We all fall down

Preached on the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany (Year A), February 8, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 58:1-9a
Psalm 112:1-9
1 Corinthians 2:1-12
Matthew 5:13-20

Light of the World, by art4prayer

A reading from the song lyrics of the Paula Boggs Band. (Paula Boggs is a Seattle-based musician and a member of this congregation.)

When life takes a turn for worse
remember this little verse:
we all fall down.
Let's not make it even worse.
There's more than enough to curse.
We all fall down, don’t you worry.
No matter how high we climb,
life will find a way to kick our behinds.
And so, I am no better than you,
Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jew,
we all fall down. 
Even your boss the jerk, chases skirts,
and thinks he's cool as Captain Kirk —
he will fall down, don't you worry,
cuz just when we think we’ve arrived,
something really crappy breaks our stride.
We all fall down, don't you worry.
Guaranteed! We all fall down.
Believe me! We all fall down.

Here ends the reading.

Sometimes it helps to just admit it, just accept it, just come right out and say it: we are all fallible, we all make mistakes, we’ll never measure up, life kicks our behinds, we all fall down. But I’m eager to remind you that this bracing acceptance of reality is cherished in our tradition. We Episcopalians often like to say that we are Catholic but also Protestant, and that we hold both identities together in creative tension. So let’s allow the best of our Protestant tradition to reassure us: Protestants admit freely that humans are error-prone, and that only by God’s grace are we saved from the dreadful future of our own design. 

So… relax. We all fall down. No need to worry about whether it will happen to someone like your skirt-chasing boss: he will fall down. And no need to worry about all the rest of us falling down. We will. It has occurred; it will occur.

I offer all of this as a preamble to the daunting Good News we hear today, news that tells us first how great and lovely we are, and second how high God’s standards are for us. Jesus begins by calling us “salt of the earth” and “light of the world.” This is high praise! As salt, we season the world around us with our insights, with our trustworthiness, with our strong and refreshing presence in the worlds of home, neighborhood, church, and public square.

Salt-of-the-earth types are found at protests: just look at the hordes of them on the streets of Minneapolis! Salt-of-the-earth types are stocking our pantry shelves and pulling our wagons around Uptown. They’re hosting coffee hour and bringing Communion to our homebound members and teaching Godly Play lessons to our children and digging graves for our friends. Salt-of-the-earth types are practicing courage and ethics in their relationships; they’re raising children with insight and patience; they’re showing up for their co-workers and friends; they’re voting for change and advocating for those in peril.

And then there are the light-of-the-world types, dazzling us with their intellects, brightening our days with their poetry or their paintings, showing us the way through the wilderness as torches of wisdom, pillars of encouraging fire in the night. And maybe the salt and light come together in one person — maybe in you. Are you a salt-and-light person? Jesus seems to think so. (No pressure or anything.)

Salt and light came together recently in another playful yet prophetic way. Christy Drackett, one of our members, texted me yesterday with a meme that was just created by someone in New York. It says this: “In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus calls us to be salt and light. Looking out my window in New York City, I think… both of those things melt ICE!”

Yes. Yes they do. Salt-and-light people melt the powers and principalities that occupy cities, abuse children, execute innocent people, and separate families. I would only correct one thing in that clever meme: Jesus does not “call us” to be salt and light. He says that we already are salt and light. (Again, no pressure or anything!)

And then, piling on, Jesus reminds his followers that his movement is not a relaxation of the Torah commandments. “Whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments,” he says, “and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” Then, after this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus launches into a series of “You have heard that it was said, but I say to you” statements, and in each of them, he turns up the heat on us.

We shouldn’t murder, for that is what we are taught in the Torah. But Jesus turns up the heat: we can’t even be murderously angry at one another. We shouldn’t betray our spouses with adultery, for that is what we are taught in the Torah. But Jesus turns up the heat: even the casual betrayals common in his time, particularly those that demeaned women, were taboo in the Jesus Movement. Jesus is determined to remind us that his movement is serious, and that we — his salt-and-light followers — need to bring our A game.

Which brings me back to Paula’s song I love so much, the song that reminds us not to worry, because we all fall down. Jesus calls us salt and light, and then he turns up the heat on us: being a Christian is serious business. Much is expected of us. But hold up for a second. Let’s look again at people we know who are salt-of-the earth people, or light-of-the-world people.

I do not know one person I would call “salt of the earth,” or “light of the world,” who is not salty or enlightening because they fell down; because they are fallible. 

How can you be a salt-of-the-earth visitor to someone who is sick or dying? Only by empathizing with them by drawing on your own history as someone who gets sick, or by drawing on your own self-awareness that you are mortal, and that one day you also will die.

How can you be a light-of-the-world protester for the rights, freedom, and dignity of others? Only by acknowledging the deep darkness people experience at the hands of our government, and relating it to your own experiences of glum sadness and dim despair. 

How can you be a salt-of-the-earth neighbor, or co-worker, or spouse, or wise elder? Only by empathizing with your neighbor’s errors, your co-worker’s shortcomings, your spouse’s blind spots, or the times without number when you as a well-intentioned but fallible human have messed things up, or let someone down, or just blown it because you were just having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.

“You are the salt of the earth, and you are the light of the world,” Jesus says, and then he gives us our daunting assignments in this community of faith. But he gives us these assignments, not flawless machines who succeed without failure, without error, without the slightest flaw. We are mortal and vulnerable; we are anxious, sometimes short-tempered, and often simply absurd. But that is in our essence as salt-and-light people. It is what makes us good at all of this. 

And God has our back. Remember the Protestant wisdom about grace saving us, not our own works? It’s God’s grace that saves us, God’s grace that sends us, God’s grace that brings all of our efforts to a good end. We heard this once again today in a stirring speech by the prophet Isaiah. (Sidebar! Do you know how many of God’s prophets were fallible, shortsighted people who resisted the call and made a ton of mistakes? All of them.)

Isaiah sings to us great words that rival even that great prophet of our time, Paula Boggs. Isaiah sings to us, the folks who will fall down, and he sings great reassurance to us about God having our back: When we imperfectly do the work of loosening the bonds of injustice, letting the oppressed go free, sharing bread with the hungry, bringing the homeless poor into our house, and covering those without clothes, then, Isaiah sings, our light (remember, we’re light!) — our light will “break forth like the dawn, and our healing shall spring up quickly”...

