Stations of the Sabbath

Remarks for Shared Homily at 5:00pm Vespers with Holy Eucharist
Mark 2:23-3:6
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 4B)
Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D.

Noon, rest from work, by Vincent Van Gogh

Well, that was the first time in two months we’ve heard a reading from the gospel of Mark – even though this is Year B in our Sunday lectionary cycle, the year that leans into Mark. Most of our gospel readings during the Easter season and on through Pentecost and Trinity Sundays came from John, with a few from Luke. But this evening we return to Mark’s gospel and now Sunday after Sunday for the next six months – with one little detour through John in August – we’ll have the opportunity to live into Mark’s distinctive and distinctively different way of telling the story of Jesus. To get ready for that immersion experience, we’re all invited to gather upstairs on Sunday, June 16 at 2:00pm when a little troupe of actor-storytellers will perform the gospel of Mark – all of it, from jarringly abrupt beginning to mysteriously open-ended ending.

This evening, however, we don’t need to wrestle with the whole gospel of Mark, just those two little stories we heard Linzi [The Rev. Linzi Stahlecker] read from the end of chapter 2 and the beginning of chapter 3. Both take place on sabbath days. Both involve what the sabbath does and doesn’t, should and shouldn’t, mean. The stakes couldn’t be higher. For after hearing Jesus’ sabbath words and observing his sabbath actions, here’s the verdict rendered by the religious and political authorities: “The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against Jesus, how to destroy him.” Not how to chastise him or pull him back or restrain him, but how to destroy him.

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And so, Jesus and his opponents and the sabbath and us. We need to be careful. I need to be careful. What we call Sunday, the Lord’s Day, the eighth day, is not the sabbath of our Jewish siblings. But they’re related, intertwined even – not always for the good of Christians or Jews. We need, I need, to avoid the self-righteous Christian stereotype that the six hundred thirteen commandments in the law of Moses are oppressive and life-denying. I once had a conservative Jewish rabbi as a colleague – and it’s true that he couldn’t come to my home and eat dinner because we didn’t keep a kosher kitchen, but he invited us to several sabbath dinners in his home with his family and they were occasions full of life and joy and blessing. Another time, Larry and I were driving back from a faculty retreat when a rainbow appeared on the opposite side of the Hudson River. He immediately started chanting a prayer of thanksgiving in Hebrew – remember the Noah story! Larry was surprised that we Christians don’t have a similar prayer in our tradition. I need to be careful, we need to be careful, as we think about sabbath not to bear false witness against our Jewish siblings.

We find one way of framing the meaning of sabbath in the book of Genesis (2:1-3): “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work God had done, and God rested on the seventh day….So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work God had done in creation.” This narrative gets carried over into the book of Exodus as the fourth of the Ten Commandments (20:8-11). Sabbath rest. And that’s what angers the Pharisees in our two stories from Mark’s gospel: Why do your disciples do what is not lawful on the sabbath by plucking heads of grain in the fields? Why do you engage in the work of healing a man on the sabbath?

As a kid growing up, we used the words sabbath and Sunday interchangeably. I grew up in the Church of the Nazarene, part of the so-called American holiness movement. We were a little different. We didn’t smoke. We didn’t drink. We didn’t play cards – well, we could play Rook!, but not those evil poker cards with their clubs and spades, jacks and queens. We didn’t go to movies. And we didn’t watch television on Sunday – and so I missed the Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. But I grew up Nazarene in eastern Massachusetts, which, by the 1960s, was predominately Roman Catholic, although its cultural and religious roots go back to the Puritans of the 1600s. When I was a kid, Massachusetts still had what were called “blue laws” that kept most shops and other businesses closed on Sundays. Those laws have since been repealed. Capitalism won out. But – and here’s my point – for me, growing up, Sunday was not so much about rest as abstinence. Sabbath abstinence. See no evil. Hear no evil. Avoid the evil attractions and entertainments of the world.

Now there’s nothing wrong with abstinence. There are very good reasons why some people abstain from eating pork or drinking alcoholic beverages or burning fossil fuels. And there’s nothing wrong with rest. The problem – whether we are Christians or Jews or some other faith or no faith at all – is when some people enjoy the privilege, the leisure, to rest, while others must work hard all weekend just to make a living. The problem is when my abstinence – or whatever my ethical or religious symbols and stories, rituals and practices happen to be – when my abstinence causes me to believe I’m better than other people; causes me to forget that they, too, are God’s Beloved.

But there’s a second edition of the Ten Commandments in the book of Deuteronomy; the law of Moses 2.0. Here the sabbath is traced back to the liberation of the people of Israel from Egyptian slavery, rather than God’s rest from the work of creation. And the insistence here is that sabbath rest is for all, not just some. “Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work – you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day” (Deuteronomy 5:12-15).

Sabbath liberation. That’s what Jesus’ words and actions are about in our gospel reading from Mark. “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath” (2:27). The sabbath is not an end in itself, but a means to address human need for the sake of human flourishing. Whether it’s hunger for bread, or hunger for inclusion, equality, and justice. For Jesus, the point of sabbath rest is restoration. “Come forward,” he says to the man with the withered hand – and then asks his opponents: “is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” (3:3-4) Grieved at their hardness of heart, Jesus invites, no, Jesus commands the man – “‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was restored” (5). Sabbath restoration.

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I wonder how these three different meanings of sabbath sit with you? Abstinence. Rest. Liberation and restoration. I wonder how we might perform sabbath this Sunday evening? Embody sabbath? Put it on and act it out? Imagine three stations set up around this worship space as prompts.

A chair turned around backwards for sabbath abstinence. Hands off. Eyes shut. Ears covered.

Then a different chair, a rocking chair. Sabbath rest. Sit. Sit back. Recline even.

And for sabbath liberation and restoration: a work bench with tools and gloves. Come forward. Stretch out your hand. Hands on.

Do you need to visit one of these three stations in particular, for a while, and sit there? Abstinence? Rest? Liberation and restoration? Or how might each station complement and correct the others for you?

I invite your responses.

Resource: Laurel Tallent for likening my imaginary stations to the Stations of the Cross we visit as part of our Lenten practice.

Eldership in Nicodemus

This homily is a short “starter” homily that encourages the assembly at our 5:00pm liturgy to add their own insights and reflections in conversation with the preacher. Gathered in a circle in the early evening, we enjoy this evening Eucharist as a more intimate form of worship on the Lord’s Day.

Preached on the Feast of the Holy Trinity (Year B), May 26, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Laurel Tallent.

Christ and Nicodemus by Fritz von Uhde

Over the past few months I have found myself in conversations with people, many younger than me, about our role in our communities as we get older. What does it mean to be an elder? What will the people that I mentor need from me? What do I need?

Isaiah and Nicodemus, two elders in their own communities, are both faced with situations beyond their considerable mortal experience, and in the process reveal eldership that breaks our modern, conventional expectations of elders. They are faced with mystical ideas, and they rise to the occasion with faith, utilizing what skills they have to understand them, and help others understand.

In these conversations I’ve been having, especially with other queer people, there is always a point where we are silent, we are speechless, because there is always a point where we have to reckon with what we have lost. We are thinking about how many black and indigenous elders - queer and otherwise - the world has been deprived of because of the virulent violence of Whiteness and colonialism. There have always been queer people, so we are thinking about the queer grandparents and great, great, greats beyond count that we have lost due to generations of erasure. We are thinking of the negligence of a government that didn’t care about young people who would have - should have - aged alongside my parents here. The creative challenge of becoming a queer elder, or in finding one, is inextricably tied to the loss that created much of the challenge. In that creative challenge, I find an example of eldership in Nicodemus.

Nicodemus, a rabbi, a member of the governing religious body, a head of a rabbinical school, is undoubtedly an elder in his community. He is mentioned glowingly both in the gospel of John and in the Talmud. While we have accounts of Jesus and other religious leaders confronting one another in front of congregations and on the street, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night for a conversation. Nicodemus is considered a saint in a few traditions, so there are plenty of depictions of him to choose from. One that I particularly like has Jesus standing arms out as if in the middle of a long explanation, body half towards Nicodemus, half towards a window, which captures the sense that this conversation is split between the immediate audience and a universal one. And Nicodemus looks up at him, head on his fists, listening. I picture Nicodemus as engaged, not convinced, but not dismissive. It recalls Jesus’ day at the temple, in Luke, where his youthful wisdom and questions were both welcomed.

We’re told that Nicodemus recognizes something legitimate about Jesus, and I think that the privacy of this conversation shows his good faith to earnestly investigate. Nicodemus’ question, in response to Jesus’ description of re-birth sounds sarcastic, but is still a sign of good faith: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” He is using Rabbinic dialogue to press an impossible situation onto a statement in order to pick out what is actually true. When I was talking to Liz about this, she mentioned that this is similar to the practice of motivational coaching - “You do not care about quitting smoking, and your family encourages it!” provides a platform for the patient to vehemently disagree, and to connect with and articulate their motivations to quit smoking. Nicodemus isn’t “just asking questions” to get a rise out of Jesus, to mock him or to silence him. He is using the tools that he has - as an elder - he is inviting Jesus to use those tools alongside him, so that Jesus is able to communicate his mission and role outside of himself.

At the core of Nicodemus and Jesus’ interaction, I see Nicodemus giving Jesus a gift. To know you are the Son of God is one thing, but how could Jesus find the words to clearly communicate what that meant? As fully human, Jesus inherently needed the support and coaching that an elder could provide. John’s first three chapters show us that Jesus has friends-slash-students who have some ideas, and one very eccentric, insightful cousin who sees him for who he is, his true identity. In the meantime, Jesus performs a miracle, he turns over tables, but I don’t read him as having a clear grasp of his mission. These are the three statements Jesus makes in John before his conversation with Nicodemus: “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these”, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace” “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days” I read these statements as the Son of God recognizing his power and his identity, but they aren’t capturing the mission of the Word becoming flesh. I don’t think Jesus is ready to teach that yet. So what a gift, to be coached by the teacher of Israel.

Nicodemus models authentic curiosity, not just as an aspect of Rabbinic dialogue, but a curiosity with the ideas that Jesus was bringing to the table. Jesus’s term “born again” was not novel, it has a Jewish origin. In the practice of the day, Nicodemus had already been born again as many times as possible for a man of his status and age. Per Pharisaic Judaism, he had been re-born four times; with his bar mitzvah, through his marriage, when he became a rabbi, and when he became the head of a rabbinical school. In Nicodemus’ question, I hear a continued interest in being transformed, regardless. He isn’t waving Jesus away saying “I have already been re-born”, or “I’ve learned enough”.

But the all-knowing elder is one we’re familiar with. The one who has no patience for youth’s exploration of identity, or the formation of their ideas. They’d rather everyone just grow up already, because arriving at one’s full potential is the only acceptable move. Liberation theologian Dr Willie Jennings points us to the enmeshment of Christianity and whiteness as a poison that deforms our understanding of maturity. If Christian life is about being born again and formed into that newness, Whiteness distorts that formation after re-birth into an individual’s trajectory that peaks and reaches a final destination. Jennings says “Whiteness offers us a relationship with the world that is one dimensional, where we take from it what we see fit, caring for it only within the logistics of making it more productive for us”. Whiteness twists our practice of eldership into a horrific drive, where elders invest only what is necessary to bring about the optimal productivity of those they counsel.

“You hold the office of teacher of Israel and you still don’t know this?” So early into his ministry, Jesus is standing at the intersection of disappointment in elders who do not understand him, and surprise that they do not understand him. Jesus’ frustration isn’t just over their rejection, but their inability to see a larger vision that he is deeply attuned to and unable to communicate effectively. Nicodemus, the teacher of Israel, is an effective elder to Jesus in this moment not because he’s invested in Jesus’ having a successful ministry, not just because he has the tools that Jesus needs. Nicodemus is a gifted elder because of his curiosity and pursuit of being made new, over and over again.

The ultimate product of this conversation is Jesus articulating God’s sacrifice for the people he loves. It makes sense in the context of John, the gospel that is so tender and so deeply in love. But I’m not focused on the productivity of the conversation. Instead I want to lift up John 3:16 as a snippet of an incredibly important and sacred interpersonal experience: Nicodemus became Jesus’ elder. The Word became flesh and lived among us. The Word became flesh and couldn’t find the words. Nicodemus became Jesus’ elder, and helped him find the words.

Our elders don’t have to look like us, or be like us to meet our needs. As a white person, I know that it is incredibly important that I find, learn from and be transformed by elders who do not look like me, who do not think or love like me. It’s not only personally important, but imperative to the mission of disentangling whiteness from Christianity, and finding our way to a truer maturity than the one whiteness offers.

There’s no “representation” for the unique son of god. But Nicodemus and Jesus’ shared identities as teachers clearly plays an important role in their conversation. They discuss like rabbis, Jesus alludes to Nicodemus’ identity as THE rabbi. I wonder how Jesus’ mission was uniquely shaped by his identity as a rabbi. I wonder how Nicodemus’ teaching was transformed in his own, unexpected, precedent-breaking 5th re-birth.

I am thirty three. I am not of a traditional “elder” age, but I feel the world’s hunger for it. I see it whenever I am clocked by a young trans person, like my wife’s co-worker’s teen, who spent multiple hours hovering around me at a health fair. Myself and other queer and trans people in my life are hungry to have elders that look like us. But gosh darn it, more and more queer kids keep showing up, and they have that hunger for elders too. The reality of our world has called many elders into that role before they feel ready. I do worry - I am trailed by whiteness’ expectations of maturity, the expectation that we reach that peak of productivity before we are called to eldership. You are too. In this matter (as with many others) the burning coal has been placed on our lips. God has met us and called us into something that doesn’t imply our perfection or full potential. We have been called clean and sent out.

Regardless of your age or identity - how do you see yourself being called into eldership? What does Nicodemus, Isaiah or Jesus, model for your practice of eldership?

The bright shadow

Preached on the Feast of the Holy Trinity (Year B), May 26, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17

Nicodemus Visiting Jesus, by Henry Ossawa Tanner

Have you ever been at a party and wanted to find a quiet corner, in the shadows, where you could collect your thoughts, breathe, and be invisible for a while? (I know that for some of you here, you may have never not wanted to do this while attending a party.) This may be true even at a fun or lovely party: imagine a party that offers good food, pleasant conversation, and a truly relaxing evening with friends; even there, you might want to step away for a while.

I invite you to step out of the party (good or bad) of your busy life, out of the party of noise and chatter around our parish, and (if just for a few moments) out of the dubious “party” of dust and heat and anguish in our troubled world. I invite you to step out of all that, and spend some quiet time with the image on the cover of today’s bulletin. This is a painting of the encounter of Jesus and Nicodemus. It was painted by Henry Ossawa Tanner, in 1899, in Jerusalem.

I have had the experience of being awake in the wee hours in Jerusalem, and even the experience of being on a rooftop deck in the Old City, like the one in Tanner’s painting. Jerusalem has a desert climate where, I discovered, it is not reliably cool and pleasant outside except after sunset, or before dawn. I wonder if, centuries ago, Jerusalem at night felt like it does now: a warm but restive city, asleep but fitful, quiet but restless. Cities throb and bustle and hum, and some cities never entirely shake off that energy, even at four in the morning. Jerusalem is like that. It is lovely, but it feels a little haunted, a little harrowed, and more than a little sad.

Can a city have a guilty conscience?

That’s the darkened Jerusalem I see in Tanner’s painting. And Nicodemus has wandered out into that restlessness, and tucked himself under the cover of that anxious darkness. Nicodemus enters the darkness of the “world,” in the Good News according to John. John the evangelist defines the “world” as the human arena of ignorance and wrongdoing, of failure and fear, of loss and shame and regret, of rebellion and rejection. For John, the “world” is that awful place where we have broken our connection to the One who wants to abide with us, the One who loves us, the One who teaches us how to love one another, the One who loves us to the end.

But the darkened “world” that Nicodemus enters, as he pads quietly upstairs to the rooftop deck, is not completely terrible. When Nicodemus heads upstairs into the darkness of John’s “world,” into the benighted Jerusalem, to get some fresh air and clear his head, the restless nocturnal city symbolizes the subconscious of Nicodemus – and the subconscious of you, and me, and everyone who ponders this nighttime encounter. The dark “world” of the human subconscious can be – and is – terrible, often enough: this is the place where our deepest fears lurk alongside our repressed rages – but the human subconscious also offers us what a Jungian psychoanalyst might call “a bright shadow.” In other words, when we venture up and out onto the darkened rooftop deck of our subconscious, we might learn something well worth learning – about ourselves, about the world, about God.

