dies giving birth to the second of her sons by Jacob. While in labor, she names him Ben-oni (son of my sorrow) – that was her choice to make. But Jacob ignores Rachel’s dying wish and names him Ben-jamin instead (my right-hand son). 

Labor and lack of bodily autonomy, not just in the ancient world. Also in our newspapers and on radio and television every day. The overturning of Roe v. Wade. Threats to recently won rights of LGBTQ folk to be the persons they are in and through the bodies they are. Nets suspended beneath buoys in the Rio Grande to keep brown- and black-bodied immigrants out. And ludicrous attempts to rewrite the history of what slavery meant for Africans brought against their will to this hemisphere or the Holocaust for European Jews.

Above all, labor and bodily autonomy as I continue to digest two recent experiences. I put them before you in their juxtaposition as a parable of sorts.

I had to drive up Aurora Avenue one morning and I was punched in the gut by the people I saw from the comfort of my car with no resources to survive, let alone thrive, other than their bodies – which they are forced to sell to whoever will pay. The mostly Hispanic men lining the entrances to Home Depot looking for day labor in and around the construction business. And the mostly female sex workers walking up and down Aurora itself, displaying their bodies and their availability.

Then, a few weeks later, I was privileged to savor a collaborative effort of creation by two artists: David Chang and Lanecia Rouse. David does a modern take on traditional Chinese calligraphy and said that for him, writing a person’s name becomes an act of intercessory prayer using his hands. Lanecia makes collages and described lovingly tearing pictures of black bodies like hers from old issues of “Jet” and “Ebony” magazines and arranging them and gluing them on paper as acts of remembrance and retrieval and celebration done with her fingers (my paraphrase). The profoundly beautiful work of the body, when autonomy has been granted or won.

Whatever the kingdom of God is like, it’s not like the kingdom we live in or any kingdom we’ve ever visited or any kingdom we’ve ever even heard of. The good news is that it’s God’s kingdom, not ours. God sows the mustard seed. God hides the yeast. God finds the treasure hidden in field and the pearl of great price. It’s that love of God from which nothing can separate us in life or death (Romans 8:38-39). Instead of The Who’s Roger Daltrey, can we hear God in Christ Jesus singing to each and every one of us:

I’d gladly lose me to find you

I’d gladly give up all I got

To catch you I’m gonna run and never stop

Now I’d call that a bargain, the best we’ll ever have, the best we’ll ever have.

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Note:

I intentionally did not take up the fifth of our little parables in today’s gospel reading, the parable of the net with its hard words about separating good fish from bad, about a furnace of fire and weeping and gnashing of teeth. That conversation would require an hour-long adult formation class, not a line or two in a sermon. However, I think some of what I say above about the reversal of insider and outsider, good and bad, in Matthew would apply here as well: the “excluded” are the powerful, elite, and (self) righteous, while lepers and tax collectors and bleeding women and all the rest are gathered into baskets of inclusion.

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Resources:

“Bargain” is from the brilliant album “Who’s Next?” (MCA Records), 1971; reissued in 1985.

See Jerome W. Berryman, “The Complete Guide to Godly Play, volume 3: 20 Presentations for Winter” (Morehouse Educational Resources). 2011, pages 77-120, for the lessons on Jesus’ parables. The quote in my sermon is from page 116.

Check out David Chang and Lanecia Rouse’s websites for more information about their work: davidchang.format.com / laneciarousetinsley.com. I saw them create together, and heard their reflections, at the 2023 Glen Workshop – sponsored by Image (image@imagejournal.org).

God Shots

Preached on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11A), July 23, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Genesis 28:10-19a
Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Wheat and Tares by Ed Morales

Sometimes people comment on spiritual topics such as the meaning of suffering, the problem of evil, and so on, and I am troubled by what they say. When someone says, “Everything happens for a reason,” I think to myself, “No, everything does not happen ‘for a reason.’ Horrible things happen, but they are not God’s will, or part of God’s great plan. We live in a phenomenal, serendipitous universe in which Almighty God enters from below as the Humble One. God is the uncontrolling Creator who calls to us from the future, inviting us, but not forcing us, to make good moral choices in this unpredictable, heartbreaking, wondrous ethical arena.”

That’s my full rebuttal to the claim that “Everything happens for a reason.” I stand by it, but I concede it’s pretty long-winded. I rarely say such things out loud because most people don’t want me to mansplain systematic theology, and I want to have friends. If I had to fit all of that on a mug or a t-shirt, I might just say, “Everything doesn’t happen for a reason, but God makes good use of everything.”

That’s still a lot to read on a mug or a t-shirt. Ideally we would forget about catchy theological one-liners and talk about these things in healthy conversation.

Other times, people say things that aren’t wrong in my view, but the other person’s experience doesn’t nicely match my own. Their experience of God and spiritual life is different from mine. This often happens when someone has a significant spiritual experience and says with confidence that God was involved in that moment. They experience something wondrous and say, “That was a God Shot!” A “God Shot”: this means that they had a palpable feeling that God was present, or God was working or moving in their lives, usually giving the gift of insight or revelation. This is good! But … though I am a person of deep, authentic faith, and though I believe strongly that the Spirit is active and present in my life and in our life here in this community, I don’t enjoy all that many “God Shots.” Maybe I’m just a little envious.

I confess I would like to have a clear and satisfying God Shot. I would love to stand up, look around, and say something like, “Surely the LORD is in this place – and I did not know it!” And then, as feelings of fear and awe overwhelm me, I would say, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” Then I would set up a large rock on its end, cover it with fragrant oil, and I would name this place “Bet-El,” which means the “House of God.”

Our forebear Jacob can give us pointers about having our own God Shots. He enjoyed – but also suffered – a thrilling God Shot, dreaming of a massive ramp that joined heaven and earth, with God’s messengers moving up and down the ramp. (By the way, we often translate the word for ‘ramp’ as ‘ladder,’ but there is a different Hebrew word for ‘ladder,’ and a different word for ‘ramp’, too: this detail in Jacob’s dream is mystifying, and we will never know exactly what this structure was. But that’s how dreams go, right?)

Anyway, as Jacob is dreaming of this awesome vision, God then stands beside him. But another translation says that God is “poised over” Jacob, and yet another says that God is “set against” Jacob, even as God gives Jacob a massive blessing. This is the LORD God we’re talking about, so even when good news is being announced, it is fearsome and even traumatic to encounter God. Remember how terrified the disciples were when the risen Jesus came through their locked door?

And that’s it; that’s the dream; that’s the God Shot. Jacob sees heaven and earth joined by God’s messengers, and then he encounters God in an awesome, overwhelming theophany. But if we go back in the story a bit, we notice other details that help us interpret Jacob’s experience. They could even help us discern our own God Shots, which of course we can’t force into existence – we are not God! – but which may be happening, whether we’re aware of them or not.

First, Jacob was on the run from his brother. He had conspired with his mother to steal his father Isaac’s blessing, which was supposed to go to Jacob’s twin brother Esau, who was a few minutes older than Jacob. This is a complicated, troubling story in which Jacob and his mother appear at first glance to be, well, terrible people, certainly from Esau’s perspective. (And Jacob arguably did have a whole lot to learn, at this point in his life, about personal integrity.) But in my reading, God is calling to this family from the future, and they are learning that God’s agenda is more important than traditional family customs and practices. For me, it’s about the fact that God matters more than birth order, more than the bonds of family, more than all the things we humans think should rule or guide our lives. In any case, both Jacob and his mother Rebekah find themselves mired in controversy as faithful and clever followers of God.

Second, just before his God Shot, Jacob, mired in controversy for God’s sake, chose a place to rest. He saw that the sun was setting, and he made camp somewhere. We are meant to notice that the location was unremarkable, like spending the night at a Motel 6 by the freeway. If we want to experience a powerful encounter with God (or notice one in progress!), we need not make an elaborate pilgrimage to a holy site. Any room in your house will do. The troubled parking strip along the St. Paul’s property – that would do. Metropolitan Market? Sure. 

