What song will you sing?

Preached on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, Year A, December 24, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Laurel Tallent.

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Psalm 89:1-4, 19-20
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38

The Annunciation, by Henry Ossawa Tanner

Today we witness a short, intense vignette: An unexpected guest, a dramatic announcement, a young woman’s simple question, punctuated by her agreement to participate in a divine plan that will turn the world on its head. Like a purposefully vague but intriguing opening scene to a movie, this scene isn’t providing us much information. Why does she agree so quickly? Her only question is an essentially logistical question: “How”. In Luke’s account, Mary doesn’t ask “why” this plan should be put into motion, or even what the plan implies for the world. I believe that Mary must know more. 

I do not like the Christmas song “Mary did you know”. It was released to the masses in 1991, written by Mark Lowry and Buddy Greene of the Gaither Vocal Band. Since then it’s topped Christian Music charts, and been covered by many, many other artists since. The song asks a series of patronizing questions. “Mary did you know that your baby boy will give sight to the blind” “Mary did you know that your baby boy will calm a storm with His Hand?” No. No she didn’t.

I’m not alone in my annoyance. Others have also pointed out its inherent sexist underestimation of Mary - a pitfall for many artists throughout the ages. Mary is often depicted innocent and unknowing because of her youth and virginity, As a Baptist theologian put it “Could you imagine a song asking Abraham 17 times if he knew he’d be the father of a great nation?” 

In order to understand the scene between Mary and Gabriel, to understand what Mary knows, we must consider the two events that Luke sets around it: Gabriel foretelling the birth of John the Baptist to Zechariah, and the song Mary sings when she is greeted by a pregnant Elizabeth. 

Let’s turn to the passage before Gabriel meets Mary. This is the beginning of Luke, before we ever meet Mary: a righteous, established, childless priest, Zechariah, is selected by lots to enter the temple and offer incense as a crowd prays outside. While in the temple, Gabriel surprises him, and tells him the good news: Your wife, Elizabeth, who has never conceived in the years - perhaps decades - you have been married, will give birth.

Gabriel says this baby will be a personal joy and delight to the older couple and their community. (I’ll note here that Mary was not given this comfort) Their son John will prepare the people, returning them to their God. This should be unparalleled good news. Could a man dedicated to righteousness receive a bigger blessing than this? But Zechariah questions Gabriel. Similar to Mary, he asks “How”. In response, Gabriel silences him, and Zechariah emerges from the temple unable to speak. Why is the same question met with different consequences? We may hear part of the answer in Mary’s song. 

We return to Mary, having quickly traveled through hill country to visit Elizabeth. The two women, relatives and miraculous parents-to-be, reunite with joy. The impossibility of prophecy and biology are coming to fruition through them. This is where Mary tells us what she knows, what she knew, when Gabriel came to visit. She is bursting at the seams, elated. She sings about her new, unexpected promise of a legacy: “He has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant, surely all generations from now on will call me blessed”. She continues, “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty”. Her child will subvert existing systems of power. God is keeping a promise to God’s people, and Mary has accepted a pivotal role in the promise’s fulfillment. 

The song “Mary did you know” asks Mary “did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters? … That the baby boy will one day rule the nations?” Luke’s account shows us that Mary not only knows, but can also sing a more articulate and powerful song on the meaning of her pregnancy and parenthood. 

If we can suspend our own knowledge of what will happen, those “did ya know he’s gonna walk on water” questions from the song, perhaps we can join Mary in this moment: Unaware of the particulars, but awake to the glorious disruption that her child will incite. 

In other words, *this* is the beginning of Luke: two women, pregnant by miraculous means, understand an angel’s message, while the priest, the person who should have understood immediately, is silenced until he is prepared to participate. 

This is not a story about how “God asks us to do hard things sometimes”. This is the story of a young woman who understood and said “yes” to God’s plan of justice faster than the person who should have understood it first. It is the first role reversal of Luke’s gospel, foretelling all of the reversals to come; the child teaching at the temple, the sinners welcomed to the table, the unclean cleansed, the sick healed. The beatitudes begin here, with the song of a young woman one step into a life-long undertaking. 

Mary’s immediate understanding and Zechariah’s period of imposed silence resonate with me because it all feels cathartic. When we look for someone who understands the condition of the world today, who says “yes” to God’s intervention in the world, whom do we look to? As it was in the beginning of Luke, so it is now: the young, the very old, the insignificant, the marginalized, are still the first to understand how systems of oppression operate. They are the first to identify bold, transformative solutions. They are the first to articulate the consequences of action and inaction. Meanwhile Zechariah, by no means an antagonist, but not the herald he could be, holds back from joining by asking “how? How?”. Happily, Zechariah provides us with a redemptive example himself: when given the opportunity, he echoes Mary’s song with his own. Even late, and even after many months of silence, it is a welcome song. It is a good and powerful song. 

What song will you sing, when God greets you unexpectedly? What song will you sing, when God calls you to join them in something different, something new?

Oaks of righteousness

Preached on the Third Sunday of Advent (Year B), December 17, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
Psalm 126
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
John 1:6-8. 19-28

Rejoice! We have been set a daunting task. Praise God! Our job is difficult. Alleluia! We face a strong challenge in our life of faith, one that will demand much from us: it will exhaust our intellects; it will wear out our bodies; it will break our hearts. But we are glad about this, because what’s worse than having no purpose, feeling underemployed, lacking direction? Happily, that is not our fate. We are delightfully busy with an immensely important mission.

And even better, we know that we can rely on one another, passing the tasks back and forth, spotting each other, caring for each other. And of course we do everything with the great benefit of God’s power.

Now, there are many different kinds of tasks in our mission. Some of them are practical ones, like filling snack packs and stocking the Little Free Pantry. Some of them are more, well, literary — joining or leading faith formation events, writing for the newsletter to define and support our various ministries. Some are technical, like auditing our finances or working with vendors to renovate our mission base. And all of us are called to the mighty task of prayer: holding on our hearts all the people who call this their spiritual home, and all the people we serve. In our prayers, we join the Body of Christ world round whose prayers rise like incense before God. And so we have many tasks, from deeply contemplative prayers to lugging wagons around the neighborhood. And as you can see, I am excited about all this. I hope you can join me as I rejoice.

All of our spiritual work grows from our particular identity in the dominion of God. The prophet Isaiah tells us that when we join the tradition handed down to us, we become “oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display God’s glory.” Isaiah says that we will “build up the ancient ruins, [and] raise up the former devastations; [we will] repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations.”

An “oak of righteousness” is strong, but strong for a purpose: oak wood forms floors, walls, and ceilings for the unhoused; oak branches provide shade for those who swelter in the sun; and the acorns of the oak of righteousness can be ground into flour for the hungry. 

As oaks of righteousness, we do not “display God’s glory” simply by being beautiful. In fact our beautiful liturgy is never only beautiful, as if we could adore God simply by dancing gracefully before God’s altar. Oaks of righteousness do not just stand in the field, or along the river bank, looking lovely. God is a subject, not an object: God is a subject of creation and formation, not an object of passive adoration. God is dynamic. God is dynamism itself, and yet always more than that, too. When God tells Moses that God’s Name is “I AM,” the Holy Name defies easy translation: we know God is not just saying that God merely is, that God simply exists. We know that God’s Name also means that God abides with us and is faithful to us; that God is active, and provocative; that God is beyond our safe grasp; that God is creating, eternally.

And so we, in turn, do not simply exist. Our faith is not about mindlessly adoring God. Our faith is not about contentedly resting in God’s inert presence. Our faith is not about passively basking in God’s glory while the world burns. No. We say a firm No to that lackadaisical understanding of faith. If we were to practice our faith that way, our righteousness would merely be window dressing: we would set a modest “outreach” budget, and trust that because we’re throwing a few dollars toward charity, we can rest comfortably inside a small “church bubble,” enraptured by the insular beauty of our prayers, closed off from God’s good world. 

No, we are oaks of righteousness, through and through. We do not do so-called “outreach,” because that word completely misunderstands both us and our mission. Reducing our faith to mere charitable “outreach” fails to recognize that we are all recipients of God’s lavish grace. Note well that Isaiah’s oaks of righteousness are the same people as those who were oppressed, brokenhearted, and held captive. We always, always share what we first have been given.

We do not feed the hungry; we eat with them. We do not “reach out” to those in need; we welcome them authentically into the center of our life, and we recognize that every human person has deep needs. We do not do charitable acts as afterthoughts of our main task; we understand that acts of justice are the whole point of our faith.

In short, we claim John the Witness as the sibling in Christ who teaches us how to practice the faith. John the Witness: this is an odd title for the one we usually call John the Baptist. (The Lutheran pastor and scholar Karoline Lewis gives John this new title.) It may sound odd to call him this, but if you read the fourth Gospel carefully, you’ll see that in this version, John the Witness does not baptize Jesus. And because he does not baptize Jesus, we do not then experience the thundering voice of God, as we do in the other Gospels, just after the baptism. In the other Gospels, as Jesus comes out of the water, God tells us who Jesus is. But in this version, John the Witness tells us. John the Witness “testifies to the Light.” John — not God — tells people who Jesus is. And for his part, Jesus says nothing.

But who exactly is this witness? “Who are you?” the authorities ask him. He assures them he is not the Messiah. “What then? Are you Elijah?” “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” “No.” The authorities are reaching the end of their patience. “Who are you?” they ask again. “Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”

John answers them by evoking Isaiah, borrowing an image from Isaiah chapter 40: John is the voice crying in the wilderness, the one who calls out to God’s people to make a straight path, to follow a royal road, to God’s realm of justice and mercy and peace. In doing this, John also evokes for his listeners the post-exile Isaiah, the one who sings in chapter 61 about all the things we do as oaks of righteousness, along that royal road: we bring good news to the oppressed, we bind up the brokenhearted, we proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, and we proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor — a jubilee of liberation for all who are crushed under the heel of the emperor. 

So… no theophany in this version of the story of John the Witness. No pierced clouds and descending dove, no thunderous voice, no wondrous vision of God’s power breaking into our mundane world. No, in this version, we oaks of righteousness are the vessels of God’s wondrous presence. We bear on our own shoulders God’s devastating, liberating power. We testify to the Light.

We are the miracle.

