Arise My Love, My Fair One, and Come Away

Preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 17B), September 1, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.

Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

'Arise my love ... and come away...', by Cláudio Pastro

The voice of my beloved! Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills.
My beloved speaks, and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

These verses are from our first reading, from the Song of Solomon. There is a long tradition in both Judaism and Christianity of reading this book of love poetry as an allegory for the mystical relationship of our loving God with us, God’s beloved people, individually as well as collectively.

I invite you this morning to join me in letting that sink in for a moment. What if we wrote love poetry to God? What if God wrote love poetry to us? Let’s enjoy those verses again, with this in mind.

The voice of my beloved God! Look, God comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved God speaks and says to me, and you, to each and every one of us: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

The verses continue with images of springtime and bounty: flowers and blossoms, fruit, and fragrance. The time of singing has come.

We are reminded of this agrarian imagery in our collect of the day: Graft, as a gardener might – graft in our hearts the love, the love of your name. Increase, as in a bounteous harvest, increase in us true religion. Nourish, as with warm sun and cool rain, nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit, the fruit of good works.

Can you feel the warm sun and the cool rain, the nourishment of God’s love, and the fruit of that love in your heart?

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

But come away from what? In these verses the lover visits the beloved who is behind a wall. The question then, is what is our wall? What wall is keeping us from following God, from answering God’s call to us?

I expect each of us might have our own answers to that question, our own wall we have built between us and God, or perhaps a wall someone else built, and we inherited, or adopted, and haven’t had the courage yet to topple.

Jesus in today’s Gospel lists several intentions of the human heart that can build or maintain that wall between us and God, and between us and each other: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away from these intentions.

Well, that is sometimes easier said than done. Although, I find it rare that people willingly choose evil before the good, at least to start. Usually something happens that drives people to desperation.

Take the beginning of the Gospel passage, for instance.

Right away it is important to recognize that it’s problematic in terms of a legacy of anti-Jewish sentiment in Christianity. Modern biblical scholarship teaches us that the writer of the Gospel of Mark seems to lack comprehensive knowledge of the full variety of 1st-century Jewish beliefs and practices about food and washing. So when we hear in the Gospel generalizations such as the phrase, “all the Jews,” we are probably not hearing the whole truth. This is important because generalizations like this are too easily used to justify oppression.

So let’s be clear. As best as historians can tell, there was in Jesus’ time considerable variety in Jewish ritual practice, and interpretation of, and adherence to, Mosaic law. It is not appropriate to interpret Jesus in this Gospel throwing out Jewish law, or disrespecting the work of his fellow Jews to live into the covenant with God. If anything, Jesus seems pretty consistent in his critique of hypocrisy of any kind, not just that of certain Jewish religious authorities, and of putting human-devised traditions above God’s commandments which can be summarized in the love of God and love of neighbor.

Instead of getting caught up in the details of who is allowed to eat what and when, I encourage us to hear in this text an echo of trauma and fear coming out of an early Christian community grappling with its identity as something other than Jewish. That phrase is important: something other. Early Christians like the community out of which arose the Gospel of Mark, sometimes felt like the other. And sometimes our Christian spiritual ancestors did what many people do when they feel traumatized: they took their hurt and their fear of being treated as other, and passed that trauma on to someone else, in this case, as is too often the case in Christian history, onto Jews, treated here as a monolithic other.

I do not believe that Jesus was in the business of othering people, of building walls between an us and a them, between an us and an other.

Arise, my love, my fair one and come away.

Yet rather than toss out some of the language and ideas of this passage of the Gospel of Mark, let’s recognize the human limitations of our ancestors, and recognize our own limitations, and learn from this, with gentleness and compassion.

Let us admit the times we are hurt and afraid, and might react by pushing each other away. Let’s admit the times we might seek to belong in an us that is defined by not being them, the other.

I hear Jesus recognizing an attempt by some of his fellow Jews to build walls between themselves and his followers, and I hear Jesus inviting them, and us, to look beyond these walls we build out of hurt and fear, and see each other as God sees us, as beloved, every one.

Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Let us come away from our walls. We don’t need them.

For God so loved the Cosmos that God came down from heaven: God was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Virgin Mary, and became truly human. Look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. See, the love of God for us is so great, God overcomes every barrier, crosses every distance, in God’s reaching out to us in love.

Arise my love, my fair one, and come away from your fear, for now the winter of death is past, the rain of sorrow is over and gone. Jesus, who for our sake was crucified, suffered death and was buried, on the third day rose again, and flowers appear on the earth, and oh, the time of singing has come.

The time of the singing of angels has come, the time of singing of every stone, every grain of sand and every star in the heavens, and every plant and animal, and every one of us has come. Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, Heaven and earth are full of your glory!

Let us accept God’s invitation to all of us to come to God’s bounteous table to be nourished with all goodness of God’s love for us, so that we may go forth with the holy Name of God grafted in our hearts, that God may bring forth in us the fruit of good works.

Oh, my fellow beloved, let us with joy hear together our loving God calling to us:

Arise, my love, my fair one, come away.

The Life of the Age

Preached on the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16B), August 25, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.

1 Kings 8:1, 6, 10-11, 22-30, 41-43
Psalm 84
Ephesians 6:10-20
John 6:56-69

Psalm 84, by Christa Rosier

“…the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

When Jesus says this he is referring to himself. But biblical scholarly consensus is that in the context of the Gospel of John, Jesus is also referring to the Eucharist. The one who eats this bread, the bread here at this table, that we will consecrate in a few minutes, the one who eats the Eucharistic bread will live forever.

This is good news. It seems to me this is big news. I would imagine that if we were to head out to the street right now, and start calling out to people we see declaring that inside this building we are serving bread that will allow the one who eats it to live forever, we would get some attention.

I can picture it: “We have the bread of eternal life! Get your bread of eternal life here! Free eternal life, step right up, come on in!”

What is odd is that this is not new news. This has been the big, good news for two millennia. You’d think this church, and every eucharistic church, would be packed every Sunday, and plenty of other days each week too.

Unless people don’t quite believe that these words mean what they sound like they mean. I am guessing that when most people hear the phrase “eternal life,” they think of getting more of the life they have. More time. More years, many more years of life. Maybe it’s a kind of afterlife, maybe it’s an extension of this life, but one way or another “eternal life” usually means more time, lots more time.

Well, I think the evidence of two thousand years is that participating in the Eucharist has not resulted in very many people living longer lives, much less eternally longer lives.

This gets to the heart of the matter for us, and for the disciples in today’s Gospel who were complaining about Jesus’ teaching. His teaching can sound, on the surface, to people today as it did to people then, like he means that believing in him and eating the Eucharistic bread will give us something we think we want, which is more time to live. When it doesn’t turn out to be what he means, people then, and I think people now, can become very unhappy.

There are a couple reasons for this.

First, it’s good to remember that Jesus was not the first divine human on the scene. There are plenty of stories in world cultures of Gods becoming human, or humans being the children of Gods, and everything in between. But Jesus was a new kind of divine human, in a way that electrified and inspired some, but also in a way that disappointed very many, and I think that this is still true.

Other divine humans tend to be super-heroic in some way. They are the sorts of characters that participate in epic battles that change the course of world history, overturn empires, punish evil and provide riches and power to the righteous. Compared to those characters, Jesus decidedly falls short.

He doesn’t overthrow the Herodian dynasty. He doesn’t smite the temple hierarchy, take power and riches away from the wealthy and give it all to the poor. He doesn’t march to Rome and slay Caesar in an epic showdown, Gladiator-style, of two men whose followers believe they are the Son of God.

Yet Jesus does some remarkable things. He says a few words and saves a woman from being stoned.  He washes the feet of his disciples and overturns conventional wisdom about honor and rank. He demonstrates humility, kindness, compassion, honesty.

All these things point to the second way that Jesus was, and is, a new kind of divine human in the world. He doesn’t fix the world for us. He shows us what we can do to fix the world ourselves. He shows us what we can do to fix the world ourselves.

Imagine for a moment that you are following Jesus two thousand years ago and you are hoping he is going to fix the world for you, you might be disappointed when he doesn’t fix everything for you.

This is connected to the second reason that people found Jesus’ teaching difficult then, and can find it difficult now. The phrase “eternal life” is an English translation of the that loses some of the nuances of the original Greek that are important to understand if we want to fully appreciate what the Eucharist is about.

In this Gospel passage when we hear the words “eternal,” or “forever,” these are somewhat reductive translations of forms of the Greek word aion which also means “age.” So when Jesus says that the one who eats this bread will live forever, the Greek literally reads “the one eating this bread will live to the age.” And when Peter says to Jesus that he has the words of eternal life, the Greek literally reads “you have the words of the life of the age.”

In both cases, the word “age” is important because it means something more than time. When the Greek word aion and its forms are used in the Gospel of John, it means not just a period of time, but a way of being.

The life of the age doesn’t just mean life that extends beyond what we think of as expected human lifespans. In fact it may not mean that at all. The life of the age means life in the Age of God, and the Age of God is outside of time. The Age of God has existed from before time, is now, and always shall be.

This means that when Jesus says that the one who eats this bread will live forever, what he means is that eating this bread helps us access the Age of God, to access another way of being, that is, somehow, outside of time.

Eating the Eucharistic bread is not about getting more time in our lives, whether in this life or in some kind of afterlife. It’s not about getting more of this. It’s not about quantity. It’s about a fundamentally different kind of life.

This is because the life of the Age of God is not measured by time, but by love. As time is to our life, love is to the life of Jesus. Love is the measurement of life in Jesus, life in God.

So when Peter confesses that Jesus has the words of eternal life, Peter is confessing that Jesus reveals the truth about God, and our life in God, that that life is measured by love. And since love requires work on our part, work to overcome our pride and our fear, this can be a difficult teaching.

God gives us what we need for the work of overcoming pride and fear. God gives us the bread of life, which means that when we eat this bread, we participate in the life of the Age of God. When we eat this bread, we proclaim to ourselves and each other the Good News that our God is a God of love, and that as long as we are loving, we are tapping into an infinite source of life, immeasurable, and therefore unconquerable, by time, suffering, pride, or fear.

"No dame ever ran the Boston Marathon!"

Preached on the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin (transferred), August 18, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

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

Our coffee-hour cake this morning featured an image of our Mary Shrine.

The amateur athlete Kathrine Switzer registered for and then ran the 1967 Boston Marathon. Her coach said he would help her run the race if she could complete the full distance in their training runs. But he warned her that, in his words, “No dame ever ran the Boston Marathon!” Switzer didn’t hide her female identity at the starting line, even wearing lipstick and refusing to remove it when one of her teammates warned her that she’d be ejected from the race. 

What happened next is told in a 2017 article on the CNN website: “A few miles in, [Switzer] saw a man with a felt hat and overcoat in the middle of the road shaking his finger at her as she passed. Then, she heard the sound of leather shoes, a distinctly different noise from the patter of rubber soles, and knew something was wrong. 

“[Switzer wrote in her memoir,] ‘Instinctively I jerked my head around quickly and looked square into the most vicious face I’d ever seen. A big man, a huge man, with bared teeth was set to pounce, and before I could react he grabbed my shoulder and flung me back, screaming, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!”