But the “party” Nicodemus leaves to steal some time for his quiet thoughts – that party is not completely terrible, either. Consider again Tanner’s painting, and notice the warm glow of light on the stair risers. I see that light and imagine gentle conversation, punctuated by bursts of laughter, half a sentence of dialogue just audible above the white noise of scattered conversation, the knowing smile of a friend, shared with me over the crowd. 

If Nicodemus stays downstairs in that amber haze of friendship, in a social world where he is a respected leader, he won’t be entirely miserable. He might not have the freedom to think and feel clearly, to focus, to meditate and concentrate. But there are consolations in the busy world. Haven’t you felt that? Even if you clearly prefer introversion, and even if you are exhausted and mortified by all that is wrong in human society (and if you have any kind of moral compass, you must feel some amount of mortification right now!), you might still appreciate the warm glow of the party.

So let’s not be too dualistic as we contemplate the nighttime adventures of Nicodemus. The raucous party isn’t all bad, and the daunting night offers valuable gifts. John’s dark “world” yields intriguing treasures. After all, Nicodemus meets Jesus not in the warm heart of an evening party, but on that desolate rooftop deck. And as they talk, the party continues to beckon, invitingly, as the amber light bathes the stairs. God’s grace infuses all of our gatherings, and illuminates all of our dark corners.

Nicodemus encounters Jesus in the twilight of the subconscious, the shadows of the unknown, under the protective blanket of a private, personal space. And here is what Jesus reveals to Nicodemus:

God loves this beautiful, terrible world. God infuses this world with God’s love. God pitches God’s tent here; God steps into the fray; God is with us. That’s an important, essential lesson. “For God so loved the world,” Jesus almost seems to sing in this scene so beautifully sketched by John — “For God so loved the world,” Jesus sings, and remember: the world is our subconscious, our ignorance, our shadow of anger and fear, the dreadful and haunting night. God so loved the world, that God gave. God gave of God’s self: God descended into the world, the Word of God spoken above and into the chaos; the Spirit of God blowing wherever she wishes; the creative power of God stirring beneath the sleeping city. God’s love for the world is ultimate: God’s love is boundless, relentless, devastating, redemptive, restorative, resurrecting.

And Nicodemus can not grasp any of that until he chooses to look into his own shadow. Some biblical interpreters see a kind of duel going on here: Nicodemus is parrying with Jesus, initiating a kind of fencing match. When he asks incredulous questions, like “How can these things be?”, he may already have a witty response at the ready, and is only pretending to be dense, to lull Jesus into a false sense of security. Maybe. But even if that’s the cynical motive Nicodemus has at the outset, John shows us that Nicodemus ends up listening earnestly to Jesus. Nicodemus authentically looks within himself, unflinchingly, to try to grasp the truth of God’s love for us — for the real us, with all our grievous flaws.

After all, we meet Nicodemus two more times in John’s Gospel. We find him trying to be the voice of reason in a heated debate about Jesus, and more powerfully we encounter him at the tomb, wordlessly preparing the body of Jesus for burial. Nicodemus helps Joseph of Arimathea anoint the body with a whopping hundred pounds of fragrant spices and aloes: the burial of a sovereign. Nicodemus puts it all together, following his decision to step up and out onto the nighttime rooftop deck, up and out into the subconscious of humanity, where our worst fears lurk, where our most dangerous impulses linger.

Nicodemus bravely steps into that awful place, and finds there the infusing, liberating, saving love of the Holy Three. Nicodemus finds in the human shadows God’s love that triumphs over all the worst we do, all the worst we are. 

Sometimes, when I meditate, old and painful memories come to the surface, like stinging needles, like sharp succulents in shadowy flower pots lining the rooftop deck of my mind in the dreadful hours of the night. I remember dumb things I’ve done, heartless things, foolish and reckless things. Then I slip into the quiet, wee-hours nihilism that tells me the sun has forever gone down on me, on you, on all of us in this benighted world. But then I breathe — I open my chest in expansive submission — and God’s Spirit fills me with power, with wisdom, with love. 

For I know this, my beloved companions, and I know it well: whenever we pad upstairs to the rooftop deck in the middle of the night, turning aside from the warm glow (and the harsh glare) of our workaday lives, we will of course be stung by the sharp needles of our own fear and anger, our own sadness and regret; but we will also be met by the Holy Three, ever creative, ever speaking words of vindication and comfort, ever filling our lungs with the holy and healing Breath of God. 

May we then follow our sibling Nicodemus, as he descends those glowing stairs and returns to the party, returns to the fray, returns to the changes and chances of this life. May we, like Nicodemus, return from our nocturnal contemplations forever renewed by God’s blessing of peace, forever changed by our encounter with holiness, forever determined to revere with our most expensive spices and aloes the Sovereign One who restores us to life.

Rejoicing in the power of the Spirit

Preached on the Day of Pentecost (Year B) , May 19, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 2:1-21
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
Romans 8:22-27
John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

Pentecost 2019, by Julie Henkener

One evening last November, one of the twelve evenings my father spent in the ICU at Fairview Southdale Hospital, in Minneapolis, I enjoyed a short conversation with the nurse who was coming on shift, and preparing my dad for a quiet night. The nurse was up and down, typing on the computer keyboard, tapping the beeping IV keypads, checking hoses, repositioning my father on the pillows, dashing in and out to get supplies and run other errands.

As he worked I asked him questions about the monitor tracking my dad’s breathing pattern. I apologized for bothering this medical professional in his duties. “Oh, I’m happy to answer your questions,” he said, with a genuine smile. “It’s part of why I’m here.” He pointed to the jagged line tracking my father breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out, above the ventilator’s constant, underlying rhythm. The line changed color when it crossed different thresholds.

“You see here?” the nurse said, pointing to the line where it stayed down in the color green. “This is a breath that the machine did all by itself, and Gary rode the vent.” “He ‘rode the vent’?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered. “It means he let the machine breathe for him. I’d actually like him to ride the vent a little, tonight,” the nurse continued. “Riding the vent lets him rest, and when he rests, his lungs can heal.” The nurse paused. Then he said, “Of course we don’t want him to ride the vent all night. It’s also good when he tries to breathe on his own. That’s part of healing, too.”

I looked at the monitor with new understanding. “Don’t ride the vent,” I found myself praying to my father. (He was one of two key people who taught me the value of working hard.) “Get it, Daddy,” I almost whispered. I felt heartened by the thin red line that told us he was working at breathing. Then I quietly chastised myself: he should rest, I remembered.

Again, it’s a both/and situation: You’re encouraged to ride the vent, but you are also encouraged to not ride the vent. Ride the vent, don’t ride the vent. Both are important. 

Now, as most of you know, my father did not regain the ability to breathe on his own. He spent the last twelve nights of his earthly life in that ICU room, sedated and intubated, in the company of good, skilled nurses and doctors. In the end, he ‘rode the vent’ all the way to that other shore. And so, as an illustration of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, maybe you might wonder if my father’s time on a ventilator is all that cheerful or hopeful.

But it truly is a good and useful story. It truly is a Pentecost story, a Holy Spirit story. After all, God is with us in both life and death. The Spirit broods over the primordial waters of chaos, and therefore we can trust that she also broods over us in our chaotic return from this earthly life back into God’s immediate embrace. My father did not recover to enjoy a few more years of unassisted breathing in this realm of human life. But he was borne by God’s Breath into the Communion of Saints. My father has found healing and health. He goes forth rejoicing in the power of the Spirit, alleluia, alleluia.

And so it is with hope and even a bit of cheer that I borrow this image of a hospital ventilator from my father’s last days, and use it to guide our reflections on the Holy Spirit of God, the Breath of the Holy Three, the soaring and warming fire of Pentecost, the movement and power that flows beneath us, rhythmically supporting us, empowering our every breath. The Holy Spirit: she is, well, she is our ventilator. And in our lives together in the Spirit, we are invited to ‘ride the vent’ — to let the Spirit teach, correct, and hold us. And we are challenged to not ‘ride the vent’ — to teach, correct, and hold ourselves, and one another, in this phenomenal and serendipitous world.

First, let’s consider the various ways we ‘ride the vent’ in our life of faith. In our Pentecost meditations on the image of the ventilator, ‘riding the vent’ doesn’t just mean resting, though it’s important that all of us rest regularly, let’s say, oh, about one day in every seven. But ‘riding the vent’ also means more than passive rest. It also means listening.

When we ‘ride the vent’ of the Holy Spirit, we listen to the wisdom of the younger generations. We ‘ride the vent’ while they tell us things we should know. In his Day of Pentecost sermon, Peter quotes the prophet Joel, who sings about the younger members of the community: the young ones among us, says Joel — they “will see visions.” That tracks. I am a member of Generation X, and I’m a little startled, in these years of my mid-fifties, to see that I am now older than three living generations: Millennials, Gen Z, and Alpha. And I am reminded almost daily that the younger generations surely do see splendid visions! 

Our youngest companions envision a world liberated from homophobia and transphobia. (They even help bring that world into being.) They envision a world liberated from warfare and oppression. (They help bring that world into being, too.) Often enough, in their youthful visions, they are more idealistic than me, and that is good: I need that. So when I ‘ride the vent’ of the Spirit, I stop and pay attention so that I can see, understand, and be inspired by — be ventilated by — the younger generations. I let them teach me. I let them correct me. I even let their visions hold me — hold me in hope.

But ‘riding the vent’ doesn’t just mean listening to the young visionaries among us. It also means listening to the dreams of the elders. Joel sings about them, too. “Your elders will dream dreams,” sings the prophet. One great gift of Christian community is the abundant wisdom of elders, who dream of so many things. They dream of times gone by, times of challenge and hardship, but triumph and progress, too. They dream of reconciliation, at long last: some elders dream of the literal reconciliation of long-estranged friends, and help bring that about. Other elders dream of the reconciliation of their own dashed hopes — reconciling the disappointments of life with how things actually turned out.

A little while ago, I spent time with one of our elders here at St. Paul’s, and I listened with great interest to their effort, after all these long years, to make sense of the problem of human suffering. It’s one of the ancient human questions: why do innocent people suffer? Why do some of us die before our time? Why do bad things happen to faithful and conscientious people? Why? This elder wants to know. Their contemplative dreams are disturbed by this hard question, but I sense the power of the Spirit in this later-life discernment. I am honored to see this faithful soul dreaming up an answer or two. I can hardly wait to hear more from this person — more dreams, more ideas, more questions.
But then I get back to work. Remember: Ride the vent, but also don’t ride the vent. The Holy Spirit opens us up, pushes us, drives us forward. She calls us to understand and articulate our own visions, to share the wisdom of our own dreams. You and I, all of us, we have a job to do, as we rejoice in the power of the Spirit. We are on the hook to teach this community, to lead this assembly of the faithful, to correct and challenge each other when we get off track, to hold each other when we fall, to embrace and comfort each other when we’re sick or lonely, when we’re anxious or depressed. 

“Don’t ride the vent,” I breathed in an anxious moment by my father’s side. I was wishing that for him, but I see now that I was also talking to myself. And now I call out this exhortation to you: Don’t ride the vent. Rise and lead, get up and teach us, work alongside us, correct and challenge us, hold us. The Holy Spirit will give you all you need to do this hard and good work.

And if you need someone to inspire you, someone to reveal what it might look like to rejoice in the power of the Spirit, consider again the strong nurse who gently spoke to me at Fairview Southdale Hospital. He patiently answered my questions; he translated complicated concepts into an ordinary language I could understand. He was friendly, steady, and serene. He did not ‘ride the vent’ as he worked, watched, and responded to the world around him.

And he reassured me that he would be there all night long.

Dig In and Hold On - and Let Go

Preached on the Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year B), May 12, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D.

Acts 1:15-17,
21-26; John 17:6-19

Jesus with His Apostles, by Edward Longo

The church does not have a mission. God’s mission in the world has a church. The church doesn’t have a mission, God’s mission has a church.

That’s my take-away from the gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles these past few weeks as we’ve journeyed through the second half of our Easter season. Oh, I’ve taken away some other thoughts and feelings, too – like: We need not cling desperately to Jesus, because he abides with us, abides in us. And: We can’t earn the Holy Spirit as reward for right belief or good behavior. The Spirit, like the wind, blows where it chooses and we don’t know where it comes from or where it goes; we can only receive the Holy Spirit as gift, as Jesus’ own first gift for us.

Those are powerful and potentially life-changing, but still I’m most taken this morning with that first idea: The church doesn’t have a mission, God’s mission in the world has a church. An idea that challenges my usual ways of thinking about and being church. That promises to shake things up.

But wait a minute, Mark, you may be thinking. We’re St. Paul’s Episcopal Church here in Seattle. Are you saying we don’t have a mission? After all, we call rectors and welcome curates. We have a vestry, a pair of wardens, and a parish ministry council. We adopt mutual ministry goals. There’s a town hall meeting scheduled for next Sunday. Sure sounds like a mission. We even talk about the building and grounds as our mission base!

Now I don’t want to bump you out at the very beginning of this sermon, so would it help if I phrased it a little less starkly? How about: The church may not have a mission of its own devising, but God’s mission does indeed have a church in order to work itself out in the world. Or, maybe, we all just need to sit for a while with the original take-away: The church doesn’t have a mission, God’s mission has a church. What could that mean?

For me, it’s about doing and not doing. About why we do what we do and don’t do. Out of duty? To prove ourselves worthy? Out of love? It’s about digging in and holding on – and, at the same time – about letting go. Both-and, not either/or. But there is an unhealthy extreme on both ends of the spectrum. The church requires many volunteers and a few paid staff. If no one digs in and holds on, the church withers away. On the other hand, some staff or volunteers may take on too much for their own good and eventually the whole community suffers from exhaustion. Those folk need to let go a little. The church doesn’t have a mission, God’s mission has a church: so dig in, hold on – and let go. We all need to live this out, but maybe in different ways or for different reasons.

I’m a dutiful first-born child with three siblings, including a youngest brother who was in and out of the hospital the first two years of his life. Taking on responsibilities and getting things done come naturally to me. Saying “No! Enough is enough!” and letting go is harder. Many years ago, back on the East Coast, I truly burned out on church. I served on one board, three committees, and an ad hoc task force. I was assistant treasurer for a year; then got elected lay leader of the congregation. I led worship, preached, taught children’s and adult education classes. Somewhere along the way, I noticed that I no longer visited with my friends at coffee hour. Instead, I went to meetings or chaired meetings or spent time frantically trying to get some other church business done. Eventually, I began to dread going to church because I knew some work or responsibility was there waiting for me. But it was the Easter egg hunt that did me in. There in the splendor of neo-gothic architecture, Tiffany stained-glass windows, awe-inspiring organ music, great preaching; there on the day of all days in the Christian year, the celebration of the Lord’s resurrection, I found myself unable to give twenty minutes to hide Easter eggs for the children when asked to do so. I felt physically ill at the thought of doing one more thing. Knowing it would hurt feelings, including those of my own daughters, I walked out of the church building and wandered around Boston’s Back Bay until the Easter egg hunt was over.

That was my experience. I’ve been in good recovery ever since, learning to let go. Maybe what you need, instead, is to dig in and hold on. To feel welcome and needed and empowered. Either way, God’s mission, the mission that has us, is shared; a mutual ministry. Digging in and holding on while also letting go. Out of love: both doing and not doing.

+++

Jesus’ words in this morning’s gospel reading from John 17 are all about mutual ministry and shared mission. A circular dance among Jesus and the God he calls Father and Jesus’ followers. A shared name. Shared words. Shared belonging. Unity. All mine are yours, and yours are mine. So that they may be one as we are one. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. But the most often repeated word in our reading is given or gave. It occurs nine times in fourteen verses. A circular dance and also a circle of gifts given and received and given again. Jesus says to God concerning his followers: “Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you” (17:7-8). This aboriginal Christian community didn’t have a mission, God’s mission in and through Jesus had that very first of churches. All as gift. Dig in and hold on. Let go. With gratitude.

Nor did the earliest church have a mission of its own devising. As you heard in our reading the Acts of the Apostles (1:15-17, 21-26), Peter stood up among the one hundred twenty believers and voiced his concern that someone was missing, that in the absence of Judas Iscariot their ministry, their apostleship, was incomplete: twelve minus one – and that the vacancy needed to be filled for the scriptures to be fulfilled. The church proposed two candidates: Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, and Matthias. They proposed two, but God had already chosen one – the church’s task was simply to pray that God would show them who God had chosen. So they cast lots – they rolled the dice – and the lot fell to Matthias, and he was added to the eleven male apostles as the plus one to restore the magic number twelve.

My imagination is fired more by the other candidate: Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus. Maybe Joseph needed a better public relations firm. He had too many names with no clear brand. He was not chosen to be male apostle number twelve. Instead, by not becoming the plus one, Joseph was freed up to share in a different ministry. Surely God’s mission had a place for Joseph and he helped work that shared mission out in the world. I wonder what Joseph ended up doing and not doing? Joseph, along with the other one hundred seven believers not counted with the twelve – including all those women, especially Mary Magdalene apostle to Peter and the others. The church doesn’t have a mission, God’s mission has a church. Let go. And then dig in and hold on.