This is part of what we mean when we say that God in Jesus “becomes flesh.” God does not just become a human person, though of course in Jesus of Nazareth God did do exactly that. But our theology of the Incarnation proclaims more: God “becomes flesh”: God is present in my human body and in yours; God is present in the elbow grease of our labor; God is present — and vibrantly powerful — in all created life. God dwells even in inanimate objects: God pulses through our SPiN wagons, and makes a tabernacle in our Little Free Pantry; God’s power runs along a surgeon’s scalpel and a poet’s pen; God even rises up powerfully from the outstretched hand of a child, reaching for their parent: God dwells in our bonds as kinfolk. 

And so, again, we rejoice. In a world gone mad, a warming world, a world where the human race fails to learn even the easiest, most ancient lessons (basic lessons like, “Share” or “Try to get to Yes” or “Practice gratitude”) — even here, even now, we rejoice that God forms us into oaks of righteousness, holding and nourishing the soil, blessing the landscape with delicious shade; cleaning the air with green leaves; anchoring a garden that nourishes the desert.

Are we the Messiah? No. Are we Elijah, or the prophet? We are not. Who are we, then?

We are God’s oaks of righteousness, testifying to the Light. We are the miracle. We embody the Good News that God is on the move; that God is coming soon; that even now, in this dire hour, even now, all is not lost. We are here, manifesting the presence and power of God. And we have much to do.

Shall we get back to work?

Turn back!

Preached on the Second Sunday of Advent (Year B), December 10, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by the Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8

St John the Baptist drinking water from a spring, by Guercino

Turn.

Turn!

Turn around. Go back. Take yourself off this path. This way lies destruction, even death. This is not the path of life.

Turn from the path of anxiety, the path of depression, the path of despair. On this path, you are likely to throw up your hands in helpless exasperation. On this path, you will read about war, seemingly endless war, and you will start to feel numb. The news will stop informing you for action, and simply dull you into defeatism, into complacency, and finally into quiet collusion with the very forces of dreadful violence that you once found so outrageous. Turn from this path. This is not the path of life.

Turn toward a better path, a lively path, a verdant and hopeful highway, a rising and royal road. On the better path, you don’t stop reading the news or listening to others, but you listen for insight, you search for solutions, and yes it has become something of a cliché, but you look for the helpers. On this better path, you understand that anger and anxiety are helpful emotions, but only when they are acute. When they become chronic, they lead you back onto the dreadful path. So pace yourself; breathe; embrace and give voice to your good and righteous anger, but do not let it destroy good things, or good people; clasp the hand of another person, even a bitter enemy; and remind yourself that few good things have been accomplished by one person alone. 

When it rains in Seattle so relentlessly, I run on an absurd and literal “path” that is not a path, really, as much as a human-sized hamster wheel: I run indoors, warm and dry, on a treadmill. But even on that bizarre machine, even there, I can ride the waves of my emotions, and even there, the metaphor of “path” or “Way” — a metaphor beloved of the prophet Isaiah —  still goes to work on me. As I run on the treadmill, running and running but never getting anywhere, I notice my progress on the path. I notice that my pace quickens unwisely when I am upset, and my footfalls are more aggressive (and harder on my knees) when I am angry. I notice that if I am sad that day, or fruitlessly anxious, I get sluggish, and my feet start to scrape each other.

But then I notice once again that my treadmill is located in a small gym crammed with ten other treadmills, and that means I have friends. I am not alone. Now, I also confess that, due to my own personality that was forged in a large family, these companions on their nearby hamster wheels inevitably become my competitors. But even when I am competing against a complete stranger, running flat out just so that I can edge ahead of her in mileage, heart rate, or some other absurd metric, even then, I feel better knowing that I am not alone.

And these friends remind me, in turn, of a more subtle drawback of the dreadful path, a problem that we might not easily notice, because when we’re on that awful path, we’re usually preoccupied by all of our deep, and deeply miserable, feelings. On the path of death, we might not realize it at first, but we have no neighbors. Others may be on the path, but they’re always up ahead, over the next hill; or they’re always lagging far behind, at best a dot in the dust of our own wake. The Anglican writer C.S. Lewis imagines hell as a vast, lonely, gray town: vast because nobody in hell can stand to have neighbors, so everyone builds their hellish little house miles away from the nearest person. 

And yet, from the perspective of heaven, that whole gray town of hell is no bigger than a speck, a tiny, nearly microscopic smudge of gloom at the far edge of God’s lush Paradise, where hordes of pilgrims climb the mountains together, rejoicing, as the sun is about to rise.

Oh, do not take up residence in that dull, tiny-yet-vast, hellish gray town! Turn. Turn! Turn around. Go back. Take yourself off that path. That way lies destruction, even death. That is not the path of life. Turn back toward Paradise. Turn back toward God’s snow-capped mountains.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to John the Baptizer, the forerunner, the cousin of Jesus of Nazareth who bears on his rough shoulders the vocation of the prophet Isaiah. John calls out — or maybe screams out — a dreadful warning to turn, to turn around, to turn away from the path of death and destruction. I encourage you to listen to John, but first you may have to work out where he is in relation to you. He may not immediately be easy to identify.

John comes to you from the “wilderness,” the wild land that stands beyond whatever you perceive as your safe civilization. John is a wisdom source from somewhere just outside your comfort zone, somewhere beyond your area of expertise, somewhere you feel awkward, or frightened, or helpless.

Speaking only for myself, I have noticed a couple of these wilderness zones in recent weeks, encroaching on my consciousness. When she learned that my father died, a friend of mine texted, quite gently and in an authentically lovely way, a grim but empathetic message. She said, “Welcome to the club.” She was referring to my new status as a middle-aged adult whose parents have both died. I had shared with this friend in past years about the deep pain she and I had suffered when our mothers had died, but when her father then died some years later, I did not notice or appreciate how, for my friend, one plus one equals wilderness: one parent dies, then the other parent dies, and you found yourself in a brand-new experience of disorientation and discomfort. On top of your sweet grief for each parent’s departure from your earthly life, you perceive a new layer of existential anxiety. It is still early for me: my father has only been gone a little over a week; but I think I am slowly beginning to discover this wilderness for myself.

John the Baptizer may appear in that wilderness, for me. If so, I can hear him saying, “Turn! Turn from all that would isolate you further, or delude you into thinking that nobody else understands what you’re feeling. Turn from easy entitlement that could lead you to harm others by wallowing in your grief, or denying your grief. Turn back. Turn toward life.”

But all of this is happening while I wrestle in another wilderness these days, one where I have found a few of you, too. The war in the Land of the Holy One has opened new fissures in what I had casually assumed were solid rocks. This is true for many people in many walks — on many paths — of life. College students and faculties are grappling with new dilemmas about free speech and campus security as protests get intense, and tempers flare. Trust is fraying between lifelong friends, between neighbors who had marched together for the same causes, between people of good conscience who find themselves on opposite sides of a terrible line in the sand.

If you are in this wilderness, listen for John the Baptizer. “Turn!” he cries out to you. “Turn back! Turn from all that would isolate you further, or delude you into thinking that nobody else understands what you’re feeling. Turn from easy entitlement that could lead you to harm others by indulging only your own perspective, or deciding self-righteously who is good and who is evil. Turn back. Turn toward life.”

Now, please understand: John the Baptizer is no pollyanna. Nobody who tells the truth will try to sell you on a path of life that contains no pain, no anguish, no anxiety. If I turn from the dreadful path and embrace my friend who, like me, has lost both of her parents, I will still be left with deep grief for my mother, and for my daddy; and I will still slowly — ever so slowly — take my place as a member of the oldest living generation. And if I resist easy answers and futile fights, and delve more deeply into the vexing dilemmas of a terrible war, I will most certainly be choosing to enter into conflict. We preach Christ crucified: our faith is not a picnic in the park. 

But I am not alone. You are not alone. On the path of life, we enjoy the embrace of Christ when we break bread alongside one another. On the path of life, you will often feel sorrow and fear, but mercy and truth will meet together; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. On the path of life, your heart will be riven by conflict, but righteousness shall go before you, and peace shall be a pathway for your feet.

We are all wizards

Preached at the Ordination of Six Deacons on the Feast of St. Nicholas (transferred), December 9, 2023, at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

1 John 4:7-14
Psalm 145:8-13
Mark 10:13-16

I love wizards. The wizard archetype, that is: the elderly artisan at the edge of the village, the wise one, the skillful — and usually a bit odd — person who possesses great intelligence, but is also cleverly gentle, strategically kind, consciously tender. Think of the sages from the east, searching Judea for a small child because they looked up at the night sky and understood what they saw. Think of a grandparent who smiles warmly — and knowingly — allowing the smile to travel all the way up to their twinkling eyes. Think of an old woman with her long white hair braided in back, her ancient face alight with youthful wonder; or think of an old man with his long beard sewn with one or two dazzling gems: is he weird? No … Well, a little bit. But he’s also ingenious.

The wizard is wise and gentle, then, but they are also powerful: our fantasy stories vest wizards with magical abilities, and the wizard is so skillful at the magical arts that they have no need for simple charms or pedestrian wands: they can simply raise one hand and silently summon mighty forces to our aid.

The wizard is powerful, then, but she is also powerfully merciful: we hear of lion-hearted wizards whose dreadful yet pastoral job is to carefully pick over the battlefield after all the violence has ended, and dispatch dying soldiers in a coup de grâce, a final blow that eases their passing. A strong wizard is equal to this daunting and solemn task.

And finally the wizard is fierce: when they are riled up, fired up, seized with righteousness, they rise to a great height. Even the weather cooperates with a ferocious wizard: darkness falls around them while they thunder with terrible tidings of swift justice for the enemy, or a swift rebuke of the wretched wrongdoer who has crossed their path. (“Even the wind and the seas obey him,” we recall, in an astonishing story about our Wizard of wizards.)

Gentle but powerful, merciful but fierce: this is the wizard in the cultural imagination of many lands. And this is Nicholas, called a wonderworker in our tradition, an easier word than “wizard” for our liturgical calendars and hagiographies. Nicholas is particularly beloved in the east, but he is cherished worldwide.