Your vindicator shall go before you,
[and] the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and [God] will say,
“Here I am!”

Click here to hear the Paula Boggs Band song, “We All Fall Down.”

"My Lord and my God!"

Preached at the Requiem Mass for Robin Allan Jones, February 7, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 121
Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 37-39
John 20:24-29

Do you like getting things right? Perhaps that is a universal trait, something all humans have in common, but I really wonder sometimes if every one of us is truly wired in this way. I always felt good when an exam or term paper came back with a high grade, and I definitely have felt better about my work over the years when someone said, “That’s right, yes, you did that correctly.” But… I tend to flex about things. Maybe you do, too. Did we mostly get it right? If so, maybe that’s good enough for us. “Progress, not perfection,” goes the bumper sticker. 

But that’s not Robin’s way. Robin gets things right.

Robin comes early on Sundays to practice. You’ll find him swinging the thurible, up and down the main aisle in here, and you’ll check your watch and wonder to yourself, “How — not just why but how — is he here well over an hour early for mass, just to practice something he’s done countless times?!” Or you’ll walk up the short staircase over here and hear Robin singing in the chapel. He’s rehearsing his lines for the Prayers of the People. He has sung them many, many times before. But here he is, practicing them yet again.

Robin is working hard to get things right.

As a minister of the ceremony here at this altar, Robin prepares carefully, reviewing the bulletin, studying it, reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting it, until he has a short speech ready to inform the rest of us of all that is about to take place. In all of this, Robin cares for this assembly. Exactitude is one of Robin’s love languages. Diligence, conscientious attention, deep and sometimes even stern respect for the right way to do things: these natural inclinations of our brother in Christ have sustained and nourished this assembly for decades now.

And so it may bother Robin that one thing I am getting wrong right now is the use of the present tense when describing him, for the self-evident reason that we are all here today to mark Robin’s painful absence from our immediate company. But if Robin is bothered by that, I will stand by it nonetheless: Robin, I am certain, is still here, if beyond our immediate sight and sound. Robin is a descendant of Saint Thomas, one of the Twelve, and Thomas has never left the Christian assembly. Like Peter and Mary Magdalene and all the saints, Thomas remains with us, in the great cloud. Robin, too, is close at hand.

And speaking of Thomas, today we heard again, in an enigmatic aside by John the Evangelist, that Thomas was called “The Twin.” This is probably not the evangelist’s report that Thomas had an actual twin sibling (though who knows, perhaps he did). It’s probably a literary hint by the evangelist that we readers of the Gospel can insert ourselves, if we like, in Thomas’s role, that we are his twin sibling.

Give it a try: Thomas the Twin wasn’t there when the risen Jesus appeared to his closest friends. That’s true about us. Thomas the Twin is eager to know what exactly happened. That’s certainly true about many of us, if not all of us. And Thomas the Twin wants to get things right. He heard the reports that Christ was risen, but he wanted the details. He’s like us going into the New York Times app and clicking on story updates (something I personally did just yesterday): we want to know what exactly happened. 

And Thomas consistently was this kind of a person in all of his appearances in John’s Gospel. SIx chapters before the resurrection in John, Jesus says, in his mystical way, “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” At that moment, in my reading of the encounter, Thomas has a very Robin Allan Jones expression on his face when he says back to Jesus, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 

But here’s the best part about Saint Thomas, and about his twin, Saint Robin: They develop; they grow; they get out ahead of us and show us a path of transformation. Thomas demands to see the terrible wounds of Jesus, who had been brutally executed by the government in a public show of force (an atrocity we are again seeing happen in our own place and time). But when Jesus appears and invites Thomas to directly examine the wounds — “Put your finger here and see my hands,” Jesus says; “reach out your hand and put it in my side” — Thomas does not need to do it. He transcends his previous, demanding self. He opens himself up to faith. Thomas grows.

Despite certain vivid paintings of this scene by artists, paintings that have Thomas gruesomely sticking his finger into an open wound, the Good News according to John doesn’t record that. Thomas simply gapes at Jesus and proceeds to call him God. “My Lord and my God!” Thomas shouts. This is probably a direct borrowing from Psalm 35, where the psalmist sings:

“You have seen, O Lord; do not be silent!
O Lord, do not be far from me!
Wake up! Rouse yourself for my defense,
for my cause, my God and my Lord!
Vindicate me, O Lord, my God,
according to your righteousness…”

All this enthusiastic and vigorous prayer, this shouting with surprise at the Risen One: all of this sounds, in my hearing, like our own brother in Christ, Robin. Robin is, as I’m sure you know, not just eager to do things right. He also does things with enthusiasm, with energy, with urgency. If someone here at St. Paul’s is going to be the first among us to call Jesus God — and take note: Thomas is the first saint in the New Testament to do so! — the first person to shout “My Lord and my God!” will probably be Robin.

Now, like Thomas, perhaps Robin sometimes comes across as impulsive, or impatient; maybe, on a feisty day, Robin and Thomas are brash companions of ours, sometimes in ways that can be a lot for the calmer among us to understand or appreciate. But Thomas and Robin are tremendous evangelists, and they are willing to learn, willing to grow, willing to move from where they once were. They are robust examples for us of faithful discipleship.

And Robin also makes it fun. Robin is a juggler and a pirate. Robin is a character actor and an entertainer. Robin is playful, sometimes silly, endlessly creative, and possessed of an infectious young-at-heart desire to savor this colorful world. In these activities, Robin is again a robust example for us, particularly now, in a time when the powers and principalities are trying so hard to suppress our good spirits and discourage our stout hearts.

Little do they know that we count Thomas and Robin among our companions. Instructed by their examples, guided by their prayers, evangelized by their faith, and goaded by their bracing good spirits, we will flourish here on God’s holy mission for many, many more generations, with Robin firmly by our side.

Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God

Preached on the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany (Year A), February 1, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.

Micah 6:1-8
Psalm 15
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Matthew 5:1-12

The view of the Sea of Galilee from the Church of the Beatitudes.