+++

But what is God’s mission in the world? There are so many ways to name it. Isn’t that what every page of scripture is about? Every Morning and Evening Prayer and every Sunday Eucharist? Every act of witness and advocacy in our troubled country and every act of accompaniment and compassion in this neighborhood?

Here’s how Henri Nouwen describes God’s mission. It “counteracts the…divisions that pervade our daily lives and cause destruction and violence. These divisions are interior as well as exterior: the divisions among our most intimate emotions and the divisions among the most widespread social groupings. The division between gladness and sadness within me or the division between the races, religions, and cultures around me. The Spirit of God…unites and makes whole. There is no clearer way to discern the presence of God’s Spirit than to identify the moments of unification, healing, restoration, and reconciliation. Wherever the Spirit works, divisions vanish and inner as well as outer unity manifests itself.”

Familiar and important ideas. But it gets more interesting. The title of Nouwen’s book is Life of the Beloved. And the key take-away is that the Spirit of God calls us – calls each and every one of us – The Beloved. So, God’s mission is nothing more or less than “the life of the Beloved, lived in a world constantly trying to convince us that the burden is on us to prove that we are worthy of being loved.” “All the good things our world has to offer are yours to enjoy,” Nouwen writes. “But you can only enjoy them truly when you can acknowledge them as affirmations of the truth that you are the Beloved of God. That truth will set you free to receive the beauty of nature and culture in gratitude, as a sign of your Belovedness. That truth will allow you to receive [these] gifts…and celebrate life. But that truth will also allow you to let go of what distracts you, confuses you, and puts in jeopardy the life of the Spirit within you” (my emphasis).

And it gets more interesting and life-changing still, for Nouwen wrote Life of the Beloved at the request of a friend of his, Fred, a secular Jew living and working among the noise and busy-ness, the arts and entertainment of New York City, but a man about to give up on his dreams and just settle for making money and a career. Why don’t you write something about the spiritual life for me and my friends, Fred asked? And so Nouwen did. Or tried to. Things did not go according to plan; Nouwen’s plan, at least. Fred read the book manuscript. And it didn’t work. Oh, he liked the writing and thanked Nouwen, but it wasn’t what he had hoped for. There were still too many assumptions about God; too much religious language. At the same time, however, Nouwen also shared his work with members of a pair of Christian communities trying to blend monasticism and social activism. And they loved it. It was the book they needed. Nouwen says in his epilogue: “I tried so hard to write something for secular people, and the ones who were the most helped by it were searching Christians.” But what about Fred, Nouwen asked these other readers? “‘Well,’ they answered, ‘you might not have been able to write all that Fred needs to hear, but Fred certainly enabled you to write what we needed to hear. Couldn’t you just be happy with that?’” Which led Nouwen to decide not “to write a new book, but to trust that what is here should be published and that what is not here may one day find an authentic form of expression.”

Henri Nouwen didn’t have a mission to write Life of the Beloved. God’s mission in the world had a Henri Nouwen who unexpectedly wrote a book for a different audience than the one he had so carefully planned. Doing and not doing.

It’s the story of Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, all over again. God chose Joseph for a different ministry than Matthias, male apostle eleven plus one. But Joseph didn’t have a mission. Matthias didn’t have a mission. God’s mission had Joseph and Matthias and all the rest of the one hundred twenty believers, including Mary Magdalene and the women.

And so maybe St. Paul’s really doesn’t have a mission. God’s mission has St. Paul’s. With rector and soon-to-be curate. Vestry and wardens and a parish ministry council. Mutual ministry goals and a town hall meeting. St. Paul’s doesn’t have a mission base, God’s mission in the world finds a base at St. Paul’s even with our building and grounds under serious renovation. All as gift, because we are God’s Beloved. Receive these shared gifts with gratitude on behalf of all God’s other Beloved Ones. Delight in them and give them again. Dig in, hold on; and let go.

Resources:

My experience eventually led to a shared book project with Carmen Renee Berry, Loving Yourself as Your Neighbor: A Recovery Guide for Christians Escaping Burnout and Codependency (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990).

See Letty Russell, Church In the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992, pages 87-96) for the roots of my idea about God’s mission and the church.

Henri J. M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World (New York: Crossroad, 1992); I quote from pages 129-31, 135, and 148-49.

Jesus never belongs to us

Preached on the Day of Ascension, May 9, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 1:1-11
Psalm 47
Ephesians 1:15-23
Luke 24:44-53

“Ascension” detail from an illuminated manuscript

While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

I think I know why.

When my father died late last November, and in the early-December aftermath, for a while there, it felt like old times. All the adult children of our family patriarch came together, with all our old shoes. By “all our old shoes,” I mean all our old ways of relating, ways of being, ways of being together. I know how to talk to my brother John, for instance, the way I know how it feels to wear an old shoe. I’ve known John from the beginning of my life. If he walks into a room, I’ll say, “Hey,” and we will need no more of an elaborate greeting than that. 

And so it went, last November, and into December, as we said farewell to our dad and laid him to rest alongside our mother. We remembered immediately who we were, who we had always been.

But our family wasn’t entirely like we were before. Things felt different. These days, all of my siblings have children of their own, and in two cases, grandchildren. And in our various lived experiences as adults, we’ve all changed. We’ve evolved.

And what’s more, my father married again after my mother’s death, so of course his wife was there at the gatherings that marked his death, along with her two sons, and a daughter-in-law. And then, at my father’s funeral reception, we were joined by a couple hundred more people: people from my father’s workplaces and from our own workplaces, old friends of the family, people from all over, many people my father knew and loved but I have never met. Even my first boyfriend was there, surprising me with his thoughtful presence and kind condolences. 

And finally, my father of course was not there. And yet, yes he was. He was painfully absent yet powerfully present: hundreds of photographs, annals of stories, his physical bodily presence until November 30 (the day he died), and then that strange, otherworldly, terrible mahogany box of ashes surrounded by pungent lilies. He was out of reach and out of sight, yet resting heavily on my heart. I could see his features whenever I glanced at a mirror. Everything was abundantly familiar, yet strange. We were a community with a clear history, but a muddled present, and an unknown future.

And that’s the thing. That’s the puzzle, the confusion, the wondrous but also exasperating thing about the Ascension of Jesus: you’re tempted to stare up to the skies, where you last saw what — or who — was familiar, someone who was with you back there, back then, but now is gone. Or if he’s not entirely gone, he’s sure a whole lot different. 

The Ascension focuses and condenses — in one mountaintop experience — the mystical, odd, deeply unsettling (yet wondrous) experiences that astonished the bewildered first members of the Jesus Movement in the days and weeks after his death. The resurrection, even more than the death, upended everything they thought they knew, including — and especially — their friendships with Jesus himself.

The risen Jesus wondrously moves through locked doors, but he also eats a bit of cooked fish. He’s an unfamiliar, unrecognizable garden worker, but then, in a flash, he knows Mary Magdalene’s name and is immediately recognizable as her greatest friend. (But then, confusingly, she’s not allowed to embrace him!) He has left the tomb and is appearing before them, which is startling and deeply unnerving, but he’s also not reliably by their side as the friend they used to know, and that’s unnerving, too. He sometimes seems to be the one they knew and loved, serving breakfast by the sea and calling them “little children,” but then he’s the scary stranger who knows what they did — what they did wrong. Friend and stranger; comforting yet harrowing; still here but also, oddly and awfully, not here. Old shoes, new shoes. The Ascension brings the upsetting season of Easter to a climactic moment. Little wonder, then, that they gaze up at the skies.

We gaze up at the skies, too. Week by week, we say and do things that bind us to those first followers and friends, the ones who visited an empty tomb; the ones who tried in vain to keep safe behind locked doors; the ones who see a stranger on the beach, and row ashore when they hear him say, “Come and have breakfast.” Week by week, we feel, say, and do things that bind us to those who stood on the mountaintop, in wonder but also in confusion, trying to work out where Jesus was, where Jesus is, and how they can know and trust him in this vexing and often vicious world. We share their confusion. We share their fears.

We search the skies, just as they did, until we remember, again and again, just as they remembered, that Jesus is still here. And so we enter through these front doors, while others of us join the livestream: in this gathering of our family, Jesus is here. Then we pour water into a basin and sprinkle water over ourselves: in this washing, Jesus is here. Then we lift a splendid book aloft, and carry it to the middle of the room: in this book, and in our proclamation of it, Jesus is here. Then we bake bread and uncork a wine bottle, we hold these gifts aloft, we break the bread, and we take care that everyone is fed: in this feast, Jesus is here. 

But this is a hard teaching. It carries a bracing and sobering sting of sadness. Jesus is here in our gathering, in our washing, in our proclamation, in our feasting. Yes. But Jesus is never only here. Jesus is not only our greatest friend, exclusively available to us, contained forever in the close confines of church as we see it, community as we expect and embody it. Jesus is also, always, beyond us. Jesus appears to people we’ve never met, and people we (if we’re honest) don’t want to meet. Jesus appears — Jesus has ascended into — all times and places, and we are mere mortals, bound fast by time and space, so we will directly witness only the tiniest fraction of the life and love of Jesus, who is present to all people everywhere, living and dead, long gone and not yet here.

Jesus never belongs to us.

And finally, we find Jesus, we embrace Jesus, we work alongside Jesus, in one more way. After finding Jesus in our gathering, washing, proclamation, and feasting, we go from here into this neighborhood, this city, this watershed, this world. And in the vocations of our lives, Jesus is here. “Stay here in the city,” the risen Jesus tells his friends, “until you have been clothed with power from on high.” “Stay here in the city,” Jesus tells us. Stay in your vocation. Stay in the arena of action and contemplation. Stay in relationship with your neighbor. Stay in the fray as an advocate for justice. Stay in the place where — as Frederick Buechner says so well — “your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.” Stay here in the city. 

Stay here.

Stay.

Jesus is not only here, but Jesus is here. Jesus is not only yours, but Jesus is yours. Jesus is not only who you think he is, but yes, Jesus is the one you’ve always expected, the one you’ve always known.

Here and not here, both. Ours and not ours, both. Closer to you than your own heartbeat, yet ever elusive, eternally beyond.

Jesus is here, but always, always, Jesus leads us into the everywhere.

Oh, how I love Jean-Guy

Preached on the Fifth Sunday of Easter (Year B), April 28, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 8:26-40
Psalm 22:24-30
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8

The Vine and Branches, by Soloman Raj

I made it all the way to the seventeenth book in Louise Penny’s mystery series before I burst into tears. I am a person of deep and powerful feelings, but that’s how difficult it is for me to cry. My problem is an ordinary, predictable one: I was socialized as a boy in the upper Midwest by the children of prairie farmers. Boys don’t cry. Farmers don’t cry. Midwesterners definitely don’t cry.

I wish this were not so, if only because, as Rosey Grier sings so memorably in that 1970s musical, Free to Be You and Me, “It’s alright to cry; crying gets the sad out of you.” And in these days of vocational challenges and personal grief, I surely have “sad in me.” But we all do, don’t we? We feel furious sadness as we lament the relentless warfare that ravages Philip’s wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza. We lose sleep contemplating climate devastation and our precarious, beleaguered democracy. It’s rough out there, and our gathered community is in profound need of the Good News. It is alright to cry.

So maybe you think I need a new author, someone who doesn’t have to write seventeen books to get me to cry. In fact I do need a new author: I’ve finished Louise Penny’s eighteen published mysteries, and number 19 doesn’t come out until October. But it’s really not her fault that it took her so long to find the sad in me and get it out. She’s good. She’s insightful and funny, and she has a knack for finding and reflecting on deep truths. I recommend her. And her characters cry plenty themselves, and they deeply move me.

But ultimately, I will forever be thankful to and for Louise Penny for creating one character in particular. His name — right out of French Canada – is Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Jean-Guy: it’s one of those fun French names that Anglophones like me love to say. Jean-Guy. (The Trekkie in me also loves Jean-Luc.) Jean-Guy Beauvoir is not the hero of the novels. The hero is Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, Jean-Guy’s boss.

Now, Armand and Jean-Guy are police officers, but Louise Penny takes great care to portray them not just heroically, but also honestly, and she returns often to the atrocious problem of police brutality as our earnest characters try to do the right thing and solve crimes. Often enough, the bad guys in her novels are other cops. And sadly, for a little while in the middle of the series, Jean-Guy takes a job with a corrupt detachment.

Somehow he manages to safeguard his good character even in the darkest nights of his soul, but it’s touch and go for a while, as Jean-Guy descends into the madness and despair of opioid addiction and breaks his relationships with everyone in his life, including his boss, Armand Gamache. In the depths of addiction and self-destruction, Jean-Guy begins to hate his former boss, and maybe you can understand why. When you’re betraying the people you love by betraying your own best self, the people you love and respect the most can’t help but be living reminders of your wretchedness. As Jean-Guy Beauvoir was dying by slow suicide, his love for Gamache curdled into dreadful rage. 

Jean-Guy’s addiction story is much more harrowing than my own, so I anxiously read my way through his descent among the dead. “Oh Jean-Guy,” I’d murmur, as I watched this impressive but flawed young man make a mess of his life. Jean-Guy is a sharp, dry, world-wise kind of person who loves rich food and frowns sarcastically at the freer spirits around him. He’s difficult, handsome, funny, impatient, and all too willing to listen to his inner demons. Oh, how I love Jean-Guy.

I’ll now share a story from Jean-Guy’s worst days, when he was in the lethal throes of addiction and had joined a corrupt and brutal detachment of the Quebec police force. Jean-Guy and Armand had pointedly avoided each other, working on separate floors of the building. But then, one day, Chief Inspector Gamache comes to work with his German Shepherd dog, named Henri. Gamache, Henri, and Gamache’s new second-in-command, Isabelle Lacoste, signal an elevator to attend a meeting upstairs. The doors open, and… well, you can guess who’s inside. Here’s the scene:

“Jean-Guy Beauvoir despised Armand Gamache. This wasn’t an act. Isabelle Lacoste wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t been in the elevator with them. Two armed men. And one with the advantage, if it could be called that, of near bottomless rage. Here was a man with a gun and nothing more to lose. If Jean-Guy Beauvoir loathed Gamache, Lacoste wondered how the Chief felt. She studied [Gamache] again in the scratched and dented elevator door. He seemed perfectly at ease…

[Then Gamache’s dog Henri’s] huge brown eyes glanced up at the man beside him. Not the one who held his leash. But the other man. A familiar man. [Floor] 14… [Floor] 15.

The elevator stopped and the door opened... Gamache held it open for Lacoste and she left as quickly as possible… But before Gamache could step out, Henri turned to Beauvoir, and licked his hand. Beauvoir pulled it back, as though scalded.

The German shepherd followed the Chief from the elevator. And the doors closed behind them. As the three walked toward the glass doors into the homicide division, Lacoste noticed that the hand that held the leash trembled. It was slight, but it was there. And Lacoste realized that Gamache had perfect control over Henri... He could have held the leash tight, preventing the German Shepherd from getting anywhere close to Beauvoir. But Gamache hadn’t. He [had] allowed the lick. [He had] allowed the small kiss.”

Oh, I loved that dog for licking Jean-Guy’s hand, and I loved his brave, faithful, and loving owner who allowed this kind gesture to happen. Even in the moments when their friendship was in grave peril, their connection was not lost.

And that is what we are talking about when we share, again and again, these precious stories from the Good News according to John, stories of Jesus, the One who abides with us, the One who never breaks the connection, the One who descends the length of the universe to board our elevator right here, just here, where we have almost given up all hope.

“I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus says, and it’s easy to miss the wrenching intimacy in that image. Vine and branches: they can’t separate; they are bound together; they are ride-or-die.

And so we watch as Jesus feeds Judas Iscariot alongside all his other companions, and then reclines quietly as Judas goes into the night to betray him. We watch as the risen Jesus appears to his male disciples, even though all but one of them abandoned him in his fatal hour. (The women disciples, like Isabelle Lacoste, stayed faithfully with Jesus, of course.) We watch as Jesus carefully repairs his friendship with Peter, after a seaside breakfast, walking back Peter’s three denials with a threefold conversation about their love for each other.

Jesus feeds his betrayer. Jesus appears to his faithless friends. Jesus repairs a relationship shattered by his friend’s fear and foolishness.