Sadly, all too often, our veneration of wizards – including Nicholas – does not do justice to their majestic nature. We see them as gentle, which is true enough, but we often underestimate their power. We adore Nicholas in particular for his high regard for people experiencing extreme poverty, but we tend to paper over his ferocity about the social forces that damage and oppress the poor. Nicholas did not gently place gold coins in rows of children’s shoes; he threw gold through the window. He was a fearsome friend of God who fed the rich with justice. Did he lose his temper and get in a fist fight at the Council of Nicaea? Our tradition stops short of confirming this story, but part of me hopes it is true. I have attended church conventions. I have felt fierce feelings.

In any case, Nicholas is not just a sweet sugarplum saint for kids on a magical December night; he is hardy enough to be the patron of seafarers; and he is smart enough to know, like Jesus himself, how powerful and fierce children themselves usually are. “Let the little children come to me,” teaches the Wizard of Nazareth, “and do not stop them.” Why would he need to teach us this, if children were harmless, easy, frivolous beings? A wizard wisely appreciates the immense power and wisdom of a child.

And so we remember Nicholas as more than a jolly elf. We remember him properly as an unnerving and intimidating wizard-saint, a faith leader who is driven into the world on God’s errand. Nicholas was and is a warrior, a zealot, a prophet — Nicholas is a deacon and a priest and a bishop.

Today we will ask God to fill with grace and power – not just grace, but power, too – the souls and bodies of Phillip, Theresa, Lisa, Martin, Myra, and Robert. Grace and power. Today, a few months before the Church affirms God’s priestly call of these wonderworkers, today we will affirm that God is forming them first to be deacons. Could deacon be another word for wizard?

Deacons certainly are powerful. Deacons descend from the long tradition of fiery prophets in God’s Church. We remember generations of prophets, priests, judges, and kings in the First Testament, and we recall many stories of prophets in particular rising up in power, sometimes dreadful power, to goad and lead God’s people. 

But deacons are not just fiery prophets. They are also iconic servants, and if the word servant makes you think of a quiet waiter at an elegant restaurant, you’re not completely off the mark, but think again. Jesus himself is perhaps no more powerful than in that diaconal moment when he scandalizes his friends by washing their feet, and asks them that penetrating question: “Do you know what I have done to you?” A good servant is a powerful agent of action and leadership in any household, including a household of faith. And deacons are, again, iconic servants: they shine in their service; they glow with the servant heart of Jesus. They inspire others to point to them and say, “Oh, I want that. I want to do that, too.”

And finally deacons are charismatic Gospellers. They proclaim the Good News. The best wizards know that prophets who only shout in anger will be dismissed as tedious gadflies. They understand their call to fill God’s people with hope. And so, before long, all six of you will carry our Holy Book into the midst of the assembly and proclaim what you read there: you will be Gospellers. And when a deacon proclaims the Gospel, her diaconal vocation silently underscores how the Good News is itself prophetic, and how the Good News calls all of us listeners into lives of powerful service.

Gentle but powerful, merciful but fierce: this is the wizard; this is the deacon. When I first discerned whether I might be called to set aside some of the freedoms of the mighty order of lay ministry to serve under the orders of a bishop, I believed I was called to the so-called “permanent” diaconate. But “permanent” is a problematic word: it evokes the same meaning as a quote “terminal” degree: I would be ordained a deacon and stop there, with a thud. But this dishonors the sacred order of deacons, which enjoys full equality alongside the other three orders of ministry. The diaconate is not a six-month pit stop for some and an underwhelming destination for others. Have you met a deacon? Even the wind and the seas obey them! And while we’re on the topic, “transitional” is also a problematic word: the diaconate is not merely a way station on the road to a Real Thing.

No, anyone and everyone who is ordained to the diaconate is a vocational deacon; a deacon forever, yes, but more importantly a person who includes “deacon” as part of what Frederick Buechner famously defines as their vocation: “that place where a person’s deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” You six are priests, but your vocation is also diaconal. All priests are vocational deacons; all bishops are vocational priests; and all clergy are ordinary Christians focusing on particular dimensions of the larger baptismal identity that all Christians share. In short, it goes like this: in Holy Baptism, we are all wizards. 

God forms us all to be gentle, but also powerful; to be merciful, but also fierce. In a few moments, our friends will submit to the laying on of hands by a wizard, a wonderworker, who again will ask God to fill these prophets, these servants, these Gospellers with God’s grace, and with God’s power. I pray that God will fill them with gentleness, too, but also ferocity. Rise up, chosen deacons in the Church of God. Carry your diaconate into your priesthood, which even now is edging over your eastern horizon. Take up your calling. Rise up in power. Throw gold through windows. Go and be prophets, servants, and Gospellers of the One who leavens all creation with fierce wisdom, and gathers all people in powerful, wondrous mercy.

Evening, midnight, cockcrow, dawn

Preached on the First Sunday of Advent (Year B), December 3, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 64:1-9
Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:24-37

Keep Awake, by Lauren Wright Pittman

Jesus said, “Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.”

Evening, midnight, cockcrow, dawn: four watches in the night. We could also be a little old school and call them Vespers and Compline, Matins, Lauds, and Prime: five of the nine monastic times of prayer that carry a religious community through a night and a day. Jesus tells us to stay awake through these wee hours. And then he goes on to meet us in each of them. 

Jesus meets us in the evening: soon after he gives us this warning about keeping awake, in the Good News according to Mark, Jesus gathers in the evening with his disciples, in a private room, and shares a meal with them. Then, as evening yields to night, he leads them to the garden, where he prays fervently, in agony, for the bitter cup to pass from him. And he tells his disciples, once again, to keep awake—but of course they don’t. They doze. Will we? Whatever we do, Jesus meets us in the evening: he meets us in our sundown gatherings, in our homecomings, in our slumbers, in our restlessness, in our private shadows, in our hauntings.

Then Jesus meets us at midnight. This is the dreadful hour of his betrayal and arrest, when Jesus enters the fray with us. He could have run from the garden before the betrayer approached: Jesus knows what is about to happen, what predicaments we face. But he stays with his beloved friends in the garden, and in staying, he is seized. He is indicted. He is in trouble. Jesus meets us at midnight: he meets us in our predicaments, in our deepest fears, in our traps and snares, in our jails and prisons—he meets us even in the anxious cages we construct for ourselves, the cages we lock from the inside. He steps into our crises, alongside us.

Then Jesus meets us at cockcrow, the bleary hour when the faintest gray is appearing along the eastern horizon, the hour when Peter denies his Lord—a desolate hour. Jesus meets us in our frailty, in our mistakes, and even in our worst offenses. Jesus meets us whenever we are discouraged by our faults or failures. And Jesus knows us in this awful hour: he is all too aware of our true story, the good with the bad, even as he meets us with mercy. Jesus meets us at cockcrow: he looks us in the eye, and we will endure his knowing gaze.

And then, finally, Jesus meets us at dawn. This is the hour when the authorities bring Jesus before Pilate: Jesus is our Victim, our Defendant, our Scapegoat, the one who bears away all our sins. “Jesus, Lamb of God,” we sing at dawn, “have mercy on us. Jesus, bearer of our sins, have mercy on us. Jesus, redeemer of the world, grant us your peace.” On Good Friday we ask God to set the cross between us and God’s judgment, between us and despair, between us and anything that separates us from God. Jesus meets us at dawn: he bears away every dreadful shadow.

But this disturbing dawn also foreshadows another dawn, a more triumphant dawn, a dawn that is just on the other side of the weekend: the dawn of Resurrection. And today, Sunday, the First Sunday of Advent—today is a dawning Feast of Resurrection, a morning celebration. Jesus does not remain a Victim forever, nor does our sleepiness endure the blaze of dawn: Jesus meets us at Easter dawn: Jesus is our Risen One.

Oh, how we need the Risen One to appear, at all hours of night and day. “Tear open the heavens and come down!” Isaiah pleads to Adonai, to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob:

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence-- 
as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil-- 
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

Isaiah pleads with God to tear open the heavens: when he cries out like this, Isaiah consciously nods to the biblical image of a remorseful person tearing their garments. Tear open the heavens, Holy One! we cry, the way biblical figures in anguish would tear our own clothes. Tear the heavens in sadness, in passion; tear the heavens because of all that has gone wrong in this realm of earth. Tear the heavens and bring down the Dominion of God. Tear the heavens and be here with us.

But God in Jesus does not tear the heavens as much as walk quietly into our gatherings, into our embraces, and into our crises. He meets us gently, then bravely, then unnervingly, then mercifully. Evening welcomes Jesus our gentle companion, breaking bread, and praying fervently; midnight welcomes Jesus our brave defender, entering the fray, entering our predicament; cockcrow welcomes Jesus our unnerving judge, our Righteous One, the One who knows us best; and dawn welcomes Jesus our Merciful Victim, the Risen One who sets himself between us and all that convicts us, all that defeats us, all that terrifies us. 

And this is our Way. This is the Way of the Cross. This is how we cope with the world and all its grief, all its violence, all its despair. This is our Advent hope: Jesus, our nighttime companion.

Every Advent I sing in my private prayers an old Advent hymn written by Percy Dearmer, one of our grand Anglican hymn writers. It’s a good song for nighttime contemplations. I ask you to notice any resistance you might have to Dearmer’s old-school Jacobean English verse, writing as he did in the Victorian era, when that was in fashion. Let this Advent hymn guide you as you wait for the presence of Jesus in all times of day, but especially in the shadows of night. Here is Percy Dearmer’s hymn:

Ah! think not the Lord delayeth:
“I am with you,” still he sayeth,
“Do you yet not understand?”
Look not back, the past regretting;
on the dawn your hearts be setting;
rise and join the Lord’s command.

For e’en now the reign of heaven
spreads throughout the world like leaven,
unobserved, and very near,
like the seed when no [one] knoweth,
like the sheltering tree that groweth,
comes the life eternal here.

Not for us to find the reasons,
or to know the times and seasons,
comes the Lord when strikes the hour;
ours to bear the faithful witness
which can shape the world to fitness,
thine, O God, to give the power.

Who is most important?

Preached on the Feast of the Reign of Christ (Year A), Last Sunday after Pentecost, November 26, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Psalm 100
Ephesians 1:15-23
Matthew 25:31-46

Christ in Glory, from late 17th Century Ethiopian manuscript

It is often easy, when walking into a room, to notice, or guess, who the most important people are. If a newcomer walks into this room for the first time, who will they believe is most important to us?