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and [he] taught them.

When United States District Judge Fred Biery, in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, San Antonio Division, saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down at his bench he heard the case of Adrian Conejo Arias and L.C.R., a Minor, versus Noem, Bondi, Lyons, Margolin, and Doe. Then Judge Biery’s disciples came to him, and he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

“Before the Court is the petition of asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son for protection of the Great Writ of habeas corpus. They seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law. The government has responded.

“The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children. This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and order them deported, but do so by proper legal procedures.”

Judge Biery continued (and yes, I’m reading his ruling in its entirety): 

“Apparent also is the government's ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence. Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation. Among [other grievances] were: ‘[The King] has sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People.’ ‘He has excited domestic Insurrection among us.’ [He has quartered] large Bodies of Armed Troops among us.’ ‘He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our Legislatures.’

“‘We the people’ are hearing echoes of that history.”

But the judge had more to say from the mountain of his federal bench:

“And then there is that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment: ‘The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and persons or things to be seized.’

“Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable-cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.

“Accordingly, the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration's detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R. The Great Writ [of habeas corpus] and release from detention are GRANTED pursuant to the attached Judgment.”

But the good judge had even more to say in his Sermon on the Bench:

“Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.

“Ultimately, Petitioners may, because of the arcane United States immigration system, return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.”

And finally, Judge Biery shared this quotation: “Philadelphia, September 17, 1787: ‘Well, Dr. Franklin, what do we have?’ [Benjamin Franklin replied,] ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’

“With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike, It is so ORDERED. SIGNED this 31st day of January, 2026.” (End quote.)

But then! Judge Biery did one more thing. He attached a photo of the detained child to his order, and underneath the photo he included two scripture references: Matthew 19:14 and John 11:35. Matthew 19:14 is this: “Jesus said, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.’” And John 11:35 is this: “Jesus began to weep.”

Judges never attach such things to their opinions and orders. But Judge Biery did so, because this is where we are, as a nation. It’s this bad.

And this is where we Christians are. This is where we live, where we work, where we struggle, and where with God’s help we overcome. Our faith is not found poolside, with cocktails and sunscreen, all the world being at peace and us taking our leisure. (Though I hasten to say that rest is vital, and vacations are healing!) Our faith is found in the fray, alongside public servants like Judge Biery.

We praise Jesus of Nazareth and call him our Lord and Savior. So we should take heed: When he finds himself surrounded by disciples and crowds, this Jesus of Nazareth goes up the mountain and proceeds to place the victims of injustice and oppression in the center of his program of action, the center of his agenda of revolution, the center of his mission of mercy in an occupied land.

We have crowds surrounding us, too. We see them thronging the streets of Minneapolis. We see them in all the major cities, marching past closed shops and shuttered businesses, closed because they are striking in solidarity. These crowds can fill us with hope, but these crowds must also — if our faith is true, and if we understand the radical thing we do every time we gather at this Table — these crowds must drive us up mountains, where we can be heard, where our voices join Judge Biery and so many others, where we clearly and without wavering place L.C.R., a minor — a five-year-old child — at the center of our faith, the center of our mission, our top priority.

Our government abducted that child and used him as bait to lure his family out for deportation. But that’s where we come in, friends. L.C.R. is one of many, many people who have us as allies and advocates. If we step up, that is.

But maybe you are still discouraged. You might admire Judge Biery for his eloquence and courage. I’d be delighted to break bread with him here. But will he really get us anywhere, finally? And as for Jesus of Nazareth, maybe you’ve heard it, you’ve seen it, you got the memo, and you’re unimpressed. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” he intones atop the mountain, and then he says they will receive the kingdom of heaven, and be comforted, and inherit the earth, and be filled.

When, Jesus? When? Maybe these Beatitudes hit you as absurd platitudes offered in vain for the people harassed by our government.

But Jesus isn’t done. Then he talks to us. “Blessed are the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers,” he says. Then he gets direct: “Blessed are you when people revile you and curse you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.”

In heaven? Where’s that, Jesus? 

Maybe you’re still unimpressed! Saving the reverence of the good judge in Texas who did his job with courage and righteousness, and giving Jesus of Nazareth his propers for doing a standup job as a prophet and savior in his time, maybe you’re still down in the dumps about our terrible time. I won’t bug you about that, too much. I get it.

And people younger than me get it even more viscerally. My friend Io is, like me, a member of Generation X, and Io’s Gen-Z kids are really discouraged, and in a way we Xers often aren’t, not because we are deluded or apathetic, but because we have a longer view, stretching back to a time not so long ago when the world seemed right-side-up, even if there were still countless injustices everywhere. Younger adults and youth don’t have these memories, and so many of them are grimly hopeless.

But they also are found surging through cities in protest. They also are rising up in anger and determination to bless the poor in spirit and fill those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. And we can join them.

It’s a simple program, really. Are you discouraged, and even despairing? Then know this: the entire New Testament was written in a time like this, and it is filled with stories of advocates, workers, teachers, and apostles who banded together and transformed their corner of the troubled world, and did so in a way that caught fire around the Mediterranean, and launched a movement that now includes us. This is what God’s power can do in the world.

But you can go even further back and listen to the words of a minor prophet. Micah teaches us a simple program, so simple we can commit it to memory and chant it when we feel frail, when we forget how to do this, when we are wishing we had half the gumption of Judge Biery. Here’s Micah’s formula: 

Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God.

So… you don’t feel like you’re a prophet or a peacemaker, let alone a federal judge with justice on your side? You can still “do justice.” You can do it in your relationships, in your vocation, in your writings, in the voting booth, in the way you spend your time as a volunteer or a faith leader or a resident in your neighborhood.

So… you don’t feel all that merciful, and definitely don’t feel pure of heart? You can still “love kindness.” You can notice and regulate your anger, and your sadness too, and channel your upsetting feelings into daily actions of kindness and honesty, with everyone you know, everyone whose lives you touch.

As for “walking humbly with God,” that task is made almost easy when we do it together. We pray here together. We welcome the stranger here together. We serve neighbors in need here together, and protest here together, and walk lightly on the earth here together, and study and work and live and love here together. And above all we break bread here together. In all these actions, we build each other up, always by God’s power and with God’s help, and we walk humbly with God — together.