Third, Jacob rested his head on or against a large stone. This seems tortuously uncomfortable, and so one translator says the stone wasn’t a pillow as much as a protective barrier, a rudimentary but serviceable hiding place. (Remember, Jacob is on the run from his brother.) A rough, hard stone: in my reading, this could represent Jacob struggling with a problem. Think of beating your head against a hard wall, or a painful stone in your shoe: the stone is Jacob’s battle with Esau. And yet, this conflict is just one subplot in the grand story of Jacob, who will be renamed Israel, which means not the one who strives with his brother, but the one who “strives with God.” 

So: be mired in controversy, but be on the good side of that controversy; then, find yourself anywhere, or nowhere special; and finally, rest your head on a rock, hang out on something rough or imperfect, lean against a tough little problem.

Hurrah! All of this reveals to me that I enjoyed a God Shot not all that long ago. It happened when I was working as a rector in urban ministry, engaging both my mind and my heart in a swirling vortex of opportunities and challenges as we work together to do God’s mission in this neighborhood. (“Be mired in good controversy:” check.) The place? Oh, nowhere special: the west door leading into the parish hall downstairs. That door currently has a damaged lock because somebody tried to break in several nights ago. It’s not flashy like our Roy Street entrance doors. It’s not the door to the altar area. It’s really just a side door to our basement. (“Find yourself anywhere”: check.) And finally, metaphorically speaking, I was leaning up against an unhoused neighbor and his problems. (“Rest your head on a rock”: check.)

Here’s what happened. This was the God Shot: I was helping an unhoused neighbor leave our building. He was my guest – he had been here at my invitation. But it was time for him to go, so that I could return to the upstairs office and move on with my day. He turned to leave, and all at once I was overwhelmed with wrenching compassion for all that he was enduring in that moment, on that day, in this difficult year of his life. I was shaken and even tearful for the rest of that workday, and I still reflect quite often on that moment. The heavenly ramp was there: God’s messengers moving up and down, heaven and earth trading places, all the forces of the universe meeting at this humble little door to our basement. I saw how this friend and I were bonded as God’s children, forever. I saw how agonizingly vulnerable he was, and how infuriatingly powerless I was. And God was standing next to us; poised over us; set against us.

Jesus tells us in a parable today that the wheat and the weeds grow up together, and that God sorts everything out at the end. Well this friend of mine is wheat and weed, both: a complicated person, but God’s beloved. And that goes for me, too. In my God Shot, I saw my weak resentments alongside my good, strong heart, my petty thoughts alongside my skillful mind. It all came together, right by that door. 

Controversy and difficulty alongside somebody else, in an ordinary place: that’s the recipe for a powerful spiritual encounter. Controversy and difficulty alongside somebody else, in an ordinary place. I think we will find, if we only look, that this ordinary place, St. Paul’s — Bet-El — this place is filled with the awesome presence and power of the Living God, and we did not know it.

We're loaded

Preached on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Year A), July 16, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Genesis 25:19-34
Psalm 119:105-112
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Parable of the Sower, by Thomas Bertram Poole.

In the opening scenes of the 1994 Coen Brothers film The Hudsucker Proxy, we find ourselves in a spacious boardroom on the top floor of an Art-Deco building in New York. It is 1958, but the furnishings and fashion all seem more at home in the Roaring Twenties. Men in suits are gathered around a gleaming conference table, hearing a financial analyst report on the condition of their company, Hudsucker Industries. His report is rosy. Talking above a stirring soundtrack, the financial analyst says:

“... We’re up 18 percent over last year’s third-quarter gross, and that, needless to say, is a new record. Our competition continues to flag and we continue to take up the slack. Market shares in most divisions are increasing and we have opened seven new regional offices. Our international division is also showing vigorous signs of upward movement for the last six months, and we're looking at some exciting things in R&D. Sub-franchising – don't talk to me about sub-franchising; we're making so much money in sub-franchising it isn't even funny. Our nominees and assigns continue to multiply and expand, extending our influence nationally and abroad. Our owned-and-operateds are performing far beyond our expectations both here and abroad … the Federal Tax Act of 1958 is giving us a swell writeoff … and our last debenture issue was this year’s fastest seller … So, third quarter and year-to-date, we have set a new record in sales, a new record in gross, a new record in pre-tax earnings, a new record in after-tax profits, and our stock has split twice in the past year. In short, we're loaded.”

I sometimes recall this scene when the officers of this parish submit their reports to the vestry. Now, I concede that our treasurer has never (so far!) reported that “we’re loaded.” But sometimes our reports are rosy, in their own way: in recent months, attendance has consistently ticked upward; our finances are in sound (if modest) shape; our capital campaign is going well; we’re restoring and repairing our buildings and grounds; there is a lot to encourage us these days. “St. Paul’s is on the move again!” someone said in a recent email. 

As true and as encouraging as all of this may be, none of this is the point of the Good News that we are called to proclaim in Holy Baptism. We are not in the business of success, and we know all too well that success by the world’s standards is fleeting. If we are truly doing good things here, if we are making a positive difference in the dominion of God, if we are doing well, at least by the standards of Jesus of Nazareth, we will never fully know or even measure it. So much of what we do is lost, scattered, given away. So much of what we do is done for those who will follow us here, long after we’re gone. So much of what we do – and everything we do that’s truly worth doing – is known to God alone. We are, well, we’re like a sower who casts their seeds every which way, not caring that the seeds are falling on rocky or thorny soil, heavily trafficked paths, and, yes, on good, rich soil. Will the sower even live to see the harvest? They do not know.

If we are doing anything that’s truly worth doing, we will never fully know it.

Our mission in this neighborhood goes back a hundred and thirty years, when we first formed a few blocks south of here as a mission congregation in a portable log cabin. All of those first faithful members are gone, most of them entirely unknown now. But our mission looks forward into the mystery of the future, too: we know that future generations of this community will gather under our 2024 roof, but we don’t know who they will be, or what they will care about, or think, or feel, or need. Our pastoral care and companionship ministries are shared confidentially with people near and far, and we won’t ever know what will come of those private, sacred conversations. Our weekly prayers for those in need typically hold up only first names in prayer: we don’t know who many of these people are, let alone what their struggles or challenges might be. God knows.

Yesterday I enjoyed a delightful conversation with a younger member of our parish, a twelve-year-old who was brimming with questions about the faith, God, symbols, and the meaning of life with Christ. (He is beginning to resemble the boy Jesus in the Temple. He’s good soil.) I sometimes worry that this child may be called to the priesthood – I worry for his sake, as the priestly calling is not without its frustrations, including of course the fact that most of the good he would do as a priest would be done outside of his own awareness. But that is true for all of us! In Holy Baptism, we all share in the calling of the sower who casts seeds every which way, not knowing where the seeds are falling.

The parable of the sower and the seeds can deepen our insights about life as God’s people. Even though Jesus later explains the parable to his closest followers, there is always more to draw from it. Parables are wondrous gifts that evade one complete explanation, even when Jesus himself offers one. 

I am interested, for example, in the birds who eat up the seeds that fall along the path. When I reflect on these birds, I bridle at Jesus saying that they represent “the evil one [who] comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart.” I think, “Yeah, well, of course the bird took the seeds: a girl’s gotta eat.” And after all, when a bird eats seeds and flies away, she deposits them far and wide: many plants rely on birds to find their seeds as part of their strategy for successful reproduction. And so, for us, if our ministry seems to be a flat failure, we do not know what will happen next. For all we know, those who hear the Word and fail to understand it are part of a larger story of transformation. And who knows? Tomorrow, another seed might be sown in them.

The thorns come in for critique, too, in the interpretation Jesus offers for his own parable. They represent “the cares of the world and the lure of wealth.” Fair enough! We are called in Baptism to hold God above all others as our ultimate concern, greater even than our personal safety, greater even than our beloved families and friends. But thorns are plants too, just like abundant wheat, and thorns protect roses. More crucially, thorns adorn the head of Jesus himself, who proves not to be choked by them, an example of prophetic endurance for us. All of this suggests to me that even when someone gets lost in lesser things, in the pursuit of wealth or fame, in the lure of personal gratification, in the slow chokehold of preoccupied self-centeredness – even then, God sees all of this, and God remains both present and powerful in that person’s life.