They will be badly mistaken, but I suspect they’ll decide it’s the people up here in the altar area who are the most important. Here I stand on this little platform. I am raised above you primarily to make the most of good sight lines, but does this pulpit satisfy an all-too-human desire to put one person above the others? And all the people up front – we get to wear special clothes. We have copes, chasubles, dalmatics, and tunicles in our closets, grand names for grand garments. Priests wear the copes and chasubles, deacons wear the dalmatics, and the first lay Eucharistic minister wears the tunicle. We say that all four orders of ministry are equal – we insist that bishops, priests, deacons, and the laity are equal – but bishops wear shiny, pointy hats and hold splendid croziers. And even though the robe of Holy Baptism – the white alb – is something every baptized Christian can wear, only the up-front people actually wear them. Our fancy outfits belie our claims of equality. It seems as if the most important people are all up here.

But if Jesus of Nazareth walked into this room and looked around, I firmly believe that he would not identify us as the most important people in the room. He might look at the altar party, and speak to us, only after he has greeted nearly everyone else. 

He would behave the same way in other rooms. In the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., Jesus would not point to the members of Congress, naming them the most important people. In Vatican City, Jesus would not point to Pope Francis and his cardinals. The most important people in the White House are not Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, at least by the standards of Jesus of Nazareth. Are you a captain of your industry? If so, Jesus has bad news for you: you don’t come first. One of the members of St. Paul’s has what I believe is the most important job in his workplace, but lately I’ve noticed that he never features himself in his company’s promotions on social media. Ah! This person gets it. He’s at the top of the org chart, but he knows he is not the most important person.

This perspective of Jesus of Nazareth applies to family life, too. Would Jesus point to my father as the most important person in my family? Perhaps he would do so at this particular moment in my family’s life, but not because my father is our patriarch, and a great-grandfather, and the most senior living member of the family. No, Jesus might point to my father right now as the most important family member only because my father is gravely ill. His illness puts him in one of the categories Jesus of Nazareth has identified as markers of importance.

Jesus directs his favor to the people in his own time who were denied access to the Temple, because their problems or identities made them ritually “unclean.” And his followers discovered that just by following Jesus, they took on some of these “unclean” problems or identities themselves. And of course we still do this: it is all too easy for religious folks like us to identify who’s in and who’s out. So, here they are, the categories of outsiders who take first place with Jesus of Nazareth:

Are you hungry or thirsty? If so, Jesus points to you and says, “You’re more important than the well-nourished people.” Are you a newcomer here, who doesn’t know anyone? You’re more important than the rector. Are you wearing on your back all the clothes you own, and facing tonight’s weather without a jacket, and tomorrow’s job interview without a change of underwear and socks? If so, Jesus points to you and says, “You’re more important than someone with a full closet and a washing machine.”

Are you sick? If so, Jesus points to you and says, “You’re more important than the healthy people.” And if you’re sick, do you have the least number of visitors among the patients in the hospital? If so, Jesus is going to visit you first. (My father is further back in the line, in this respect: his ICU room overflows with visitors, most of them his many children.)

Are you in prison? If so, Jesus points to you, he utterly disregards whether you are guilty or innocent, and he says, “You are more important than people on the outside, than people who are free.” Look up “Sister Helen Prejean” to learn more about this. She ministers to death-row inmates, innocent and guilty alike, and she never fails to find Christ there.

Now, I wonder if this rankles you. You likely don’t have a problem with Jesus helping those in need, and teaching us to do the same, but we are well trained these days to pursue equality, always equality: “In the eye of God there is not one among us who is greater nor one who is less.” True enough. In fact, all of this beautiful vesture we wear in church is meant to symbolize how God has “wonderfully restored the dignity of human nature” – the dignity of all human beings, even if only a few of us wear the vibrant colors. And yet, despite the truth of our equality in God’s sight, Jesus borrows a page from the job description of an Emergency Medical Technician, who climbs aboard her ambulance to help not all the healthy people, but the one who collapsed, or the few who were injured. In short, Jesus does triage. Of course everyone is important! But Jesus is drawn first to the hungry and thirsty, first to the stranger and the unclothed, first to the sick, first to those in prison.

When Jesus visits the Gerasenes on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, he ministers first to the demoniac who is raving among the tombs. (The villagers are scandalized by this healing, and ask Jesus to leave their town: they are disturbed by the demoniac’s restoration, fully clothed and in his right mind; but maybe they’re also upset because Jesus put him before them.) Whenever Jesus enters any village or house, he begins his ministry there with acts of healing. Simon’s mother-in-law lay dying: nobody mattered more, at that moment. And when Jesus preaches to a crowd, he pressures his followers to focus first on the crowd’s need for something to eat. And finally Jesus was himself an incarcerated defendant, a victim of a sham trial, a dead man walking who was executed by the state: he doesn’t just visit prisoners, he is one of them. 

And that’s the key to understanding how Jesus identifies who’s most important. He searches for the people who most resemble him. He sees himself in the hungry, in the impoverished, in the stranger, in the sick, in the prisoner. Their plight marks them as most important. Their hunger is their royal robe, their poverty a cope of crimson velvet edged in splendid ermine. Their illness is their scepter; their prison sentence is their crown. These are the royalty among us, the ones who reveal to us the face of Christ our Sovereign.

Today we hear about the Last Day, the Day of Judgment, a day of dreadful anxiety. If you visit the Sistine Chapel, you can view Michelangelo’s wondrous and unnerving fresco of the Last Day, and you can begin to appreciate the hold it has on the Christian imagination. And if you listen to Mozart’s Requiem, you’ll hear the unsettling text of the Requiem mass. Here’s a portion: 

Day of wrath! … [dissolving] the earth in ashes … What dread there will be when the Judge comes to strictly judge all things … A trumpet, spreading a wondrous sound through the graves of all lands, will drive humankind before [God’s] throne … Sovereign of awful majesty, who freely saves the redeemed, save me, O Fount of Goodness … Place me among your sheep, and separate me from the goats, setting me at your right hand …

And on it goes. But the point of Matthew’s description of the Last Day is not to terrify us. That is incidental, a byproduct of the true mission of Jesus: He wants to get our attention. He wants to startle us so that he can radically reorient us. He wants to tell us something about the here and now, not about the end of time. He wants to give us new eyes to recognize those among us who most closely resemble Christ himself. It is all too easy for us to see a human being dressed in the robes of privilege and mistakenly revere them as the one God favors.

It is far more difficult for us to look up at the cross, and see hanging there all who are hungry, thirsty, unclothed, sick, or in prison. It is far more difficult for us to see them, recognize their ultimate importance, and bow to the presence of Christ that pulses through their bodies, the presence of Christ that claims our attention, that forms us to love, that forms us to serve, as the dominion of God begins to dawn upon this war-ravaged land.

These are our sovereigns; these are our royalty; these are those to whom we bow, in the splendid but upside-down reign of Christ.

This is what you must do

Preached on the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, November 19, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Laurel Tallent.

Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18
Psalm 90:1-8
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

The Three Servants, by Kazakhstan Artist Nelly Bube

Today we are tasked by our Collect read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest instructions from two community leaders on catastrophe, a distraught song calling out for comfort, an emotionally charged parable that is difficult to separate from its illustrations of slavery and finance. The parable also happens to feature my family: The Five Talents. I won’t be trying to pull too much meaning out of that. 

Zephaniah, Paul and Jesus are instructing their communities on how to be, work, maintain their unity, and ultimately… survive in a time of turmoil. Jesus and Paul, and less directly Zephaniah, urge the people they love to be ready, to be careful and to deftly navigate the systems that constrain their survival. “Our survival - your survival - is imperative, it is my deepest hope. This is what you must do'' they say. 

How must they survive? In part through vigilance, nimble action, wise use of resources and preparation. The apathetic, those who say “God will do neither good nor harm” in Zephaniah are dire threats to the community. The “sleepers” in Thessalonians, community members in Christ who refuse to engage in the watchfulness that Paul urges them to take up, are also a threat to the safety of their community. 

I don’t think the elders providing this instruction relished giving their loved ones these bitter and unyielding codes of conduct. I assume there is tenderness undergirding the steely directives. We hear that affection and tenderness most clearly to the Thessalonians, “For you, beloved…” Paul addresses them. 

Jesus’ recommendations are more abstract, to my ears at least. Jesus uses a framework of a master and slaves, money, investment and interest that is so, so easy to take literally. But with context, we can save Jesus from being dubbed a “finance bro”: 

The parable of the Five Talents is his penultimate parable before the plot to kill him is put into place. Being in Jerusalem, surrounded by powerful and hostile leaders, he may have decided to utilize the language of power to communicate a subversive message; for his followers to continue their work with attention to the long-term.

This message itself is challenging, even if we untangle it from its metaphor. It is tempting to limit the parable to something along the lines of: “only be generous if it will pay out later”. Instead, we could choose to hold the story loosely, and listen for the loving desperation of Jesus saying “survive with your wits. survive by understanding your situation, survive with your savvy and ability to act within the systems available” 

So what are we called to, when we hear these passages? Zepheniah, Jesus, Paul, their historical contexts and the loved ones they were trying to protect passed on generations ago, but we continue to revisit their warnings year over year, whether or not we are experiencing similar existential threats. 

When I hear these passages I feel a call to pick up these survival tools again and use them. Due to my current time, place and privilege, I am in no immediate personal danger, but my days are laced with reminders that others - people I love, people like me and unlike me, people I do not know but am called to love - are suffering, are threatened, are experiencing untenable living conditions. I suspect that many of you can relate to this both as fellow humans and as a collective called to ministry, action and justice. 

We are certainly not alone. I am reminded of the community organizers dedicated to justice, access and equity. Their preparedness, ability to leverage what power they have and their nimble action remind me of today’s readings. I think of social workers and - even more so - those who navigate welfare and social services on their own. Their savvy within broken and discriminatory systems reminds me of these readings. 

The authors of this advice surely knew that being vigilant, unsleeping, prepared and street-smart is not a humane way to live eternally - it is a means to an end. This is why social workers and organizers are admonished by their modern-day elders in many, many workshops and seminars to know when their rest will come, and where it will come from. Although the realities of actually accomplishing this are complicated, especially for those who must simply carry on because of the existential threats they face. 