“The man was race director Jock Semple. Press photographers captured Semple’s contorted face as he grabbed at Switzer’s numbers while her boyfriend pulled Semple off her.

“[Switzer] ran from the scene bewildered. She ambled on for a few miles before her anger transformed into energy and she took off for the finish line. Dropping out was not an option…

“[Switzer writes,] ‘…I knew if I [dropped out,] no one would believe women could run distances and deserved to be in the Boston Marathon; they would just think that I was a clown, and that women were barging into events where they had no ability. I was serious about my running and I could not let fear stop me.’

“She finished the race in four hours and 20 minutes, but would later be disqualified and expelled from the Amateur Athletic Union.

“Support soon eclipsed the fallout and she became a celebrity.”

The CNN article concludes with Switzer reflecting on gender equality in sports, saying, ‘We’ve come a light year but we still have a long way to go.’”

Kathrine Switzer made history, but to do so, she needed to summon and sustain a conscious disregard for the rules. And here in the Episcopal Church, we don’t just support athletes who advocate for equality in public sporting events, we also are known for other types of rule-breakers who teach us things that some of the rule-followers among us are not yet ready to learn.

Do you want to make the Church better? Do you want God’s people to do a better job proclaiming the Good News of justice, peace, reconciliation, and resurrection? If so, you may need to break a rule or two.

Every year, here at St. Paul’s, we break one particular little rule, a rule that is found in the fine print of our Book of Common Prayer. Compared to Kathrine Switzer, and compared to a few other people I will speak about in a moment, this rule-break here at St. Paul’s is definitely a small potato. It’s really a tiny rule, the one we’re breaking. But it’s significant that we are breaking it, and it is significant why we are breaking it.

Here’s the rule we’re breaking at St. Paul’s. I’ll read it at some length, just to give you a feel for how the Church sometimes sounds when we are inventing rules. You’ll find all of this on page 16 in the Prayer Book:

All Sundays of the year are feasts of our Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to the dated days listed above [for example, December the 25th], only the following feasts, appointed on fixed days, take precedence of a Sunday:

The Holy Name [January 1]
The Presentation [February 2]
The Transfiguration [August 6]

The feast of the Dedication of a Church, and the feast of its patron or title [for us, that would be St. Paul], may be observed on, or be transferred to, a Sunday, except in the seasons of Advent, Lent, and Easter.

All other Feasts of our Lord, and all other Major Feasts appointed on fixed days in the Calendar, when they occur on a Sunday, are normally transferred to the first convenient open day within the week… With the express permission of the bishop, and for urgent and sufficient reason, some other special occasion may be observed on a Sunday.

If you still can’t work out what the rule is, much less how we at St. Paul’s broke the rule, you should congratulate yourself for being a socially well-adjusted person. We’re in the weeds here. This is the rule we’re breaking: We are not named “St. Mary’s Episcopal Church,” so it is irregular for us to transfer the August 15 Feast of St. Mary the Virgin to this Sunday. Transferring St. Mary disrespects the Sunday that got bumped, which was the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, which is one of the fifty-two Sunday feasts of our Lord Jesus Christ.

But we break the rule twice, most years! In late September, no matter whether September 29th falls on a Sunday, we transfer the September 29 Feast of St. Michael and All Angels to the last Sunday of September. This also is … irregular! And we don’t even ask the bishop’s permission!

Now, normally I wouldn’t bring any of this up in polite, mixed company. I don’t like having the weird fine-print eccentricities of the church on display in the front of the house. We’re hearing a lot about “weird” people in our national politics these days, and I don’t want us to look weird to newcomers, or to people whose eyes would understandably glaze over if I pulled out page 16 and all of its mind-numbing calendar rules. All of this seems to fail the “Who cares?” test.

But I like that we break this rule a couple of times every year, again for two reasons. First, we are breaking the rule. St. Paul’s is a rule-following kind of parish, so when we break a rule, it is news of a difference. This bit of inside baseball seems trivial, but it might be worth your attention nonetheless, because we rarely do anything around here without a good reason, especially when doing the thing means flying in the face of the tidy, complicated, sometimes beautiful rules and rubrics of our communion.

The second thing I like about this rule-break is that we are doing it for an excellent cause: to raise up a rule-breaking woman, St. Mary the Virgin; and then, in September, a host of rule-breaking gender-fluid Angels. Think of Gabriel barging into Mary’s hut, uninvited, and telling her that her entire rule-breaking pregnancy is not a life-threatening scandal, but God’s will for a renewed earth! Mary was in big trouble; Joseph could have followed the rules and “put her away,” essentially dooming her to a nameless, landless existence as a shameful outcast. But the Angels, God’s messengers, bravely equipped Mary — and Joseph — to break a few rules.

This brings me to other rule-breakers in our Church, who broke far bigger rules than a calendar instruction. Late last month the Church celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the irregular, rule-breaking ordination of the Philadelphia Eleven, the first women priests in the Episcopal Church. Their ordination inspired the ordination of four more women the next fall, and the change in our church canons at the following General Convention that affirmed the legal, regular ordination of women to the priesthood. Fourteen years after the Philadelphia Eleven were ordained, the first Black woman bishop of the Episcopal Church was ordained. 

This fall I’m working on hosting a screening of the documentary, The Philadelphia Eleven, if only to give you all the experience of watching the Right Reverend Barbara Harris don the bishop’s miter for the first time. Was the Church ready for this? No. Was it the right and good thing to do? Yes.

Then, in the 2000s, the Episcopal Church was confronted with yet another rule-breaker, this time the Right Reverend Gene Robinson, an openly gay and partnered priest who was elected bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire. We were most definitely not ready for that, and years of painful schism followed. We didn’t yet agree that it was within the rules to elect and consecrate Gene, our sibling in Christ. But it was time.

You could say that the rule-breaking part of all these stories is the least important part. The rules are … well, they’re outdated, right? That’s why we break them! Persons of all genders should be welcome in amateur athletic events (and professional ones too, for that matter). Persons of all genders and orientations, leaders in God’s sight, should serve God’s Church. So maybe we look at that persnickety page 16 of our Prayer Book and we just say, “Big deal.”

But the rules do serve one good purpose: they mark the baseline that God transcends, right in front of our eyes. The old rules bring into sharp relief the need God’s people have for continuing reform, for ongoing renewal. In Mary’s song of triumph, she lists all the ways the world changes when God’s people get into what John Lewis famously calls “good trouble.” We break the rule before the world is ready. That’s how we move forward.

I will give one of the rule-breakers the last word. She tells us why all of this rule-breaking is so important. The Reverend Carter Heyward, one of the Philadelphia Eleven, spoke at the funeral of one of her sister priests, the Reverend Alison Cheek. Mother Carter said this:

“I’ll remind you that Sophia is an ancient image of God, specifically the wisdom of God. It’s who she was, our Alison, ongoing source of Sophia wisdom. Alison would want me to insist that the Philadelphia Ordination was the wake-up call to get moving and to do what Jesus of Nazareth did — stand with the marginalized, and embody courage in the face of cruelty, and lies, and bullying, and violence.”

"The bread that I will give is my flesh"

Preached on the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14B), August 11, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35:41-51

Bread of Life, mosaic art by Jenny Earnshaw

I am married to a cook.

This is such a familiar, such a basic fact of my existence, I sometimes fail to focus on it. Andrew has been feeding me for nearly twenty-five years. Since the year 2000, for thousands of evenings, Andrew has prepared food for me to eat. On many Saturday mornings, he bakes biscuits.

I wash and fold all of our laundry; Andrew prepares all of our meals. This has been a clear, firm division of labor for us.

In my last call as a priest, I spent two evenings a week overnight on Bainbridge Island. A Grace Church family generously gave me their little above-the-garage apartment to use. It did not have a stove. All it offered was a toaster oven and a microwave. I would cook an Amy’s pizza, or reheat an entree from the grocery store. I fed myself in college-dorm fashion. My food had calories and nutrients, and often enough it tasted okay. But it was not two important things, two things Andrew’s cooking has become in our household.

My humble solitary meals in that apartment — in contrast to Andrew’s cooking — were not eucharistia, and they were not koinonia.

Yes, I just dropped two fancy Greek words. But bear with me, and don’t worry: you probably already know one of them quite well. Eucharistia: that’s the Greek word for ‘thanksgiving,’ and it has arrived in English basically unchanged as the word Eucharist. Every week, you and I, all of us, longtimers and newcomers, elders and children and adults in midlife — all of us make Eucharist together. We gather at this Table, and give thanks to God. We celebrate eucharistia.

But eucharistia is not just a prayer of thanksgiving. It is that: after all, we say right up front, “It is right to give our thanks and praise.” But eucharistia is far more than a perfunctory “thank you.” It’s not, “Cool, yeah thanks bro.” Eucharistia is a full reorientation of our whole lives, even our whole identities, as Eucharistic people. We become God’s People of Thanksgiving. Gratitude shapes not just our attitudes and choices and behaviors: gratitude shapes us. When we receive and consume the Eucharistic bread every week, we become what we receive. 

The transformation may be subtle today, but noticeable when we look back over our lives and see how we have changed. I have been receiving Communion since 1984, when I was in ninth grade and my Lutheran parish led me through Confirmation and first Communion (quite late in life, by our standards here at St. Paul’s!). I’ve been a fairly faithful churchgoer for the last forty years, so maybe it’s fair to say that I have slowly been transformed into a Eucharistic person. I have my bad days; I don’t behave well in a sugar crash; I have a rap sheet of bad behaviors. But: maybe I’m changing. Maybe I’m becoming “Eucharistic.” I hope so.

How long have you been receiving Communion? Some of you may have been receiving it far longer than me. Others may be able to count your trips to this Table on one hand. However long each of us has received and consumed this bread and wine, this Body and Blood, our faith invites us to reflect on our identities, and how Eucharistia changes us.

Has the Eucharist gone to work on you? Remember, it’s often subtle. It can take a whole lifetime, and even as we prepare for death, we may sigh and wonder whether we really have lived lives of thanksgiving, lives marked by a sacrifice of praise. 

One way to notice Eucharistia is to see the Eucharistic effect on other people. Today is the second Sunday of the month, so I’m scheduled to walk with the St. Paul’s in the Neighborhood ministers — the SPiN walk. Often, when I go on this walk, I see Eucharistic people in action. I see BJ, our Neighborhood Action team leader, embracing neighbors with whom she enjoys powerful friendships. She chats them up, picking up threads of conversation that they have been sustaining for weeks, months, maybe years. She knows many of our neighbors, and not just by name: she knows their circumstances, their dilemmas, their regrets and griefs, their hopes and fears.

That’s a Eucharistic person.

But this example also illustrates the second fancy Greek word I mentioned a bit ago: koinonia. We can translate koinonia as “life in community.” We come here weekly to receive the Eucharist, allowing God to form us into Eucharistic people, and that inevitably, viscerally, essentially forms us into a community. As a priest, I am authorized by you, the Christian assembly, to preside at this Table. But I am not permitted to preside there if I am the only person in the room. That is not a valid Mass. If I came in here all by myself and spoke all the prayers, chanted all the refrains, held my hands in the orans position, said and sang and did all the correct things, nothing would happen. It would not be Eucharist. 

Eucharist only happens in community. Without koinonia, eucharistia does not exist.