Now, sometimes the success stories in the good soil are inspiring: we are delighted when we gain new insight, when people come into this circle of faithful people and find a home here, when our voices harmonize in vigorous song, when a tween asks intelligent questions about the faith, when our prayers appear to have been answered, when a neighbor finds shelter with our help, when life rises up in this place, and the light of Christ burns brightly. This is all lovely, abundant, delightful. Still, the yield of spiritual fruit can vary. “In one case a hundredfold,” Jesus says, “in another sixty, and in another thirty.” This difference in yields of spiritual fruit – this is not just empty rhetoric or a poetic flourish. This is another gift in the parable, something to guide our reflection: sometimes we’ll enjoy spectacular, tangible victories in ministry; other times, our progress will be modest. Note also that Matthew reverses the numbers: in Mark’s version, Jesus says the yield will be thirty and sixty and a hundredfold. Why reverse it? 

I think it’s better when the numbers descend, as they do in Matthew’s telling: yes, we may find much to celebrate in our life with Christ, but other times we will feel less flush, and still other times we may yield less than a third of what we had hoped would grow. That’s honest. Matthew puts the fine print in the same font size: the parable ends on a bit of a downer. But that’s just part of the Good News: again, if we are doing anything that’s truly worth doing, we will never fully know it. 

Back in that boardroom of Hudsucker Industries, the fatcats are laughing smugly about their financial wealth. They’re on top of the world: business is booming, and they stand personally to gain great riches. But the CEO shushes their laughter, and they fall silent. Mr. Hudsucker gets up, climbs onto the conference table, stands up, gets ready, breaks into a trot, flings himself through the pane-glass window, and falls to his death on the street, dozens of floors below. We spend the movie wondering why someone so successful would suddenly take his own life. We’re invited to reflect once again on how fleeting worldly success is, and how, in the end, it is all vanity.

But we who live as God’s people, as the Body of Christ – we need little reminder of this. We learn week by week that all that we do that’s worth doing is given away. Often enough we feel futile and frustrated, the yield just a disappointing thirtyfold. After all, we praise a Savior who hung on a cross. And yet we know that in all of this helter-skelter scattering of seeds, in all of these profligate labors of love, in all of these unfinished, twisting stories of our faith and life, in all of this, no matter what happens, we know that, in short – 

we’re loaded.

The wolf in the children's story

Preached on the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9A), July 9, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Psalm 45:11-18
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

“What have we here?
said the wolf in the children’s story
stumbling upon people doing kind, small things.
Is this small monster one of us?”

This is a line from a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. I’ll share the whole poem a bit later, and as you’ve likely already seen, it’s printed in your bulletin.

“What have we here?
said the wolf in the children’s story
stumbling upon people doing kind, small things.
Is this small monster one of us?”

The wolf in the children’s story: perhaps the wolf is that exiled part of our inner selves, that ravenous, heedless, unnerving, dangerous, violent part of our inner selves, sharply critical, occasionally insightful, but rarely merciful. The wolf perceives others as it perceives itself: a “small monster.” The wolf inside me: it wants to kill or destroy; often hungry, it will eat whatever it hunts, it cares not what. Or who. “When I want to do what is good, [the wolf] lies close at hand.”

But the “people doing kind, small things”: they, too, live inside us. More than one inside each of us, most likely. I have a young, preverbal part of my psyche, a boy who loves tenderly yet fiercely. He motivates some of my purest acts of compassion. He fears my inner wolf, of course, so I usually keep them separated. (He fears your wolf even more.) But I have other psychological parts, other selves, who do kind, small things. These psychological parts have reached maturity, so they can hold their own against the wolf.

The other day, one of our unhoused neighbors asked a member of St. Paul’s for something. They asked for something that was innocent enough, but it would have crossed a boundary. They wanted to open the gate of our parking lot after hours. “No,” replied the volunteer, flatly but not unkindly. “No,” he repeated. “That’s the right answer,” my kind and wise inner selves thought. (“Clear is kind,” says Brené Brown.) When the volunteer said “No,” it wasn’t his inner wolf talking. It was his better self. Sometimes the humane, good, and even kind answer is “No.” Boundaries protect everyone, particularly those in the system with the least power. Saying “No” can be one of the “kind, small things” we do as God’s people.

Jesus speaks to all of us, inside and out, the good and the dreadful, our kind selves and our wolves. Jesus speaks to my youngest, most innocent self; he speaks to my higher-order selves who set healthy boundaries and act with skillful compassion; and yes, he speaks to the wolf. Jesus of Nazareth was all too aware of the capacity for his own lupine generation to miss the point, to stumble and fall, to “do the very thing they hate,” to choose violence and even murder rather than “kind, small things.” Further on in the Good News according to Matthew, Jesus rages against his contemporaries — does Jesus have an inner wolf? He was fully human, so, sure — and in his rage Jesus rants, “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you? How much longer must I put up with you?” And today we hear him lament their mulish resistance to the Good News. Today we hear Jesus say,

“To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’” Even now, some eighty generations after Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord Jesus Christ notices the parts of us that stumble and fall, or miss the point; and he notices the dangerous parts of us that are less innocent and less safe than that — Christ notices our worst selves, knows our worst selves, and speaks to our worst selves — he speaks to our inner wolves. Sometimes in frustration! But he sticks with us.

And Christ also speaks to our best selves. Tenderly, with God’s own universe-transforming loving-kindness, Jesus says to us — to all that is good and healthy inside us — Jesus says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

This is the Good News for people who are doing kind, small things. With God’s own fierce tenderness, our volunteers embrace our neighbors, call them by name, and reassure them truthfully that they are praying for them. With God’s own immense compassion, we care for our sick, for our friends near death, for our companions whose hearts are riven by grief. And with God’s own quiet courage, we strive to learn, grow, set down our old ways that exclude or harm people, and take up new practices of inclusion as honest and reflective allies. Yes, as God’s courageous people, we are woke. These acts, and more: these are the burdens we carry as followers of the Crucified and Risen One.

But these burdens are light.

So much has gone wrong in the world, and so often our hearts ache with grief, worry, and resignation. Yet our calling is light: we share a yoke with Jesus Christ, which means we don’t have to carry the whole load. We share the yoke with one another, which means no one needs to be alone and unsupported. And we carry on, doing kind, small things.

This brings me to Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, titled “You Are Your Own State Department.” Now, I feel obligated to say that her poem is not Christian, and when I interpret and engage her words, I speak only for myself, not the poet. But I believe in this poem she speaks to something ultimate, something universal — something that our faith, in its own way, also touches and proclaims. As you listen, let yourself imagine sharing the yoke with all of us as we work together, with God’s help, to mend this world. We can be what Nye might call “secret diplomats,” here to make things just a little better, each day carrying worries sufficient for that day, every burden made bearable by our companionship with one another, and with Christ.

You Are Your Own State Department

Each day I miss Japanese precision. Trying to arrange things
the way they would. I miss the call to prayer
at Sharjah, the large collective pause. Or
the shy strawberry vendor with rickety wooden cart,
single small lightbulb pointed at a mound of berries.
In one of China’s great cities, before dawn.

Forever I miss my Arab father’s way with mint leaves
floating in a cup of sugared tea—his delicate hands
arranging rinsed figs on a plate. What have we here?
said the wolf in the children’s story
stumbling upon people doing kind, small things.
Is this small monster one of us?

When your country does not feel cozy, what do you do?
Teresa walks more now, to feel closer to her
ground. If destination within two miles, she must
hike or take the bus. Carries apples,
extra bottles of chilled water to give away.
Kim makes one positive move a day for someone else.
I’m reading letters the ancestors wrote after arriving
in the land of freedom, words in perfect English script. . .
describing gifts they gave one another for Christmas.
Even the listing seems oddly civilized,
these 1906 Germans. . . hand-stitched embroideries for dresser
tops. Bow ties. Slippers, parlor croquet, gold ring, “pretty
inkwell.” 

 How they comforted themselves! A giant roast
made them feel more at home.
Posthumous medals of honor for
coming, continuing—could we do that?
And where would we go?
My father’s hope for Palestine
stitching my bones, “no one wakes up and
dreams of fighting around the house”—
somebody soon the steady eyes of children in Gaza,
yearning for a little extra electricity
to cool their lemons and cantaloupes, will be known.
Yes?
We talked for two hours via Google Chat,
they did not complain once. Discussing stories,
books, families, a character who does
what you might do.
Meanwhile secret diplomats are what we must be,
as a girl in Qatar once assured me,
each day slipping its blank visa into our hands.