If we take up the tools of survival for our own cause or anothers’, what happens when we do not - or can not - rest? In my experience, it can turn life into an unforgiving, unending watch as those sleeping around us become a nagging source of disdain. How dare they sleep when I am unable to put down my vigilance? Don’t they care about our ministry? Don’t they watch the news? We become unforgiving of ourselves and others, not allowing for the slightest slip. This is a hard place, it’s a place where there is no space for learning, growth, re-consideration or mistakes. There is only the watch. 

When we do not rest, or are unable to, God themselves is irritating - their eternality stands in sharp contrast with our short time to accomplish so much. As the Psalm cries out, God seemingly swats away our lives saying return to the earth; the cycle of life will begin again without your efforts. How is it then that the Psalm begins with “In every age, Oh Lord, you have been our refuge?”

Psalm 90 takes us through a journey, from that grand statement of trust and solace in God, to irritation with God, to lashing out at God, to reasoning with God, finally ending with resolve: Teach us to number our days so we can apply our hearts to wisdom. In my short tenure in social services, I found comfort in this hymn. Its emotional arch was a more eloquent, poignant reflection of my own feelings. Singing and contemplating the Psalm reminded me that my work, my watch, was finite, and that it was not a solo endeavor; God’s eternal work of restoration will continue with or without me, I will not finish it all. Not as an individual, not as a single generation, not even as a single community over many generations. I’ll admit that from here it seems logical to jump to nihilism. I would rather wrestle with the mystery of Psalm 90 and take morbid comfort in the fact that my lifetime of work will be a human lifetime amount of work on an eternal project. 

Our second source of comfort is in each other. Our calling includes the comfort of reminding each other of our lives in Christ together. We can provide mutual reminders that those “sleeping around us” as Paul dubs those who do not participate - share in that life. Yes, we will be called and call each other to watch, and to be vigilant, nimble and savvy. We must also rest and seek refuge. Deciding when it is time for which is the work of our community over the span of many lifetimes. 

May we continue to encourage each other, as we are already doing.

Wisdom is seated at her gate

Preached on the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27A), November 12, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16
Psalm 70
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13

“Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her… One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty, for she will be found sitting at the gate.”

We have constructed a new light-green gate to the garden at St. Paul’s. It is simple, yet also a little bit grand. It rolls gently but heavily, along a track laid down upon a new slip of concrete. When it arrives in the fully-closed position, it readily submits to a strong padlock. If you like, you could clamber over this gate and get inside, but that would be awkward, and somehow the gate quietly discourages you from doing this. It is elegant but heavy; it is permeable but strong: it is a substantial metal fence. The gate seems to say, without words, “Respect my boundary; yield to the limit I place upon you.”

I invite you to place yourself, in your imagination, at this gate. It is of course just a physical object that functions practically to strengthen security on our campus, but this gate is more than lovely enough to become your metaphorical gate – to aid you in your spiritual contemplations. Imagine yourself at this gate, and as you contemplate this image, let your heart seek Wisdom, the one who sits at the gate. Let your every thought discern her, for she takes up her post at all of the marked boundaries of our lives.

The boundary is often where we say – and hear – the word “No.” At our new gate, there is to be no entry after hours, because we do not want anyone to be in danger, and that includes those who have malign intentions when they enter gardens. If you are not able to behave safely in our garden, then you yourself are among those who can be harmed. This insight — that the wrongdoer is among their own victims — it hit home for me this summer when a person was suspected of dealing fentanyl at the edge of our property, at the very spot where the gate now stands. In the days when I intervened repeatedly to interrupt and prevent this person’s unsafe actions, I included this person in my prayers, and I continue to do so. He is desperately vulnerable. And so I realized once more that the word “No” is often the beginning of Wisdom, even for the one who wants to hear it the least.

May I do whatever I like? No.

But the word “Yes” also belongs at the boundary, at the gate, at the seat of Wisdom. She will say “Yes” to many things. Yes, you may come inside to say your prayers, and to walk the path of discernment on our labyrinth. You can come in springtime to stand under the snowfall of our cherry blossoms, or you could come in any season to help our gardeners tend this edge of God’s verdant Paradise. 

Wisdom, on her seat at the boundary, offers a particularly prophetic and full-hearted “Yes” to those who are different from one another, and want to embrace across that difference. Wisdom teaches us to approach the boundaries between cultures and peoples, to notice the tension that runs along those boundaries, and to speak across that tension, to speak peace, to speak the truth, to seek – and receive – understanding. Can you name all the boundaries in this weary world that are riven by war, or slammed shut by walls and garrisons? But at Wisdom’s gate, her wall is perforated with openings to let people through, to let light shine through, to say “Yes,” even when that “Yes” is fraught with anxiety. If I say “Yes” to someone different from me, I stand to lose: I may not emerge from the experience with as much certitude as I had before; I may even be asked to set aside privileges. Just like the word “No,” the word “Yes,” at Wisdom’s gate, is not always simple and straightforward.

And finally, today, as we linger at Wisdom’s gate, we hear a story of ten people, five who were welcomed across the boundary, and five others who were turned away. You may feel a reasonable, understandable revulsion as you hear the harsh “No” spoken at the gate by the Wise One, the bridegroom in the parable, the One who marries us, the One who welcomes us – at least, those of us who are ready – to walk through the gate, to enter the fold, to join the celebration. The bridegroom offers a delightful “Yes!” to the five wise ones who were ready, approaching the boundary with their oil lamps full and burning; but the bridegroom abruptly shuns the foolish ones, saying, “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.”

Ouch.

But before you cast aside this parable as unnecessarily judgmental and harsh; before you reject another religious teaching that condemns some while welcoming others; before you throw up your hands in frustration with yet another nasty story from church; recall that Wisdom, sitting at her gate, says both “No” and “Yes”, and both judgments administer God’s grace. And though we might assume that the “Yes” answer is lovely, even Wisdom’s graceful “Yes!” could startle us, especially when she says “Yes” to people who — let’s be honest, now — we would really prefer were kept outside the gate. And we’ve already been told that the “No” answer is necessary, often enough, to protect the health and safety of the community.

The preacher and professor Matt Skinner says that the harsh rejection of the five foolish bridesmaids makes sense — or at least it seems less awful — when we consider the damage that unprepared people can inflict on their community. In their action — and in their inaction — they reveal their lack of concern, their lack of commitment, their lack of love for their people. The wedding in this parable is not just a romantic sweetheart ceremony for two lovebirds. It is the reconciliation of a whole community. It is a tremendous visitation of God’s justice and peace on the face of this battle-scarred earth. And so, if I am unprepared, if I did not bother to do my part, if I did not rise early (figuratively or otherwise) to meet Wisdom at her gate, or hear her voice in every thought, then I need to hear that terrible yet just boundary judgment: “No.” 

So is that it, then? Do the foolish bridesmaids stagger away in despair, fade to black, roll the credits? If I blow it, am I done, banished, condemned? Definitely not. God in Jesus goes all the way to hell itself to persuade every last soul to approach the gate again, but to be ready this time: ready to hear a new teaching; ready to accept correction; ready to “mortify” — to put to death — all that is deathward within.

And it is here that I want to direct your attention to the future tense that Jesus employs when he gives us this difficult teaching. “The kingdom of heaven will be like this,” he sings to us. God always, always opens up a future for every human being God has so lovingly made. Which bridesmaid do you want to be when you next approach the gate? Wise, or foolish? You’ll have another chance.

There’s a story that Bill Wilson, one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, begged for a drink at the very end of his life, as he lay on his deathbed. In fact they say he made four separate appeals for a glass of whiskey. The assisting nurse evidently did not grant his request. She spoke with Wisdom’s voice, it seems, when she said “No”, and Bill died a sober man. I hope so, for his sake; and whatever actually happened, the official story of his sober death – his holy death –  is reassuring to the countless addicts who have been inspired and guided by Bill for nearly a century. But if the nurse ever did reveal — in a newly discovered diary, say — that Bill died under the influence, that’s okay. It really is okay. He may just be standing on the “No” side of the gate for a little while longer, that’s all.

“No,” says Wisdom, when we are not ready to cross the gate safely, to tread the border safely, for the life and health of the community. “No,” Wisdom will say to me, if I am not ready, if I am dangerous. If I focus on myself before others, if I mulishly resist God’s compassion for those who suffer, if I continually fail to open my heart and mind — then I will remain a person who harms the community. But no matter how long I struggle with all of that, I affirm that one day – when I am ready – I will hear the glad, lovely “Yes.”

We Protestants tend to stop short at theological concepts like Purgatory, rightly viewing them with a critical eye, understandably wary to imagine a complicated and judgmental cosmology in which people have to be cleansed or reformed before they can stand in the presence of God. It’s not like that.

It’s more like Wisdom sitting at her gate, saying “No” when that is the wise answer, and saying “Yes” when that is the wise answer. And so, in a few moments, after we pray for the world – that is, after we pray for all who are thronging both sides of the gate – we will gather at this Table, we will sing our triumphant songs of thanksgiving, and we will tear apart a loaf of bread, bread from heaven, bread from the “Yes” side of the gate. We will share this bread so that we might be nourished and strengthened: strengthened to get ready; strengthened to repair (always with God’s help) all that we have damaged; strengthened to meet Wisdom behind our every thought; and strengthened, finally, to hear Wisdom pronounce her unimpeachable judgment upon us. Even today, even now, we are invited to perceive Wisdom turning toward us, and saying, with God’s own grace and gladness,

“Yes.”

"O may thy soldiers faithful, true, and bold..."

Preached on the Feast of All Saints (Year A, transferred), November 5, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12

All saints, by Emilia Misiura

I was talking to myself the other day. (I like to talk to myself; I am one of my best listeners.) “Stephen, I think you need to talk to the parish a little,” I said, quietly, in my heart. “I think you need to talk to your folks about two big things that happened this week. These events affect them; they affect our life together here. Fill them in,” I finished, in my little self-talk. “Let them hear from you.” And so I will.

I begin with something difficult that happened to one of us, and I am choosing carefully, and cautiously, to call him by name. I want to respect his personal privacy, and most importantly I do not want to establish a double standard where we discuss some of us by name – usually those of us who lack a particular privilege – while being diplomatically circumspect about others. In this case, the privilege this person lacks is wealth privilege. But the events of recent days compel me to speak with responsible candor. And so will I do that, with exceeding, anxious care.