And happily, I can gladly reassure you that koinonia is far easier to recognize than eucharistia. Life in community — which is formed around this Table — is here or not here; we can often tell. I’ve been to churches where koinonia seems absent, and those are hard, sad places. Pray for people who attend those churches. (Seriously: I bid you to pray for them.) Those churches are not just riven with conflict, not just depressed, not just angry or anxious. There is an aching absence there: the whole thing feels like a flat, false show. 

Churches suffering from that lack of koinonia came to my mind this week when I listened to a sermon preached by a Jewish faith leader, Rabbi Sharon Brous, the spiritual leader and teacher of Ikar, a Jewish faith community in Los Angeles that seeks to embody the best of Jewish identity and mission. Rabbi Brous was reflecting on stories of zealots two thousand years ago whose extremism led to famine and mass death. Standing inside the Jewish tradition, Rabbi Brous noted an ancient Jewish description of an extremist, one that she said describes the top Israeli government officials responsible for the devastation in Gaza. Jewish tradition describes violent zealots as “empty people who are eager only for war.” Empty people, eager only for war. That is who we risk becoming if we do not cultivate koinonia in this place.

And so I am here to encourage you by pointing directly to this loving, active, living parish: koinonia flourishes here. Koinonia infuses our gatherings. Sometimes it brings a lump to my throat, and I can hardly choke out my song of alleluia. Now, I am not naïve. St. Paul’s has a few problems. We don’t always, unfailingly treat each other with respect and care. We strain and even fracture the bonds of koinonia that God has woven here. We’re a human organization.

But we flourish nonetheless as the Body of Christ in this place. If my reception of the Eucharistic bread over forty long years hasn’t done enough to transform me, you all help by embracing me as your sibling. Whether you’ve received Communion for five decades or for the first time today, the power of your Eucharistic identity is contagious; it flows from you; it transforms those around you. Eucharistia and koinonia work together, they reinforce each other, they swirl together and lift us and change us and send us forth from here as Christ’s loving hands and feet.

And so we finally can begin to make sense of that strange, even bizarre thing that Jesus says about himself in the Good News according to John. Jesus says, “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” 

The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.

What an odd, startling, maybe even revolting thing to say! The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. We feed on Jesus, the Bread of Life. We eat our Savior. We take him into our very bodies — that’s how intimate we are when we keep koinonia with Jesus, and with one another. 

And this brings me back to my husband, the cook, who I suspect was a little mortified to know that I ate like a college kid whenever I was away for those solitary overnights on the island. Andrew is not, of course, Jesus. (Believe me; of this I am sure.) But his witness to us as a cook may help open up the image and meaning of Jesus giving us his own flesh to eat. 

Cooks — the good cooks, that is — give of themselves, with startling generosity, to nourish their companions. (Companion: a word that means “with bread,” or “breaking bread together.”) Andrew’s cooking has formed and shaped our marriage, every bit as powerfully as the thousands of times I have tri-folded our t-shirts and towels. These are costly labors of self-giving love. We have friends who cook and care for their companions with the same spirit. Our parish has bread-bakers, coffee-hour hosts, formation leaders, faithful staff professionals, vestry members, devout parishioners who evangelize simply by praying in the pews — all of these saints are “cooks” whose costly, self-giving love forms and shapes the koinonia that thrives here.

Christianity is not a fascinating little intellectual exercise. Christianity is not an entertaining little social club, or a sweet nonprofit charity, or a nostalgic family reunion. Christianity is not frozen in place: if this is a place where excellent cooks are at work, then the menu will change often. Christianity is not going to leave us unchanged, unchallenged, or untransformed. Christianity will not even leave us undamaged! The intimacy we share when we eat our Savior — the intimacy we share when we “cook” for one another — it can be dreadful, daunting, even devastating.

God gracefully breaks us to creatively transform us.

Eucharistia and koinonia. That’s what’s happening to us, week by week. That’s who we’re becoming, week by week. And this is how God heals and restores this whole wondrous world.

He was her man, and he done her wrong

Preached on the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Year B), August 4, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Christ Teaching at Capernaum, by Maurycy Gottlieb

Do you know the song, “Frankie and Johnny”? I would rather not sing it to you — the music of Jimmie Rodgers lies a bit outside our splendid Anglo- Catholic tradition, and outside my own stylistic abilities, and anyway I have no guitar up here with me, and couldn’t play it if I did — but I’d like to offer you a spoken sample. I think I can recite portions of “Frankie and Johnny” as a compelling story. Terrible, sad! But — compelling. Here goes.

Frankie and Johnny was sweethearts,
oh Lord how they did love
Swore to be true to each other,
true as the stars above
He was her man, he wouldn't do her wrong

Frankie went down to the corner,
just for a bucket of beer
She says, Mr Bartender
has my loving Johnny been here
He's my man, he wouldn't do me wrong

I don't want to cause you no trouble,
I ain't gonna tell you no lie
I saw your lover an hour ago
with a girl named Nellie Bligh
He was your man, but he's doing you wrong

Frankie looked over the transom,
she saw to her surprise
There on a cot sat Johnny,
making love to Nellie Bligh
He’s my man, and he's doing me wrong

Frankie drew back her kimono,
she took out a little 44
Rooty toot toot, three times she shot,
right through that hardwood door
Shot her man, he was doing her wrong…

This story has no moral,
this story has no end
This story just goes to show,
that there ain't no good in men
He was her man, and he done her wrong

Here ends the reading.

“There ain’t no good in men.” That’s a persuasive little argument, right there. Just look around. Look at all this mess. Jimmie Rodgers offers what sounds like a fairly reasonable take on human nature. And there’s a kind of safety in this argument, a protective shell you can huddle under, keeping you safe from crushing disappointment. Frankie’s on her way to the bar, telling herself that her man wouldn’t do her wrong, but if she really believes that, then why is she looking for him, and with a gun? She doesn’t trust him. Not deep down. Our girl is all too ready to find out that her man, he done her wrong.

But today’s Good News is for Frankie, even if it arrives too late to save her from killing Johnny, even if she can’t or won’t listen to it. Frankie, hear this Good News: your man was doing you wrong … but he can change. He can make it right. He can get square with you. 

He really can.

The prophet Nathan says so.

Nathan — a name from the Hebrew root natan, a word that means “gave” — Nathan gives King David a tremendous gift. Nathan isn’t packing a 44 in his tunic. He has something even more devastating: he comes to King David with the hard truth. He confronts his boss with the one thing David does not want to hear. And he persists until David confesses his terrible crimes.

In doing this, Nathan saves David from a terrible fate. David admits his dreadful wrongdoing — that he coerced a woman into having sex with him, a power move that she could not resist; and he then abused his power to have her husband killed in battle. David repents from all of this, and therefore, though his actions foreshadow the eventual collapse of the kingdom, David recovers. David improves. David is remembered now with honor, as a good king, a strong and inspiring servant of God. He did several people wrong, but that wasn’t the end of his story.

As for Bathsheba and her husband Uriah, David’s victims, they most certainly were not saved from a terrible fate, but this may be the most honest part of this awful story from the second book of Samuel: David’s moral journey doesn’t end happily for everyone, and so it rings true. We all know stories like that. Many of us have lived — many of us are still living — stories like that. But Bathsheba and Uriah, for all their sufferings, come first from God’s perspective. Note that the text says, “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord, and the Lord sent Nathan to David.” We praise the One God who sees the victims in a story of violence, the One who frees the slaves from a cruel empire, the One whose eyes are on the orphan and the widow.

I hope you can hear how extraordinary this is. Where else in ancient literature do we encounter the moral development of a privileged sovereign who abused and murdered his subjects, challenged and corrected by his god? This is news of a difference on the face of the earth: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob checks the privilege of human leaders. The Lord Almighty pays attention to the victims in awful human dramas. God cares about those who are last and least. And so God gives a privileged man a terrible, redemptive gift: the gift of a chance to repent, to confess, to make amends, and to evolve; the gift of a chance to be a better king, a better leader, a better person.

David accepts this gift, gracefully. His story of redemption shapes our own growth and maturity in faith. Every Ash Wednesday we sing Psalm 51, today’s psalm, a psalm of repentance attributed to David himself. What David did was terrible, and will always remain so. No feeling or act of remorse can fully undo bad actions. But the gift of a chance to confess, and to make amends: that ancient gift of God is evergreen. We will receive it yet again, today, when for the umpteenth time we hear these words: “Let us confess our sins against God and our neighbor.”

But the story of salvation continues, long after David dies in the peace of God. Centuries later, not far from the city where David once reigned, another figure emerges. For us who proclaim the mystery of Christian faith, this person is our prophet and priest and sovereign: this is Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Word of God, Jesus the Incarnate One who moves into the human neighborhood — including this neighborhood — and extends God’s invitation to us once again to repent, to confess, to make amends, and to evolve.

Jesus feeds the multitude in a wondrous sign of his abundant grace and power, and this feast on the hillside prefigures the Christian Eucharistic community, the community we form here, week by week, year by year. But he has more to teach that multitude, more for them to learn and to know. Shortly after the hillside feast, the crowd discovers that Jesus slipped away somehow, and they go looking for him. But when they find him, he upbraids them a bit. He says, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life…”

And so we watch as the crowd is corrected in their misunderstanding of who Jesus is, what Jesus is doing, what he’s all about. They underestimated him as merely a source of abundant food. Now, in their defense, abundant food is undoubtedly a good thing, and seeing Jesus as a food bank is a reasonable and understandable assumption for these hungry peasants to make.

But Jesus invites them into a deeper understanding of his mission, and their mission, and our mission. He is calling us all into a new community, a new Rule of Life, a new Way.

In the Jesus Movement, we don’t merely find food for ourselves. We don’t even settle for sharing food with our neighbors, as virtuous and essential as that is! In this movement, we abide with Jesus, in dreadful yet lovely intimacy. And whenever we abide with Jesus, we abide with one another, bonded forever as one human family. This family transforms the whole world into a just and peaceful home where God dwells intimately with God’s people. When we do all of this — when we study more carefully what Jesus is saying and doing, and envision the kind of world the Word of God is speaking into existence —  then we improve. We get better.

Take note: our SPiN walkers don’t just hand out food and supplies. They build lasting and collaborative friendships with our neighbors. Like King David, and like those hungry peasants who initially misunderstand Jesus, we deepen our understanding. We expand our skills.

There are several misunderstandings in John’s Gospel, stories of people who don’t get it at first, but then make progress, and get better in their practice of faith. The watching crowd at the temple misunderstands what Jesus is saying about the old temple, and how his own body will become the new temple. Nicodemus needs a minute to make sense of being “born again.” The woman at the well initially underestimates what Jesus means by “living water,” thinking only of her immediate practical needs. (She’s clever, though, and soon puts it all together.) And so on. People initially don’t get it.

Our forebears are models for us, models of improvement, of evolution. King David reforms. Nicodemus bravely acknowledges his ignorance and asks Jesus to enlighten him. The woman at the well is astonished and perplexed, but she figures it all out and runs back to her village with exciting news. Peter repairs his denials and goes on to found a whole new movement. According to the letter to the Ephesians,

“All of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God; [all of us come] to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”

So Frankie, oh Frankie, please put your 44 revolver away. Your man, he done you wrong. That’s the truth. But he can get better. And if you put your weapon down — and Frankie, I speak this truth to you in love — if you put your weapon down, you can get better, too.