What is most important to you?

Preached on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8A), July 2, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Genesis 22:1-14
Psalm 13
Romans 6:12-23
Matthew 10:40-42

Abraham's Sacrifice, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1655

What is most important to you?

What rises above everything else – truly, everything else – as the most important thing or task, practice or creative pursuit, person or being, in your life?

They say addiction is about putting a substance on top as the most important thing. The love of money, the love of novelty, the love of attention: Maybe you put a vice or a guilty pleasure on top as the most important thing. I know I have done that.

What is most important to you?

No one would blink an eye if you said, “My child,” or “My marriage,” or “My career.” Well, maybe putting your career first would raise an eyebrow or two. But you may understandably assume that the elevation of family above all other concerns is an unquestioned Christian value. After all, not only are there arch-conservative Christian organizations with names like “Focus on the Family,” even progressive, affirming Christian congregations like St. Paul’s place children and families at the center of parish life. “Family first,” you may say. And if you do, who would critique that?

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – that’s who.

Today we hear a deeply disturbing story from the Torah, one that sounds at best bizarre, at worst, pathological. In contemporary midrash about the story – midrash, a Hebrew word, meaning interpretations that add something to the story to deepen or even transform its meaning – in contemporary midrash, it’s been suggested that the voice of the Angel who calls to Abraham, staying his hand before he slaughters his son, is actually the voice of the boy’s mother, Sarah. Sarah is outraged that her husband would do such a dreadful thing, and as she rises up in power to stop him, her voice arcs into the heavens, crying out, “Do not lay your hand on the boy!” Perhaps this interpretation honors the idea that a mother would never dream of such an atrocity, even if a father might do so. But in my experience, the passion a parent feels for the life and health of their child transcends gender. Would my father slaughter me to demonstrate his faith in God? I doubt he would even imagine such a thing.

But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob tests a father in just this way. God tests Abraham by demanding he take his son’s life, and though God intervenes at the last moment, Abraham passes the test. No one – nothing – is more important to Abraham than God. 

A simple (and persuasive) interpretation of this story is that in recounting Abraham’s experience on Mount Moriah, the Torah condemns child sacrifice, a practice that existed in the era when this story was first told and recorded. Sure, that’s plausible, and it is reassuring whenever we see the ancient Hebrews rising above the domestic gods and less-than-inspiring spiritual practices of their Bronze-Age neighbors. Moreover, in our own age, we do not protect children from slaughter. This is a good – and tragically necessary – teaching for us.

And of course there is a Christian interpretation of the story: the ram that takes the sacrificial place of the boy foreshadows Jesus, the beloved Son of God, who is slaughtered yet raised up in resurrected life, saving humanity from Sin and Death. We proclaim this story every Easter at the Great Vigil, calling it a “story of salvation.” The story of the binding of Isaac, interpreted through this Christian lens, helps us grasp the troubling theology of the cross, the idea that Jesus gave away everything, even his life, that others might live; and that we in turn should do the same.

But as valuable and insightful as these interpretations are, this remains a dreadful story. It’s not just dreadful that a parent would come close to slaughtering his own child; it is dreadful to imagine that God would assume God’s own ultimate importance in human life so radically, so totally, that even the evolved and instinctive bond between parent and child pales by comparison. Even if this is just a test, and even if God knows that Abraham will prove himself worthy, it is a dreadful test. If God tells you to do something, you do it – that much seems logical and even sensible. But if God tells you to kill your miraculous only child, who blessed you with life and hope in your old age – this is all so terrible to imagine. Why would God do or say such things? And why would Abraham comply?

Why do we keep this story around?

But there’s really little point in wondering all this if we can’t understand why we would place God on top as our ultimate concern in the first place. If we understand why God matters most, or why it matters that God matters most, then perhaps we could begin to understand Abraham’s inhuman behavior. God matters most: What does that mean? What would the world be like if God matters most? What would our lives be like? 

I offer two answers. If God matters most to us, then 1) our truest identity is caught up in God, not nation or personal identity or even family; and 2) we are saved by our ultimate trust in God.

First, identity: we share with one another an indelible identity in our covenant with the God of Israel, and — for us Christians — our identity as those who are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever. This identity is ultimate: that means it far transcends lesser identities like nationality, ethnicity, gender, political affiliation, and yes, even family. (There will never be a U.S. flag in this room, not even on the Fourth of July.) Our other identities teach us values and say something truthful about us, but our identity with God runs deeper. God makes us who we are, and teaches us God’s values.

Consider the value of unconditional love between parent and child. Abraham is Isaac’s parent, and what’s more, Isaac is a child of hope against hope: Isaac’s parents had long since given up their dream of children before God told them they would have Isaac. But their identity as God’s own, and as the forebears of God’s people, matters more. To parent a nation of God’s people, they need to place that commitment above being the parents of a human child.

For us, what might ultimate identity with God look like, and what values might it supplant? Well, we are “Christ’s own forever:” so we are bound to him even as he dies in self-giving love. Therefore, giving ourselves away in love is more important than anything or anyone else. We are not, first and foremost, U.S. Americans, or members of political parties, or even families! In our essence, we follow the Way of the Cross, even if it separates us from so much we hold dear.

And second, if God matters most to us, we practice ultimate trust in God, no matter what. Now, before you say you trust God, can you count all the things from which God doesn’t necessarily save us? My mother died too young of cancer; most of us have suffered trauma; and if war, injustice, and oppression are defeated at the cross, they nevertheless are taking their time going away. We can’t expect magical rescues or fixes. And yet we trust that “God will provide.” Provide: a flat English translation of the Hebrew ra’a, which means not only the provision of materials or benefits, but revelation: God does not provide things as much as reveal God’s own self to us, and we are called to trust that God will do this.

And so, in my reading of this disturbing story, Abraham saying “God will provide, God will reveal” is not a faith statement that God will spare his son. It is a faith statement that God will be there throughout: no matter how awful our experiences, God will reveal God’s own companionship; God will reveal a path to wisdom; and — through Christ — God will powerfully transform us from who we were into who we are. And so my mother’s death by cancer is not the last word for her or for those who love her; she found wisdom on that hard road, and died in God’s presence; and because we trust God more than even our bonds of kinship, all that is essential in my mother’s life and witness continues to be revealed in those who grieve her death. 

And so perhaps we could do further midrash on this story, and imagine Abraham failing to hear the Angel’s — or Sarah’s — warnings. Before they could stop him, he tragically kills Isaac, plunging himself and his spouse into unimaginable despair. Well, even then, God would provide. God would reveal. God would raise up a nation from this couple, and form God’s people from these parents. Perhaps a daughter, or an adoption, or — hey, this is midrash, we can dream big — perhaps a resurrection.

Which brings us back to Jesus, the One whose sign is indelibly marked on the foreheads of the baptized, the One who seals us with ultimate identity and cultivates in us ultimate trust in God: Jesus is slaughtered, yet he is raised. God in Jesus is more important — and more powerful — than even death itself. 

Dreadful? Oh, yes. God is not tame; the Way of the Cross is not easy; we suffer much as God’s people. But God will provide. God will reveal. Wisdom will find us. Life will triumph over death. And because we are bound to one another in Christ, we can trust fully that among the many things God provides, God gives us each other, forever.

Jewels, Precious Jewels

Remarks for Shared Homily at the 5:00pm Mass given on the Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Apostles (transferred) by Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D.

2 Timothy 4:1-8; John 21:15-19

This might be a terrible way to launch a sermon, but I have to confess I don’t remember the specifics of a single sermon I heard preached as a child – and growing up in the Church of the Nazarene, I heard sermons every week, Sunday morning and evening, Wednesday night prayer meeting too. But I do remember the hymns we sang. I could probably retrieve a hundred or so, at least their first lines or refrains.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I attended the liturgy at Seattle University celebrating and lamenting the closing of the graduate School of Theology and Ministry where I used to teach and the queer, Black artist who provided the music, Stephanie Anne Johnson, sang a hymn I hadn’t heard or thought about in fifty years. It’s entitled “Jewels,” which is also the name of Johnson’s newest album. I immediately recalled the first verse and refrain from my childhood:

When He cometh, when He cometh / To make up His jewels,

All His jewels, precious jewels, / His loved and His own. //

Like the stars of the morning, / His bright crown adorning,

They shall shine in their beauty, / Bright gems for His crown.