So to borrow and modify that classic Ben Franklin quotation, what do we have, here at this refuge for sinners, here at this school for the faithful, here at this haven for the weary? What do we have? 

We have the Kingdom of God, if we can keep it.

"It's been a hard year"

Preached at the Requiem Mass for Prudence C. Kluckhohn, January 24, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.

Lamentations 3:22-26, 31-33
Psalm 121
1 John 3:1-2
John 10:11-16

Prue recently got a new car. She never really got to enjoy it. It is a sad irony that the most unfussy and practical person that any of us has ever known did not have a chance to enjoy a shiny new car in her twilight years.

Prue wore fun t-shirts that played on words. One of our best photographs of our sister in Christ has Prue in a Seattle Aquarium t-shirt with a Star Wars theme, “The Otters Strike Back.” It is a funny irony that one of the most serious and missional Christians that any of us has ever known was famous for her quietly playful, self-effacing silliness.

Prue lay on her deathbed holding the golden gift of self-aware wisdom and the majestic power of love for God and neighbor. It is a lovely irony that the person who has done more ordinary, menial tasks for this community than anyone we have ever known was given a holy death of the kind we read about in the lives of the saints.

The Cappadocian father Gregory of Nyssa, brother of Basil the Great, remembered his older sister Macrina’s holy death with great solemnity and awe. Filled with the Holy Spirit until her last breath, Macrina reflected insightfully on the human soul and on the Resurrection, and then she died in the peace of God.

Such was the death of Prue, who knew every corner of our storage rooms and sacristies, who scrubbed out our stains and ironed wax off our linens, who spread mulch and swept up dirt and stocked our shelves with supplies. She lay in great weakness last month, and when her kidneys began to fail she knew it was time. “Either the kidneys or the tumor will do me in,” she said, on the day before she died, in her straightforward way, in that pragmatic, sensible, cheerful way you all know so well.

But then she got quiet. 

She looked at me. She blinked. (“I never knew how pretty your eyes are!” I thought to myself but had the sense not to say out loud.) Then Prue said to me, “It’s been a hard year.” It never occurred to me that she was talking only about herself, about her cancer struggle, about the pain and the fear, the long days and nights of feeling “puny,” her word for the awful side effects of chemotherapy. “It’s been a hard year,” she said, and I knew, just as you would have known, that Prue never, ever speaks only about her personal struggles. She is always focused on other people, and on this parish. Until the very end of her life, Prue spoke the way a shepherd speaks about her flock.

When she said it’s been a hard year, Prue was talking about Tom, John, Ellen, and Robin, who all died in the months just before Prue. She was talking about Zoli, who we mourned in the spring, singing together the Hungarian national anthem, surrounding our beloved Maria with prayers and friendship. She was talking about a few of our members enduring chronic illness. And Prue’s husband and soulmate Bob also died, if not in 2025 – another loss we sustained all too recently.

But Prue didn’t wail her lament. She didn’t speak as one without hope. Congregations have hard years, and she knows that. She has lived that. And Prue doesn’t need the usual consolations, either. I didn’t need to remind her that last June we held a festive celebration of the hard labor and awesome generosity of our membership that led to the renovation of this mission base from drain pipes to rooftop. I didn’t need to remind Prue, of all people, that we are a hardy crew, a mighty band, a strong and faithful congregation. She knows all of that. It still has been a hard year. That’s all.

Not, “It’s been a hard year, but we’re great.” And definitely not, “It’s been a hard year, and we’re defeated.” It’s just been hard. Shepherds know about that. They live that.

In the wake of Prue’s death, a few of us have tried to remember all the things she did through each week and month, and do them in her stead. Sometimes we remember something when it doesn’t happen: a supply runs low, or a laundry basket overflows, or a candle doesn’t get changed, or a closet of old robes quietly says, “Prue would have sorted me out by now.”

But what we can’t catch, what we can’t replace, what we can’t solve or fix or mend, is the quiet absence of Prue herself, an absence that sneaks up on me in my undefended moments, when I get quiet, as she did at the end of her life, and when I repeat to myself her simple yet sublime deathbed pronouncement, that “it’s been a hard year.” I can’t easily salve that wound. We must just embrace one another, and hold our sister in remembrance, and make our alleluia song at her grave.

But this, finally, is the true task set to us by Saint Prue, who has taken her leave with great courage and serenity, and gone before us in the faith. Should we change the candles, launder the linen, and spruce up the garden? Of course. There are a hundred hundred things Prue did that we now must do. But the true task, the most important task, is something deeper, something bigger, something more: we are supposed to shepherd this flock as she did. We who are shepherded by the Good Shepherd himself, the One who even now welcomes Prue – a lamb of his own redeeming – into Paradise: we must follow his lead, and follow Prue’s lead, and tend this flock with skill, with courage, and with love.

Prue gives us some clues to the best way to do this.

Think back, all the way back, so far back that almost no one in this room was here at the time. Think back to 1971, when Prue and Bob celebrated the very first wedding held within a Sunday morning liturgy of Holy Eucharist here at St. Paul’s. They were the first couple to do this. It was late in the season of Epiphany, the season we’re in right now. Prue and Bob stood right over here and married each other in the presence of the parish they loved. Their wedding evoked all the marital themes and metaphors we find in Holy Scripture – that God and the Israelites are married; that Christ and the Church are married; that the City of God descends to earth and all of us will join the marriage supper of the Lamb.

On that winter day in February 1971, Prue and Bob taught this parish that heaven is here, that God is Love and that we therefore should walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us. To be a shepherd is to love the flock in your care. Prue and Bob both taught us that, on their wedding day, but also in the tens of thousands of days that followed. Their love sang down the decades, showered over us in hundreds of ordinary tasks, offered with cheer, and maybe a dash of impatience with our impractical mistakes. 

And finally there is the earthy yet heavenly task that Prue performed countless times over the years: as shepherds of this flock, we must dig the graves of our friends. When I met with Beth and Ben, Prue and Bob’s children, to talk over all the arrangements, we came to this question. “Who will dig the hole?” I wondered. Then I said, “I don’t like that word, ‘hole’, for a holy grave.” Beth and Ben laughed – they were raised in a good home; they know how to laugh with love. Of course Prue never gave it a second thought: it’s a hole, and someone has to dig it. That was enough for Prue to understand the weight and glory of this task. 