Wheat ground fine by the lion's teeth

Preached on the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12B), July 28, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21

Jesus multiplies the loaves and fish, Jesus Mafa –  an initiative in the 1970s to help teach the gospel in Northern Cameroon

Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to [Jesus], “There is a child here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated.

Loaves of bread.

Loaves of bread made from barley flour, which even the poorest households in first-century Palestine could afford.

God’s dominion revealed to us in the distribution of cheap but good bread, broken skillfully, handed carefully from person to person, until everyone has eaten their fill.

God’s dominion as the breaking of bread.

God as Bread.

I can see it.

Bread is crusty. It can have sharp edges, especially when the baker scores it down the middle before putting it in the oven, or makes a cross cut for our Thanksgiving bread we share here week by week. I eat the top crust of crusty bread last, because it is crunchy and chewy, both, and I always save the best for last. So God is … crusty? Yes. And sharp. God is not just soft and tender. God is, in all times and places, not merely the best, but the only One, the One who knows us, the One who pierces us with awful yet graceful intimacy. And God endures at the last.

But bread is soft and tender, too. If it is baked just a little less than you think it needs, bread can come out perfect. God can feel — maybe even taste — this good. “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” the psalmist sings. 

Bread is fragrant. God is fragrant. Sometimes the smell of baking bread is so lovely it is maddening — that unmistakable yeasty smell, layered and strong. The psalmist sings of fragrances, too: “Let my prayer rise before you as incense,” we sing, usually around sunset, at evening prayer. My psalm would be, “Let my prayer rise before you as baking bread.” The Spirit blows where she wills, and when she blows, her breeze carries delicious smells of nourishment.

Bread can get moldy. If God is Bread, then God is home to — and God is food for — mold. God is that humble! God dwells that lowly, that meekly.

And there are countless different kinds of bread. Is God diverse? Well, God certainly creates in splendid variety: the air is filled with birds of every kind; the seas teem with fish of every kind. And so of course bread is dizzyingly diverse too. As we’ve seen, poor folk in ancient Palestine made their bread from barley, and so Jesus multiplied barley bread to feed the crowd on the hillside. But in my feast with Jesus, he multiplies loaves of focaccia baked at La Rustica restaurant in West Seattle. God creates in splendid variety: what bread does God multiply that feeds you? What bread delights you? How does God taste, to you?

And .. we punch bread. Well, we punch the dough, that is, as part of the rising process. If Jesus is the Bread of Life, can we punch Jesus? Yes. Yes we can. The risen Christ, still wounded yet rising up in life – he can take our punches. We — like so many prophets and singers of psalms before us — we get to confront and challenge God. We get to punch up.

But here’s the main thing, in my book, that makes “God as bread” so vivid and true: bread breaks.

On the evening of the first Easter Day, the Emmaus walkers recognized the Risen One when the bread was broken. And so, every week here at church, we break our bread with intention, holding it aloft for a time. When the bread is broken at the climax of our Thanksgiving Table prayer, we recognize Christ in our midst, and we acclaim that Christ appears in the breaking. The Body of Christ is, essentially, vitally, broken.

God as Broken Bread.

I can see it.

Only by breaking the bread can we share the bread, and stop hoarding it. (God showered pre-broken manna upon the Israelites, but it would rot overnight, so they couldn’t possibly hoard it.)

Only by breaking the bread can everyone be nourished. (God in Jesus was known for countless meals with those who hunger, including Jesus himself, a famished peasant: he did not feed the hungry; he ate with them.)

Only by breaking the bread do we find the wounded but risen Christ in our midst.

And only by breaking the bread can we come to see how we ourselves — we who follow Jesus, the Bread of Life — we, like Jesus himself, will become broken bread for this hungry, this famished world.

But we live in such a famished world that we can no longer afford to confine the concept of “bread” to our creative metaphorical imaginations: the hungry multitude on the grassy hillside is all too literally real. In an article published today in the New York Times, journalist David Wallace-Wells wrote this: “It can be tempting, in an age of apocalyptic imagination, to picture the most dire future climate scenarios: not just yield declines but mass crop failures, not just price spikes but food shortages, not just worsening hunger but mass famine. In a much hotter world, those will indeed become likelier, particularly if agricultural innovation fails to keep pace with climate change; over a 30-year time horizon, the insurer Lloyd’s recently estimated a 50 percent chance of what it called a “major” global food shock.”

Harrowed by these fears in our existential age, we follow the One who literally gave food to hungry people in his effort to show us what the Dominion of God is like. And so we, in turn, literally feed people, at the center of our spiritual mission. (Notice our shelves full of food for our neighbors, in our entryway.) We are welcome to keep “bread” in our imagination as an image of Christ, but it is also our task, as followers of Jesus who fed the multitude, to become the barley, ground into flour for the substance of the bread, the substance of the Body of Christ.

“God as Bread” is not just a beautiful metaphor. “God as Bread” is a challenge, an exhortation, a sending of everyone gathered here to feed all who hunger, even at great cost to ourselves, against all of our instincts to hoard for a safe future. Jesus the Bread of Life joins the hungry multitude in their predicament, in their anxiety, in their vexing, spiraling crisis.

Here’s how Ignatius of Antioch, a first-century member of the Jesus Movement, says it: Ignatius says, “I am God’s wheat ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.” I am God’s wheat ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.”

We are invited to follow Jesus the Bread of Life, but this following is not simply walking behind a friendly sherpa up a twisting mountain trail. To follow Christ means to be ground fine and consumed like he was: to be torn open, to be crushed like dry grain.

And so we affirm, finally, that when Jesus is on the hillside, surrounded by hordes of hungry people, and says to his disciples, “Make the people sit down,” he is saying something startling, something daunting. “Make the people sit down,” Jesus says, just before he wondrously multiplies loaves of cheap bread into a mountaintop feast. But he hosts this wondrous dinner with the full knowledge that he will himself become that bread, torn to pieces, distributed up and down the hillside, consumed by pilgrims who are frantic with hunger.

And then, following Jesus, we fall into this pattern right behind him. Ignatius makes this plain: we are God’s wheat, ground fine by the lion’s teeth, to be made purest bread for Christ.

We allow our lives to be consumed in mission alongside God’s beloved hungry people. We allow our hearts to be torn open in compassion for refugees, for victims of war, for migrants at the border, for farm animals in tiny cages, for human persons in tents just outside our door, for this whole grassy hillside we call Uptown, for the grassy hillside of this whole round world.

God’s mission asks a lot of us.

But we have guides along the way, apostles who help us understand, accept, and finally join God’s mission. My husband Andrew is, like his namesake the apostle Andrew, one of those in our community who evangelizes by baking bread, by fixing dinner. Happily, it was his turn today to bake our bread. I say “happily” because whenever it’s Andrew’s turn to be one of the St. Paul’s “Flour Children,” our house is filled with holy fragrance. Our kitchen is adorned with luscious fresh-baked bread. It’s almost a shame that this lovely gift will be broken and torn apart, then chewed and swallowed, by all God’s hungry people.

But that’s how it works. That is our faith. Come on up, then, hungry pilgrims. Come forward to eat your savior, which will strengthen you to be torn apart and eaten, too. In all this tearing and eating, all the people of God will receive as much as they want, all that they need. All God’s people will be satisfied. But all along this difficult Way, up and down this grassy hillside, all of us who follow Jesus the Bread of Life – we will surely be ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.

Rest and Home

Preached on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11B), July 21, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.

2 Samuel 7:1-14a
Psalm 89:20-37
Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

“For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.”

For me, this passage is viscerally evocative. I can feel in my gut the rush, the coming and going, the getting things done, and all of it important, surely. I have lived this passage, so many times in my life. Perhaps you have too.

This is a bright, shining time in the Gospel of Mark. Two weeks ago we heard about the disciples being sent out by Jesus to proclaim the Good News. Today we hear about them returning, and telling Jesus all about what “they had done and taught.” Today’s Gospel passage is really two passages put together, in the middle of which is one of the times that Jesus feeds thousands of people with a few pieces of bread and fish, John’s version of which we will hear about next week. Today’s passages frame the feeding of thousands, and are themselves full of healing and teaching.

We get the sense that the whole countryside is on fire with the Jesus movement. There is good ministry happening, and there is a kind of breathless exhilaration to it all.

Maybe you came to church this morning to participate in some of the exhilaration that a very active life in parish ministry can bring. If so, you are welcome.

Maybe you came to church this morning because the rest of your life is already packed full of things that demand your attention, in a way that you might sometimes feel that there is so much coming and going that you have no leisure even to eat. Maybe in that case you came to church to rest, to be carried for a little while by the liturgy. If so, you are welcome.

And maybe you came to church this morning not quite sure why you came. If so, you are welcome.

However or whyever you came, I think our Scripture passages today have Good News for all of us.

For me, today’s Good News can be expressed in two words that run like a river through the whole Bible, and that bring life-giving water to us today. These two words are Rest and Home.

If you came looking for rest, then I hope you hear with me what Jesus says to the disciples in today’s Gospel: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”

If you came looking to do a lot of things, that’s great. I hope that in the midst of your generosity toward the church in terms of your time and energy, that you are also generous to yourself and hear what Jesus says: “rest a while.”

And if you are one of those people not sure what you want, I hope you too can hear Jesus inviting you to “rest a while,” because part of rest can be resting from the anxiety of not knowing what to do next. It’s okay to rest sometimes from feeling like you always need to know the answer, the when, the where, the who, the how, the why.

It’s okay to rest. It’s faithful to rest sometimes.

And I mean exactly what I say here: it’s okay. It’s not binary — rest is not always better than work. Sometimes it’s time pause a rest and get to work. But our civilization produces many messages that validate work at the expense of rest, and that’s when I think what Jesus says to the disciples is especially good for us to hear.

So far I’ve been talking about rest as it relates to physical and mental action, the sort of activity in which we are likely to engage in various ministries at church, in the administration of a household, at school, or at a workplace other than one’s home.

But there is more to rest, both in our lives, and, I believe, in our Scriptures today. This is spiritual rest — rest for the soul that is weary, wandering, weeping, or wailing.

And essential for rest is a safe place of rest, which is where our second word comes in: home.

By home I mean a spiritual home, a dedicated safe place in which to practice, together, the following of Jesus, the love of God, and love of neighbor as ourselves.

Maybe sometimes it is a physical place, such as church, right here right now. More than a physical place, though, our spiritual home is to be built and nourished within us. In the Gospels, Jesus and the disciples are often shown moving from place to place, without the kind of home-base, if you will, that we today might consider our parish church. Paul, in his letters, and in the Acts of the Apostles, is often on the move, also without a permanent home for long periods of time.

The fact that Jesus, the disciples, and Paul moved around a lot does not mean that in order to be good disciples of Jesus we need to be on the move all the time. Rather, we see in Scripture that a spiritual grounding, as sense of spiritual home, is not necessarily found in any one physical place, but is found in an interior foundation in that which is the ground of all being, the ground and source of all that is, seen and unseen, God.

Paul writes about our belonging to and in God. He tells the Ephesians, and it is appropriate for us to hear Paul saying this to us, as well, that we “are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom [we] also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.”