This week I initiated the relocation of Houston, a member of St. Paul’s who camped on our parking strip. Now, please hear me: Houston remains one of us, and I believe he has a future with St. Paul’s. He pledged to our capital campaign, and he met that pledge; he was a presenter at the Celebration of New Ministry this past February; for years now he has volunteered a lot of time to help us with safety and maintenance in and around our garden. But Houston’s arrangement with us became problematic, and though Houston was but one participant in that arrangement, he unfortunately bore the brunt of the consequences. Speaking only for myself, my learning curve is steep in the work of ministering alongside our neighbors. It is a complicated ministry.

I deeply respect and care for – indeed I love – Houston. I pray for him regularly. I think you should pray for him, too. Pray for Houston: he is your sibling. He now lives nearby, but not on our block. He expressed deep dissatisfaction with his church home, and I understand why. I truly understand. 

“Blessed is Houston, who is one of those who mourn,” our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ proclaims today, in my hearing. “Blessed is Houston, for he will be comforted.” I believe that Houston mourns. In my experience of him – and please hear me say that I am sharing my experience; I am not speaking for him – in my experience, Houston bears up beneath a deep and debilitating sorrow. He is a powerful, resourceful survivor, but Houston is deeply grieved, striving to survive in a city that cares very little, if at all, for his welfare. I experience Houston, who like all of us shines with God’s image and likeness, as one of all too many in Seattle who cry a silent yet poignant lament of grief. 

If Houston does mourn, he is far from alone. We are surrounded by grieving humans. They sit in these pews. They camp on that parking strip. They stand in this pulpit. I, too, am mourning. I believe that I am not a fraction as wounded and vulnerable as Houston, but I am lamenting this world so harshly riven by seemingly intractable conflict.

And that brings me to the second big thing that happened this week, that led me to tell myself, “I think you need to talk to the parish a little.”

I published a blog post with my thoughts about Gaza and Israel. I did so with trepidation, but I think with too little trepidation, given some sharp responses I received. This is a dreadfully polarizing topic, but I felt I had to address it, as a public faith leader, and as a friend and family member of people who are closely involved.

My position is complicated. I share in the depths of my being a passion for peace with justice for all people in what we problematically call the “Holy Land,” and I pray for the Palestinian people in particular, again and again. But I also have family and friends who are in Israel right now, and I understand some of the political choices Israel has made, both in recent weeks and across seven and a half decades. I appreciate the predicaments everyone in the region has faced since Israel’s founding, and I believe that right now Israel is faced with a small number of terrible choices. And while I harbor grave concerns about the Israeli government, I have many of the same concerns about my own government, and I am outraged by the actions and statements of Hamas.

But more personally, and more viscerally, I empathize deeply with residents of Gaza who live in such chronic and desperate peril, but I also empathize with Israelis who have seen their children slaughtered and their family members abducted by terrorists. And while I pray for a peaceful and just ceasefire, I also struggle to imagine how any nation could not respond to a terrorist attack with some form of military retaliation. And finally we arrive at the most critical dilemma in all of this: all military action, all violent political action, destroys innocent life.

All of this takes me back to the list Jesus gives us of those who are “blessed,” or in some translations, those who are “happy.” Happy are those like Houston who mourn, for they will be comforted. There are countless desperate mourners in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Israel, throughout the Middle East, across the whole war-torn world. But Jesus also says, “Happy are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

I want to be a peacemaker. I want to be a peacemaker when I am working with a few of you to move our sibling in Christ from his dwelling at the edge of our property, while keeping him secure at the center of our hearts; and I want to be a peacemaker when he understandably rises up in anger when we do this. I want to be a peacemaker when I pray for family and friends in peril, and I want to be a peacemaker when I confront more anger, this time against me personally for comments I made about a dreadful war. I want to be a peacemaker who understands another peacemaker’s critique of my position.

Now, I want more than to be a peacemaker; I also want some arguments: I want to persuade others to share my views. (And not to digress too much, but I have an argument or two with Houston as well, who inspired conflicted feelings in me and others, and did not just feel them himself.) But more deeply I want true, and just, and lasting peace – peace between me and the persons upset by my Gaza/Israel post, peace between all of us at St. Paul’s, peace between those who are dismayed by the Israeli government and those who work in and for that same government, peace that rises beyond human understanding, peace that comes only from the Holy One. That is what I most want.

And so now, as we begin another week on this troubled block; another week in this grieving city; another week on a planet deeply wounded by war, atrocity, terror, and rage; as we begin another week here, we pursue peace by … baptizing. We will lead our sibling in Christ, Michael, to the font of Holy Baptism, to the roiling waters over which the Holy Spirit hovers, to the river where the Word of God is heard, and we will baptize Michael in the holy name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Michael plunges into the cruciform life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; Michael wades safely through the waves that cast the horse and rider of oppression into the sea; Michael joins us in God’s mission to liberate all of the oppressed – all of them, even those, including us, who are complicit in the oppression of others; Michael takes his place at this Table of Thanksgiving, where he is strengthened boldly to enter a new week, and then another, and then another, alongside us.

In Holy Baptism, Michael becomes a “soldier, faithful, true, and bold,” to quote today’s grand entrance hymn, For All the Saints. A soldier: now that’s a potentially troubling image. I know and have known soldiers, good ones, yet I expect some of you find their vocation disturbing. Militant imagery is especially dangerous to use in any religious context, and as more than one person has said, all wars are crimes. So why do we use the image of “soldier” when we talk about all the saints? 

Because we are fighting, that’s why. We are fighting the force of death that bears down upon so many neighbors, many of them unhoused, in our immediate midst. We are fighting the force of fear that prompts us to recoil from the world’s problems rather than face them together. We are fighting the force of discord that tempts us to argue about false dichotomies rather than grapple with the complexity of a wretched catastrophe that kills children on all sides. We are fighting the force of despair that could drown Houston, and me, and you, and Gaza, and Israel, and the entire human family, if we do not rise up and join God’s mission of hope, God’s promise of peace with justice. We are fighting on many fronts.

And in all of this — all of this sadness, all of this anger; all of this anxiety, all of this terror; all of this conflict, all of this death; in all of this, I want you to know, my friends, that you are stitched on my heart, forever, and I love you. As my mentor Kate Sonderegger told you earlier this year, I “join you in your common life before God, and array my strength in your cause.” And finally I am fiercely confident, I am certain, that God the Father rides before us in cloud and brightens our path with fire; that God the Son, the firstborn of the dead – who once was an innocent Jewish Palestinian – God the Son walks reliably beside us; and that God the Holy Spirit fills us with power to meet the manifold challenges of these perilous days.

Come forth, then, good saints, good soldiers, faithful, true, and bold. Come forth and join this mighty battle.

Moshe was kissed into eternity by the love of his life

Preached at the 5:00pm liturgy on the Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25A), October 29, 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.

Deuteronomy 34:1-12
Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46

Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, teaching in Jerusalem, January 2020.

I would like to share not my own interpretation of today’s first reading, but an interpretation by an Orthodox Jewish rabbi from Chicago by the name of Yehiel Poupko. In 2015 I traveled with an interfaith group to Israel that was co-led by Rabbi Poupko. He is a friend of Christians, yet he is firmly and happily Jewish, and I often turn to him for insights about the Hebrew Scriptures, which we Christians have been opening for only twenty short centuries as part of our Holy Book.

As it happens, the story of the death of Moses appears in autumn on the Jewish lectionary calendar, too, and this year that festival, scheduled for October 7th, was marred badly by the terrorist attack in Israel. Since October 7th, of course, the war in Gaza and Israel has only worsened, and we hold in prayer all innocent life in peril, including citizens of Gaza (most of them children) and the Israeli hostages and their terrified and grieving families. As that region continues to suffer the ravages of war and injustice, I invite you to hear a Jewish reflection on the death of Moses, as we join countless people of all faiths who pray to God for peace, and for justice.

Here is Rabbi Poupko’s interpretation. I have changed some of the Hebrew words and names to help this be easier to understand in our hearing, but left others, most notably the Hebrew pronunciation of Adam, a-DAHM, and the non-Anglicized Hebrew name for Moses, which is Moshe. Rabbi Poupko writes:

“The [Torah reading on the Jewish calendar] enables an unusual meeting this week. Adam and Moshe, these two who begin and end the Torah, will have their once a year reunion. With the conclusion of the Torah reading cycle on Simkhat Torah [the Day of Rejoicing in the Torah, an autumn holiday], we focus not just on the loss of Moshe, but we review his whole life. Indeed, there was once a time, which has now been lost, when Simkhat Torah was both a happy and a sad day. It was a day when following the Torah reading, [poems] that extolled the greatness of Moshe, that reviewed his life accomplishments, and that lamented his passing were known, read, and chanted in the synagogue. Sadly, there are few synagogues left in which these [poems] are known, let alone read. No sooner do we finish reading about the death of Moshe than we begin the Torah reading again and we meet the first person, Adam. These two, Moshe the last person of the Torah meets up with Adam the first person of the Torah. These two have an enormous amount in common. Given what they have in common there are also some equally enormous differences.

Adam and Moshe are the two loneliest people in the Torah. By the time Moshe dies Aharon and Miriam have preceded him in death. His wife and two children have slipped into oblivion. He is all alone on [Mount Nebo].

However, his greatest friend, the love of his life, is with him, the Kadosh Barukh Hu [the name for God which means ‘the Holy One, Blessed Be He’]. Moshe is kissed into eternity [by God]. When Adam, fashioned by the very hand of the Kadosh Barukh Hu, is kissed into life he is utterly and absolutely alone; except of course for the presence of the Kadosh Barukh Hu. For this first person of the Torah, the Kadosh Barukh Hu provides the kindnesses of food, companionship, and clothing. For Moshe, with whom the Torah closes, the Kadosh Barukh Hu performs the kindness of clothing him for burial and is his constant companion. Whereas Adam is told that he will eat lehem – bread – by the sweat of his brow, Moshe tells us that when he was forty days with the Kadosh Barukh Hu, he did not need lehem – bread. Both Adam and Moshe want to know everything that there is to know. That of course is what it means to be a person possessed of an element of the divine intellect. Adam wants to know all there is to know and so he eats of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, asserting that he knows what the Kadosh Barukh Hu knows. Moshe also wants to know everything there is to know, and so he asks the Kadosh Barukh Hu, ‘Let me see Your very Being.’ The Kadosh Barukh Hu tells him that is not possible. Moshe accepts that. [We heard that story last week.] Moshe is then given the gift of the Name. Adam does not possess the Name. [And so] the Kadosh Barukh Hu addresses the loneliness of Adam by creating a partner for him. The Kadosh Barukh Hu addresses the loneliness of Moshe by becoming his companion.