Prue did not dig her own grave. Three other shepherds here – Anne, Mark, and Jasper – did that humble yet holy work. And so, a little while from now, we will tuck Prue into the very same earth she herself tended so lovingly, so reliably. We will hold her close, as she rests in the peace of God. But before that, we will gather here at this Table and sing yet again our song of thanksgiving, our wedding song, our antiphon of rejoicing that the Good Shepherd himself is here, in the breaking of this bread, and sends us saints the likes of Prue. 

Strengthened by that meal, I think I will feel bold enough to pray to Saint Prue one small correction to her last words: “Prue,” I will say, “It has been a hard year. But you made it a lovely year, too. Thank you for everything. We all love you, always and forever.”

I want to sit quietly in a room

Preached on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord (Year A), January 11, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 42:1-9
Psalm 29
Acts 10:34-43
Matthew 3:13-17

Baptism of Christ, by Vladimir Zagitov

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his teaching.

I would like to sit quietly, in a room. That is a New Year’s resolution, I suppose, but more accurately it is a lifelong aspiration. It is a plank in my intentional Rule of Life, my Way of Life. When I see others doing it, I admire their maturity and integrity. I want to be the kind of person who can simply sit quietly in a room. I am glad I have a job that asks me to practice doing exactly that, every week. 

The march of evil and violence overtaking our nation relies on noisy spectacle: decapitate a nation’s leadership with no plan for what to do next, then threaten to violently seize territory from a NATO ally, then terrorize a high school and murder a woman in her car, then gloat with macho bluster in a viral interview, saying, “...We live in… the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” These actions and words are all profoundly unchristian and unethical and even monstrous, but mostly it’s all just noisy spectacle. It’s intended to keep us roiled and riled, exhausted, tense, and finally desperate.

I find all of it maddening, sickening, enraging, disgusting, revolting, agonizing. My friend Mark, a native of Minneapolis, has been apoplectic with rage this week, posting daily on social media, echoing the mayor of Minneapolis in his demand that ICE “get the f— out.” I have lived in Minneapolis. I have family there. I still have one niece young enough to attend high school there. I understand and share Mark’s outrage.

Winter-hardy Minnesotans don’t cancel school often. But my niece got a couple of “snow days” last week, not because of weather, but because the Minneapolis schools needed to protect the children in their care from the federal government. That’s where we are right now. My brother John — my niece’s father — texted wryly to our sibling group, “[These are] not the kind of snow days you would hope for.”

But, as outraged as I feel, I really mean it: I want to be the kind of person who can sit quietly in a room. I don’t want to be tossed about, at the mercy of the chaos agents. I quickly feel nauseated by the upheaval. I can barely look at images of certain federal employees, and find it even harder to watch videos of their violent crimes, videos of them murdering a young mother, videos of them tearing children from mothers and fathers. “The collective ache of mothers this week is palpable,” one of the members of this parish posted yesterday. I think we all know that ache.

So, sitting quietly in a room: maybe it will feel like a dream come true, if only for a few minutes. To stop, to breathe, to feel your heart rate slow, to let your body metabolize all the stress hormones zapping through your blood.

But there are some problems with sitting quietly in a room. There are personal problems, and vocational problems. 

Here are some personal ones, for me. When I sit quietly, I sometimes am overwhelmed with debilitating fatigue. I just want to sleep. Or I am buffeted by suppressed feelings of rage or anguish, pushing against my lifelong habit of enduring everything with stoic steadiness. There’s a part of my personality that likes to take over when I’m feeling hard and painful feelings: I call her Queen Elizabeth the Third. No doubt most of you have met her, when I’m striding sternly up and down the decks of this ship. “Duty first, self second,” she teaches, full of the self-reliant, latchkey-kid wisdom of Generation X. “One does not wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve,” she proclaims. Queen Elizabeth the Third doesn’t like it when I sit quietly. She prefers I stay up, and stay busy.

Then there are the intrusive thoughts. Do you hear those? “You’re not doing enough,” one of them says. (That voice is not wrong.) “Why bother doing anything?” says another particularly nihilistic voice. Another friend of mine told me that her Gen Z daughter wonders rhetorically why her mother would expect her to feel hopeful about the future, with the world in such endless, outrageous turmoil. If we sit quietly in a room, we are prone to hearing these intrusive voices.

And then there are the vocational problems that arise when we sit quietly in a room. When we stop and rest, when we breathe and listen, God gives us work to do. In the Good News we heard today, Jesus pauses quietly in a river — in his case, the room in which he sits quietly is the Jordan River, the countryside around it, the cruel empire crushing that whole region, and even the whole cosmos itself — and when Jesus pauses there and gets quiet, he hears God’s voice. God declares that Jesus is God’s Son, the Beloved. But this is not just an empty honorific: Jesus is sent on a mission.

And so, in turn, are we. Our lengthy silences in this liturgy are not just moments of Zen, sweet time to just bliss out in serene contemplation of the woodwork in here, or the candles, or the billowing incense. Our silence is an opening, a vulnerability, to God’s call to us, God’s instructions, God’s marching orders.

In a few moments we will interrupt our sitting quietly in this room by standing and reaffirming our baptismal vows. These vows are an acceptance of mission, a “Yes” to the call from God that arrives uncomfortably on our hearts and minds in moments of gentle yet dreadful silence. The mission of Jesus claimed his life. When we follow him, we say yes to entering the fray, to putting ourselves in harm’s way, to joining those anguished parents whose children are in mortal peril, to drawing alongside school kids and teachers and parents who remember their city before it was invaded by their own government. 

So: the silence is challenging; the silence is daunting.

But in all this personal struggle and vocational challenge, we do not necessarily need to turn into brash warriors. Now, some of us do shout loudly, and often, as prophets of the Holy One, and God blesses that cacophony! Shout it out! But Holy Baptism also forms us into peacemakers, into skillful allies, into quiet yet effective servants like the one that Isaiah sings about. Isaiah’s song is worth singing yet again:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be crushed
until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his teaching.