In Christ Jesus we are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God, and we are members of God’s household. This means that we have within us what we need to be at home. But that takes intentionality on our part. We find our spiritual home within only when we recognize and affirm our membership in the household of God, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone.

This also means that when we reside in our spiritual home, and take a spiritual rest, just as our home is in God, our true rest must also be in God. But God is infinite. We, who are finite, tend to need something a little more concrete to think and feel and do, to actualize a rest in God.

Thomas a Kempis devotes, in The Imitation of Christ, several chapters to spiritual rest in God. I recommend in particular Chapters 9, 21, 23, and 25. I’ll share a little from Chapter 25, which is titled “Where Certain Peace and True Progress Are To Be Found.” Kempis writes:

“Always attend to your own business and watch what you say and do. Direct your every effort to this end, namely, to seek only to please [Jesus] and desire nothing other than [Jesus]. Judge not rashly the words and deeds of others nor meddle in what does not pertain to you. The result will be that you will only rarely or infrequently suffer anxiety… “ Later, he continues:

“Spiritual progress and perfection consist in offering yourself, with your whole heart, to the divine will, and not seeking yourself in anything either small or great, in time or in eternity. Weigh everything in the same balance, and with equal serenity of heart offer thanksgiving to God in times of trial and in periods of prosperity.”

Simple enough - though perhaps easier said than done. If you by any chance are thinking right now that this so-called rest sure seems like a lot of work, yes. Thomas a Kempis is not suggesting a quick fix to our stress and anxiety, and I think he is right about this. What is offered, however, is the kind of rest that can come from the faith that God is faithful to us.

Note that in the Gospel Jesus calls the disciples to rest, but when he and they are followed by many people, Jesus does not cut short the disciples’ rest. Instead, Jesus “saw a great crowd; and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” Maybe the disciples went back to work at this point, but I like to think that perhaps they didn’t, that perhaps they rested exactly as Jesus instructed.

I encourage us to be thoughtful about when it might be time to rest, and to resist the temptation to cut short our rest to leap back into action. I am inspired by a quote I read this week in our book of the month, Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle. Boyle in turn is quoting Pope John XXIII, although he admits it may be apocryphal. Apocryphal or not, I think it’s appropriate here. Supposedly, every night the pope would pray the following: “I’ve done everything I can today for Your church. But it’s Your Church, and I’m going to bed.”

This week I hope we all continue to each day do what we can. And I pray that part of doing what we can is finding times and ways to rest. Here today let us take a little time, pause our coming and going, and take the leisure to eat together the bread of life, so that it may be for us the cornerstone of our spiritual rest in God, who is our home.

She despised him in her heart

Preached on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10B), July 14, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington, by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

2 Samuel 6:1-15, 12b-19
Psalm 24
Ephesians 1:3-14
Mark 6:14-29

 St. John the Baptist in Prison, Visited by Salomé, possibly by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)

As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.

She despised him in her heart.

Girl, preach.

Michal is a bystander, not meriting much more than a brief afterthought in the story of King David’s accession. But there she remains, in the story. If we don’t include Michal, we won’t have all the story we need.

I have often come back to Michal over the years, in my reflections. She is an aging member of the new king’s growing harem of wives, a has-been daughter of the deposed king, a bit player in a colorful royal drama that still shapes our worldview about leadership, government, humanity, and God.

King David is still leaping and dancing before the Lord, even now. King Charles the Third – consciously or not – borrows ideas and imagery from King David’s world-changing reign. And our own presidential contests carry many of the same dramatic themes forward in our own nation, as we all, like Michal, look out of our windows at our political leaders, and at all their friends and foes, with deepening dismay.

Yes, King David and Michal are still very much among us.

What is a king, or queen? What is any human authority figure? Is a human leader divinely ordained, if not actually divine? Maybe they take on, at the very least, a few attributes of the divine, as long as they manage to look the part, to have the requisite charisma, to be able to pull off an elegant, vigorous dance around the Ark of the Covenant. 

But no matter how attractive and alluring our human leaders might be, I wonder if you, like me, are drawn more powerfully to Michal the bystander, Michal the skeptic, Michal the disillusioned observer. She sees through David, and the intrigue of his court. She can predict the trouble that’s coming. She is nobody’s fool.

David claims to be God’s anointed one, God’s favorite, God’s choice; and in his dance around the Ark, David claims God’s power as his own. His dance is a political move, a bold claim, a striking and daring assertion. The Ark of the Covenant is a particular, tangible location of God’s cosmic presence and power. As such, the Ark is a lethally dangerous object, not a toy or a trifle. It represents for God’s people the ineffable, ultimate, beyond-the-universe power of the Holy One. Therefore, if you place the Ark in the center of your new royal palace, you are claiming to be God’s chosen one to reign over all the people of the land: the strongest warrior, the indestructible sovereign, the God-ordained human who reigns at the center of your world.

That’s a shocking thing to say about yourself, even if the personal world you claim to control is as small as your own little household, or your own little parish, or workplace, or neighborhood. And we can hear echoes of this shocking claim of ultimate power whenever our own political leaders say things like, “Only I can do this. I alone am the one who can do this.”

Naturally, given his many triumphs and successes, everyone assumes that David must be God’s favorite, God’s chosen. But David’s people are forgetting something important in this thrilling moment of his accession to the throne. The people are forgetting that God did not want the Israelites to have a human king. God reminded Samuel that God is their sovereign, and furthermore that human rulers do nothing but deprive the people of their crops and livestock and money, and even their spouses and children. 

Human rulers impoverish the people and damage the land. God is faithful.

Human rulers level forests. God nourishes and waters the land.

Human rulers degrade their subjects. God lifts up God’s people.

And so, though David seems invincible now, though David seems to be God’s chosen one, though David seems to be the answer, the only choice, the One, this is an illusion. The people, in elevating a human king, will come to grief.

Michal the bystander, perhaps knowing all of this (or at the very least, reminding us readers of all of this) – Michal despises David as he dances around God’s ark. She sees David for who he is: a fallible human being who claims ultimate power as his own.

And then, much, much later in the story of God’s people, there are a few more bystanders who attract our attention. These are the disciples of John the Baptist, looking on helplessly as their leader is executed by another foolish king as part of an evening’s entertainment. Don’t overlook the bystanders in this story of corrupt human authority: after John is beheaded, they quietly come to fetch his body for burial. This is a bold move. Coming forward is risky. It lets Herod’s stooges know that you’re an ally of the executed criminal. You could lose your head, too.

But these disciples share something with Michal, who looks knowingly out her window at the hubris of a new king. The bystanders in both stories have much to teach us.

How often do we find ourselves looking out windows, with growing dismay, as terrible events unfold? We want a ceasefire in Gaza; we want the Russian army to retreat; we want one political candidate or another to do this, or stop doing that; to step up, or step aside. We want massive corporations to stop devastating the face of the earth when we’re already worrying that our planet will become uninhabitable in our children’s lifetimes. We long for an end to factory farming, an end to white supremacist public policy, an end to misogyny and transphobia and — God save us! — an end to the slaughtering of children in wars abroad and shootings close to home. 

And of course the shootings don’t just endanger children. They endanger our own King Davids, and King David aspirants, as we saw just yesterday; and they endanger all whose job it is to protect them. When we look out our window, we have many disturbing scenes to contemplate.

We look out our window and despise in our hearts the forces of madness and violence. We look out our window as goodness seems to lose its head under the guillotine of human wickedness and human folly.

And so today we once again proclaim the Good News of resurrection — we truly do proclaim this Good News! — but we proclaim the Good News from Michal’s window. We proclaim the Good News from the shadows of Herod’s court, where John’s followers are lurking in fear, but also summoning courage.

We keep these bystanders in the story, as we catalog the long saga of human folly. The ancient Israelite scribes remembered Michal; the ancient Christian evangelists remembered John’s disciples. They handed these memories down to us. These savvy, brave, nonviolent bystanders have much to teach us.

First, they teach us to pay attention. Michal watches David with keen intelligence, foreshadowing the prophet Nathan, who later confronts the king in his wrongdoing, and sparks authentic remorse in David, who is rightly mortified by his own murderous misbehavior. Michal is the conscience of her people, tapped into the very wisdom of God, silently watching, skillfully observing. Pay attention, Michal teaches us.

Second, the bystanders teach us to remain faithful. John’s followers risk their own necks — quite literally. Their claim of his body is a courageous, prophetic act: they are defiant in the face of casual evil. No, they couldn’t save John from his fate, but their witness inspired generations of the faithful, and teaches us even today — living through our own time of madness and cruelty — to summon courage, to keep the faith, to work together for all that we know is good and right and true.

Additional biblical bystanders — the disciples of Jesus — attend to his remains when he suffers his own state-sponsored execution. They come to his tomb bearing spices: these are the myrrh-bearing women, the original Spice Girls. They are — like Michal, like John’s disciples — exasperated bystanders in a world gone mad. But they watch, pay attention, and remain faithful.

And finally they witness resurrection. 

We are God’s people; we are the Body of Christ; as such, we are, often enough, exasperated bystanders. We are, often enough, despising in our hearts so much human wrongdoing. But when we stay, and stay together, and pay attention, and remain faithful, and encourage one another, we then witness resurrection. We see God’s power rising up and defeating the terrible worldly powers of Sin and Death.

So come forward, I invite you, to this Table, this Table laden with nourishment for God’s faithful bystanders. Come with your prayers of lament; come with your rage prayers; come with your fears about all that seems to be falling apart around us. Come and take sustenance, take heart, take courage: we bystanders are here together. And together, led by the Risen One, we will overcome.

Preached on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, July 7, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.

Shake off the dust, by Mark A Hewitt

We hear in today’s Gospel a wonderful celebration of the new. Jesus sends out the disciples to new ministry — to new places, to meet new people, to call to repentance, to cast out demons, and to heal. This is Good News.

We hear this Good News in the midst of the new ourselves. I am a new priest, a new curate. I am new to you, and you are new to me. We gather in the midst of new construction. Blowing through this place is a blessed wind of renewal, and I cannot help but be inspired about the time we share, growing together in discipleship. How might we, with God’s help, join in the ministries of calling to repentance, casting out demons, and healing?

But there will surely come a day, my friends, when I am no longer new to you, and you are not new to me, and the shininess of the new construction may seem to subtly fade, if only through growing familiarity. This is not a bad thing. Familiarity can go hand in hand with trust, with steady knowledge of ourselves and each other, with a mature faith that is lived out over lifetimes.

In a way, for all that is new here, today, we are also held up by what is known, and known well. I am new priest, but priesthood is not new. As a congregation, you are new to me, but the practice of Christians to gather in congregations is not new. Even this building, although young compared to Christianity, and presently being renewed, carries on a long tradition of being the sort of place to which people can bring their most deeply felt hopes, and fears, and dreams.

But this place is also dangerous. The new can bring the unexpected. That might sometimes feel dangerous. But I think the greatest danger is not from the new, the unknown, the unexpected. No, I think the greatest danger, even in a place full of blessing such as this, is the known. As soon as we think we know everything we need to know about ourselves and each other, we are in danger. I interpret the first part of today’s Gospel to be about this, the danger of the known.