Stephanie Anne Johnson, with their acoustic guitar, did a blues-y, breath-y, Black church and country-fied version of the hymn. I’ll play it for you on my phone after mass, if you’d like.

When I got home from the liturgy, I had to look up the hymn in one of my old Nazarene hymnals. [Holding up “Worship in Song” hymnal and then paging through it.] This is not the 1950s hymnal I grew up with, but the one that replaced it in 1972. Still, there it is, “Jewels,” #494 in a little five-page section of hymns for and about children. Then I turned the page to #495, a hymn that begins: “Our church is such a friendly place; It’s where I love to be.” Words by Elizabeth B. Jones – my maternal grandmother. And when I flipped back to the inside cover, there she had written her name: Elizabeth B. Jones. This was my grandmother’s copy of the hymnal. I have no idea when or why it came to me, but this family history coupled with Stephanie Anne Johnson’s redition, forced me to sit a while with the hymn “Jewels.”

It’s an old hymn, with words written by William O. Cushing back in 1854. So, I was not surprised to find lots of capital H “His-es” throughout, which always puts me off a bit: His jewels / His loved and His own / His crown. Although in this case, at least, they all refer to Jesus rather than God “the Father.”

In the first verse: When He cometh, when He cometh / To make up His jewels: “make up” his jewels? Why that verb?

The second verse is a bit more troubling. He will gather, He will gather / The gems for his kingdom: / All the pure ones, all the bright ones, / His loved and His own. Which might suggest there are others, not so pure and bright, but dirty and dull, who Jesus won’t gather. I hope that’s not what Cushing meant.

The third verse makes explicit the connection between children and jewels:

Little children, little children / Who love their Redeemer / Are the jewels, precious jewels, / His loved and His own.

But what most intrigues and entices me about “Jewels” is how this hymn reverses a typical way of imagining us and our lives in relation to Jesus. Think of another old hymn: “Crown Him with many crowns, the Lamb upon His throne.” Little old us paying due allegiance to a high and mighty Lord Jesus, and showing proper deference. Or, how about this one: “So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross, / ‘Til my trophies at last I lay down. / I will cling to the old rugged cross, / And exchange it someday for a crown.” Jesus crowning us with what belongs rightfully and truly to “Him.” Of course there’s truth in both those notions. But listen again to what “Jewels” proposes:

When he cometh, when he cometh / To make up His jewels,

All His jewels, precious jewels, / His loved and His own. //

Like the stars of the morning, / His bright crown adorning,

They shall shine in their beauty, / Bright gems for His crown.

We are the jewels in Jesus’ crown. We adorn him, not just he us. We adorn Jesus by shining with our innate beauty. Like the stars of the morning. How do they adorn Jesus? They just be themselves and act themselves and shine with their own beauty. Us too, in all our unique differences one from one another, and yet also knit together in unity by God’s Spirit. That should be a source of deep pride for us, especially at the end of this Pride Month.

And maybe even Saint Peter and Saint Paul who we commemorate today. What if we imagined them not as bearded men, but as little children, as jewels, as gems for Jesus’ crown. Peter with the belt someone else fastened around him, gracefully letting go, closing the distance from those people he’d rather have avoided. Paul holding on tenaciously, finishing the race, keeping the faith: a libation, a cup of wine, a chalice poured out for God and other people. Pure and bright, both in their own ways.

Stephanie Anne Johnson seems to agree, given the few slight changes they make to the 19th century text of “Jewels. “So let’s be children, little children,” Johnson sings; and “We’re those pure ones, we’re those bright ones, / his loved and his own.”

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So, I wonder if and how my trip down memory lane with the hymn “Jewels” engages your life and your experience?

And I wonder how with pride, capital P “Pride,” we might each shine in our own unique beauty – like the stars of the morning – and adorn the crown Jesus wears?

I invite your reflections.

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Resources:

stephanieannejohnsonmusic.com

“Worship in Song: Hymnal” (Lillenas Publishing Co. 1972).

Foreign Country and Homeland

Sermon given Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Apostles (transferred) by Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D.

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

Auslӓnder!

All these years later, I can still hear the irritation, contempt even, in her voice. Auslӓnder. Foreigners. She was an attendant at the Pergamon Museum in East Berlin – back when Germany was divided by the Iron Curtain and there still was an East Berlin. It’s true, my little family and I had arrived thirty minutes before closing. But we really wanted to catch a glimpse of those treasures of the ancient world: the bust of Nefertiti, the Ishtar Gate that once led into Babylon. Just when the attendant was ready to be done for the day. Can you hear it even in the German word she used? Auslӓnder. Out-landers. Outsiders. Foreigners. I held my tongue, but felt like responding: “Ja, aber kann ich ziemlich gut Deutsch sprechen. / Yes, but I can speak reasonably good German.” After years of study and eight months of making myself at home – at least a little bit – in that foreign country. Of course, there’s the deeper issue of why an American graduate student with spouse and two young daughters would be able to view the wonders of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in a museum in central Europe. We’ll come back to that later. For now, let the attendant’s word ring in your ears as it does in mine: Auslӓnder!

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A second century document known as the Letter to Diognetus speaks of Christians as foreigners. Back at a time when they were a tiny, non-conformist minority within the Roman Empire, the anonymous author defends Christians against the charge that they live off somewhere in cities of their own, speaking some different language, and describes their paradoxical citizenship. They dwell in their own countries, the Letter asserts, but only as sojourners. For to the follower of Jesus, “every foreign country is a homeland, and every homeland is a foreign country.” In other words, there’s something odd socially and politically about being a Christian. Christians can and should be at home, can and should be active participants in any society; for the Christian calling is always and everywhere to love God with one’s whole being and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. And yet the Christian will never be fully at home in any society or under any form of government, because each and every human political system falls short of the reign of God’s justice and peace. Every homeland a foreign country and every foreign country a homeland.

Now the Letter to Diognetus could well have cited Saint Peter and Saint Paul – who we commemorate today – as examples of this odd citizenship, this paradoxical stance toward society and government. Both apostles end up in Rome during the corrupt, brutal, and chaotic reign of emperor Nero and are put to death for following a different Lord, the Lord Jesus. But Peter and Paul negotiate foreign country and homeland in different ways.

Peter was a backwater Galilean fisherman from the edge of the Roman empire, while Paul was a cosmopolitan rabbi and Roman citizen. Some might have dismissed Peter as a hick or a yahoo. Others, in turn, might have despised Paul as one of those coastal elites. Despite their different social locations, however, Peter and Paul shared a common Hebrew heritage of moving back and forth between homeland and foreign country. Their ancestors Abraham and Sarah just picked up and left home in Haran and set off for a foreign country God promised to show them. Then later, Jacob and Leah and Rachel and all their children were forced to flee that promised land of Canaan for Egypt during a time of famine. Over the years, guests became slaves. Until Moses led them out of bondage and back home again. For a while, at least, until the cycle repeats – next time with defeat and displacement by the Babylonian Empire. Exodus and exile. Return and restoration. From foreign countries and to foreign countries. Leaving home behind and making a new home. But always guided by the promise we heard from Ezekiel: that God would seek out the people and rescue them from all the countries to which they had been scattered and bring them once more to their own land. That God will search for the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured, and strengthen the weak (34:11-16).

Peter was settled in his Galilean homeland only to find it a foreign country under Roman occupation. Paul had made the Greco-Roman world, in all of its cultural foreign-ness, a homeland; even though that didn’t prevent him from being brought in chains to the heart of the empire of which he was a citizen.

Peter teaches how to negotiate homeland as foreign country by gracefully letting go. Peter returns home to Galilee after Jesus’ crucifixion and takes up fishing again. And there, just as Jesus promised, Peter reunites with Jesus. Jesus has breakfast ready on the seashore and a thrice-repeated question: Simon son of John, do you love me? Jesus continues: “Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go” (John 21:15-19). Letting go, when age or change or circumstance re-makes the one who was once at home and in control; re-makes Peter such that he can no longer dress himself and choose where to go and what to do.