“I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus says. This is one of the seven great I AM statements in the Good News according to John. Each of them begins with the significant, resonant “I AM,” a conscious reference to God revealing God’s name to Moses at the burning thornbush, where God says, “I AM WHO I AM.” We are meant to hear the booming Exodus echo of “I AM” when Jesus says, “I AM the bread of life; I AM the light of the world; I AM the resurrection and the life; I AM the way, the truth, and the life; I AM the door [to the sheepfold]; I AM the Good Shepherd; I AM the vine.” But only the I AM statement about the vine tells us who we are. “I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus says. That’s unique among these seven majestic proclamations.

We are the branches. Our identity is fused with the identity of Jesus. Forever. We abide intimately with Jesus. Forever. And in Jesus, our identities are fused with one another, and we abide intimately with one another. Forever.

And if you’re looking for me in all of this, come over here where I’m sitting next to my beloved friend, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, a troubled but beautiful soul, a good man but a flawed human, a sardonic but passionate public servant who is trying not to drink or use today. A bunch of mystery novels ago, Jean-Guy tensely stood in an elevator while his greatest friend revealed his enduring, indestructible love for him. And now, in grateful recovery, Jean-Guy is healthy, married to Gamache’s daughter, and the passionate, good, fierce father of two children.

Finally, at great long last, seventeen books into their friendship, Louise Penny gives Armand Gamache the line that got the sad out of me, the words I wished so long for him to say. Here is what this good man said to his ride-or-die friend, fused forever with him like a branch to a vine:

“As Jean-Guy slipped by, Armand laid a hand on his arm. ‘You don't look anything like me,’ he said. ‘But you're still my son.’”

What is a shepherd?

Preached on the Fourth Sunday of Easter (Year B), April 21, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 4:5-12
Psalm 23
1 John 3:16-24
John 10:1-18

Shepherd and his flock, by Vincent Van Gogh

This homily is a short “starter” homily that encourages the assembly at our 5:00pm liturgy to add their own insights and reflections in conversation with the preacher. Gathered in a circle in the early evening, we enjoy this evening Eucharist as a more intimate form of worship on the Lord’s Day.

***

A shepherd.

What’s a shepherd?

Our holy book is full of shepherds. A shepherd is up on the mountainside when a thornbush bursts into flame, but is not consumed. A shepherd is called from his work and, in the presence of all his older brothers, is proclaimed sovereign of the kingdom. Shepherds are working the night shift when the heavens split apart in glory and angels announce a wondrous birth.

Those shepherds may have been teenage girls. The job of shepherd was not glamorous, not an impressive bullet point on a resume. Even now, a livestock worker in, say, Montana, is not exactly killing it in our high-tech economy.

But our holy book is full of shepherds, and from its most ancient poets to the Christian Gospels, we borrow the image of shepherd quite often, when we’re trying to speak about God, about who God is, about how God acts in human life. “Adonai is my shepherd,” sings the ancient poet who composed Psalm 23. “I AM the Good Shepherd,” sings Jesus in the Good News according to John. 

Why? Why shepherd?

Shepherd is a versatile role. A shepherd is quiet and serene, until the critical moment when the shepherd swings into action to protect the flock. A shepherd handles livestock in an everyday way, one sheep is much like another, and yet she starts to get to know the idiosyncrasies of each animal in her care. One human is much like another: we all share roughly the same genetic material; and yet each of us is unique. If God is a shepherd, then God recognizes my humanity, and yours, and everyone’s, holding us all equally in God’s sight; but God also knows what sets me apart, you apart, each living human person apart from all the rest. 

Shepherd is a humble role. It’s not just a job for commoners, for farm kids, for unassuming country folk. It’s a job that’s close to the earth herself, the hummus, the mud and muck of the soil. The word “human” is related to “humble” and “hummus” – to mud and muck. Shepherds know about our dirty laundry, our bloody towels, our tangled bedsheets, our burial shrouds. If God is a shepherd, then God is down in the mud and muck with us.

But shepherd finally is a leadership role. Shepherds aren’t just working stiffs. In fact, Jesus in John takes pains to remind us that the shepherd is not like the “hired hand,” who does not care about the sheep and does not protect them from the wolf, whoever the wolf is. (Sometimes the wolf rises within the sheep themselves…) If God is a shepherd, then God takes us places. God directs. God leads.

A versatile and humble leader: God as Shepherd. From the very beginning of our story of faith, and that of our cousins in the Abrahamic tradition, we prayerfully discern God as our Shepherd; and we Christians proclaim Jesus as the Good Shepherd, the über-Shepherd, the one who breaks the mold. 

We watch as Jesus in John steps between his flock and the soldiers swarming the garden gate to arrest him. We watch as Jesus lays down his life for his flock, lays his body at the gate of the sheepfold, the way first-century shepherds would do when the gate was not at all like our fine rolling metal gate upstairs, but just a gap in the low wall. 

And finally if God is a Shepherd, then you and I, we are sheep. We’re sturdy, but not always sharp enough to perceive every threat before it is upon us. We’re fuzzy and warm, and we love our children, but we are vulnerable to predators, easily spooked, prone to listen to our fears. We need help. We need direction. We need the loving care of a strong leader.

I invite you to share your reflections on this intriguing and lovely image of God, God as Shepherd, and Jesus as the Good Shepherd. What pulls you in? What bumps you out? What kind of shepherding may you need the most? Or how do you yourself learn from Jesus how to be a shepherd for others? I invite your reflections on this, or on other images and ideas from our readings, or on this Easter season of renewing life and springtime hope.

"I am the Good Shepherd"

Preached on the Fourth Sunday of Easter (Year B), April 21, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 4:5-12
Psalm 23
1 John 3:16-24
John 10:1-18

I am the Shepherd, by Galih Reza Suseno

When the first Christians want to tell us about Jesus, they often reach for the image of shepherd. This, they say, this is Jesus: Jesus is a shepherd. They know about shepherds themselves, living as they do in a pre-industrial agrarian world where city streets are designed for beasts of burden, not automobiles or trains. But they also cherish older stories of the faith, stories already as ancient to them as their stories are ancient to us. And in those older stories, shepherds reliably appear.

Moses is tending sheep when God appears in the flaming thornbush and sends Moses on his vocation to liberate the Israelites. David is tending sheep when Samuel proclaims that he is the new sovereign of the Israelite nation. God comes near to shepherds. And so it’s not surprising to encounter the shepherds of Bethlehem, knocked off their feet by angels. God in Jesus has come near, so… here come the shepherds. Jesus is divine, his followers say, so… he’s a Shepherd.

But none of this shepherd imagery is necessarily going to pull us in, persuade us, move us, change us. What do we know about shepherds? Let’s take a deeper look. John the evangelist can help us with this.

First, John tells us that Jesus the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. That was a powerful teaching for John’s community, because they were badly hurt, painfully rejected, cast out of their communities because they held so firmly to Mary Magdalene’s strange Good News that she had seen the risen Lord. Jesus lays down his life for a rejected community.

And then, later in the Gospel, when the John community tells us their version of the arrest of Jesus, they say he leaves the garden to meet the soldiers alone: he comes forward, standing at the gate between the dangerous army and his beloved companions. He places his body between his followers and a mortal threat. Shepherds do that kind of thing.

But John also gives us at least one more key insight about Jesus the Good Shepherd. Today we hear a portion of John’s “Good Shepherd discourse,” a moving speech, a love song, really, sung passionately by Jesus, that powerfully explores the shepherd metaphor.

And here’s the point, the essential thing to know about the “Good Shepherd discourse” in John: this “Good Shepherd” speech, or song, is how Jesus explains his healing of the man born blind, the disruptive event that happened just before the speech, a wondrous action that led to great controversy. The man born blind was rejected, another outcast, living at a time when to be born with a birth defect didn’t just make you a target in an ableist culture, it made you a pariah. “Someone sinned!” people would say, when they came upon the man born blind. Someone is being punished. There could be no kinder interpretation of his condition.

And so Jesus the Good Shepherd is Good News for the man born blind, and anyone who can identify with him. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his friends, of course, but among those friends are those who the respectable, privileged people consider beneath contempt, reprehensible, even disgusting.

But maybe Jesus as Good Shepherd is still not hitting home for us. We live in a hard, angular city, not on a natural, pastoral hillside. So I’d like to introduce you to a contemporary shepherd. Two shepherds, really: a man and his dog. The man is Jon Katz, a novelist who decided to buy a farm in upstate New York. Jon Katz quickly learned that his suburban New Jersey lifestyle had not remotely prepared him for the brutality of farm life, and one of his best early teachers was his dog Rose, a border-collie/shepherd mix. 

I’ve read, and recommend, Jon Katz’s books about his farm, and about his many dogs. If you’re a dog person, get his guide book for dog owners called “Katz on Dogs,” a play on his name, k-a-t-z. If you read his books, though, fair warning: you may fall in love with Rose, in my opinion his most intriguing dog.

Rose the dog, even more than Jon Katz, her owner, opens up for me what we Christians might mean when we proclaim Jesus the Good Shepherd. I want to share with you a portion of The Story of Rose: A Man and His Dog, by Jon Katz. In this portion, Katz writes about a dreadful night in February. I will be quoting him at some length, but I hope you’ll agree that he’s worth our generous attention. And I hope you’ll let Rose guide your reflections on our Savior, Jesus the Good Shepherd, who is our guide and our helper; our defender and our leader; our companion and our chaplain, in life and in death.

The story begins like this:

“I remember sleeping in bed… in the farmhouse and being awoken suddenly by a cold dog nose against my arm. Rose had hopped up into bed and was whining. She only did that when something was wrong.”

Jon follows Rose into the snowstorm until she leads him to a newborn lamb and her distressed mother. He continues:

“I was frozen for a brief moment by the awful beauty of the scene. Rose moved quickly to head off the lamb, who was going uphill. I knew — [Rose] also did, clearly — that a newborn lamb out in a storm meant almost certain death. I had heard stories of farmers finding lambs frozen to the ground.

I also knew that if she were separated from her mother for too long, the ewe would reject her and refuse to give her milk. The lamb would either die or have to be bottle-fed, a difficult and laborious process. The lamb stood braying at Rose, perhaps thinking she was her mother. Rose seemed to understand that this creature was frail. She did not bark, charge, or nip at her. Rose stood her ground gently in front of the lamb. She held the lamb in position until I could scramble up the hill, get my arms around the little creature, and then start to make my way back to the barn. Rose did not need any commands. She stayed behind with the ewe, who was still lying on her side, struggling.”

Jon then takes the lamb into the barn and warms her up, feeds her, and gets her settled. He then trudges back up to Rose and the troubled ewe. Their next task was to get the mother sheep into the barn. He continues:

“Rose had an inch or two of snow across her head and back. I had not seen Rose like this — close, intense, still. She seemed to know what she could do and what she could not do. And right then there was nothing she could do. She seemed protective of the ewe. She did not look around or try to leave. Rose seemed to have the sense that this was her responsibility… 

“I realized that I knew how to get the ewe into the barn. I stumbled back into the barn, grabbed a sling, slipped it under the lamb, picked her up, and brought her out into the storm. Keep her there, Rosie, [I thought], keep her there. And she did. I knew she would. When we got close, the lamb began crying out, and the ewe recognized her voice, then her smell. Frantic, she forgot about Rose and began moving toward me, toward her baby. I saw her bond with her baby and was shown again what a powerful instinct mothering is.” 

Jon, the lamb, Rose, and the mother sheep struggle back toward the barn, and then, Katz writes, “the ewe balked, refusing to come in, and ran right over Rosie and began to climb up the hill to the pole barn, her safe place.

Rose turned into a wolf right there, barking and circling. She seemed larger to me, so determined, and then the ewe turned and ran toward me, deciding a man and a barn were much safer.” Katz finally reunited mother and baby, and got them settled and safe in the barn.

“There was no sweeter, deeper feeling,” he wrote, “than seeing that mother and child in their pen, dry and warm in a storm. We did it, Rosie, we did it. And then I saw Rosie turn her head toward the barn door. She ran to it, and then I saw her swivel and tense, her ears up, fully alert. Something was wrong, something had happened, and I heard the cry that she had just heard, piercing and sharp. Another lamb. There was another lamb up there. She had twins, I thought; she must have had twins, and both of them had been searching for her in the storm as she lay on her side.”

Jon and Rose went back into the storm, and Rose led her owner to the other lamb, but this time it was too late. He continues: “I was surprised, shaken, and numb, feeling so many things out there in that snowy pasture. Rose and I sat quietly over the dead body, this lamb that was our responsibility. Just a few minutes ago I had been asleep in bed. It was hard to get my bearings in that field, on that night.

“Rose, too, I think, was uncharacteristically thrown off balance. She was not so sure about the world now. She had never seen a dead sheep before, never seen something in her charge die, nor had I. It was an awful feeling, not so much of grief, but of failure and sadness. I should have known, should have been better prepared, should have avoided this…

“I left Rose alone to sit up on the hill with the lamb for as long as she wished. Even then, I had this instinct to let Rose work things out, to see her amazing ability to process things and move forward, something I have struggled almost all of my life to learn how to do.

“I came down to the barn to make sure my first lamb was healthy, which thankfully it was. A little later, I went to the rear of the barn, surprised that Rose had not come down yet to check on things.

“The barn floodlight was on, and I turned the flashlight on the dark hill. There was Rose lying down next to the dead lamb, and looking down at the barn, at me.”

Needing Easter

Sermon given the Third Sunday of Easter (Year B), April 14, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church by Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D.

Acts 3:12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36-48

Fish & Pita, by Mark Hewitt

I need Easter. Not as decoration or distraction. I need Easter as a matter of life and death.

I need Easter, not just for one day or even a seven-week season. I need Easter for a lifetime. I need Easter as the beating heart and breathing lungs of my life.

I need Easter. It’s a life and death matter. I need to see and hear and touch the risen Jesus. I need the eyes and ears of my faith opened. Its hands and feet roused. I need to share a meal with the living Christ and know him in the breaking of bread.

I need Easter because, as the Apostle Peter says, we have rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to us. We have killed the Author of life (Acts 3:14-15). Truly a matter of life and death. Our own death, the death of someone we love, the deaths of the many children who starve daily in our world, the deaths of the countless people who are murdered by the sin and greed of others. And all the miniature deaths that haunt our lives. Age and illness and dementia. The miniature deaths of eroded friendships, of broken promises and shattered dreams. Lonely decisions, the heavy weight of failure, the shame of facing someone we have disappointed. Those profound personal faults we keep hidden from most everybody most of the time, except the people who deserve our best and don’t always get it. I need to encounter Jesus raised from the dead; from the death that enslaves us, the death we have done, and the death done on our behalf. I need hope for the future – not just dead things brought back to how they once were – but a new future of abundant life. For as the Apostle John writes, we are God’s beloved children now, but what we will be has not yet been revealed. This we do know: when the risen and living Christ Jesus is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is (1 John 3:2-3).

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This morning, as on every Third Sunday of Easter, we hear one last story of an appearance of the risen Christ before we turn the pages of our gospel book back to Jesus’ words to his followers around the table during their Passover meal – and then ahead to the stories of Jesus’ ascension and the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. I say one last appearance story, because there are many spread across the closing chapters of our four gospels. I count eleven or twelve. We never hear all of them read on Sundays in any given lectionary year, so here’s an executive summary.

Each of the four gospels tells a version of the story of Mary Magdalene – Apostle to the Apostles – coming to the tomb where Jesus’ body was laid, accompanied, maybe, by another woman or two, only to find the stone rolled away and the tomb empty (Matthew 28:1-8; Mark 16:1-7; Luke 24:1-12; John 20:1-10). Wow! The first appearance of the risen Christ is actually an appearance of his absence. Nothing to see here! Which means the women must hear something from someone else even to begin to grasp what has happened. You’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He is not here. He has been raised from the dead. The bearer of this good news differs in each version: an earthquake and an angel; a young man in a white robe; two men in dazzling clothes; two angels. In some versions, Mary Magdalene, and maybe the other woman or women, go and tell the male disciples what they’ve seen and heard. In some versions, Peter and maybe another disciple believe the women enough to go to the tomb themselves and also find it empty.

Next, according to Mark’s gospel, the women flee from the tomb in terror and amazement and say nothing to anyone (16:8). Thud!

In Matthew, the women see Jesus himself as they leave the tomb. But then the gospel writer cuts to a strangely believable story of how the religious and political authorities concoct and spread the lie that Jesus’ followers stole his body during the night. Some soldiers even get paid to broadcast the fake news (28:11-15).