It is Adam who is given Eden and then expelled. It is Moshe who first restores Eden in the [Tabernacle]. (Please recall that there are kruvim – cherubs – only at the gateway to Eden and in the [Tabernacle] above the Ark; that the Tree of Knowledge is realized in the tree shaped Menorah; that one of the rivers that flows out of Eden is Gihon, which then lends its name to the spring below the Temple Mount. Adam spends most of his life east of Eden looking back on what was lost. Moshe arrives just east of Eden and spends an eternity there looking over the river in the knowledge that he has brought the Jewish people to the restored Eden, the Land of Israel and Jerusalem. Moshe restores what Adam squandered. And we are still in [the Garden of] Eden. The tragedy is that we do not know that.”

I invite your reflections on the death of Moses, the provocative words of Jesus of Nazareth, who for us Christians is sometimes called the New Moses, this season of autumn, or this perilous time in world history; and I invite any other ideas, questions, or insights that the Spirit may have given to you.

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Source: Torah Matters, a weekly emailed reflection on the Torah passage, by Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, October 11, 2017.

Stunned silence

Preached on the Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25A), October 29, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Deuteronomy 34:1-12
Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46

Earth, from a distance of 3.7 billion miles.

“No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”

Carl Sagan was a popular 20th-century writer, astronomer, and exobiologist. He cultivated an infectious enthusiasm for popular science, and he encouraged people to ask big questions about the universe, and humanity’s place in the universe. Sagan was the one who persuaded NASA to turn their Voyager 1 space probe around to photograph Earth from a distance of 3.7 billion miles, giving humanity the astonishing image of a “pale blue dot,” our tiny home, aloft and alone in the vast preserve of outer space. Years before that, Sagan led the development of the Golden Record, an artifact placed on board that same Voyager probe (as well as Voyager 2), containing information about us and our planet for potential discovery by extra-terrestrial species, who might one day intercept our wondrous inventions.

In Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, he writes, “There are naïve questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.”

“Every question is a cry to understand the world,” says Carl Sagan. “There is no such thing as a dumb question.”

And yet our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ seems to be silencing all who have questions. In today’s encounter he asks a provocative question of his own, but “no one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”

Why did they fall silent? Let’s begin reflecting on this by accepting Carl Sagan’s assertion that “there is no such thing as a dumb question.” This is self-evidently true: every question is an attempt to learn something. Think of a small child acquiring language and asking question after question: “Why is the sky blue? Why does the dog chase her tail? Why is that bald man always wearing a black shirt with a white collar?” These are not dumb questions. They readily lead the questioner to their straightforward answers. Perhaps the questioner is inexperienced in the field about which she is asking; but asking questions is an intelligent thing to do. She asks naïve questions, but they are not dumb questions.

But these are not the questions the challengers of Jesus are asking. The Pharisees were naïve about many things – something we can truthfully say about every human person who has ever lived, or ever will live – but their questions were not part of their quest for new knowledge, let alone wisdom. Their questions were hostile. In Carl Sagan’s list of less-impressive questions – remember, he said “there are naïve questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, [and] questions put after inadequate self-criticism” – the Pharisees are asking questions with too little self-criticism. They are not looking honestly at themselves before asking a hostile question of their political opponent.

And that is what Jesus is, to them: he is a political opponent. He threatens their firm hold on authority in their society and culture. But we tell their stories of failure in debates with Jesus not just because they are fascinating characters from a story, and definitely not just to stroke our own egos under the assumption that we’re better than the Pharisees. We recall their questions and failures because we, too, stand to lose politically if we follow Jesus, and we, too, stand to lose a lot even if we merely question him. Jesus threatens whatever firm hold we may have on our world, on the means of production, on our control of other people, on our safe and self-satisfied beliefs and attitudes. He is our political opponent.

To follow Jesus means to surrender to a worldview that clashes with many things we unconsciously accept as good, and even necessary: things like capitalism, which involves private ownership in a market economy. While I doubt I will ever live without a bank account and retirement funds and real estate, following Jesus makes me chronically uncomfortable with those arrangements. The longer I walk in the Christian Way, the deeper I am bothered by the profound injustice of the world that so frequently benefits me, privileges me, ensures my own comfort and safety at the expense of others. I can afford to watch the Gaza-Israel War from a safe distance, with only one member of my family directly in harm’s way. I can form opinions about that war – and of course opinions about your opinions about that war – without the threat of airstrikes flattening my own house. When I follow Jesus, I can’t help but notice that disparity, and I must awkwardly wrestle with it.

This helps me understand more deeply why the Pharisees stopped asking Jesus questions. His answers were unsettling, even upsetting. He didn’t just defeat them in their petty attempts to embarrass and discredit him in the eyes of the people, though that was bad enough. He was also correct about things that deep down they wished he were wrong about. 

I can behave like this. I want to say – and believe – that the money I earn is my money, and therefore it belongs in my bank account, and can rightly be invested by my financial representative, and therefore can earn even more money that will become my money. And all of that is true, by the rules of our economic system. My money is my money. But Jesus is right when he points to the manifest injustice of that system, and then turns his finger toward me, inviting me to step into the discomforts of my conscience, and work for a system that feeds, clothes, and houses everyone in peace and dignity. But that new system – it’s going to cost me. Do I dare ask Jesus questions, even well-intentioned (if naïve) questions? If I do question him, his answers will make me deeply uncomfortable, and end up costing me wealth, ease, and safety.

But other people in the Holy Book bring home this problem in even more profound ways than the Pharisees. The Pharisees ask hostile questions, questions that reveal their hypocrisy, questions that lead to awful answers that challenge and repel them. I get that! But other people ask Jesus a different question, a heartfelt and honest one. They ask Jesus, with sincere curiosity, “Who are you?” They ask this in various ways, and the questioners are diverse, from rural fisherfolk all the way up to the regional Roman governor. And several times in the Good News we see Jesus evading this question, or answering it but telling them to keep quiet about it. In biblical studies they call this “the Messianic Secret,” the habit Jesus had of strictly ordering his friends not to tell people that he is the Messiah. 

And here is why Jesus does this: Jesus does not want to answer the “Who are you?” question until he is nailed to the cross. When the centurion sees Jesus on the cross he puts it all together and says, “Truly this man was God’s son!” The cross is the place where the answer to the question, “Who is Jesus?” becomes clear: his grievous, humiliating death; his whole life poured out in love for others; his life, death, and imminent risen life — all this reveals to the whole world that God in Jesus is transforming all people into a new dominion; God in Jesus is mending the world; God in Jesus is routing the powers of sin and death, and making all things new. But always at great cost.

And so, finally, we encounter even more people who stand mute before Jesus, not just the Pharisees. They stand at the cross and are struck speechless by both the wonder and the horror of who Jesus is, and what his identity implies for all who follow him. On Good Friday, Christians look back at the prophet Isaiah, who spoke to a different generation that did not imagine or anticipate Jesus of Nazareth. But Isaiah’s words, written in a different time and for a different purpose, somehow, centuries later, speak eloquently to us Christians about Jesus on the cross. Isaiah sings:

See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up and shall be very high. Just as there were many who were astonished at him — so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals —so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him, for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate.

“Kings shall shut their mouths because of him.” More stunned silence, more fear to ask any more questions, more anxiety about who Jesus is, and what will happen to us if we listen to him, and follow him.

You may not like his answers, but I encourage you to approach Jesus in your prayers, and ask him your questions. “Who are you?” That’s a good question. “I am the Crucified One,” comes his answer, and that is a hard teaching, for it compels his followers to live costly, cruciform lives. “Why is there innocent suffering in the world?” That’s a question I like to ask Jesus. His answer? He answers by entering into that suffering himself as one of the innocent victims. We find him among the Gazan children, and also among the abducted Israelis. We find him among the slaughtered in our own nation, so overrun with guns that I almost didn’t notice this week’s mass shooting in Maine. Jesus compels his followers to enter that suffering too, and to relieve that suffering among those we call our neighbors.

Your questions for Jesus will give you uncomfortable, challenging, even vexing answers. If you listen to them, and if you still choose to follow Jesus, that will cost you a lot. But you will have many friends here alongside you, if you choose to follow. And here in this community of faith, we ask the hardest questions, remembering our sibling Carl Sagan’s wisdom:

“Every question is a cry to understand the world.”

God takes a long time

Preached on the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 24A), October 22, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen. This liturgy included the marriage of Liz and Laurel Tallent.

Exodus 33:12-23
Psalm 99
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22

Christ and Pharisees, by Gia Loria

It is all too easy for us to perceive the absence of God, and even to feel despair about that absence.

It is all too easy for us, looking at ourselves and the world around us through our post-modern, apocalyptic, existential lenses, to see all that has gone wrong, all that is terrible, all that seems to be pitching everyone over the cliff, dooming everyone to a meaningless death. “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,” Jesus tells us today. Well, that part is easy enough: we readily perceive the presence and power of all who can fairly be called “emperor,” and we readily perceive the dreadful imperial damage done to humanity and the earth.

But how do we give to God the things that are God’s, when the very idea of “God” can elude our most basic belief? And even if we could manage to allow for the existence of God, it remains hard to perceive God’s power. It is hard for us to find ourselves not only safely tucked into a cleft in the rock, but placed there by God, so that we might glimpse not God’s face, but just the edge, or the back, or the faintest hint of God’s presence. 

The tangible presence of good in the universe eludes us. Why does God hide God’s face from us?, we might ask – we might scream. (If we do scream this, we will only echo several people in the Bible, including Jesus of Nazareth.) But some of us all too easily abandon that question altogether, concluding with ashen resignation that it is not that God hides God’s face from us; it is that there is no God, there is no face of God, there is no glory of God, there is nothing but this wretched world we see and hear, this sorrow-filled world we touch and taste … and that taste is bitter.