Paul teaches how to hold on tenaciously in order to negotiate foreign country as homeland. “Proclaim the message,” Paul writes Timothy from his prison cell. “Be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable. Convince. Rebuke. Encourage….I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:2, 7).

But both Peter and Paul’s citizenship remains paradoxical. By letting go, Peter closes the distance between himself and those people he’d rather avoid: Jesus on trial for his life; Cornelius the Roman centurion and his Gentile household; even Paul the apostle to the Gentiles. Peter once knew how to keep his distance and stay ritually pure. He was good at fastening his own belt. But distance made for denial. When someone else fastens the belt around him, a path, a road appears – not to where Peter planned to go, but to a foreign country Jesus will show him. A road that leads to other people, to difference, to love.

By holding on, Paul safeguards something he can then offer others. “As for me,” he confides, “I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come” (2 Timothy 4:6). A libation. A cup of wine, a chalice, ritually presented to God or the gods by ancient Hebrews and Romans. If Paul, if Paul’s very life, is poured out as a libation, then it is not being squandered. Instead, Paul bestows his life upon other people as a precious and unexpected gift. And just as unexpectedly, the same Jesus who once turned water into wine, promises to transform the executioner’s sword awaiting Paul into “a crown of righteousness” (4:8).

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Debra and I just returned home from a week-long trip to Olathe, Kansas. It often felt like a foreign country, far from Seattle and St. Paul’s. There were lots of white guys wearing t-shirts, many with interwoven religious and political messages. One read: “Jesus loves me and my guns.” Debra quipped: “Well, he’s half right.” Another: “Jesus is my savior. Trump is my president. Biden is just a resident.” I don’t speak that foreign language. But, at the same time, our adopted Starbucks coffee shop – at 135th Street and Black Bob Road (yes, Black Bob Road, that’s its name) – had a chalk drawing on its welcome board celebrating Pride Month with lots of little colorful balloons, and there was an active American Sign Language table for the deaf and an employee who could communicate by signing. That made us feel more at home for an hour or so each day.

And at first, the assisted living facility where my soon-to-be 95 year old father with his late onset Alzheimer’s lives, hardly felt like home – even though the primary reason for the trip was to be with Dad again. My siblings and I with our spouses worried that we shouldn’t go visit him all at the same time because it might just confuse him. It turned out, the more we were with him, all together, interacting with each other, day by day, the more alert he became, more engaged, more fully himself – so that as we were saying our good-byes that last afternoon, he was able to volunteer: “Thank you so much for coming here to see me. Bless you.”

On the wider stage of world history, why were those antiquities from Egypt and Babylon on display in that museum in Berlin rather than in Cairo or Baghdad? Because of centuries of European colonialism, of course, and its many forms of theft of other peoples’ homelands. In North America, truly native born, indigenous folk have become a tiny minority, pushed to the brink of disappearance by the rapacious behavior of millions of white settlers, including my own ancestors. Native Americans marginalized by the outsiders who displaced them, put them down and in their place alongside black and brown people removed from their homelands physically or economically. Maybe all it takes to make us feel like we’re in a foreign country is to follow the daily news about our supposedly democratic institutions or take a walk through this neighborhood around St. Paul’s. What happened to our sense of the common good?

But here’s the hope I cling to. That the God of Jesus and Ezekiel does still seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured, and strengthen the weak. That Jesus incarnates both Peter’s belt and Paul’s chalice, closing the distance and pouring out his very life for us. That as both Auslӓnder and native born, Jesus makes his home in our lives and in our world. Ancient and timely words from the Letter to Diognetus again: “Do you think that Jesus was sent by God to establish some sort of political tyranny, to inspire fear and terror? Not so….Therefore, Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity either in locality or in speech or in customs….Every foreign country is a homeland to them, and every homeland is a foreign country.”

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Resource:

Jaroslav Pelikan discusses and quotes from the “Letter to Diognetus” in his book “Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture” (Yale University Press, 1985), pages 49-50.

God is coming: bake bread

Preached on the Third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6A), June 18, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Genesis 18:1-15
Psalm 116:1, 10-17
Romans 5:1-8
Matthew 9:35-10:8

The St. Paul’s Centennial Garden, where so many encounters with the divine take place.

This week, an unhoused neighbor and I had words. Neither of us was in a happy mood. It wasn’t a pleasant conversation. This is at least partly because it happened at the wrong time of day.

I’ve noticed that often I follow a daily emotional arc, in my effort to get ahead of the chaos that swirls around Uptown in these hard times. In the early morning I feel quiet, thoughtful, insightful, sometimes even serene. Then, at the proper beginning of the workday, I feel anger: a righteous anger, something akin to a “mama bear,” even though I am not a mama, strictly speaking. As the sun reaches its zenith, I feel more regulated and steady, working alongside staff and volunteers with level-headed reliability. For an hour or so in the mid-afternoon, I feel tired, in need of rest. Then I rally in the late afternoon and feel energized and in good humor, leading to a relaxing evening with follow-ups and a look at the next day’s tasks. That’s the pattern; that’s the arc. I’ve noticed that other leaders here at St. Paul’s follow their own emotional arcs, but I’ll let them describe their own experiences.

In any case, one day this week, an unhoused neighbor bumped into me during my mama-bear hour. Now, even at the wrong time of day, I rarely lose my professional composure, give or take an eye roll, and I did not lose it in this encounter. But I was, let’s say, stern, when the neighbor saw me cleaning up our property and was outraged that I was taking the debris that he thought was his. He chose to call me something designed to provoke a strong reaction, a dreadfully bad name, one I can’t even type out on my laptop, let alone repeat out loud. My response was a gruff “uh huh, call me that all you want,” and I continued cleaning up. That was it.

Not earth-shattering, no. Just a grumpy exchange. But I don’t like those interactions. I’m a pastor. I’ve been a counselor. I have training in reconciliation and communication. If there’s one thing I like the least in our mission work – apart from the staggering human suffering I see – it is the scarcity of positive, constructive conversations with our ministry partners who live outside. I wish we all could talk more, and really hear one another. And I strive to listen better myself.

And – I confess I harbor a somewhat ridiculous hope for stirring dialogue in our conversations around the neighborhood, for flashes of inspiration and insight, for a conversation that would jump off the page of a novel or be featured in a clip on Oscar night. I know this is all base vanity. Most everything outside these doors is grounded, concrete, earthy – because it needs to be. The countless people who live and work here need to address important practical concerns. That’s not to say it’s not spiritual work: quite the contrary. But God’s Spirit lies down in deep humility along these urban streets. Give someone a blanket, and listen to what they have to tell you, what they have to give you, hidden in a conversation about the basic needs we all have. That can be a top-of-the-mountain spiritual experience. It really, truly can. But you have to want it. You have to accept that the Spirit moves, but she moves down low, in the dust and dirt of the struggling neighborhood.

And that brings me to the real problem I was having in that gruff exchange with our neighbor. I forgot the wisdom of the Torah, where God’s people meet God in deep humility. Specifically, I forgot the teachings of our foremother Sarah. Just before a momentous encounter with the divine, she responded positively to Abraham’s hurried request, and she “made ready quickly three measures of choice flour, kneaded it, and made cakes.” This is Sarah’s grounded, concrete, earthy teaching: When an important encounter with the divine is about to happen, prepare food.

If God is coming, bake bread.

Sometimes, of course, the bread we bake to welcome the divine is not literally bread. But it’s often still food of some kind. In the spiritual work of recovery from alcoholism, for example, Sarah’s bread takes the form of hard candy. The practical AA literature suggests setting out a bowl of candy to help recovering alcoholics raise their blood sugar, and to give them something to do with their palettes. Much of a substance-abuse disorder is caught up in the bodily mechanics of drinking or using, and the hard candy gives the person a little bit of that experience – but safely. My favorite hard candy is grape Jolly Ranchers: for me, grape Jolly Ranchers are as holy as Sarah’s three quick-bread cakes. They help make possible my encounter, in sobriety, with the Holy Spirit.

Oprah has famously said that she grew up in a family that always placed food at the center, in every celebration, in every wedding and funeral, in every meaningful encounter. And who is Oprah but a contemporary foremother, teaching God’s people the basics of spiritual practice?