John tells three powerful stories of appearances to specific individuals. Mary Magdalene lingers, despairing, outside the empty tomb, and Jesus appears to her. But she doesn’t recognize him. She mistakes him for the gardener – until he calls her by name. Hearsay is not enough. Mary must listen more deeply for intimate, personal address (20:11-18). Thomas is not present with the rest of the community when Jesus appears to them. And so he refuses to believe their report that they have seen the Lord until he can put his finger in the mark of the nails and his hand in Jesus’ wounded side. Seeing isn’t always believing. Sometimes, only touch will do (20:19-29). Peter goes back to the way things used to be before he met Jesus and takes up fishing again – with no success. Jesus appears on the seashore at daybreak, but Peter, like Mary, fails to recognize him until Jesus tells him to cast the net on the other side of the boat – and now it’s impossibly full of fish. It is the Lord! Peter shouts. Then Jesus prepares and serves Peter a breakfast of fish and bread. And asks him three times: Do you love me? – redeeming Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus and opening for him a new future (21:1-19).

And in Luke’s gospel, we hear how on that first Easter, two followers of the crucified Jesus trudge disconsolately from Jerusalem toward an outlying village when a stranger joins them. The three have a conversation about the events of the past few days and the stranger – who is Jesus, although the two don’t recognize him – has a word to speak to them: he explains to them from scripture all things about himself, especially why, as the Messiah, he had to suffer and die. The three reach Emmaus, and yet the stranger acts as if he is going to journey on. Cleopas and their companion urge him strongly to stay with them, as it is almost evening and the day now nearly over. He does. They share a meal. And when he was at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him (24:13-35).

Which brings us to this morning’s gospel reading from Luke and our last appearance story for this Easter season. It’s a continuation of the Emmaus story. The two companions have returned to Jerusalem, rejoined the community of Jesus’ followers, and tell them what they saw and heard and tasted on the road and at table with the risen Christ. While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them. But one more time, they fail to recognize him – thinking, instead, they were seeing a ghost, a disembodied spirit, a phantom. Jesus insists: Look at my hands and feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones. While his followers whirl in joy and disbelief and wonderment, Jesus has one more thing to say, one more way of making himself known. Have you anything here to eat? he asks. Have you anything to eat? They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence. Jesus again revealed through a meal. But flipping the Emmaus story and that of Peter’s breakfast, this meal is prepared by the disciples and served to Jesus not the other way around (24:36-48).

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Chef José Andrés, founder of the World Central Kitchen, has much to say about people eating and people being fed. For food is a life and death matter. Listen to some words from his recent New York Times op ed in response to the killing of seven of his co-workers in Gaza by the Israeli military (April 3, 2024).

“Their work was based on the simple belief that food is a universal human right. It is not conditioned on being good or bad, rich or poor, right or left. We do not ask what religion you belong to. We just ask how many meals you need.

“From Day 1, we have fed Israelis as well as Palestinians. Across Israel we have served more than 1.75 million hot meals. We have fed families displaced by Hezbollah rockets in the north. We have fed grieving families from the south. We delivered meals to the hospitals where hostages were reunited with their families.

“At the same time, we have worked closely with community leaders…[to serve] more than 43 million meals in Gaza, preparing hot food in 68 community kitchens where Palestinians are feeding Palestinians.

Andrés continues: “The peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle East, regardless of ethnicity and religion, share a culture that values food as a powerful statement of humanity and hospitality – of shared hope for a better tomorrow. There’s a reason, at this special time of year, Christians make Easter eggs, Muslims eat an egg at iftar dinners and an egg sits on the Seder plate. This symbol of life and hope reborn in spring extends across religions and cultures. I have been a stranger at Seder dinners. I have heard the ancient Passover stories about being a stranger in the land of Egypt. The commandment to remember – with a feast before you – that the children of Israel were once slaves.

And he concludes: “It is not a sign of weakness to feed strangers; it is a sign of strength.”

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I need Easter. Maybe you do, too. If so, then know that all of the appearance stories from all four gospels are yours. Which one do you need to live into? Or live out from? And know that the risen Christ can be revealed through any number of your senses.

Do you need to see that the stone has already been rolled away? That the tomb is empty? That the beloved is not here? That he, that she, they, it – the family, the church, the school, the nation – is not here but risen?

Do you need an earthquake and an angel in order to hear the good news? Or do you need instead a young man dressed in a simple white robe, because you’ve already suffered an earthquake in your life? Do you need to come alongside Mary Magdalene in the garden, weeping, and hear the risen Christ call you by name? Were you absent with Thomas when the good news was announced? Do you need to touch – and no longer avoid – wounded hands and side? With Peter on the seashore, do you need to be served breakfast after a long night of fruitless labor and then, but only after you have been fed, talk openly about betrayal and love, about amends to be made and new hope, hope for a new life? Or, walking with Cleopas, allow a stranger to enlarge your little circle of shared grief and explain those stories you’ve heard for years but never really understood or taken to heart? Do you need to invite the stranger to stay for a meal and suddenly, beyond all belief, recognize them as the risen Christ in the taking, blessing, breaking, and offering of food?

If you need Easter as a matter of life and death as I do, then know that even as we talk about this, Christ Jesus himself stands among us and says: Peace be with you. Look at my hands and feet, see that it is I myself. Touch me and see. And most urgently today, he asks: Have you anything here to eat?

Yes! Our answer is a resounding yes. This altar of ours is an emergency feeding station – an outpost of Jesus’ World Central Kitchen – because sharing his holy meal is a life and death matter. And our best sign of hope for the future.

For further reflection

But Mark, you may be asking, what about our fifth sense, the sense of smell? It doesn’t figure directly in any of the appearance stories. Nevertheless: surely the aroma of that broiled fish preceded its taste. And isn’t smell the most ancient, most animal of our senses – the deepest trigger of danger to be avoided and the deepest trigger of memory of the beloved. The stench of decay or poison. Also, the fragrance of abundant life – honeysuckle and lavender and roses. His cologne lingering on a jacket. Her scarves still hanging in the closet. The decades of incense permeating the walls of this church. I wonder what it would mean to smell the risen Christ?

They want to see our wounds

Preached on the Second Sunday of Easter (Year B), April 7, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 4:32-35
Psalm 133
1 John 1:1-2:2
John 20:19-31

I have a core memory from my childhood that reveals interesting backstory about my character, my leadership style, my worldview. I have worked on this memory in therapy. I strive (successfully!) to develop beyond it. Here is the memory, reinforced for years when I was a child: I sat in the back of the family van.

Most of you know I’m one of seven children, fifth in the line. We kids would pile into the van every summer for the long, hot drive to visit my mother’s family in Denver. My dad would take the wheel, driving us across the monotonous miles of southwest Minnesota, northwest Iowa, Nebraska, and eastern Colorado.

Family legend recalls the hot, dusty afternoon when my father was flooring it (I think understandably) on one of the highways, probably in western Nebraska, and he got pulled over for speeding. As the officer walked alongside the van on his way to my dad, he saw a little-kid face in every single window of our vehicle. (Some accounts of the story uncharitably put snot in every child’s nose. Other versions are kinder to us, but all of the storytellers maintain that each kid stared manically out of their respective window.) The highway-patrol worker, when he finally reached the driver’s-side window, let my dad off with a warning, saying, “I think you’ve got enough problems today.”

All of this is to say that I know in my bones what it’s like to have a lot of peers, and what it’s like to assume a place in the back, to let the group decide, or let the parent decide, or let the older sibling decide what’s happening, where we’re going, what’s next.

And this personal experience guides my contemplation of another great sibling in the faith, Saint Thomas, the faithful disciple who is cast in a supporting role, but who nevertheless is all in, who wants to see, who wants to know, who wants to participate fully.

Whatever Thomas wants, he makes it known. Maybe he doesn’t have a juicy role like Peter or Mary Magdalene, but Thomas isn’t a back-of-the-van person.

When Jesus assures them that they know where he is going, Thomas says what others likely thought but were afraid to say: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” This sets Jesus up to pronounce one of his great “I AM” statements: “I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” Jesus proclaims to Thomas. 

In another important encounter, Thomas encourages his friends, stirring them up, bracing them to follow Jesus even to their deaths, when he says, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

Thomas does not sit quietly in the back of the van. He knows what he wants, and he knows what he needs. He summons courage to assert himself to meet those needs. He’s the kind of apostle I want: Thomas is an advocate. He speaks up. He is our model, our example, a saint for all who have too often stepped back when the healthier choice, the braver choice, the best choice, is to step forward.

And Thomas is called, curiously, “the Twin.” Thomas the Twin: this is probably meant to give all of the rest of us a place to join the story, a place closer to the front of the van. If Thomas is a twin, and his twin is not named, then we can assume that we — all of us who hear and read the Good News — we are the Twin of Thomas. We enter the story through his window, his perspective, his vantage point.

And doesn’t that track? Like Thomas, we weren’t there when the Risen One appeared to his friends on Easter Evening. And as the Twin of Thomas, we often can share his confusion about where Jesus is going, where Jesus is leading us, even the basic question of who Jesus is. (Thomas tells the others, and the world, who Jesus is, but only after Thomas asserts his need to see and touch Jesus, intimately.) And finally, if we are the Twin of Thomas, we may also share with Thomas his vigorous, dreadful, life-changing passion to give it all for the cause. 

So… we can’t meekly cower in the back of the van. Dear twins of Thomas, my siblings in this parish, which in its own way is a van crammed with people, hear this challenge: it is our job to speak up, to act up.

Like Thomas, I demand to see the wounds of Christ. I insist on seeing how this Body of Christ, here and now, is wounded in mission. Over nearly a year and a half now, St. Paul’s has begun to grow again, welcoming newcomers just about every Sunday. That’s exciting! But it is also challenging. We don’t truly welcome newcomers only by greeting them and authentically making a place for them by our side. That’s important, and don’t get me wrong: I found out last year that a child in our parish saw a picture on our social media advertising abundant cake at coffee hour, and begged her parents to take her to this delightful cake-eating church. This inspired my resolution to feature cake at coffee hour as often as possible. Church is fun. Cake is delicious!

But church is also a place where we are beautifully wounded, and that is something I believe newcomers want to see, too. We don’t just renovate a beautiful building and tend a garden around it so that we can enjoy aesthetic beauty; no, we build an urban mission that connects us beautifully to this wounded — and wounding — neighborhood. We are doing vital — and painful — ministry here. This gives our lives meaning. And we attract many others who, without a world-changing mission, would struggle to find inspiration and meaning in their lives. Without our mission, they’d find it harder to affirm their vocation.

Thomas speaks for them when he demands to see the wounds of the risen Christ: not just the living Christ, but the wounded Christ. Thomas is not just trying to verify the improbable, mystifying news of the Resurrection, though that alone is a worthy goal for him and for us, who were not there to see it. Thomas wants to see the wounds. If this is Christ, then he is wounded. If St. Paul’s is a church, then we are wounded. One of our newer members, when visiting some time ago, told me she stayed when she saw our porous borders that allow unhoused neighbors to be close to us, to be part of us, to be us. If we ever chose to seal ourselves completely behind a secure wall of hostile architecture, this person told me, she would not see us as a church anymore. She would not see our wounds. We might not even be wounded, at least in the way that Christ is wounded.

Like Thomas, I want to see the wounds of the Body of Christ. I want to see suffering, death, and resurrection — all of it — happening here, and then I will believe; then I will trust; then I will follow.

In recent weeks I’ve been reflecting and praying about a certain neighbor of ours who has found housing, with our help. We didn’t obtain the exact apartment he lives in, and we haven’t given him lots of money to secure that housing. All we’ve done is build friendship with this person, over time, holding him in prayer, hearing his story, asking him to pray for us, asking him to guide us to others, drawing on his wisdom in our street-centered ministry, letting him evangelize us, and recognizing that God has brought us to this neighbor — and not the other way around. We are the newcomers to the mission of this neighborhood, where this friend of ours is one of the presiders, one of the celebrants, one of the leaders. He is deeply wounded of course, but all of us are, with wounds of the body, wounds of the mind, wounds of the heart and spirit. 

And I tell you this: the light in this person’s eyes; the gratitude he expresses for the help he has received; the help and encouragement he offers to others, and to me: all of the wounds of this resurrected person reveal to me, right here at 15 Roy Street, right now in this fraught and frightening first half of the 21st century — these bright wounds reveal to me the Risen One moving easily through the locked door of our anxiety, standing among us, breathing peace through all of us. We have helped save the life of this neighbor, and he has helped save other lives, while strengthening the hope I feel in my own life.

When I see all of this, here in this community where almost nobody cowers in the back of the van, then like our sibling Thomas, I can’t help but cry out, “My Lord and my God!”

Who will roll away the stone for us?

Preached on the Resurrection of our Lord (Year B, Mark), March 31, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Mark 16:1-8

Easter Morning, by He Qi, used with permission.

“Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” the spice-bearing women ask, up at dawn, worrying their way to the grave of their friend.

Great question. Who will roll away the stone for us? The stone is immensely heavy. Sure, it’s shaped roughly like a wheel, so it can roll. But you can imagine the difficulty in getting a purchase, getting it to first start rolling. Once it has a little momentum it will move with increasing ease. But that first shove is heavy. Maybe impossible.

But we want the stone to move, because like those women, we want to visit our friend’s grave. And we want to do what one does when visiting a friend’s grave. But maybe the grave is impossibly shut. Maybe the cemetery is closed.

Who will roll away the stone for us?

And — we also know that the stone belongs to us. It is ours. We lent the stone every inch of its immense size, every pound of its crushing weight. We rolled it into place, you and I, all of us, down the ages, together. We made the stone. We like the stone. We need (or at least we needed) the stone.

The stone hides death. That’s one good reason for its existence in our lives. We don’t want to look at death. We don’t want to smell death. Our own death is hard to contemplate of course, and we have plenty of deaths of loved ones to grieve. These sad deaths are a hard reality that the gravestone can sometimes shield from our eyes, push out of our awareness, the tomb sealed shut.

But then there are the deaths we cause, the deaths we participate in, the culture of death inside which we live and work. The bad news around the world, the news of the countless deaths of innocent people — this news doesn’t just come at us, with us as impassive, innocent consumers and bystanders. No, we are caught up in it. We are a part of it. We contribute to suffering and death in the world.

We know that, and we can admit that, when we’re honest, when we choose not to hide the truth behind a heavy stone. The women who come to the tomb, wondering about that stone: they know well the many forms of death in the world. They know well how complicated human life is, how complicated human death is.

They’re the ones who remained with Jesus, watching him die, watching the removal of his body from the cross, watching the burial. Mark the evangelist names them three times: all three of this morning’s spice-bearing women are named as witnesses of the death, and the two Marys saw where the body was buried. They saw the stone roll heavily into place. They have seen difficult things. Just like us.

And when they witnessed all of that, what did they think about? What did they feel, as they watched from a distance? I don’t know, and we are not supposed to beam ourselves back to an ancient time and pretend we know what it was like. If the resurrection matters, it matters because it is happening today, here, with us. Now.

But I can tell you what I think and feel as I hear the story of the witness of these spice-bearing women, the record of their vigilant watch, and their fretful wondering about the tombstone. I can see, through their eyes, the death and burial of Jesus, and I can think about my own involvement in death, in the here and now. My unconscious – and, often enough, conscious – support of an economy that privileges my life above others’. My unconscious – and, often enough, conscious – enjoyment of many privileges that my neighbors do not have. On the other side of Lent, on Ash Wednesday, we confessed many things, including this terrible thing: we prayed, “Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done: for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty…” If I am standing with the spice-bearing women, I am reflecting on all of that – on all of that death. And how that death sometimes has my name on it.

So yes, I can imagine wanting a heavy stone to block all that out – to block it out from myself.

But the stone doesn’t just block out death, mask death, hide death. The stone also secures and safeguards a grim, sad future. That sounds like a bad thing, but at least it’s the devil we know. The stone is an object of hopelessness: our friend is dead, and once you’re dead you stay dead. Everyone knows that. The women approach the tomb worrying about the stone, not because he might be alive but only because they want to anoint his dead body. In fact, when they are confronted with the news of his resurrection, they are far more upset and disturbed – and even terrified – than they had been during his arrest, trial, torture, execution, and burial. All of those things are horrible, but they are reassuringly familiar. But resurrection? A good, redemptive future? Authentic hope? The spice-bearing women – and all of us alongside them – we can’t easily wrap our minds around such a thing.

The resurrection reveals a new future, which maybe sounds exciting but is also, when you really contemplate it, deeply unnerving. In a new future, a future with authentic hope, I will have to set aside comfortable things, like my privileges. I will have to let go of the grim comforts of cynicism and nihilism. I will have to grow and change. I will have to trust. I may not have to believe something hard and fast. (Please note — particularly if you resist going to churches that demand hard beliefs — please note that belief isn’t about signing your name to a list of firm conclusions. It’s just the courageous practice of trusting someone outside of yourself.)

But even with all of these conflicting feelings — our resistance to the reality of death alongside our desire to be honest and courageous about it; and our resistance to the reality of a bright future alongside our desire to be filled with hope and amazement and even joy — even with all of these conflicting feelings, we now, like the spice-bearing women, want someone to move that stone for us. We want to get in there. We want to see.