I invite you to join me in imagining that this place is Jesus’ hometown. Lower Queen Anne is Jesus’ home neighborhood, and St. Paul’s is his home church. As a community, we’ve known Jesus all his life. His mother, Mary, is here. His siblings are here. We are all familiar with his carpentry. We all know Jesus. A regular person, one of us. Just like one of us.

Notice how the things the people in Jesus’ hometown say about him are positive. They say, “What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands!” They don’t say, why does this person claim to be wise, or claim to be capable of deeds of power. No, they acclaim and affirm him. They see his wisdom, and they admit his power. Good. Would we not also, given the chance affirm the wisdom and power of Jesus, our hometown hero?

Yet I invite us to consider the possibility that we might not be as affirming as we would like to think. I do not say this lightly. Oh, how I wish that we could remain safely in the good, and the known. But we cannot. The reason is found in the wound in this Gospel, a wound so close to home as to pierce the heart of all who hear it.

The wound is this. The people in Jesus’ hometown took offense at him precisely because they thought they knew him, and knew him well, as a known good. And the fact that he was a known good is what made him safe. It appears that the people who knew him would have rathered he remain as he had been, than to change, even if him changing brought to that town wisdom and power and healing. The people in Jesus’ hometown chose the lesser known thing over the greater unknown and unexpected thing. What they seem to have wanted is for everyone to have and know their place. Jesus is known as a carpenter, and is not meant to be known as a prophet, much less the Son of God.

Here at St. Paul’s I invite us to reflect on how much we have decided we know about each other. I would hope that we all see each other as blessings, as good companions in the Way. But are we willing to affirm each other as we change? What if, one day the Holy Spirit suddenly enabled someone among us to perform miraculous healing in our presence, in a way that is inconvertible and not to be explained away? Would we respond the way people did to the disciples who visited them, or would we respond the way the people in Jesus’ hometown did to him?

Of course I would like to think that we would respond as people did to the disciples. I hope that we would heed the call to repentance, accept the casting out of our demons, and, in our faith, be anointed with oil and cured of whatever ails us.

I believe that the key to us responding the way we wish we would, is in that first part of the ministry of the disciples: the call to repentance. Now, I am aware that in the Episcopal Church in the early 21st century, paying much attention to repentance outside of Lent and Advent may not be popular. But to that I must refer to this Gospel, and the wound at the heart of it, and declare that I think to heal this wound, we must act decisively, boldly, bravely.

It is no coincidence that healing and repentance are bound up together in this Gospel, and that repentance is the necessary groundwork before the healing. It is significant in the description of Jesus in his hometown that repentance is not mentioned.

Repentance for misdeeds — we are familiar with that. But to address the wound in this Gospel, a more subtle repentance is needed. This is repentance for the folly for thinking we already know everything we need to know about ourselves and each other.

The people in Jesus’ hometown thought they knew everything about him, and their pride in their own knowledge closed their hearts to the healing Jesus offered. I also suggest some of those people probably thought they knew everything about themselves. Prideful self-knowledge can take two forms here: we can think we know ourselves well enough to know that we do not need healing. Turns out, that’s false.

The other form is more insidious, the prideful supposed self-knowledge that we are not worthy of healing. How often we poor human beings convince ourselves, perhaps unconsciously, that we are not worthy of God’s healing love!

If this were Jesus’ hometown, and he showed up today offering wisdom and healing, can we honestly say that we may not secretly fear that he is here to heal other people, known good people around us, but that we ourselves are surely too far gone to heal? It is my belief that this secret fear is at the center of the wound in this Gospel, and is very likely here, today. Because while we are in the midst of the new, we are also in the midst of the known. We have the privilege of living at once in both parts of today’s Gospel.

So, repentance. We are called to repent of our prideful belief that we know everything we need to know, and to instead prepare ourselves to be surprised by the Holy Spirit at work among us. We are called to repent of the prideful belief that we don’t need any healing. We are called to repent of the prideful belief that we aren’t worthy of healing.

The Good News is that we have repentance, and renewal, available to us. First, in Baptism. Baptism is about many things, including preparing us to be changed by the Holy Spirit. Baptism in the Episcopal Church is well expressed when it is a communal rite, so that the whole community can affirm their readiness to witness the newly baptized person changing over the course of their discipleship.

We also have the Eucharist. The Eucharist is, like Baptism, about many things, but in this case I am interested in the way in which we come together in communion at once as we are and as we may be in the future. We gather as ourselves, with all our beauty and all our brokenness. We gather in hope, and in fear. But we gather to be transformed, to be remade. We gather to offer ourselves in thanks and praise, so that God who loves us can make of us the new Creation, in, with, and through Christ.

Baptism and Eucharist together ask of us something extraordinary. We are to travel this Way of Christian discipleship together, getting to know each other, hopefully recognizing in each other and in ourselves the known, the good. But at the same time we are to hold such knowledge lightly, in humility, readying ourselves to discover that along the way God has been remaking us into something more wondrous than we could imagine.

And if this Gospel teaches us anything about how God works through the new, is that it is likely to be in unexpected ways, ways that may challenge how we thought we knew ourselves and each other.

For everything new in the world is part of God’s Creation.

And all our knowledge has its source in God, and has its end in God.

I am excited about our ministry, and our discipleship together. I hope you are too. I pray that we, in humility, remember that the source of our excitement is properly in God. I pray that we remember that each and every one of us is beloved, could use some healing, and is worthy of being healed. And lastly, I pray that we be ready to welcome the renewed versions of ourselves and each other, however the Holy Spirit sees fit to reveal these wondrous things to us. I believe that if we faithfully answer the call to repentance and accept God’s healing love, we will be amazed at the deeds of power that Jesus is doing here in his hometown.

On your left

Preached on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (transferred), June 30, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

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

My mother Nancy, throughout her life of nearly fifty-nine years, probably did not run or jog more than a very few miles, and all of them in her very first years of life. She contracted polio as a child, and suffered serious post-polio syndrome. Just before her death, she reflected on the topic in her last conversation with one of her grandchildren.

“What do you think I will do first when I get to Heaven?” she asked her then-four-year-old grandson, John. He replied, “I don't know, Nana, what do you want to do?” “I want to run,” she said. “My mother told me that when I was a little girl I ran everywhere, ran down the stairs, down the block, to school, to the neighbors, everywhere. And then when I was eleven I got sick and couldn't run anymore. I miss that, and that's the first thing l'm going to do because I know that in heaven my body will be fixed and I will be able to run as far and as fast as I want to.”

In heaven my body will be fixed.

Let’s unpack this a little. Heaven, the first Christians teach us, is not just an afterlife paradise. Heaven is this earth, our world, restored to God’s dominion of justice and peace, with the whole communion of saints, living and dead, gathered here in one gleaming, tree-filled city. The leaves of the trees offer healing balm to all the war-torn nations. But even if heaven descends to earth in this way, and even if heaven descends to these earthly bodies of ours, some of them resurrected from death – even then, we humans may still imagine that in this earthly heaven, all bodies will be fixed.

Many of us long to be freed from disabilities. Some days after my mother’s conversation with my nephew, the funeral home asked my father if he wanted her to wear her glasses in the coffin, at the viewing. He shook his head, exhausted by decades of my mother’s health problems and final cancer struggle. “No,” he said. “No more disabilities.”

“In heaven my body will be fixed.” “No more disabilities.”

This is all understandable, and poignant, and close to the quick for my family. I have never, ever known a world without someone I love – someone I need – experiencing a physical disability. I remember my mother’s body casts, and I was intrigued as a child by the steel rods they installed in her lower back. I learned quickly how to monitor her fluctuating mood, and sensed the obvious truth that chronic pain was one of its key drivers. After she died, my dad went on long, long walks in the suburban wilderness east of the Minneapolis airport: his wife could never have joined him for those walks, so maybe, after she was gone, maybe he felt a little less sheepish about taking them.

Less critically, my father and mother both had myopia, and gave it to all their children. They’ve passed on other more serious problems to some of us, like psoriatic arthritis. I dearly love people who are hard of hearing. I have friends and colleagues who no longer can walk, or they walk stiffly and haltingly. Isn’t it understandable to dream of a heavenly fix for all these human conditions?

But we humans, for all our dreams of fixed bodies and perfect freedom to run, would do well to re-examine the teachings of Saint Paul. Paul doesn’t encourage an idyllic dream of so-called “fixed” bodies. Perhaps Paul understands that one can’t fix what’s not broken. In his second letter to Timothy, he urges us to “proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching … As for me … the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord … will give me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing.”

Paul does not promise comprehensive ability to God’s people, everyone uniformly perfect and flawless. (Neither Paul nor Peter, both deeply flawed apostles to the end, would try to sell perfectionist ideas to us. They would recognize perfectionism and ableism as the idols they surely are, and they both learned much from their complicated and unique identities.) They simply tell us what we must do, whatever our ability, and in all our splendid and endless diversity: we should proclaim the message, no matter what; we should convince, rebuke, and encourage; we should practice patience, fight the good fight, finish the race, keep the faith.

And even though my mother (understandably!) dreamt of a “fixed” body, Paul’s message fell easily on her ears, and on my father’s: they were both patient faith leaders. They exemplified hard work and dogged endurance, whether the time was favorable or unfavorable. They likely understood that Paul didn’t talk about able bodies, or spectacular gifts or strengths, in his description of our life of faith. He doesn’t say that we win the race. He says only that we finish.

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” 

We don’t have to win the race. We just have to finish it.

Of course I love this metaphor – finishing the race. I’ve finished several long-distance-running races over the past ten years, and a few in high school when I was the slowest runner on the cross-country team. Last weekend I ran a half marathon in southeast Seattle, which many of you know since of course I posted a fitness brag on social media. 

In that race, I placed 691st out of 1178. I ranked 38th among runners between the ages of fifty and fifty-nine, assigned male at birth. (37 guys in my demographic beat me.) I averaged ten minutes, nine seconds a mile. (The winner, some kid in his twenties, ran a five-minute, forty-five-second mile.) But: I finished. I was not distinguished and the prize winners were headed home by the time I finished, but – I finished.

But there were more than 1178 runners that day. An additional 28 runners were marked as “DNF” – did not finish. “DNF”: how rude! I tell you this Good News, today: the “DNF” runners also finished. “The race” – even a literal race on a literal course – “the race” is not only run by superheroes like Captain America, who famously jogs an easy half marathon in under a half hour, calling out repeatedly to the slower runners, “On your left.”

“The race” is many things, and everybody of any ability is running one race or another. It is not just all of us slow runners plodding down the trail while Captain America is irritatingly calling out “On your left!” over our shoulders. Showing up at all is a race well worth finishing. Cheering on other runners is definitely a race well worth finishing. Accepting one’s own limitations, and recognizing it’s time to pass the baton to the next runner — that’s a race worth finishing, too. Standing up as a queer person or queer ally in proud solidarity with all LGBTQIA+ people: that’s a race many of us are running, particularly this weekend. And whenever we stand up for what’s right but not popular, we are running a just and righteous race.

And sometimes the race is about justice, but it’s also deeply personal. Back at that literal half-marathon race last week, one athlete pushed himself along the course on his wheelchair, his upper-body strength orders of magnitude stronger than my own. In a competitive and ableist world, his witness is profoundly inspiring. Another race finisher was in a recumbent wheelchair, pushed over the course by a companion. Signs on the wheelchair promoted “Payton’s Project,” an organization that advocates for mental health and wellness, in memory of Payton Rose Freeze, a bullying victim who suffered fatal symptoms of Persistent Post-Concussion Syndrome.