A friend of mine, someone far less famous than the matriarchs Oprah and Sarah but someone who, as a mother, comes honestly by the title of “mama bear,” told me this about herself: “I will always feed my children,” she said. She said this in the context of our conversation about so-called “tough love,” in which the parent sets hard boundaries with the teen or adult child when they are suffering from substance-abuse disorders, mental illness, and the deadly, untreated, comorbid diagnoses that so often lead people into unsheltered living on the streets. Strong boundaries matter: “If my child were ever to come to me off the street, demanding money for drugs,” my friend said, “I would not give her money for drugs. But I would feed her dinner. I will always feed my children.” This mother knows in her bones that food is the beginning of a spiritual path, a spiritual conversation, a spiritual connection with the divine. No matter what, she and her children will always enjoy this connection, together.

So again, here is the teaching: When an important encounter with the divine is about to happen, prepare food.

If God is coming, bake bread. 

And so, finally, near the end of the week, a couple of emotional arcs after our grumpy conversation, I finally remembered the Torah. I remembered Foremother Sarah’s example. (And I remembered that people here at St. Paul’s buy Oreo cookies for me.) So I went downstairs, got a snack pack and two bottles of water from our SPiN storage room, and took them to the neighbor. And once again, whether I needed to learn it or not, I got the dull lesson that this mission is not about magic moments: the unhoused neighbor pointedly did not say thank you. I said, “Here are some snacks and water,” he took the snacks and water, he said nothing at all, and that was the end of our exchange. “You’re welcome,” I mumbled inaudibly (well, I dearly hope it was inaudible), and I suppressed an eye roll.

But then, but then! On Friday, late in the evening when I was greeting a new security guard we’ve hired to safeguard not only our property but the safety of so many of our friends who live outside, I ran into this unhoused person a third time. This time he asked me a question, beginning with the title “pastor.” “Pastor,” he began, and then he asked his question. We were at peace. The Spirit arrived. (Well, she’s been here all along. She was revealed.) The three strange beings who visited Sarah and Abraham at the oaks of Mamre: there they were, in our own labyrinth garden. We did not have a particularly memorable conversation, this unhoused neighbor and I. He is not capable of very many memorable conversations, which I say not to disparage him at all, but only to be realistic about his limitations as he suffers with so many untreated illnesses and losses. But the awful epithet was replaced with the word “pastor,” and for a moment I felt like a pastor – a shepherd – and I sensed that he was once again someone under my protection, and no longer a wolf that I snarl at when the morning sun stirs my angry defenses. And I was someone who could learn something from him, too.

Go, then, good shepherds, as Jesus has commanded us to go. “Cure the sick,” Jesus says, “raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” If Jesus were to say this in my hearing, I would add some commands: Go, I would say – and Go I do say! – Go, and cast out the demons inside you, not just the ones haunting others. And then hand out Jolly Ranchers, hand out snack packs, feed your wayward children, gather your family around a table laden with food, carry the gifts of food and drink forward to this Table; make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes. An important encounter with the divine is about to happen. We must bake bread.

You want a piece of me?

Preached on the Second Sunday after Pentecost (Year A), June 11, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Genesis 12:1-9
Psalm 33:1-12
Romans 4:13-25
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Jerry Stiller as Frank Costanza, in “Seinfeld.”

Some time ago I was talking with someone about renting our space downstairs, and we were discussing the complications of parking and basic safety, given the various challenges posed by our neighborhood, which is of course on the front lines of the ongoing Seattle housing crisis. After several generations of national political and cultural conflict, major cities like Seattle have seen a slow, yet devastating, dismantling of the social contract: we simply do not live in a nation that reliably works together, giving people a hand when they need one, everyone doing their part, all citizens understanding that each of us receives good things from the whole, so each of us therefore should give and serve; we should do our part.

Of course this has always been a problem, down the whole history of the United States, and if I have failed to see that, it is only because I have enjoyed privileges that allow me to look away. Founded by slave owners, our nation gave the vote to women only about a century ago, and we seem always to have been quarreling with one another about how best to build and sustain a just society. It may just seem even worse now, and worse for more people, but the struggle has endured throughout this country’s relatively short life. 

St. Paul’s is one of countless faith communities that work to cover the gaps, helping our neighbors while other institutions fall short, or even work against the causes we champion. This is what it was like for Jesus and his followers, too. 

That’s the big picture. But in my conversation with the person who wanted to rent our space — like most conversations around the neighborhood these days — the stated topics were small and practical: where will people park? Are they safe walking from their car to our bridge door? How do they handle unwelcome visitors who might walk in during their event?

And then this person said something like this: “It’s a shame,” he said, “that quiet little churches like yours have to deal with all this.” “I’m sorry?” I replied. He clarified: “Well, you know, churches that are getting older, having to cope with all this.”

“Older.” “Little.” “Quiet.” These were not flattering descriptions of this parish I so passionately love and serve. An image flashed in my mind, as I suppressed my irritation at someone who evidently was condescending to us. I indulged a little fantasy. For one delightful moment I imagined responding to this person like the legendary comedian Jerry Stiller, who memorably played George’s father, Frank Costanza, on Seinfeld in the 1990s. When Elaine insulted his son George in the final scene of one episode, Frank looked at her in outrage and said something I honestly would love to have said to this guy, who called my beloved parish “older, little, and quiet.” Frank says to Elaine, “Are you sayin’ … you want a piece of me?” Elaine gives him a look and says, “I could drop you like a bag of dirt.” And Frank says, “You want a piece of me? You got it!”

Of course that’s not how Jesus responds to condescension. They laugh at him when he says the little girl is only sleeping, that she is not dead. Of course she is dead by their reckoning: they are world-wise in a weary world. Of course she is dead. Jesus sounds like a fool, a Pollyanna, a frivolous optimist. And anyway did you see him talking to that woman with a hemorrhage? He is ridiculous; the hemorrhaging woman is ridiculous; that the dead girl is just sleeping is ridiculous. They laugh at him. But Jesus rises above it. He is no Frank Constanza. He just keeps on doing his ministry, noticing and responding to the people who need it the most.

And Jesus notices and responds to sinners. “Sinners”: this is a complicated word. It doesn’t only mean wrongdoers. Depending on where it appears in God’s Word, it can mean wrongdoers; or it can refer to people like Judas who refuse to abide in God’s love; or it could be outcasts in a class-conscious society; or it could be a term for all of humanity buckling under the Power of Sin: we can all relate to the experience of being our lesser selves, messing up, getting lost. The world-wise people with good reputations criticize Jesus for befriending “sinners” like poor Matthew who sits in a tax booth colluding with the hateful empire, probably because he inherited the family business, and so he’s doomed to ply his father’s trade. Jesus doesn’t care if they criticize; he doesn’t care if they laugh. He’s here for Matthew, for the hemorrhaging woman, for the feverish girl asleep on her sickbed. Jesus knows these neighbors need a powerful community of support, not just a clutch of “quiet, little, older” people.

And those who laugh at Jesus — how quickly they forget Abraham, the father of many nations, so old that he was “as good as dead,” by the standards of the condescending world. God chose ancient Abraham and elderly Sarah to parent a whole nation, and eventually to gather all nations into God’s embrace. Abraham: another laughable old fool. 

So, who are you? Are you decrepit Abraham or doddering Sarah, overlooked — or looked upon with condescending pity — by our ageist world? Maybe you’re the woman who can’t stop the bleeding: you’re battling chronic illness, and in our ableist culture you are well aware of your low status. Maybe you’re the sleeping girl: vulnerable, weak, unable to advocate for yourself. Or you’re her father, frantically trying to help your vulnerable neighbor. Or you’re sitting in your proverbial tax-collector’s booth, toiling your life away as you uneasily contemplate how your labor perpetuates an unjust and even cruel economy.

If you resemble any of these laughable people, hear this Good News: Jesus isn’t writing you off as dead. Jesus is your truest friend, and he is here to help you. Jesus is visible and tangible — he is incarnate — in this mighty assembly, the Body of Christ. This week a few of us lent our aid to an unhoused neighbor who suffered a catastrophic loss. At one point this person was sobbing with me on the phone, and I wasn’t the only one he called. It is horrible to beg for one’s life. He literally cried out to us, and we did not not look down with contempt, or shrink away in fear. 