And here is what we see.

A young person dressed in bright clothing tells us that there is no dead body: death has been reversed, creation is young again, the future is bright again. We will all die, but that is not the end of all things. We are driven by the Risen One into the world to cultivate life where there is death, hope where there is despair. We do that here at church, helping people find shelter, building friendships with those who are lonely, feeding hungry people, embracing grieving people, walking with our oldest elders and our youngest children, assisting those unable to walk, tending and revitalizing this neighborhood — revitalizing, a word that means “restoring life.” 

And though the spice-bearing women run away, amazed and afraid, we now are invited to heed the instructions of that brightly-dressed young person — and maybe it was him who had the strength to roll away our stone. We can follow his instructions. We can go to Galilee. Galilee: not just rural hills around a lake in northern Israel, but our own world, our own city, our own neighborhood, occupied by our friends, and also those we all too easily call our enemies. Galilee is our own context, our own households, our own workplaces. That’s where the Risen One first appeared to us, teaching us how to care for the sick, how to clothe the naked, how to feed the hungry, and how to change the world.

Alleluia, Christ is risen, and Christ has trampled death, kicked aside the pebble of our gravestone, and gone ahead of us into this world, this dangerous world, this sad and anxious world, this beautiful and lovely world.

So let’s go. Let’s go from here, filled with hope — and also more than a little scared by what we have seen and heard. Let’s go from here into God’s good world.

There we will see the Risen One, just as he told us.

Just get up

Preached at the Great Vigil of Easter (John’s Gospel), March 31, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

John 20:1-18

When I am awake in the wee hours, I can’t always think clearly. There’s not a lot of blood flowing to my neocortex. We have two dogs with food sensitivities, and a third dog who all too recently was housebroken: if something goes bump in the night, I don’t even have to look. I succumb to the grim conclusion that there’s a mess, somewhere in the house. (Even if there isn’t.)

But even when the dogs are sleeping in heavenly peace, often enough, before first light, I am vulnerable to dreadful thoughts and awful feelings. “I offended somebody yesterday!”, an inner demon will mutter in the shadows of my mind. “I didn’t finish a project!”, whispers another gremlin as it shuffles along another mental corridor. “I was foolish; they think I’m a fool; I am a fool.”

But there are still worse gremlins in my mind, in the pre-dawn hours. The climate-change gremlins tell me the world is ending (though even at noonday their argument is persuasive). A bridge fell down last week? Well of course it did. I try to go to my “happy place” – and of course you just know I have a happy place: I have given and received lots of therapy; I am couch trained, as they say in our psychotherapeutic culture – and sometimes I can just manage to get there.

My happy place is a serene, leafy, quiet glade near the top of a hill, where I sleep snug under a down comforter, with gentle breezes flowing over me. I try to go there in the early morning, when it is still dark, when my mind isn’t working properly – when I am out of my mind. But I don’t reliably find that place of serenity. Finally I give up, I get up, and I go downstairs to turn on the kettle. Then I take my hot instant coffee (with four sugars – yes, four, one for each evangelist, if you like), and I get comfortable under a blanket in the living room, hoping Dash, a most outstanding dog, will come downstairs to be with me. He always does.

Two mornings ago, by ancient Jewish reckoning the sixth day of the week, while it was still dark, I spent some time with an icon of Saint Mary Magdalene, whom I consider the patron of morning people, the patron of those with nocturnal anxiety disorder (if that’s a thing), the patron of early-morning feelers of feelings.

This particular icon reveals Mary before a dark background – it seems that even now, among the communion of saints, she is up in the night. And in this icon, she is a brown Palestinian woman. (I hope you can come up and see her, after the liturgy.) Her splendid red garment suggests that she is wealthy, and that tracks: we know that the first Christians gathered in households run and bankrolled by women. Her name is written at the base of the icon in Syriac, a dialect of the language spoken by Jesus and his friends.

In this icon, as in all icons, you are invited to pray with the guidance of the subject. And the subject – Mary of Magdala – stares directly into your eyes. She holds an egg, a familiar symbol of resurrection, but in her hands also a symbol of Mary’s status as the apostle to the apostles, the one who ran to them to tell them, “I have seen the Lord.”

When I pray with Mary while it is still dark, she teaches me a few things. I want to share them with you, if only because every single one of you was a sibling of Mary Magdalene, early this morning, on this the first day of the week. Against all reason and good sense, you rose in the middle of the night to come here. But you are in good company, when doing this odd thing.

Mary teaches us, first, to just get up. Are you laying in bed, helpless against the flood of wretched thoughts and feelings, certain that the world is forever corrupt, that your life will end in grief, that all is lost, or all is just pointless?

Get up. Get up and go downstairs and start the kettle. John the evangelist tells us that Mary doesn’t even bring spices or give herself anything to do, exactly. She just gets up and goes to the tomb of her friend, the grave of her teacher. (More than teacher: she calls him “Rabbouni!”, which doesn’t just mean ‘teacher.’ Rabbi means ‘teacher.’ Rabbouni is a caritative term. Rabbouni means teacher-I-love, teacher-I-adore.) Anyway, Mary just gets up and goes. That’s her whole mission.

Next, Mary teaches us to just feel our feelings. We’re going to feel them whether we want to or not, so why resist? Mary sees that the stone had been removed from the tomb, so she just runs to her friends and tells them – with no evidence – that someone had taken the body away.

Now, at this point in Mary’s story, a couple of men cause a distraction. They run to the tomb – they respect Mary enough to take her alarm seriously – and they enter the tomb, a bolder step than Mary had taken when she was lost in her early-morning fears. (It helps to be the second or third person to arrive at an upsetting scene, so they have Mary to thank for that.) They step into the tomb, one at a time, and see that the body is gone. But then they just ... go home. Clunk, they take no further action. Thanks, guys.

But Mary stays at the tomb, where she has more to teach us. She has already taught us to just get up already, and feel our feelings, even the hard ones. Now she teaches us to stay. Stay at the tomb: stay at the place where it hurts the most. Trust yourself that you will know what to do, and what not to do; and trust yourself that even if you do something foolish, you’ll be able to cope with the consequences. Mary stays at the worst place she can think of – the tomb of her friend – and she weeps openly, weeps freely, in that terrible garden.

Get up. Feel your feelings. Stay where it hurts. Weep freely. But here’s her ultimate teaching, the one thing we should all read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, from our first and bravest apostle, Mary Magdalene: In the depth of our grief, in the wasteland of our early-morning despair, in the worst muck of this world, the Risen One calls us by name.

The Risen One calls us by name, and this is not just an empty promise from a pollyanna: they said Mary had been “filled with demons,” probably an ancient way of saying she had been mentally and emotionally disturbed. This world-wise and world-weary saint has no illusions. Her greatest friend, her beloved teacher, was executed before her eyes, and even in resurrected life she can not hold on to him; she can not keep him to herself; she still loses him. She is the first of his followers, a brown Palestinian woman who sees the world as it truly is, and trusts even the wretched thoughts and feelings that haunt her in the awful hours before dawn. Mary knows. She won’t lie to you.

Accept her teaching: the Risen One calls you by name, calls you by name not out of the world, but into it, with power, and with purpose. Everything we do as followers of the Risen One, here on this block and across this city, day and night, week in and week out – everything we do is done with a clear understanding of how hard things are in this world. And yet we do good things, powerful things, life-sustaining things, resurrecting things. And we do them because the Risen One calls each of us by name.

We practice names, here at St. Paul’s. We practice names so that we can follow the Risen One, who knows each of our names. A little while ago we showered lovely baptismal water on everyone, the water that flows when each of us is named before God. If I do not know your name, or if I forget it in a moment of early-morning fatigue, you will still be known here. Always.In a little while I’ll personally be naming many neighbors of ours who are living outside, or used to live outside until they gained shelter, in a few cases with the help of this community. Names matter. And we followers of the Risen One, we remember names.

In the depth of our grief, in the wasteland of early-morning despair, in the worst muck of this world, the Risen One calls you by name. So get up, feel your feelings, stay where it hurts, and hear the Risen One calling your name.

And hear me now, dear friends, as I tell you this Good News:

I have seen the Lord.

We proclaim his death

Preached on Maundy Thursday, March 28, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Exodus 12:1-4, 11-14
Psalm 78: 14-20, 23-25
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

We proclaim a death. We do this every week. Some of us do it more than once a week. We break bread and give everyone in the room a small portion, and everyone eats. We pour wine into a chalice and everyone is invited to drink. And whenever we do this, we proclaim a death.

We break the bread, and as it breaks we cherish the horrible memory of his body broken, hammered to a pole and crossbar, left to hang in such a way that he would slowly suffocate. And we remember his body stripped of clothes, particularly clothes that would identify or dignify him: no colorful garment to signify that he was a rabbi, an educated teacher and leader; no tunic that signaled wealth or social status; no pockets to hold money; no modest underclothes to protect his privacy. 

We break the bread, tear it in half, then quarters, then into little bits. And then we gobble it up, we wolf it down, we consume it. We consume him.

Then we pour the wine, and as it pours we cherish the horrible memory of his blood poured out. If he hadn’t suffocated on the humiliating pole, then he would have bled out. Blood: it carries oxygen and nutrients to the furthest reaches of the body; and it carries back toxins to be processed and discarded. Blood carries life. Blood sustains life. But his blood poured out, taking the life out of him. 

We pour the wine, and each of us is offered a taste. We drink it down, we guzzle it, we quench our spiritual thirst. We quench our thirst with his blood, with him.

Every week, sometimes multiple times a week, we do this. We eat and drink our Savior. And in this eating and drinking, we proclaim his death. We enact it. We perform it. We live it. We eat and drink him as he passes from life to death.

We do this because our Savior taught us to do this. He demonstrated the whole thing, to his friends. So when the priest leads our thanksgiving prayers, she wears a tunic, much like his tunic: we call it a chasuble. You’ll see Father Jay change into the chasuble in a little while: he’ll take off his coat (which we call a cope) – the cope is a lot like the overcoats that Roman officials wore when they worked in unheated government buildings – anyway, Father Jay will take off his coat, and then he’ll put on the chasuble, the tunic – Christ’s tunic.

This is done not because the human presider at the Eucharist is Jesus, or even “Jesus-y” – we may love our presiders, but they’re just our human siblings. The presider’s tunic merely reminds the assembly – it reminds all of us, priests included – that Jesus gives us this meal; Jesus teaches us how to break his body apart and pour out his blood; Jesus makes us ready to proclaim his death in this particular, startling way.

And tonight – just one night a year – tonight we will take the leftover bread and wine and place it on the Altar of Repose. We set it on a table covered in candles and surrounded by fragrant flowers. The table stands at the entrance to this space, next to the baptismal font. This is our Garden of Gethsemane, recalling that fateful night before his death when he waited and prayed in the garden, all night long, while his friends dozed. 

If you like, at any point overnight, you could keep watch, though from the distance of our video stream. We’ll have a link on our website that you can use to spend some time watching, and waiting, and watching. Youtube tells you how many people are watching with you. You can see the number go up and down. If others are watching with you, say a prayer for them.

Whenever I do this, I look at the veiled bread and wine (you can’t actually see them because they’re covered in a white cloth), and every single time, every year, I think about the priest who consecrated that bread and wine, whether it’s me or Jay or Catharine or Mary Jane, it doesn’t matter. I think about that person. I pray for them. (Is that selfish? I sometimes pray for myself on this night.)

Whoever the priest was, they asked God to sanctify these gifts – these gifts of the earth, shaped by human hands. And so now, the bread and wine are more than just a dish of starch and a flagon of alcohol. They are also the Body and Blood of Christ. They’ve been broken; they’ve been poured out. And since that first night, every time we do this, someone leads the prayer, wearing a tunic. So I think about that person, and pray for them.

And then I think about all of you. I think about you sleeping in your homes, which dot the city, near and far. I think about how hard you work, not just here at church but in your family lives, and in your vocations, and in your countless efforts to make a positive difference, to be kind, to be good. If you’re like me, then you’ll doze in the garden, just like those flawed disciples. But you do care. You do make a difference. And I pray for you.

Then my mind wanders, as I keep watch with the bread and wine, the veiled Body and Blood of Christ. I think about the world, every bit as broken as Christ’s Body. I reflect on the rivers of anguish and anxiety that course through the world right now. And yes, the world has always suffered from anguish and anxiety, but it seems especially terrible now. Do you feel this agony? I think about some of our members who are only thirteen years old, or only three years old. I pray for them.

And I wonder, in all of this, I wonder how this meal of thanksgiving, this eating and drinking our Savior, makes a difference in the world, makes a difference in our community, makes a difference inside you, inside me. Why stay up in the night, spending quiet time with a plate of bread and a jar of wine? Why do it? Does it matter? Does it help? Does it work?

Yes. It matters, helps, and works because it extends great love into the world. When we break bread and drink wine together, and when we keep vigil together with the Body and the Blood, we naturally, inevitably keep vigil with one another, and with the whole world. We breathe, and our breathing slows, becomes even. Our Savior, broken in a terrible death, is poured out to the whole world in wondrous self-giving love.

You see, when Jesus taught his friends about the bread and wine, he knew what was about to happen. He knew that he was about to die, and die horribly. And so he taught them how to proclaim that death, enact that death, embody that death, so that his death would fire and found a new community, a community of wondrous self-giving love. 

And so it’s only natural, then, that Christians down the ages have been known for taking bullets to save innocent life; we’ve been known to give everything away to be sure everyone in the village has food and clothing; we’ve been known to stand alongside the vulnerable – think Sister Helen Prejean standing in solidarity with death-row inmates, seeing Christ crucified even in them! It’s only natural. We Christians act this way because Christ taught us about this meal, and we repeat it countless times to be sure it works – to be sure it works on us.

The death of Christ is not just a trauma. It is not just a pointless tragedy. The death of Christ is dinner: Christ’s death is a Table laden with platters of food, groaning with flagons of festal drink. If I am going to die, Christ teaches me, then my death should count for something: my death should save lives; my death should bind wounds; my death should nourish all who hunger. 

And so it seems right, it seems fitting, that we should recall an old Protestant saying, a little statement the presider would make after the invitation to Communion. It’s in our Prayer Book, but we never say it at St. Paul’s, probably because we Anglo-Catholics don’t want the mystery of the Eucharist to be nailed down by one specific explanation. But the statement is short and sweet, simple and good. It helps us understand why we share this odd but nourishing meal, week by week, and especially tonight. And it only riffs on what Jesus himself said, wearing his tunic at table with his friends on that terrible night, long ago.

Good catholic Christians, allow yourselves to hear this bit of Protestant wisdom:

The gifts of God for the people of God: take them in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving.

Let her alone

Preached on Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion (Year B), March 24, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 31:9-16
Philippians 2:5-11
Mark 15:1-47

Palm Sunday, by Kris E E Miller

“Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

“Let her alone.” Listen, if you can, to that strong command. “Let her alone.” Jesus says more to his churlish, resentful friends in this paragraph-long speech — he says more by far — than he’ll say in his own defense against his accusers, later on, at the sham trial. He is speaking to his own, to his friends, to his beloveds, to his family. And he is unhappy with them. And they know it. They remember it. This rebuke is recorded more than once: the first Christians cherished this memory. They wanted us to cherish it too.

Jesus is correcting his closest followers, but he is not shouting. He is not throwing a fit. He is not snarking, or delivering a sick burn, or being aggressive, or even harsh. But his rebuke is all the more devastating because of its gentleness. He is firm, direct, even assertive! Yet he remains gentle, kind, and good.

We see Jesus through five ancient lenses: the four Gospels, and Paul’s letters. These five portrayals are distinct. Mark’s Jesus is raw and immediate and human; Matthew’s Jesus is the new Moses preaching from the mountaintop; Luke’s Jesus is an eloquent prophet of economic justice, a foodie who loves to eat with the hungry; John’s triumphant Jesus rises above the earth in splendid glory; and Paul’s muscular Jesus is the risen Christ, shattering the powers of Sin and Death. All different, all memorable in their own ways. And yet, it’s uncanny how we encounter the same gentle yet fierce person across all five portrayals. One person seems to shine through them all.

Jesus always defends and protects the vulnerable, and makes them his own, whether he’s the human friend we meet in Mark, or the cosmic mystery we crane our necks to glimpse in John. In all five portrayals, Jesus is an ally of those without male privilege, without education privilege, without health or ability privilege, and especially those without wealth privilege. When he says, “Let her alone,” he is standing alongside the one other person there who fully understands his mission, and who he truly is.