This is our calling, our identity, and our hope. As we once again are showered today with baptismal waters, we may just hear God’s affirmation of us as beloved of God, but also hear the call, the challenge, the great daunting task to which God sets us: to be quiet yet effective, merciful yet ferocious leaders, advocates, and healers.

Joseph Fasano, a contemporary American poet, evokes for me this call, this identity: a call and identity that last week cost Renee Nicole Good her life. Fasano did not compose his poem specifically for the community of the baptized, but I will close with it, and then let you return to yet another time of daunting silence. We will once again be encouraged to sit quietly in this room. Here is Joseph Fasano’s poem, titled The Healers:

The Healers

You can hear them
moving among the ruins,
hear them by their silence in the noisy crowds.
You can see them, opening
their little bags, opening
the shrapneled hearts of strangers,
crouching before the body of a child
to lean down and whisper her a story,
a story in which what's happening
is not what's happening.
They mend; they stitch; they carry.
They work; they weep; they lose.
And when nothing can be done
among the rubble,
they kneel there as the fires fall around them
and they cradle the face
of the dying,
the life that is trying
to speak to them,
the life that whispers, listen,
and they do.

Are the kids alright?

Preached on the Second Sunday after Christmas, January 4, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington, by The Rev. Stephen Crippen.

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Psalm 84:1-8
Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a
Luke 2:41-52

The Boy Jesus in the Temple, He Qi.

The kids are not alright.

We are living in the first decades of an era when children in this country do not expect to exceed their parents in education, income, health, or length of life. The advent of new technology always inspires anxiety, but we really do not know how generations raised on the internet will develop, what they will need, or whether they will thrive. Children and youth, particularly trans and queer children and youth, are thrown around as political footballs in a profoundly unhealthy public square. They are abused by politicians who will say or do anything to distract us from what’s really going on in this country, and around the world. We should be talking about climate justice and wage justice and public education, but instead we are provoked to argue about trans kids in sports.

So I want to hear some good news. I want to hear the Good News. Thankfully, our companion in Good News this morning is Luke, the third evangelist, my favorite (Luke just barely wins my approval in a photo finish with the sublime John). I love Luke because Luke is sanguine, but not a pollyanna. Luke is cheerful, but not glib. Luke writes in gorgeous prose, and Luke assumes that a diverse audience can keep up with an urbane, sophisticated storyteller. So… Mark the evangelist tells the story of people “digging” a hole in a roof to let down their friend to Jesus, for healing. But Luke, in his telling, improves the architecture: the man’s friends remove roof tiles, not clumps of sod. Luke’s Gospel is a classy establishment.

Yet Luke is not a snob; Luke does not preen. Luke composes gorgeous songs and puts them on the lips of humble people — a young woman (Mary of Nazareth), two older women (Elizabeth and Anna), two older men (Zechariah and Simeon). This is exceedingly rare in ancient literature: a compelling story of salvation, but very young and very old people have lines in the story.  I am grateful to Luke for this. Luke is a good companion for us as we search for the Good News that can be announced to — and from — young people, including our kids who are not alright. 

And today, Luke does not disappoint. Today we hear a vivid story, told by Luke, a story that stars a teenager. And somehow, in his genius, Luke’s ancient teenager jumps off the page. We readily recognize this precocious, confident kid. We’ve met this kid. Luke gives us the lightest sketch of a scene: The Holy Family joins a “group of travelers,” probably a caravan, to make the yearly Passover pilgrimage to the holy city of Jerusalem. The caravan likely makes the trip both cheaper and safer. (And this is a bit of subtle foreshadowing: years later, the adult Jesus will return to Jerusalem, again at the time of Passover, to accomplish his great work of salvation there.)

But back here in his teenage years, Jesus gets lost in the crowd, and his parents assume what you might assume if your kid gets mixed up in a jumble of friends and extended family: he’s fine, he’ll turn up, he always appears when he’s hungry! But he doesn’t appear. Three days go by as they search, ever more frantically, for him. (Always the three days! We Christians delight in three-day adventures, from Jonah in his fish all the way to the Great Three Days of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection.)

Finally, the parents find him, and we can all forgive Mary for letting him have it. “Child, why have you treated us like this?” she hollers. “Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety." My mother would have required fewer words. “What is the matter with you?!” she might have shouted.

But this kid is unruffled, which I suspect might have been maddening for his parents. In fact he throws a bit of shade on Joseph, his adoptive father, by saying, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But Luke writes a safe and tidy ending to the story (perhaps in a way that stretches our belief), saying that after this encounter, Jesus obeys his parents, so much so that his mother has time and energy to “treasure” all these things in her heart. This is not the first time that Mary treasures things, ponders things, contemplates all that is happening to and around her.

And this “treasuring” of the mother of a teenager — we should stop and consider this. We shouldn’t just let it go by, a neat little ending to a story about a wondrous youth. By treasuring what her son told her, and treasuring what he did, even though his actions caused great anxiety, Mary takes her place among the Temple teachers, the ones who were spellbound by Jesus for three days. Mary is savvy enough to reflect on her provocative child. She is a scholar, and she is an example for us.

Friends, we should do some treasuring, some pondering, this morning. We should turn aside, like Mary, the mother of an intriguing teenager, and ponder what this Gospel might teach us.

We could enter the story anywhere we like: some of us may naturally identify with the exasperated parents, others with the precocious tween, still others with the friends and kinfolk in the caravan, helpless to relieve the anxiety of these parents, bemused by all that’s going on.

But I’d like us to enter the story through the teachers in the Temple, the ones who were smart enough to stop and listen to this youth. Luke doesn’t tell us what Jesus says to them — we will find out soon enough, as the story of salvation unfolds. But there’s another possible reason why Luke doesn’t record all the dazzling things Jesus says in the Temple: if we don’t hear what the young Jesus had to say all those centuries ago, then we stop reading it as an historical account (and while something like this could very well have happened, this story about the young Jesus is not a newspaper article). It’s better understood as a parable that turns our attention not to the long-ago 12-year-old Jesus, but to our own young companions.