If this is where you find yourself today, then I have some Good News for you. Today we can see God’s goodness, if not God’s face; today we can perceive God’s grace, if not God’s tangible presence; today we can glimpse the edge of God’s glory, right here, in this room, in this couple, in their love, in the power and beauty they create as they celebrate the sacrament of Marriage in our midst, supported by our prayers.

Today God tucks all of us in a cleft in the rock, where we can shield our faces from the bright effulgence of God’s glory, and glimpse all the light we can tolerate as these two souls grasp one another and become entwined.

God can be exasperating, dwelling everywhere in a universe pulsing with God’s power, yet always just out of sight, just out of reach. Yet isn’t this what it’s like to interact with Liz? Liz is subtle, quiet, sharp but contained. More than once I’ve texted Liz to get a read on her, to find out her thoughts after a vestry meeting or some other encounter, because Liz has a masterful poker face. And yet Liz is good. Liz is just. Liz is powerful.

Meanwhile, Laurel is perhaps more easily accessible than Liz, but Laurel moves quickly, leaping from one thought to the next, creatively interjecting yet another thought or idea into the discussion, laughing at their own bright insight for a brief maddening moment before they share it with the group. Laurel radiates God’s glory, but in a way that is, in their own distinctive style, also out of reach, just a little beyond our grasp.

Together, this couple is alight with God’s elusive energy, God’s intriguing mystery, God’s enigmatic yet good and nourishing power. And today, right here, in front of all of us, Liz and Laurel will celebrate the sacrament of Marriage.

The sacrament of Marriage: an outward, visible sign of God’s inward, spiritual grace. And there it is again — in the sacraments, God is out of reach, God is just beyond our sight, God is too bright and too overwhelming to be seen full-on; so God must tuck us in the cleft of a rock so that we can ever so hesitatingly turn to the side and glimpse just the edge of God’s glory. This is how sacraments work. This is what Liz and Laurel are up to this morning.

Sacraments: A morsel of bread, not a table laden with splendid foods. A sip of wine, not a giant Jereboam-sized bottle that pops open with fizzy champagne cascading everywhere, filling every glass to the brim. A little splash of water, not a flood or a tide that would drown us beneath its mighty crash. Sacraments are subtle.

The sacrament of Marriage, then, is subtle. The sacrament of Marriage reveals itself slowly. And this makes marriage a perfect fit for the inward genius of Liz and the delicate wit of Laurel. Marriage is not a bonanza of joy unfolding all at once, even though, often enough, we design weddings to pretend to that kind of theatrical grandeur. No, marriage deepens over years, sometimes over the better part of a century. Couples sometimes wake up, look around, and discover that they haven’t really been married, even though they’ve been together for half a lifetime; or sure, of course they’ve been married, but they’re still in the shallower end of a vast pool, with much more to explore together in their work of intimacy, in their labor of love.

But this, I say again, is how all the sacraments work. A morsel of bread and a sip of wine this morning, and next week the same modest repast; and then, decades on, we discover how deeply we have been nourished at this Thanksgiving Table. A splash of water and a dollop of oil, and then, years away, we have yet to climb the high country of our baptismal identity, claiming not just one happy moment of initiation into Christ’s Body, but a lifetime of often-painful incorporation into that Body, our whole lives giving witness to what the mystery of Holy Baptism really means.

Sometimes it takes a century for God’s glory to be revealed. Would the people who prayed in this church one hundred years ago have been able to imagine that this congregation has become a queer space, where the sacrament of Marriage is celebrated by non-binary persons, where women and queer folk are sponsored for the priesthood, and where the community of the baptized that prays here is living out their sacramental identity by taking up the work of anti-racism and reparations? No, I think our forebears long ago would not have been able to imagine all of that, whether it would have delighted them or horrified them. 

It takes a long time because sacraments take a long time. And that’s little wonder, because God, the Source of all Being, the One whose grace is mediated to us in the sacraments, God takes all of history to reveal God’s self to all living things, and even on the Last Day, God will not fully submit to our understanding.

So, take your time, as you stand today and witness Liz and Laurel celebrating the sacrament of Marriage. Don’t try to understand it all right now. Some of the sight lines in this room are poor: maybe you’re partially behind a pillar, or someone in front of you is tall; oh well, you can’t see all that’s going on anyway. Neither can I, and I’ll be standing right in front of them! 

It will take Liz and Laurel a lifetime to reveal to us — and to themselves — all that this sacrament they celebrate today will mean, all that it will say about God, all that it will do to mend the world, all that it will stand for long after all of us, Liz and Laurel included, have died in the peace of Christ.

Marriage is a novel, not a short story; it’s an ultra-marathon, not a sprint; it’s an epic poem that never ends, but melts into another couple’s sacrament of Marriage, and theirs into another’s, and on and on, blending with the sacramental lives of individuals who are called to ventures other than marriage, blending with the sacramental missions we share as God’s people, until finally we, all of us, including our great great grandchildren, will lift up our heads, look around, and realize that God, the ever-elusive One, the Source of All Being, God has married God’s people, heaven has married earth, and all living things are flourishing beneath the Tree of Life.

On that day all people will sing together an ancient song, a song which we sang this morning, a song that is yet another subtle foretaste of the feast to come. All people will sing, for the umpteenth time, this great song of gladness:

Proclaim the greatness of the Lord our God and worship upon God’s holy hill; for the Lord our God is the Holy One.

The wedding banquet

Sermon given by Kevin Montgomery at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle on October 15, 2023, the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, at 8:00am and 10:30am masses.

Matthew 22:1-14

Matthew’s Jesus can be hard to swallow. This is supposed to be the Good News, but where is it? At this point in the story, he’s overthrown the money changers. He’s now denouncing the religious authorities to their faces, “Woe to you blind guides. . . . Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” and giving parables of judgment against them. Here we have the story of a wedding where those who decline the invitation are killed and their city is burned; and one person who accepts the invitation is thrown out for wearing the wrong outfit. Where’s the good news in that? Where’s the grace?

Well, let’s dive into this and see what’s with this wedding. At this time and place, the rich and powerful would throw a banquet or such to show off their wealth and status. They would then invite other elites with the expectation they’d return the favor in some way. It was also standard practice to send an initial announcement of the upcoming festivities, sort of like a “Save the Date” card today. When everything was ready, an invitation to come would be sent. That would also give the invitees a chance to see who was on the list. “So who else is coming?” Maybe the intended guests didn’t like who was going to be there. Maybe they didn’t like the king. Either way, to refuse the summons would be a grave insult. To kill the king’s servants? Well, that’s treason. That’s rebellion. An earthly king would have been expected to punish them severely. 

But we’re not talking about an earthly king here. This heavenly king does the unexpected. He doesn’t replace one set of elites with another. He sends his servants out of the city, to the highways and byways, the squares and the crossroads, to gather all those they find. These are the outsiders who are being brought in. Mind you, this is not about Jews being replaced by Christians or one chosen people being replaced by another. This is about opening up the feast, the messianic banquet, to those who otherwise would not have been able to come.These aren’t necessarily the people with wealth and status who can throw a party for the king or return extravagant favors. In Luke’s version of the parable, they’re the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame. In Matthew’s, the servants gather both the good and the bad. By “bad” what do we mean? Morally? Sure. Prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners. Perhaps also those who might not fit into “polite society,” those who don’t quite “fit in,” those who just aren’t the “right kind of people.” And it might include some of us too. Being invited to a king’s party when you just might not deserve it, that sounds like a pretty nice gift. 

And we’re not just allowed in either. The king, the ruler, God sends servants out to bring us to the feast. Think of the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures, the apostles of the church; and speaking through them is the Holy Spirit, the conveyor of grace. In the collect, we heard a request that God’s grace “may always precede and follow us.” Forgive me for going all Wesleyan on you for a second. (With my Methodist heritage, I can’t help it.) But one of the key points in John Wesley’s theology is what is known as prevenient grace. This is the aspect of grace that goes before us and provides a light for the path, that shows us the good and lets us want it. It invites us to come to the palace that we might never have thought we’d visit. It’s like the porch where we gather as we’re brought into the great house we never dared enter. There we’re greeted and declared worthy of coming inside. Put on the wedding garment of holiness and celebrate.

Oh, wait, what about the guy that didn’t have one? Well, it was not unusual at the time for the host to provide robes to guests who didn’t have them. And if all these people were brought in off the streets, how many of them would have been wearing their fancy dress? So perhaps everyone got a robe, but this person wasn’t wearing it. That means they refused the one that was offered or got rid of it. Why? Maybe it was a sign of disrespect to the host’s hospitality or just disregard of the dignity of the event and the other guests. Or perhaps the person already had clothes they thought were better than what was provided. They wanted people to see them and give them a place of honor at the banquet, to treat them with the respect they obviously deserved. Regardless, this person didn’t get it. They totally missed the point of the celebration. When called out on it, they couldn’t or wouldn’t give a response. No apology, no request for a new garment, silence. 

The really annoying thing about God’s grace is that just because you accept the invitation, that doesn’t mean everything’s all hunky-dory. There’s a cost. I’m not talking about returning the favor or having to follow an exacting set of rules. No, it’s about letting ourselves be transformed. To put on Christ is to become a new person who shows forth the fruit of new life. To put on Christ is to clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, as St. Paul writes. It’s not just to answer the call of God’s prevenient grace or accept the gift of justifying grace but to also open ourselves up to the work of sanctifying grace and cooperate with it. To put on this wedding garment is to accept that we are worthy to enter regardless of our place in life. To put on the garment is also to enter that banquet the same as everyone else, even if we think they’re the “wrong” people. But this choice has a cost. We risk making ourselves vulnerable, sitting down not just with those we don’t like but maybe even with those we hate. When we enter the banquet, we don the robe and put off body armor. We take up the food and drink of life and put down the weapons of death. In this time of hyper-polarization, conflict over resources, and especially now with the seemingly endless cycle of destruction in Israel and Gaza, we need to hear this message more than ever. Can you make that choice? Can I make that choice? With God’s grace and your help, I hope so. God, I hope so.

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.