Jesus stands alongside his one lavishly generous companion, a woman whose name we do not know. (Maybe, if we do not know her name, we ourselves can more readily take her place of honor in the story.) By anointing the body of Jesus with shockingly expensive ointment of pure nard, this woman does something brave and extravagant and loving. She performs a quiet but brazenly prophetic act: she centers Jesus as the source of our virtue, the ground of our faith. She centers the movement of Jesus on his saving death, in which he gave it all away – even his life – for the dawning of the dominion of God. She touches and caresses and soothes his physical body: in doing this, she performs a startling sign of the raw, earthy, sensual, physical bond we have, through Jesus, to one another and to our neighbor.

And so they scolded her. They scolded her because of course they scolded her: she shames them in the poverty of their imagination. She steps far beyond the basic, pious, perfunctory charity that upstanding people, then and now, perform around the edges for the ever-present “poor people.” Jesus says, “The poor you will always have with you … but you will not always have me.” Don’t miss the meaning of this odd verse. If our neighbor remains only a recipient of our charity, then we will always, always have people around us who are in extreme need. And we will always be patronizing them while hoarding most of God’s blessings. But if we really understand who Jesus is and how Jesus challenges us to change the world, then the world really will change.

This woman gets it: She sees how, with Jesus at the center, we are all in with all the people the kingdom of the world rejects and ignores. With Jesus at the center, our movement makes the ever-present them full members in one beloved us. We embrace one another. We are scandalously generous with one another. We caress and soothe and anoint one another.

And consider all the people who are no longer the ever-present “poor,” but are now our beloved siblings in Christ. Imagine who will join our movement, when we are ridiculously and radically generous, when we take up the vocation of the nameless woman and her alabaster jar. Reflect for a moment on who, exactly, gets stitched into the center of our heart, when we anoint the body of Jesus for burial. We have known them.

Well, maybe we’ve mostly just tolerated them, or managed to discreetly ignore them.

He is Black or brown, or undocumented, or wasn’t taught English, our language of empire. She is starving in southern Gaza. He is neurodivergent, or lives outside, or struggles with mental or behavioral challenges. She has a rap sheet, a record, a history of wrongdoing, like those awful tax collectors Jesus loved. He is desperate to defend his Ukrainian town. She is a faithful, decent member of a group we love to hate. They are nonbinary and therefore hunted mercilessly, taunted viciously, in the halls of their senior high school, in the halls of Congress.

And — what a friend they have in Jesus. Jesus is the friend of the vulnerable. He is the friend of the woman who anoints him, the generous companion who gets it. But even when he rebukes those of us who don’t get it, the kindness never leaves his eyes, even as his voice becomes devastating. All five ancient lenses reveal this fierce yet kind Jesus, this harrowing yet lovely Jesus.

Fierce yet kind; harrowing yet lovely. This is the person we contemplate, year by year, in this holiest of weeks. We keep coming back to this person at the center of our community. He is a great man, yet he’s great enough to reject out of hand the ‘great-man theory’: this is not a master and commander, not a decorated war hero and global diplomat, not a canny executive or corporate titan. No. That’s not Jesus. That’s not the one we look for, the one we caress, the one we finally see on the Cross.

Jesus is kind. And that is no small thing. That is, in fact, everything. Kindness, true kindness – the ancient word is chesed – true kindness is almost as rare as a unicorn. I sometimes think I understand kindness, even if I fail to embody it. I want to be kind. Do you? I know for sure that I look for kindness. I look for it everywhere. For me, Holy Week is about my never-ending search for kindness, the potent kindness that shatters the powers and defeats the principalities, the dreadful kindness that removes the oxygen from the room with a quiet yet startling rebuke on behalf of one brave person.

But we know in our bones what the broken world does to the strong and kind ones, the fierce and good ones. Year by year, we contemplate not just Jesus, but the death of Jesus. We contemplate how goodness is shredded and kindness is scolded. We stand with the women who huddled at a distance to watch the burial of Jesus; and alongside those brave women, we refuse to veil our faces to the reality of injustice, the reality of cruelty, the reality of hell on earth. 

And we keep at it. We strive to be kind, as Jesus is kind. We strive to be fierce, as Jesus is fierce. We strive to be something bigger than resentful scolds. “Let her alone,” Jesus tells us. “Why do you trouble her?” We hear this rebuke, and the harrowing kindness that drives and directs it. I pray that we will then go and do this good thing, in the presence of this memorable, mighty woman with her jar of pure nard.

I pray that we will let her alone.

What do you see?

Preached on the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Year B), March 10, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

Monument of the bronze serpent erected by Moses, Mount Nebo, Jordan.

Look up, and see. Raise your eyes and look at the cross, at Jesus on that cross. Jesus rises above us, in glory. Lift your head. Feast your eyes.

Even for those of us who struggle to see with our physical eyes, or see only in ways other than physical, we are a visual species. “I see,” you say, as you finally understand a complicated point. “I feel seen,” you say, when you experience another person truly empathizing with you. “Why can’t you see that?!” you shout to your friend, who has failed to understand your good motive, or your sensible solution.

We humans imagine (imagine is a visual word). We see.

When Mark the evangelist tells us their version of the Good News, their portrayal of Jesus the Crucified and Risen One, Mark takes pains to focus on the centurion seeing Jesus hanging dead on the cross, as Jesus does here in this room, in this sculpture rising above us, high enough for all to see. The centurion sees Jesus on the cross, and only then does he grasp the truth that almost no one in Mark’s Gospel has fully comprehended: the centurion says, “Truly this man was God’s Son.” He sees, and in seeing, he understands.

Don’t miss Mark’s point here: we can’t understand Jesus, who he is, why he matters, until we see him giving away his whole life in love, on the cross.

But John the evangelist expands on this idea. He riffs brilliantly and vividly on this image. (“Brilliantly… vividly…” Those are adverbs related to vision, to seeing…) Again, in Mark, the full identity of Jesus is revealed only when he dies on the cross. But in John, the identity of Jesus is revealed in his death, resurrection, ascension, and giving of the Spirit — and all of those things happen on the cross. In John’s telling, the cross soars high, so high that it looms over all creation, so high that Jesus does not just die on that cross, he also rises to life, and ascends, and gives us his Spirit. Now, John does give us some post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus — some of our most powerful and provocative Resurrection stories! — but Jesus in John is already rising on the cross. He knows what is happening to him, as he hangs there; he sees all ends, as he suffers; he knows that his death is but the beginning of his triumph and glory, even as life departs from his body.

And so Jesus himself, in John’s Good News, when he’s on the cross — that one, terrible, dazzling, glorious location where he dies, rises, ascends, and gives the Spirit — Jesus on the cross is everything we need and want to see. “Look!” Jesus invites us, just as he had done in an earlier scene in John’s Good News, the time when he said to his first followers, the blinkered disciples, “Come and see.”

“Look at me,” Jesus calls out.

Jesus invites us to look at him — to look at him on the cross — in his encounter with the befuddled, myopic Nicodemus, the scholar and leader who anxiously but eagerly seeks out Jesus under the cover of darkness — the darkness of fear, the darkness of spiritual blindness, the darkness of ignorance and confusion.

Jesus takes pains to explain, to the seeker Nicodemus but also to us, that he is all we need to see, as he rises high on the cross. Jesus draws on an ancient story to make his point. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus says, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” Jesus is touching on a riveting narrative from the book of Numbers in the Torah, the story we just heard in our first reading. In that odd, mysterious, and dreadful story from the desert wilderness, Moses lifts up the serpent in the wilderness. He lifts it high — so that all the people will see.

And what do they see? They see the venomous, burning viper, the same snake that had bit them, injuring and sometimes killing them. Our best translation of the Hebrew calls the beast a “fire snake,” probably alluding to a historical memory of the burning pain a desert reptile had inflicted on the wandering tribe. But the word for “fire snake” is the same word as the word  for the seraphim, one of the orders of heavenly angels. God is not being gentle in this story, in most stories. Even the angels are startling, upsetting, dreadful … even terrifying.

And even today, even now, millennia later, on the other end of history from this ancient memory, even today we hold on to this upsetting, awful image, this image of the snake on a pole. It forms the logo of the American Medical Association, and it’s on the shield of Blue Cross Blue Shield. It’s even etched into the glass of the medical bay on Star Trek, a show that imagines a distant, post-religion future. You have seen this symbol. We have kept it around. Why?

Well, when the snake-bitten desert nomads look frantically up at the copper snake hanging from its bronze pole, they are healed: they can see; they can understand. The text tells us they are healed from their physical ailment, but we are invited, as always, to explore the deeper meaning of the story. They are healed of their ignorance, cured of their low insight. Like the centurion centuries later — a military official on a brutal so-called “peacekeeping” mission in an occupied land at the edge of the empire — like the centurion, the Israelites finally see. They see their bitter complaint against God; their venomous, inflamed contempt for God’s blessings; their destructive, deathly resentments. They see all of this hanging above them, on a pole. And they finally understand.

This is a parable about insight. (Insight: another visual word.) They understand, finally, with great relief. Ah! they exclaim, as the truth finally dawns on them (dawn: a bright phenomenon that one sees: another visual metaphor). Ah! they exclaim, as the truth finally dawns on them. We see. We get it. We understand.

And so I wonder, and I invite you to wonder, what you see when you look up at this new pole, which is now a cross, and this new serpent, which is now the Christ, crucified, risen, ascended, and handing over his Spirit. What do you see? What do you understand?

I can tell you what I see.

I see our shared culpability, our shared responsibility for all that stings us in this hard wilderness of a world. I confess I see our wrongdoing first, before any of the happy things I might see on this cross, on this crucified Body. I see our guilt. The Church rightly comes in for rebuke about our long, sad history of guilting people, and so I rush to assure you that that’s not what I’m doing. I just know what I suspect you also know: we are caught up in the venomous bite of injustice. We sometimes tolerate it, whether we’re aware of that or not. But we also inflict it. You know that, right? It is a hard truth.

But I also see hopeful things when I gaze at that cross. I see Jesus pouring out his whole life in self-giving love, for us, for those in extreme need, for refugees, for victims of ignorance, for victims of war, for victims of climate destruction, for victims of despair. I see Jesus showing us the Way to pour ourselves out, too, for all of these same people, and for one another. I gaze at the cross and I see self-giving love. 

But I see other good things. I see reconciliation; I see glory; I see the gift of the Spirit. In John’s Gospel, the crucified, rising, and ascending Jesus places his mother in the care of his dearest friend, and places his dearest friend in the care of his mother: we are meant to see in this conversation at the cross the formation of the Christian community. “Behold your mother,” Jesus says to his beloved friend. “Behold your child,” Jesus says to his mother. And so once again, yet again, Jesus is inviting us to see! “Behold,” Jesus says: “behold”— yet another visual word.

And so I see — when I gaze at this cross — I see Jesus looking at me, and saying to me, “Stephen, behold your congregation.” The crucified, rising, and ascending One, looking down to me from the cross, is inviting me to see you. And in seeing you, I am instructed by Jesus to love you, to care for you, to sometimes challenge you, to faithfully draw alongside you, even as you and I, all of us, are invited to see our neighbor, to love our neighbor, to care for and sometimes challenge our neighbor, to faithfully draw alongside our neighbor.

And that is the hope and glory of the cross, rising above us in a vision of splendid sacrifice and dazzling triumph. “Behold. Look. See,” Jesus says, shining gloriously, from the cross.

Do you, my beloved companion, do you see? Do you see Jesus on the cross, and through his eyes, do you see me? Do you see yourself? Do you see your own conflicted but good heart? Do you see your sins forgiven, the fire snake’s venom extracted, your hope restored? And do you see your neighbor, craving your embrace?

What do you see, when you gaze at this terrible sight, when you adore this vision?

I invite you to lift up your eyes, and look.

God is terrible

Preached on the Third Sunday in Lent (Year B), March 3, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.

Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22

This homily is a short “starter” homily that encourages the assembly at our 5:00pm liturgy to add their own insights and reflections in conversation with the preacher. Gathered in a circle in the early evening, we enjoy this evening Eucharist as a more intimate form of worship on the Lord’s Day.

The Second Inaugural Address, by Anna Rose Bain

We just sang a portion of Psalm 19, perhaps one of the most beautiful psalms in our collection of these one hundred and fifty extremely ancient hymns. Psalm 19 sings of the splendor of creation, of the sun joyfully running its course through the sky, of the flaming spheres of the cosmos singing a song without music, proclaiming a message without words.

Then there are a couple of verses that sound beautiful, but maybe strike you as a little ho-hum. Verses eight and nine, which go like this:

The statutes of the Lord are just
and rejoice the heart; *
the commandment of the Lord is clear
and gives light to the eyes.

The fear of the Lord is clean
and endures for ever; *
the judgments of the Lord are true
and righteous altogether.

Aw, that’s nice. Right? But wait! One of our national leaders a century and a half ago explored how even these verses are startling and troubling. The leader was Abraham Lincoln, and while he may not deserve the blind hero worship he has received across nearly sixteen decades (and while he is now, in our time, coming in for some valid critique for being a little too pragmatic and equivocal on the issue of slavery), Lincoln was (in my view) an intelligent, if personally flawed, reader of his bible. He seemed to understand, in his bones, how terrible God is, how dreadful, even, God may be. Here is Lincoln’s take on a half verse of Psalm 19, in his second Inaugural Address. He writes:

“Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” (End quote.)

Did you catch the dreadfulness of what Lincoln is saying? Maybe, says Lincoln, maybe God wills that every unearned wage-dollar of every slave must be wasted on a devastating war. Maybe God wills that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Maybe God wills all of that. And if so, “as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

That’s a lot to take in.  But I want to point to this, lest we think Psalm 19 is just a little bit of sweet lemonade among the sour lemon of God’s Ten “You shall not” Words on the fiery mountain; and the sour lemon of Paul’s uncompromising and challenging interpretations of the Cross; and the sourest lemon of all – Jesus fashioning a whip of cords and cleansing the temple. Sweet Jesus, nice Jesus, graceful and loving Jesus – yeah, well, today Jesus fashions a whip of cords. God is terrible. God is dreadful.

When he cleanses the temple in this way, Jesus renders the whole temple useless to everyone, not just to the people running it (the ones he condemns for turning it into a “marketplace”), but the pilgrims, rich and poor alike, who risked their lives and spent their savings to climb the hills to Jerusalem just to pray in this temple. By driving out the money changers, Jesus makes it impossible for a pilgrim to exchange their Roman Empire money, which bears the idolatrous face of Caesar (making it unclean for the temple); so now they can’t go in. And by driving out the cattle and sheep and doves (cattle are sacrificed by those who can afford them; doves are sacrificed by working-class peasants like the parents of Jesus) – by driving the animals out, the pilgrims can’t do their temple prayers properly, even if they figured out how to get inside with their dirty money.

We try to make sense of these terrible stories, like the cleansing of the temple; and we try to make sense of these uncompromising ideas, like the Cross as stumbling block and folly but also the very power of God. We try to make sense of them. Maybe it’s best to borrow a page from Abe Lincoln: we won’t make sense of them if we also try to keep God nice, to hold God down as a just a graceful, gentle Creator. 

But then, what use would we have for God if God were merely a gentle giant, like Big Bird or Barney the Dinosaur? Maybe it’s good for us that God is terrible, because we live in a terrible world. Jesus ferociously disrupts the temple practices – the easy, timeworn, ethically compromised spiritual life of his people – because that Way has finally become nearly worthless in the face of their terrible world. 

On Ash Wednesday I preached about spiritual warfare, and at least one person was upset by what I said. We are in healthy dialogue about it, this person and I. I need to stand by what I said, in the same way that I stand by what I say tonight: that God is terrible; that God is dreadful. Why, though? Where does this get us? Well, let’s go back to President Lincoln, who had just said that perhaps God willed that the evil of slavery be defeated by a war that was just as terrible as slavery itself. Lincoln didn’t just stop at that idea, that terrible idea. He continued, finishing strong, by saying this:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right — as God gives us to see the right — let us strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

God is terrible; God is dreadful; but not just because God is those things. God is fashioning us into people who strive, people who bind wounds, people who care for those who have suffered the very worst. God does not form us to shrink from a challenge, to recede into a sing-song community of sentimental huggers. Now, we do embrace each other, and oh, the sweet peace – the luscious delight! – of sins forgiven, of friendships restored. Yes. But we are formed by God the Terrible, God the Dreadful, to engage the enemy of peace, the enemy of justice, the enemy of refugees and victims of war. We are formed to stand tall in defiance of the worldly powers of violence and terror, in all their forms. 

And so I invite you now, whether you want to or not, to share your own reflections on these provocative readings. Are you at the foot of the fiery mountain, your eyes blazing as Moses descends with those terrible tablets covered with the words “You shall not”? Are you at the foot of the Cross, that dreadful Cross, contemplating the confounding mystery of self-giving love? Maybe you’re a dove merchant just trying to help poor people say their prayers in the temple, and a zealot just ruined your livelihood. Where is God, in all of this, for you?