That’s why, this week, I emailed the parents of our teenage members here at St. Paul’s. I wrote them to invite their children to consider these questions:

“What do you — a teenage member of St. Paul’s — think the rest of us need to know, or need to do, or need to be? If you could say one thing to us, what would you say? What is the most important thing for this faith community? What matters most to you? If you had the microphone and our 125 people on a Sunday could hear what you have to say, what would you say?”

And my friends, I got some answers! (And please know: I also received permission to share these answers, and their authors’ names, with you.) Damian Anderson is fourteen years old, a bit older than Jesus when he lit up the temple with his ideas. Here are Damian Anderson’s responses to my prompt, and you’ll notice that he took it very seriously, and answered every question:

Damian says that the people of St. Paul’s need to know “that a lot of kids (maybe more than you think) want to learn about God and will benefit from learning about God but need more spaces than just church [services]. [They need] a ‘youth group’ or something like that.”

Regarding what we all need to do, Damian says, "The people have been doing a lot already, but having kids help during the services is fun.”

(Are you writing this down? Don’t worry, I am.)

Damian said more. What do the people of St. Paul’s need to be? Here’s his answer: “The people need to be leaders in the community, a safe sanctuary. If you need safety, you know you can go to St Paul's. Or if you want to talk to someone, [you know you can go to St. Paul’s]. Maybe [have] a ‘hotline’ that is staffed by volunteers that kids could ask questions. That might be fun!”

(I suspect it might be more than fun. I suspect that if we took our cue from Damian and set up a hotline, we could save more than one young life.)

But Damian had more to say! When I asked him what he wanted to say to us, he answered my question with his own question. Damian Anderson, 14, asks this of us: “What is most interesting to you about the younger generation?”, Damian wonders. And he added this idea: “It would be fun to have an ‘ask the teens’ event or a game night with teens.”

Noted.

But there’s more! When asked what is the most important thing about or for this faith community, Damian replied, “That you know you are helping people, and [helping] yourself.” And when asked what matters most to him, he said, “My family; using my voice to help make changes that need to be made; and people being treated with kindness.”

Amen.

And finally, if Damian had a microphone and our 125 people on a Sunday could hear what he has to say, he would say this: “This is going to be a long year and we have to stay connected to what we care about and help our families and anybody who needs [help.]”

Damian speaks with authority, and not like the scribes.

Then I heard back from Ivey and Grey Hopkins. They had fewer words to say, but their responses were no less powerful. Their mother Kira replied by saying, “Ivey… is most interested in animal welfare, especially equine welfare. [She] did a school project on how horses should be treated better, especially in the Olympics, where the U.S. standards are not equally applied to other nations. I think for both [Ivey and Grey], they are most interested in fairness and justice.”

I would only add this, regarding Grey, who gets the last word in the Good News according to St. Paul’s, the Good News proclaimed more eloquently here than even Luke the evangelist can manage, the Good News that comes to us from our youngest companions. Here is something Grey recently did, and again, I have his permission to share. Some months ago, on a Sunday I was downstairs with our younger members, Grey was the only one in the room in his age group, and it didn’t really seem best to loop him into a Godly Play story. So he and I played chess. 

Chess? Yes. Heaven and earth are found, in splendid discourse, on a chess board. Two people can learn a lot about the world while playing chess together. Grey and I played our way through the game, and I realized to my growing chagrin that I was beating him. This was our first significant encounter: I didn’t want to win. I wanted Grey to feel welcome here. I felt that dull pressure we church folk feel to pander to people, to meet their every need as if we were the customer service department of a retail store. But I noticed my feelings, suppressed them, and went on to win the game.

Grey looked at the evidence of his defeat on the board. He thought for a moment, then tipped over his king, stood up, and extended his hand. “Good game,” he said. I almost burst into tears. The class, the wisdom, the maturity. The delightful, dazzling decency of this young person! I was evangelized. I was stirred with hope and eager expectation for a bright future on this weary earth. 

Keep listening to these companions, slight in years but vast in wisdom. Listen for their good words, their Good News, for us, and for the world. And take it from me, out here in the ministry field alongside these good Christian souls:

The kids are alright.

Click here to watch this sermon on video.

Children of light

Preached on the First Sunday after Christmas, December 28, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Samuel Torvend.

Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Psalm 147:13-21
Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7
John 1:1-18

The Organist’s View, by Heidi McElrath

All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 

Perhaps you know this simple scientific fact: that all living organisms - from germs to jellyfish to human beings - are made of the same basic chemical components. But, we ask, where do those building blocks of life come from?

Astronomers at the European Space Agency suggest that the answer is found in the light of the stars. Their research holds that ultraviolet starlight is the key to creating the molecules necessary for the formation of life: the formation of carbon atoms connected to hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements that make your life and mine possible. 

Patrick Morris, the director of Infrared Processing at Caltech in Pasadena, writes that “the sun is the driving source of almost all life on Earth. Now, we have learned more recently that starlight drives the formation of chemicals that are precursors to the chemicals” that make our lives possible. Thus, we can say that in the remarkable process of earth’s creation some 4.5 billion years ago and in the subsequent evolution of life on earth, including human life, you and I are dependent upon star light. Indeed we hold in our bodies traces of starlight in the trillions of molecules that make life possible. 

Imagine, then, that you and the people gathered around you here as well as your pets, if you have them, as well as your children if you have them, as well as friends, siblings, spouse, and co-workers are bearers of star light, unseen to the human eye yet vibrating within you and them.

But there is more. Since 2006, Dr. Masaki Kobayashi of the Tohoku Institute of Technology in Japan has been photographing the light in human beings and has done so with incredibly sensitive camera technology. What Kobayashi and his colleagues suggest is that virtually all living things – from fireflies to human beings – emit measures of light, of light unseen to the human eye but nonetheless particles of light. This is to say that that you and I glimmer, we glimmer as chemical reactions in our bodies liberate energy, produce heat, and release particles of light: a glow that tends to be strongest in the afternoon and strongest on the face. What comes to my mind is the priestly blessing in the Book of Numbers: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord’s face shine upon you – the Lord’s face shine upon you – and be gracious to you” (Numbers 6:24-25). 