In this particular example, there are a few races being finished: there’s the finisher in the chair, perhaps suffering from PPCS; then there’s the finisher pushing the chair, an ally up at dawn to guide a friend across the finish line in an effort that could help save lives. And then there’s me, an aging amateur athlete noticing all this and, I hope, finishing the race of letting these advocates and their witness go to work on me.

Every person at that race last week is running lots of races. Everybody here today is running races. And, always with God’s help, everyone is a finisher.

And finally, one race that we at St. Paul’s are running is the vigorous race of our mission in this lovely, challenging corner of God’s heaven. But in this race, we get to take turns. We pace each other. We help each other. I run a mile, then you run a mile; then it’s your neighbor’s turn, then mine again; and on along the course we go.

And this is the great insight we learn today from our patron Paul, and Peter, his fellow apostle: we will all finish this race, but this race is a relay. Paul wrote his second letter to Timothy shortly before his death, when he handed off the baton. And though it sounds like he’s a solo finisher of a race – the personal pronoun “I” comes up a lot – his letter assumes a communal faith, a team effort, a body of bodies, bodies not necessarily “fixed,” everyone working together toward a shared finish line.

And so I encourage you, I implore you, to take heart, to take courage. Your body may not need to be fixed. Your body, your mind, your spirit: no matter your struggles, no matter what, you are already running the race. You are finishing the race with all of us here. And only when we run the race together, pacing each other, spotting each other, supporting each other — only then can we shout to the dreadful and destructive powers of this world this cry of victory:

On your left.

It's about Love.

Preached on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7B), June 23, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Jay Rozendaal.

1 Samuel 17:57-18:5, 10-16
Psalm 133
2 Corinthians 6:1-13
Mark 4:35-41

Over the years, some of you have undoubtedly heard me talk about my biggest challenge in preaching - actually both challenge and gift. 

At my field placement in seminary, any Sunday I was assigned to preach, I had to send the Rector a single sentence summarizing what I would say in my homily. He would listen to my sermon, expecting that everything I said would be directed to making that point. 

It was a gift, because it really did help me to keep my thoughts focused and clear and not rambling or self-indulgent.

The problem for me became that once I’ve condensed the message to a single sentence…why do I need to keep talking for ten minutes?!

But then, on a rare occasion, I come to a day like today, when I just want to say everything.

For two reasons -

First, the readings are wonderful and there are so many interesting details to explore.

Second, because - as Father Stephen noted in this week’s newsletter, “Many of our older adults [I think I have to include myself in that group now…] have recently been doing serious discernment, reflecting on their shifting callings…”

Indeed, I have been doing that for some time now… And without much emotional or spiritual fanfare, it finally came to me this spring that it is time for me to step away from my role as Priest Associate in this community. 

A few words about that before I get back to… we’ll see whether it’s “the point” or “saying everything.”

As many of you know, I have divided my time between Seattle and Bellingham for many years - and while my husband and I also had an apartment here for a number of years before the pandemic, we don’t now and our real HOME is in Bellingham. 

But for a long time St. Paul’s in Bellingham was a place I didn’t really feel comfortable - for reasons I don’t need to get into - but I’m happy to say that has shifted in the last couple years.

And the pandemic also contributed to my simply wanting to spend more of my time closer to home - and I am doing that. 

I was so grateful to be involved here during the pandemic and through the transition between rectors… and now here we are, here you are - capably and energetically led by Father Stephen… and it’s time for me to see how God may be calling me to be of service in the place where I actually live, and where I now happily spend most of my time. 

So I need to make space for that - it’s hard for God to call me to something when there’s no time or place for it to bear fruit.

Clarity in discernment sometimes comes like a flash of light knocking us off our horse in mid-journey - like it did for St. Paul.

This discernment, however, came to me (like I think it does for most people, most of the time) slowly, over a few years, and as I said, without fanfare.

I think of the work of discernment as the task of faithful decision-making. Today’s gospel is an apt reflection on that work. The story begins with Jesus’ invitation to “go across to the other side” - and they set out on a journey. As in today’s gospel, the journey is sometimes a stormy one.

There are some bits in this story that strike me as curious…

Why do they set out “when evening had come”? Why would they want to be sailing in the dark? 

And then when the storm overwhelms them the disciples wake up Jesus just to say “don’t you care?” They don’t actually ask him to do anything… they seem only to want him to be as panicked as they are! (And maybe help bailing out the water that’s filling the boat.)

And also, they don’t ask for a miracle - but they get one anyway.

Discernment, faithful decision making, can often feel like traveling in the dark, when you can’t see clearly either where you are or where you’re going. It can feel lonely - like you’re doing all the work, trying to keep the boat on course, trying to bail out water and keep the boat upright… while a key member of your support system is asleep in the back. You’re exploring all the questions… and God is keeping quiet, seemingly asleep, biding Her time.

It’s also interesting to me that after Jesus quiets the storm, he asks them “have you still no faith?” Almost as if they should have known to expect a miracle, or even ask for one. “Why are you in a panic, instead of just trusting in God?”

I’m sure if he had asked that question directly the answer would have had something to do with the cumulative expertise of the fishermen in the boat, and their knowledge of how wrong things can go under those circumstances. And that they’d never previously seen such a situation have a miraculous ending!

As an allegory of discernment the story certainly suggests that dark & stormy crossings aren’t particularly unusual, and that it’s not particularly unusual, somewhere along the way,  to feel like our spiritual boat is sinking…

So while we may not expect miracles, the message here is clearly that we also don’t need to panic. The Teacher - leader, companion, friend, Son of God - in the back of the boat is not oblivious to what’s going on. 

Really, in this moment, Jesus is the model of faith to us. He trusts that his competent companions, with God’s help, actually have the situation well in hand. He knows they will arrive safely on the other side.

So too in our various journeys in and through life - stormy or not - we can (in the words of today’s collect) rely “upon the sure foundation of [God’s] loving-kindness.”

Which brings me to the last things I really want to say today (short of “saying everything.”)

Also in this week’s newsletter - Father Stephen invited us to discern “what is the gospel, the Good News, according to You?”.

Having arrived at “the sure foundation of God’s loving-kindness”…

“The gospel according to Jay” is about Love.

Any of you who have been around here a little while, at some time will have seen me up here, or at the altar, or sitting out there in a pew, with tears in my eyes.

If you wondered why…

It’s about Love. 

I find the miracle of God’s unfathomable, at times inexplicable, Love for us truly overwhelming at times. 

And when I see and hear that reflected in words and music, in scripture and sacrament, in the beauty that surrounds us, in the relationships nurtured here, in this Body of Christ…

I am filled with awe, that simply spills out of my eyes and runs down my cheeks.

“God is Love” scripture tells us; and “love is the fulfilling of the law;” and “we love because God loved us first…”  Love of God and neighbor is the “first and greatest commandment…”

And week after week, the Eucharistic Prayer reminds us, “in your infinite love you made us”….

I believe that Love is the essence of God’s image and likeness in which we are made. That it is the divine nature shared with us - with all of humanity - in creation, and renewed in us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And finally today, it is why I trust my relationship with this community is not over. This journey will continue - changed, not ended.

It is the sure foundation of God’s boundless, astonishing, loving-kindness that makes it certain that it will endure.

We know not how

Preached on the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6B), June 16, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
Psalm 20
2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17
Mark 4:26-34

World’s Smallest Seed, by Jim Janknegt

I am getting older.

This, of course, is literally true of everyone and everything. The youngest dog in my home is nineteen months old — a powerfully fabulous age for a dog, with most of the growing pains and training restraints of puppyhood receding into the past, and many years of frolicking and bugging the older dogs lying blissfully ahead in the future. Yet this energetic yearling is, like you and I, getting older. Even now I can all too easily imagine his gradual senescence, his frailty in the teen years, his grievous death.

From a dog’s perspective, I have not reached my teen years, but I think it’s fair to say I’m almost a canine tween. So I scheduled a routine exam this past week with my new primary doctor, and we went over everything. At one point he casually mentioned that we should review a couple of topics because, he said, “You’re over fifty and you have some issues.”

That’s fair. I am over fifty and I have some issues. I am getting older.

Now, physically I am just fine, and it occurred to me that my companions at St. Paul’s might like to hear this, so that you can relax and know that your rector is fit for duty. I have hypertension but it is controlled well by medication and the good midwestern practice of counting how many times I turn the salt grinder over my green vegetables. (I try to keep it to two turns. Or three.) I do enjoy cake and cookies but I am a teetotaler and I exercise often, arguably too often. My LDLs are not in the green zone but my HDL/LDL ratio is good. My heart has a slight electrical issue but that does not cause any problems, and like both my parents I am unlikely to die of heart disease. Overall, my stern and sensible farmer ancestors would be satisfied that I am a hard worker who takes reasonably good care of himself.

But things sneak up on me, as I get older. I fell on a dog walk last year and the imaging of my hand revealed “scattered bone spurs.” “That means you’re getting older,” a friend said, bracingly. I would not have known about those spurs if I hadn’t had the ER scan my hand, but I do notice other symptoms of aging. For instance, it took a surprisingly long time for the hand to heal. (I still can’t bend it back with ease!)

I can still do most physical movements, but I am gradually getting a little more tentative. Standing from a kneeling position at the confession – which I do so that I can proclaim God’s forgiveness – is still something that comes fairly easily, but I am always aware that I am doing it. It isn’t an unconscious behavior anymore. I do not remember when that shifted.

And so it goes. We age.  It happens moment by moment, year by year. We begin to lose one ability privilege or another, learning that every last one of us will eventually lose them all. (This is rightfully humbling.) We discover that a joint is more stiff, or a menu is harder to read, or – and this is the most wondrous part of aging for me to describe – we may notice that we have developed an ability to ride emotional waves with something akin to wisdom. I have gratefully experienced this. When I am enduring a low emotional point in the day – usually around 3:00pm – I do not chant “This too shall pass,” but somehow my body knows, down deep, that, well, this too shall pass.

My great hope is to arrive later in life not with any particular mobility or sensory privilege, but with serenity, with healthy acceptance of all that is, with reverent gratitude for all that has departed, and with quiet contentment about what lies ahead. I might not make it that far: some don’t, because illness, injustice, violence, or accidents get in the way. If that is my future, then that will be sad for me, but I trust I will have companions who care for me, even if that’s just by reading a book while I sleep in my hospital bed. 

Now, when Jesus took up the image of the seed in so many of his parables, he was a young man in his late twenties or early thirties, and likely did not have human aging in mind. Most of his first followers were martyred long before they would have reached old age, and life expectancy in the ancient world was far lower. But I hope you can bear with me. The seed parables can teach us something about our own lives, and all their long seasons. And our own lives can teach us something about the faith, and about Jesus.

Recall today’s parables: The seed is sown and it grows in the earth, the sower knows not how. Then the tiny mustard seed explodes into an invasive shrub that shelters a whole host of living creatures. Jesus seems to love the image of the seed! And he follows the seed through its life cycle: it begins as a seed breaking open deep in the soil, then it is a sprout, then a vine, then a sheltering plant, bearing fruit.