No one bears the cross alone

Preached on the Second Sunday in Lent (Year B), February 25, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Kevin Montgomery.

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38
Psalm 22:22-30

Believe it or not, speaking from this pulpit is a vulnerable task. Heck, getting up in front of people is vulnerable, period. Everyone’s looking at me. Am I going to mess up? Am I going to make a fool out of myself? Am I in the procession with the back of the tunicle tucked up behind me? Yes, that has happened. (No, not here.) Most of you know me to some extent and have seen me up here or downstairs at coffee hour or elsewhere. Some of you might even think I’ve got my stuff together. Well, one thing you might not know about me is that I have struggled with chronic depression for many years. As I’m sure you know, depression is more than just feeling sad. It encompasses the whole self – physically, emotionally, spiritually. Imagine feeling both pain and numbness at the same time. You want nothing more than to be somewhere else even though both your mind and your body seem to be swimming in molasses. Simply getting out of bed can be an achievement. There were times when I would wrestle up just enough energy to get an arm off the mattress, then maybe a leg, and eventually my whole self. Sure, I’d now be lying on the floor, but at least I was out of bed. And there’s much more incentive to get up off a cold floor than out of a warm bed. Emotionally, I’d feel like a crushing weight was resting on my heart. Sadness, failure, shame. “Why can’t I get over this?. . . Maybe you deserve it. . . . I don’t want to feel like this. . . . But can you really expect better? . . .” 

I’m lucky, however. My mom had a cousin who had bipolar disorder. The message I always got from my family was that it wasn’t something to be ashamed of. Cousin Dot simply had a medical condition. If she stayed on her medication, she was mostly fine. If she didn’t, well, not so fine. When I was diagnosed while in college, I already knew that it was something that could be treated. Thank God for mental health professionals, pharmaceuticals, and supportive family and friends. Before we go on, I have responded pretty well to medication, and I have the stability of a good job, a good church, and loving family. Nevertheless, I still sometimes have episodes, and I always carry with me the experience.

One of the worst parts of depression is the feeling of being utterly alone. Even with the support I had, during the lowest periods, I would feel cut off from everyone, from myself, sometimes even from God. Today we sang part of Psalm 22, the cheerier part. “Praise the Lord, you that fear him. . . . For he does not despise nor abhor the poor in their poverty; neither does he hide his face from them; but when they cry to him he hears them.” But who can recite that psalm without thinking about the beginning of it. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? and are so far from my cry and from the words of my distress?” Can there be any other verse in scripture that describes so well the reality of depression? “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest.” I’m almost certain that I’m not the only one here who has experienced that desolation. Actually, now that I think about it, I am certain I’m not the only one.

In Mark and Matthew, on the cross there is the cry of abandonment that flies from Jesus’s parched lips, a broken body giving up what seemed like a broken spirit. I was never ashamed of having depression, but it did break my conception of myself. Someone logical in thought and planning, in control at all times. But then I found myself being controlled by the emotions that arose within me. Well, the emotions were always there, always strong, but now I was the one being held in a box. I was always the scholar, the A-student, someone always hearing about people’s “high hopes,” being told that I’d go far. Yet the depression played a major, albeit not sole, reason in my burning out of a doctoral program. I was supposed to achieve great things in a field that I loved. Instead, I collapsed under the weight of misery and the shame of failure. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. This wasn’t the plan. “Told you you couldn’t do it.” Oh, what I would have given to be able to say in response, “Get behind me, Satan.” 

Even though in some of the worst episodes I felt totally abandoned by God, at other times I would feel the closest to him. Like being so bereft of my own strength that I had no other choice but to rely on Christ’s. Maybe I was stripped so bare that I couldn’t help but feel the warmth of his love on my skin. “Yet you are he who took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother's breast.” Even in Jesus’s cry of abandonment and his Father’s response of sheer silence, God was not torn asunder. God was not divorced from humanity but descended into the abode of the dead. Psalm 139, “Where can I go then from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.” I’m not saying that God sent this to me to teach me a lesson or some nonsense like that. Nor do I believe that suffering by itself is redemptive. Rather, God is present wherever we find ourselves. And wherever Christ is, there too is the Cross on which hung the world’s salvation.

When he says to take up the cross, we shouldn’t mistake it for some sort of work we have to do. He’s not saying, “Come to me you who are lightly laden, and I will give you chores. My yoke is hard, and the burden is heavy.” Nor is he telling us to press a cross upon others, especially if we do nothing to help. He calls us to follow him. It was a path that led him to the cross and the tomb, and it very well might lead us there as well. We take up our cross and lay aside what keeps us safe. Some might already be carrying some sort of cross. But since we are all one in Christ, no one bears the cross alone. Deny yourself? Deny what the world says you should be, whether it’s high or it’s low, whether you’re supposed to be better than everyone else or to be worse. Deny the power the world bestows upon you and embrace humility and weakness. Deny the powerlessness the world imposes on you and hold fast to the strength of Christ. The cross was meant to be an instrument of excruciating torture and burning shame, but through the power of the Spirit’s refining flames, it becomes a crucible of transformation. For even in the deepest darkness, the light of the Resurrection shines through. As we say in our funeral liturgy:

“As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives

and that at the last he will stand upon the earth.

After my awaking, he will raise me up;

and in my body I shall see God.

I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him

who is my friend and not a stranger.”

The crucible

This homily is a short “starter” homily that encourages the assembly at our 5:00pm liturgy to add their own insights and reflections in conversation with the preacher. Gathered in a circle in the early evening, we enjoy this evening Eucharist as a more intimate form of worship on the Lord’s Day.

Preached on the First Sunday in Lent (Year B), February 18, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.

Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25:1-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15

An alchemist working with his assistants at a crucible, by F. Pedro after F. Maggiotto

A crucible is a metal container, roughly in the shape of a cup, that you heat to very high temperatures to manipulate chemical compounds. But in history, the word crucible has also referred to a lamp that is placed near a crucifix. Crucible … crucifixion … excruciating. These words are related. I wonder if the objects they describe are also related — the alchemist’s device and the devout Christian’s chapel lamp. Think about it: the alchemist uses the crucible to put chemicals under the pressure of intense heat. Perhaps, by the light that burns near the cross, you can endure the pressure of seeing things you normally would not see, or would not want to see.

In my years as a couples therapist, I studied the work of David Schnarch, who coined a new term, the sexual crucible, to describe what couples need to do if they want to grow and change together, toward the goal of reviving and invigorating their long-term, monogamous relationship. One member of the couple needs to take a calculated and dreadful risk, by telling the other person what they want, or who they are; they need to tell them something honest that the other person needs to hear.

When they do this hard task, the person is going through their own personal crucible: they are being brave. They are doing something truly difficult. It’s scary! Can you relate? Imagine telling someone you deeply love something about yourself that they might find hard to hear — a desire you have that you’re pretty sure they don’t share with you; a hope or ambition you have that could threaten their dreams.

When Andrew and I watch television programs, I often imagine “crucible” conversations the couples on the shows could have with each other. (Okay, I also imagine “crucible” conversations Andrew and I could have, but I don’t have his permission to list them as examples here.) If the show is, say, Resident Alien, I want Kate to go through her crucible and screw up the courage to tell her husband Ben that staying in Patience, Colorado, is a deal-breaker for her, and if he doesn’t want to follow her to New York, then they need to assess whether they should stay married. And I want Ben to respond positively to that challenge — and by responding positively, Ben would go through his crucible — and accept this reality about his wife, and dare to trade his safety and security for a scary but potentially thrilling new adventure for their family.

All of this brings me alongside Jesus of Nazareth, recently baptized and driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. The wilderness is the crucible for Jesus, the dreadful praxis where he finds out who he truly is. Mark the Evangelist doesn’t say much at all about this experience, only that he is “tempted by Satan,” and that he spends time “with wild beasts.” Maybe the gift of Mark the taciturn evangelist is that we get to fill in the details with our own temptations, our own wild beasts. These are the things and the beings that we would use to escape our own crucibles.

I have a few.

A major temptation I have is to yield to my basic longing to be liked, to receive approval. But the crucible of faith demands that I step outside of that safe zone. For years I’ve sung a hymn — really a song more than a hymn, and usually at diocesan events, not at St. Paul’s — that includes this imagined question that Jesus asks of us: “Will you leave yourself behind if I but call your name? Will you care for cruel and kind and never be the same? Will you risk the hostile stare should your life attract or scare? Will you let me answer prayer in you and you in me?”

Wow. Yeah, I don’t know if I will. It’s scary to “leave myself behind.” It’s hard to “care for cruel and kind” (though that one runs right down the middle of my vow as a priest!). But recently, not to pat myself on the back, but a couple of times recently I have “risked the hostile stare” by preaching things that are things I think should be said, but things that are painfully provocative. This is all rough. And I want my life to attract others, not scare others. But even an attractive vocation is daunting. Attractiveness can spark imposter syndrome. It’s easier to stay snug in the safe zone where I don’t say or do anything significant.

As for the wild beasts in the crucible of the wilderness, well, I have a few of those, too. Dreadful creatures in my psyche; creatures like selfishness, being judgmental, unkind or unjust aggression, and the dreadful wolf of unchecked privilege, the wild beast who dresses like a mild sheep even as it does unspeakable damage.

And so I wonder — did you know this was coming? — I wonder about your crucible. Our faith tradition sets aside forty days to do “crucible stuff,” to meet the accuser or tempter, to wrangle wild beasts, to discern who we really are. We always have the option of “noping out” of all this, just skidding to Easter without much thought or concern about any of the truths that find us in that wilderness. (And hear this Gospel truth: if you skip Lent entirely, you’ll still be warmly welcome at God’s Easter table: God’s rainbow arcs above all of us, no matter what. Life is a lot. Do what you can. Pace yourself if you need to.)

But … what might be your crucible? Can you identify a wild beast, or two? Do you wonder whether Noah is apprehensive, having survived a harrowing flood and unsure whether he’s up to the task of rebooting the whole human race? How does the lovely yet wild season of Lent find you? When God’s angels minister to you, what might you tell them about your experience?

I invite your brief reflections and insights.

All the creatures under the rainbow

Preached on the First Sunday in Lent (Year B), February 18, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25:1-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15

Follow me, Satan (Temptation of Jesus Christ), by Ilya Repin

Let’s do some systematic theology, shall we? I’ll try to keep it interesting, and relevant. It may even be urgently important! Let’s do some theology together. Ready? Okay. Here we go.

If I take a hammer and bear its weight down upon a nail, the nail will comply and descend into a plank of wood. (Or it will slam onto my fingernail and bruise me badly.) Aristotle would call this an example of efficient cause: I employed a hammer to cause the nail to go into another object.

But there are three other classic, Aristotelian types of causes, three other ways one can make something happen, or bring something into being, or change something. There is the efficient cause, which I just described. Then there is the material cause: hammer, nail, wood, and fingernail — these objects are made of metal and trees and human flesh. The material causes the interaction of the four objects, simply by being the “stuff” the four objects are made of.

Then there is the formal cause: the conceptual form of the thing I’m making when I hammer a nail into wood. Maybe I’m building a table, or assembling a cabinet, or fashioning a door. The imagined form in my mind causes the thing to take shape in physical reality.

And finally there is the final cause: If I am building a table, the final cause is the dinner we will share at that table. The dinner is the motivation — the final cause — that compels me to start building, guided by the form of the thing I want to make, consisting of the stuff I’m using to make it, the stuff I manipulate efficiently with my hands.

Efficient, material, formal, final: these are Aristotle’s four causes of all that comes into existence, all that moves and develops, all that changes, all that transforms.

And it is, I think, deeply disappointing that God does not seem to create with the efficient cause! God does not hammer nails; God invites Noah to hammer them into boards to build an ark. God does not resist temptation; the human person of Jesus does that, and God’s Spirit only drives him, with inspiration, into the wilderness.

But oh, how this world might quickly improve if God efficiently caused things! God creates ingenious doctors and compassionate caregivers, but God could instantly and magically zap cancer cells, rather than permitting them to grow. Those doctors and caregivers are wondrous, but they’re not omnipotent. God could simply reverse climate damage, instead of driving us into the wilderness as advocates for the earth and all living creatures. God could directly save children from harm, instead of stirring and sending us to create a world that actually nurtures children. But God is the Humble One. God enters creation abundantly, but always in deep humility. God is not a carpenter; that’s the job of Jesus’s human father. And God is certainly not a superhero or wizard. God seems to intervene only indirectly in this serendipitous and phenomenal world. Alas.

But God intervenes nonetheless. God creates all the stuff of the universe. God creates material: the word material comes from mater terra, Mother Earth. God creates the atmosphere, then, and God tells Noah in today’s portion of Genesis that God will “bring clouds over the earth” — “bring clouds”: that sounds like efficient cause! — but God is still not taking direct control, not hammering nails, even if God is “bringing” clouds. No, God simply creates the material that makes up the clouds, and the material that makes up the whole atmosphere, and the material that makes up the sun and the sun’s rays, and all of that material interacts in such a way that clouds are “brought” over the land.

So God, in turn, does not efficiently or directly “set” the rainbow in those clouds, the rainbow that will remind God to be merciful with all created life. God perceives the rainbow, and God will make meaning of the rainbow, and take a course of action in relationship with the rainbow; but God does not efficiently create it. As we know, the rainbow is created not by God, but by sunlight passing through raindrops. God may point to the rainbow as a profound atmospheric sign of God’s grace, but the rainbow itself is created by ordinary atmospheric phenomena.

So let’s review things so far: God apparently does not create efficiently, like striking a nail with a hammer, but God makes all matter — all stuff — that interacts in this astonishing, splendid universe: God creates Mother Earth; God creates material. And all of that material flourishes freely, forming into planets and cities and people and rainbows and art and music.

Next: God causes things to happen — causes things to come into being — by formal cause. God imagines a form: a world of land and sea and air; a world teeming with creatures; a world with a moral and ethical arena; a world vulnerable to destruction; a world that remains in relationship with God its creator, a world that has the capacity to overcome evil. In this way, God employs the formal cause. Some key examples:

God imagines the form of a good and just human race, and inspires Noah and his family to strive through great hardship to become good and just themselves, and then to fill the land with good and just people.

God begets God’s own self with a particular human being, the perfect form of a human being capable of defeating the powers of Sin and Death. God’s Spirit then drives that being into the wilderness, into the praxis of human struggle, where that being chooses righteousness. And then God sends God’s messengers to serve that being, Jesus, with nourishing bread, and consolation, and companionship. 

All of this corresponds to what Aristotle calls the “formal cause”: the Holy One, Blessed be God, creates a great form for the universe, and by that form God inspires random stuff to coalesce and organize, to come into order; by that form God encourages the flourishing of Noah and the whole human family; and by that form God sends us Jesus to lead us toward redemption and wholeness, and the world toward goodness and glory.

And finally — literally, finally — God creates by “final cause.” God calls to us from the destination we are striving to reach. God calls to us from the future. If we’re hammering nails to assemble a table, God is already at that table on God’s holy mountain, the mountain where everyone shares a feast of rich foods and well-aged wines; the mountain where we feast on food while God dines on death – the mountain where the prophet Isaiah says that God “swallows up death forever.” God is calling to us, even now, from that mountain. God feasting with us in the future: that is The final cause. That’s where creation wants to be.

And today, we draw closer to that mountain. Today we pray the Great Litany, perhaps the first Christian liturgical text to be translated into the English language, a litany that goes on, and on, and on, invoking God’s mercy and power; pleading with God to spare and save us, to empower us to trample Satan under our feet. But we do not pray that God will simply do these things, striking hammer to nail. We pray for all of these things because God has already accomplished them, in the future from which God calls to us. The Great Litany is not a song we sing; it is God’s song that pulls us forward into God’s future. Where do we get all these ideas that fire our prayers? Where do we get our desire for the defeat of pride, the destruction of “sinful affections,” the end of hypocrisy and malice and all the rest? We get them from God’s mountain, where all of those things are already being swallowed up. 

And we touch God’s mountain every time we set this Table, where we enjoy a foretaste of that rainbowed mountaintop feast of victory and peace and justice. The stuff of the feast — bread and wine — is consecrated into the form of Body and Blood, but the final Feast itself is the thing: God is there, even now, creating a universe that bends toward that mountain, toward the rainbow that arcs above that mountain, toward the end of all suffering, toward God.

And so we do not lose hope. As the earth stirs and the trees bud; as springtime finds its way across the landscape and warms our wintry hearts; as the days lengthen and we long for the renewal of all things, we sing our Great Litany to God, the Creator who loves all creatures who live beneath the rainbow; the Savior who embraces us in the wilderness of our difficult lives; the Spirit who drives us into our vocations with power, with gladness, and with purpose.

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the Good News.