Our response was not “little” or “quiet.” We were the sleeping girl’s father in this week’s crisis with this neighbor. We were advocating forcefully — and sometimes frantically — for someone we love who is achingly, agonizingly vulnerable, as close to death as that centenarian nomad called Abraham, who (Paul tells us) “hoped against hope,” even though his body was “as good as dead.” 

I am fiercely proud of all that we do in this youthful, vital community of faith. I am profoundly inspired and motivated by all that we are, and how we live out what we believe. Our love for our neighbors rises up in might from this mission base; our exquisitely musical prayers ring through creation; our passion — and our compassion — is a sign of the Dominion of God, right here. We often observe solemn silence, but we are not quiet. We are not little. We are not older. Now, sure, some of us are full of years; some of our strongest leaders are senior citizens. But others of us are not yet even ten years old, and all of us are mighty oaks like Abraham and Sarah, formed and sent to proclaim Good News with power and purpose.

God transforms the quiet, little, older ones, so that they will then transform this world. God in Jesus draws alongside hapless government officials and unwell women and ailing children and old crones, clothing them in dignity and raising them up as part of a loud, large, and vigorous mission. We have no reason to be modest about all that God is doing here, with and for us, and for our friends who live outside, and for all who cry out in need. And that’s why, if someone looks down on anyone in this house of God; if someone condescends to my friends at this gate of heaven — whenever someone does that, I may just say, with the fire of God’s own Spirit: “You want a piece of me? You got it!”

In the Beginning, Here and Now

Remarks for Shared Homily at the 5:00pm Mass

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Trinity Sunday (Year A)

June 4, 2023

Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D.

The Trinity, by Lance McNeel

Creation stories are on my mind this evening. We hear Genesis chapter 1 with its “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth” read each year at the Easter Vigil. But the Sunday lectionary offers us just one opportunity every three years to engage this Hebrew creation story as a 5pm community and share our reflections. Let’s take advantage of our opportunity this Trinity Sunday in Year A.

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Creation stories are ancient. Ancestral. Passed down across centuries, carrying the wisdom of our elders. Creation stories reach back to a primordial past to account for the present. Creation stories try and explain why things are the way they are here and now in light of how they came to be back in the beginning. But creation stories always narrate their “in the beginning” from a particular historical and cultural vantage point. We humans create creation stories in our own image to explain a way of being in the world.

Take the creation story of the Dunne-za, an aboriginal people from the subarctic region of western Canada – a hunting culture. In the beginning, their story goes, things were different from the way they are here and now. Roles were reversed: giant animals hunted and killed human beings. Until Saya, mythic hero of the Dunne-za, steps on to the primordial scene – the first person to follow the trails of animals, the first person with knowledge, the first hunter. Saya boldly stalked the giant animals who had been preying on humans. After slaying one enormous beast, Saya scattered its flesh in all directions and called out the names of the wild animals that populate Dunne-za lands to this day, and brought them into being: rabbits and deer, weasels and wolverines, lynx and cougar. The giant animals Saya did not kill, he pursued relentlessly until, in their desperation, they sought refuge under the surface of the earth. There the great beasts rested. You can still see the contours of their bodies in the hills and valleys and mountains of Dunne-za lands.

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Now I know the historical and cultural context of Genesis 1 differs dramatically from that of Saya the first hunter. In fact, the Dunne-za narrative might remind us more of that other Hebrew creation story in Genesis 2 and 3, with its God who walks in a garden at the time of the evening breeze and has hands to form the first human being from the dirt and then take one of the man’s ribs to make the first woman. The God of Genesis 1 is less anthropomorphic, more cosmic, and, well, up there. The story itself is so neat and symmetrical; so logical and step by step – six days of creation, evening and morning. Light. Sky, seas, and dry land. Plant life. Sun and moon. Water creatures and air creatures. Land creatures and human beings. And then God rested on the seventh day. So familiar. Still, with my ears tuned a bit differently by the story of Saya, I hear three intriguing ideas in Genesis 1.

First, God creates by separating. God allows, no encourages, mandates even that each element, light and darkness, waters above and below the dome of the sky, be itself, fully, unique and not diminished or coopted by another. As if God said, let there be variety and difference. Dignity in diversity. Diverse dignity.

But second, God also creates by gathering together – the seas in their own place and the dry land in its. As if to proclaim: all that make up these particular aspects of the world are richer in solidarity than if they remained scattered; more productive and abundant together than apart.

And third, the God of Genesis 1 creates by creating co-creators. Yes, let there be light, God says, and there was light, just like that. More often in the story, however, God says things like: let the waters bring forth great sea monsters and everything with which the waters swarm; and let every winged bird of every kind fly above the earth and across the sky. Let the earth bring forth green plants and trees, cattle and creeping things and wild animals – and let them all, the creatures of land and air and water, continue and expand God’s creative work by being fruitful and multiplying. So, too, God’s human co-creators, who are singled out in the story for special attention: created in the image of God with dominion over the other creatures, told to fill the earth and subdue it, whatever those words meant to the ancient Hebrews or might mean to us now. After all, this is a human creation story, told from our vantage point. I wonder how the cattle and green plants, or the sea monsters and birds, would narrate God’s creative work?

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Creation stories are ancient and ancestral. But they can grow old and tired and out of touch with the times. Creation stories try and explain why things are the way they are, but often end up reinforcing social, political, and economic structures that elevate and privilege some people, while oppressing others. So creation stories sometimes need to be questioned and critiqued – even turned back upon themselves. An extreme example would be Jim Jones, founder and cult leader of the Peoples Temple. Jones used to preach a parody of Genesis 2 and 3 every six months to get his people, 75% of whom were black, to laugh at the cruel and dominating “Sky God” of the King James Bible and break free of “Him.” In Jones’ version, the serpent is not the tempter of the first humans but one who brings revolutionary knowledge of liberation from slavish obedience to racist and capitalist authority. Of course, Jones led the Peoples Temple to communal suicide, rather than salvation, becoming himself an image of the tyrannical god he originally critiqued. More helpful are the generations of activist leaders who insist that the Genesis 1 story of God creating humankind in God’s own image enshrines the truly revolutionary idea that all human beings, not some, possess equal divine dignity despite the racism, patriarchy, and homophobia of the established order. I’d love to add to the warning of centuries of Christian wedding ceremonies: “those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder” (BCP 428), an alternate and liberating affirmation of Genesis 1: what God has separated in order to give each their unique dignity in diversity, let no one join together, let no one incorporate and dilute to the advantage of men over women, white folk over people of color, straight over queer.

Because, even at its best, no creation story ever tells the whole story. There’s always something left out – like, where did those giant beasts that hunted and killed human beings come from before Saya the first hunter reversed the roles? Or there’s something left over and above or hidden behind and beneath every creation story. A wild card. A surplus of meaning. Something excessive and maybe transgressive of the dominant narrative the creation story means to tell. For me, it’s those lines early in Genesis 1, before the six days of separating and gathering together, bringing forth and multiplying, that are most suggestive. “[T]he earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” The word our Hebrew ancestors used was ruah: wind, yes, but it also means breath and spirit. What if we imaged God not as subduing and having dominion over darkness and the formless void but accompanying them as partner. Before God speaks God’s Word and creates the new, the ordered, God is already present and active in other guises. A wind sweeping over deep waters, energizing them. The breath of God sighing gently in the darkness, stirring life. God’s spirit hovering over the void like a mother caressing the unborn child in her womb.

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But I wonder, for you, what does the creation story of Genesis 1 still help explain here and now? And what does it fail to explain?

What social, political, and economic structures might Genesis 1 reinforce that ought to be questioned and critiqued? And does this ancient, ancestral story nevertheless hide an alternate narrative that could help point us toward liberation?

I invite your responses.

Resources

For the Dunne-za creation story, see David Suzuki and Peter Knudtson, “The Wisdom of the Elders” (Bantam Books, 1992), pages 38-39.

And for Jim Jones and his parody of the Genesis creation stories, David Chidester, “Salvation and Suicide” (Indiana University Press, 1991), page 106-109.