When we explore these parables about seeds, we can gain some insights about our life in the dominion of God. In our hearing, the parables about seeds can be an affirmation by Jesus that all seasons of life are holy, all decades of life yield a harvest, and much of what we need – indeed, much of who we are – develops and grows beyond our awareness, we know not how.

Much of who we are develops and grows beyond our awareness, we know not how. And this means we will probably be surprised to discover changes along the way.

As I’ve said, I occasionally blink with surprise in my mid-fifties to discover that I am noticeably older, which of course can be a startling disappointment. But it also can offer certain treasures: I am better able these days to integrate and regulate my passing feelings (at least on a good day); I have a bit more skill at recognizing my own wrongdoing and making amends; I’ve finally learned how to handle my money more responsibly; and best of all, I’m slowly discovering that health and ability are not the same thing, and that health and healing are not the same thing.

Meanwhile, I watch and listen to other people – I watch and listen to you – all along the cycle of human life, from our three-year-old theologian at St. Paul’s who teaches us how to notice and engage the living water in our baptismal font, all the way to someone not far from ninety whose powers of observation and insight are a formidable and wondrous blessing upon this community. 

I learn from a tween among us who studied his lines for today’s performance of Mark’s Gospel, and brings creative enthusiasm to every rehearsal; I learn from young parents here who astonish me with their ability to lead immensely complicated family lives; I learn from parishioners in midlife – on both sides of my age – who bravely navigate the treacherous waters of the corporate world, grapple with traumatic changes and disappointments in the academic world, discern their progress toward retirement, and search for deeper meaning in all things.

In all of these human lives, the humans grow and change, they rise and fall, they work and weep and rejoice and rest – I know not how.

I know not how. Oh, how often – so often – I have preached to you that God is the Humble One! I come back to that theme so frequently. But it works; it preaches; it helps. God the Humble One works in, with, and under creation, we know not how. God works along the bones of my injured hand and along your creaking knees; God works at the bedside of our ailing elder; God works on the overstuffed kitchen calendar of a busy family; God works in the quick mind and open heart of a young actor proclaiming the Good News according to Mark. God works in the tedious morning staff meeting at your office.

God works in, with, and under whatever struggles we face today.

And God works perhaps most especially in the desperate and terrible places of the world. God guides the skillful hands of Doctors Without Borders; God strengthens weary diplomats who labor in agony to negotiate a ceasefire; God sustains the hearts and stills the anxieties of frantic refugees, and God stirs our consciences to come to their aid. God does all of these things, we know not how. We often can’t see – and sometimes, we should confess, we occasionally refuse to see – how God does much of anything in this desperate and roiling world. But God the Humble One is here, at work, closer than our own thoughts and feelings.

And we, you and I, we have many tasks, as we discern God’s humble presence and power thrumming quietly throughout this good yet aging world. Jesus puts it this way: When the grain is ripe, at once we go in with our sickle, because the harvest has come.

There is always much to do, but be confident: we are fit to serve, whatever our age or ability, whoever we are, whoever we were. And always, around God’s Table of Thanksgiving, we have each other. So we do not lose heart. Our patron Paul sings this Good News to us: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

Bad guys don't get what they need

Preached on the Third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 5B), June 9, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

1 Samuel 8:4-11, 16-20
Psalm 138
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35

Lately I’ve taken a deeper interest in bad guys. But then, they’ve always captured my imagination. After all, as many of you well know, I spend a lot of time on the theological topic of remorse, the idea that our life of faith is about all of us getting better. (Maybe it’s my background as a psychotherapist, or my background as a Lutheran: those identities will always be alive in me.) 

For whatever reason, I’m intrigued and inspired by the notion that in our life of faith, we’re supposed to learn things, improve our behaviors, turn from our bad attitudes, repent from our selfish impulses, grow in maturity, stop hurting our neighbors … in short, we’re supposed to get better. And if that means we need to talk about scary or repellent topics – topics like sin – well, it’ll be worth it. Look at the devastation around the world: our faith offers humanity a robust solution in the form of human redemption and restoration.

But I hasten to say that I’m not talking about shame. I’m talking about sin and remorse, about forgiveness and reconciliation. We discard shame as the abusive and damaging emotional hell that it is, and we simply get in touch with our common human need to get better, to improve, and – always with God’s help, always with God’s power – to reveal God’s own image and likeness that shines from our essential identity as ethical human beings.

All of that fascinates me. 

And so, in turn, bad guys fascinate me – villains, adversaries, rogues, crooks, killers, the worst people, and how the worst of humanity can lurk within all of us. And that’s why, when a group of us began rehearsing to perform the entire Gospel according to Mark, I insisted that I be cast in all the bad-guy roles. I speak none of the lines of Jesus, but instead enter the performance as the Pharisees, as Herod, as Pilate, as Judas.

I even take up the parts of the family of Jesus and Simon Peter in the moments when they oppose or try to restrain Jesus. When his family worries that Jesus is out of his mind, they briefly become bad guys: they become opponents of the Holy One. When Peter reprimands Jesus for predicting his passion and crucifixion, Peter briefly becomes a bad guy (and he foreshadows his betrayal of Jesus later on). Peter becomes an unwise voice of caution that would tempt Jesus to abandon his cosmic and cruciform mission of grace and redemptive justice.

And here’s something I learned when I took up the parts of all the Gospel bad guys: I began to understand them, to empathize, to see the world from their perspective. And when we understand someone who does terrible things, we can become more effective in reforming them … or at the very least, stopping them from doing more harm.

We hear from two groups of bad guys today: the family of Jesus in their brief episode of bad-guy opposition to Jesus, and the scribes, a class of religious leaders who study the Torah, the prophets, and the writings of Hebrew scripture. The scribes might remind us of the Pharisees: they are religious leaders of their day. They are the keepers of the flame: they interpret to the people what the scriptures mean, and what God wants from God’s people.

Mark sandwiches the challenging scribes between two encounters of Jesus and his family. We see this kind of thing often in the Gospels. If the evangelist wants to get something across to us, they structure their storytelling to fuse two story lines, making vital comparisons, or emphasizing sharp contrasts. In this section, Jesus is under fire: both his family and the scribes are resisting him.

And I happily get to play these provocative parts next Sunday afternoon in our Mark performance. I get to say, “He has gone out of his mind!” and “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons!” I relish these parts, because I have come to understand why they feel these fierce feelings. 

From his family’s perspective, Jesus is indeed out of his mind. He is disappointing and disturbing them, behaving in ways that could bring shame upon the whole family and cause dangerous resistance against them as well as himself. And the scribes truly want to do and say the right things. They are guardians of the tradition, and their objections are heartfelt. They are not just cynics or nihilists. They want things you and I want: they want the world, and God, and the faith tradition, to all make sense.

And they might also want personal safety and contentment.

Bad guys misbehave, sometimes violently, but their motivations are often understandable. Now, again, this does not excuse bad behavior! Remember: I am preoccupied by remorse and relationship repair – I want justice. But if we try conscientiously to look at the world through the eyes of the bad guys, we can begin to understand them, and that helps us work effectively with them, and with our own internal bad-guy impulses.

All of this reminds me of a classic bad guy in popular U.S. culture, and how the person who portrayed her wanted everyone to understand her better. The actor Margaret Hamilton played the memorable part of the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. As a child, I trembled with fear – and looked away from the screen – whenever the Wicked Witch appeared. Every time I watched the film, Hamilton’s performance was disturbing.

Finally, in 1975, Margaret Hamilton appeared on the children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. She (and Fred Rogers) wanted to reassure children like me that we need not fear the Wicked Witch of the West. Margaret Hamilton visited Mr. Rogers and told him that she was delighted to play the wicked witch because as a girl she had always chosen the witch as her Halloween costume. They talked about how children love to play scary parts – children love to explore the experience and identity of bad guys. 

And then, remarkably, Mr. Rogers said, “Girls and boys like to play witches, don’t they?” “Yes they do,” replied Margaret Hamilton, “yes, they certainly do!” (This was 1975!)

Then Margaret Hamilton offered her reflections about the witch, and how the witch’s motivations made sense. “Sometimes the children feel that she’s a very mean witch,” Hamilton said, “and I suppose she does seem that way, but I always think there are two things about her: She does enjoy everything that she does; whether it’s good or bad, she enjoys it; but she also is what we sometimes refer to as frustrated: she’s very unhappy because she never gets what she wants, Mr. Rogers. You know, most of us get something along the line, but as far as we know, that witch just never got what she wanted, and mainly she wanted those ruby slippers, because they had lots of power and she wanted more power.” “Yes,” Mr. Rogers murmured, with evident empathy. Hamilton continued: “...Sometimes we think that she’s just mean and a very bad person, but actually you have to think about her point of view. It wasn’t as happy a time as she wanted it to be because she just never got what she wanted.”

Then these two remarkable people pulled the witch’s costume from a steamer trunk. Margaret Hamilton tried it on, saying with delight, “That’s my skirt!” (She also noticed – well ahead of her time, I think – that the skirt had pockets. “Even witches have to have pockets!” she said. Yes. Even bad guys need pockets.) And once she was fully dressed as the familiar Wicked Witch of the West, she good-naturedly played the part for a few moments, so that children need not be so troubled by the character.

Sometimes each one of us is a so-called “bad guy.” We resist the good, we kick against what’s right, we listen to the weaker, frightened, and hurt voices within us. And often we misbehave simply because we have not gotten what we wanted. The witch wanted power, and that alone is not automatically a bad thing: one can use power for good purposes. If she were not so frustrated, Margaret Hamilton seems to have believed, the better angels of the witch’s nature could have emerged.

I’ll add just one more idea to all of this, to close our reflections on bad guys and the Gospel. Recently I encouraged my goddaughter Jubilee to watch The Good Place, a sitcom about heaven and hell, and how a woman died and went to heaven – to “the Good Place” – only to discover that she was not supposed to be there. Jubilee watched the first couple of episodes with me, and then continued watching it with her mother, Alissa.

Alissa recently told me that Jubilee was troubled about heaven as it appeared on the show. Jubilee had a hard time understanding how it could even be heaven, because, she said, “everyone gets everything they want, but they don’t get what they need.” Once again I marvel at the wisdom of our younger theologians. Heaven, for Jubilee, is the place where everyone gets what they need.

And this is my amendment, offered in humble gratitude, to Margaret Hamilton’s take on an iconic bad guy. The Wicked Witch of the West did bad things because she did not get what she needed.

And what do bad guys need? Well, if they’re the distraught family of Jesus, they need to understand who Jesus is, and why he is calling so many people into a dangerous and controversial mission. If the bad guy is a Judean scribe, he needs to understand why religion at its best is not safe and orderly, but prophetic and disruptive. 

And when you and I are “bad guys,” doing and saying things we really should not do or say, often enough we simply have deep needs, too. Our faith calls us to serious purposes, to a daunting mission, to a way of life that will change and challenge us. We need one another for this way of life; we need Jesus for this life of faith; and we always, always need to look at the world through the eyes of those we least understand.

If we don’t get all of these things that we need, then we may have trouble – and get into trouble – along the way. But God in Jesus knows this about us, and always meets us with mercy.

My prayer for you, and for myself, is that we will receive all that we need.

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.’”