It would seem, then, that we and all other creatures, both fauna and flora, are united in our need for light and are united as holders of natural light within us: a network of beings who share in the light of the stars and whose bodies glimmer with particles of light. Is it any wonder, then, that the author of the fourth gospel would say that the creating Word of God has endowed all things with life and with light? Of course, here we move from the natural light accessible through scientific study to light as an image of who we are called to be as disciples of Jesus.

And so I wonder: What does it mean that you and I are children of the light, that we are called to be light in the world? Perhaps it can be helpful to remember that light has always been seen as a  sign of God’s presence and God’s unmerited, unconditional, and ever-flowing grace: God’s grace as that photon of light, as that spiritual energy which causes the molecules of our souls to vibrate with energy and radiate outward. To be called light bearers might then suggest that we are called to be gracious toward ourselves and toward others, to let that annoying voice of negative judgment about ourselves or others, that voice we sometimes hear within ourselves, take a rest or just go silent. 

To be bearers of the light might mean that we recognize our capacity to enliven, why even to excite the particles of light, of grace, of graciousness, in others. For, as you must know, light is a radiating power that begs to be shared in order to make life possible. Imagine that as your purpose in life: to look for the particles of light, of grace, of graciousness in others and support them.

Or this: to be light bearers in a world frequently marked by conspiracy theories, rejection of science, and untold waves of misinformation filtering through the internet, might well mean that we are committed to the work of enlightenment, of seeking the truth and telling the truth even when it is hard to hear or might get us in trouble. As Anglicans, we are quick to say that God’s gift of reason to each of us is an enlightening ability intended to support and enrich life rather than diminish or degrade it.

To speak then of light and imagine that we are children of the light is no dopey New Age trend that places my sweet bliss, your sweet bliss at the center of the world. When, in this place, we hear in the baptismal liturgy that we are called to let our light shine before others, that call comes to us from the flesh-and-blood Jesus whose “light” was expressed in what? Why in caring for the sick, in releasing people from tormenting spirits, in welcoming so-called social outcasts, in forgiving others, in refusing to retaliate when harmed, in God’s alliance with the poor, in eating and drinking and thus sharing life with those considered by one’s culture or peers to be undesirable table companions. That is, his light radiated an energy that gave others hope. I wonder: should it be any different for us?

The interesting thing about light particles is that, in and of themselves, they don’t make any  sound. However, when heated even slightly and expanded in material such a wood or metal or a human body, light particles generate sound waves. That is, light can become sound, photons become phonons. And when warmed and expanded in an enclosed space such as this, we can say that we are literally being showered with musical light, photons transformed by chant, hymn, canticle,  anthem, bell, and organ. Imagine, then, that if we had the highly sensitive camera technology of Dr. Kobayashi, we would see glimmering, sparkling waves of light emanating from the loft as we sing that great hymn of praise, the Sanctus, with angels and archangels and all the host of heaven, with our beloved dead who are eternally alive to God and join us in that chorus of thanksgiving. 

And so, I say: come to this eucharistic table where the creating Word of God continues to share that radiant energy with you and me; where his generosity is for our good and the good of the world in which live. Dear friends, we are small in number and yet each of us can be a light within this city, a light that shines and sings brightly amid the darkness. After all, what good is light unless it is shared? 

Our Christmas Song

Preached on Christmas Day, December 25, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Kevin Montgomery.

Isaiah 62:6-12
Titus 3:4-7
Luke 2:(1-7)8-20
Psalm 97

I love words. I truly do. And that’s not just because I was an English major. Most of us use them everyday without even thinking about them. We use them for objects, like “pulpit.” Actions, like “pray.” We string them into sentences, weave them into languages. We write books or poems. Give speeches or sing hymns. Words written or spoken. Even words signed. We use them for conversations, to create systems of thought and action, to build communities. Words have power.

And here at the start of John’s Gospel, we have “In the beginning was the Word.” Not the kind of word we think of, the words I was talking about before. As powerful as they are, this one is even more so. Actually, it is power. “Word” is a barely adequate translation. This is the Logos. (Pardon my Greek.) It’s the creating and ordering life of God. We often think of words as talking about something else. God’s Word, however, is an effective, you might even say performative Word. It does what it says. “Let there be light.” “Let us make humans in our image.” “This is my body.” “This is my blood.” 

But again, “word” hardly begins to encompass what is the divine Logos. Think of it as maybe like music, a song that stirs everything into being and sets it into motion. In C. S. Lewis’s novel The Magician’s Nephew, we have the singing of Narnia into being. It begins with something happening in the darkness, sounding from all around, even the earth beneath. The music continues, and it builds and builds. Then we see the world burst into creation. Thousands upon thousands of stars appear in the sky. New voices ring out, maybe even the stars themselves, but there’s something greater still, “the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.”

All of this is coming forth from the mouth of Aslan, the Christ figure of this series of novels. The song births reality. “When you listened to his song you heard the things he was making up: when you looked around you, you saw them.” It’s not a violent wrestling of order out of chaos. This Word sings the world awake. 

We also find this idea of creation as song in the work of Lewis’s friend, J. R. R. Tolkien. At the start of The Silmarillion, we read, 

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones . . . And it came to pass that Ilúvatar called together all the Ainur and declared to them a mighty theme, unfolding to them things greater and more wonderful than he had yet revealed; and the glory of its beginning and the splendour of its end amazed the Ainur, so that they bowed before Ilúvatar and were silent. Then Ilúvatar said to them: “Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in harmony together a Great Music.”

Through this music the world of Arda is brought forth. But not all goes smoothly, for Melkor, the greatest of the Ainur, seeks his own glory and introduces his own chords and melodies at odds with Ilúvatar’s theme, producing discord and dissonance. So Ilúvatar introduces two more themes that grow and develop, marked by gentleness but also power and depth yet contain “an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came.” Melkor’s music, however, became a loud and harsh unison endlessly repeating itself, trying to drown the rest through the violence of its clamor. We hear that everyday, sometimes every hour.  Think of all the ways we use language to demean, to deny, to destroy others. Shouting the same things again and again to overwhelm and crush those we consider our enemies. But in Tolkien, that discordant strain cannot overcome the other themes. Ilúvatar could have silenced it. Instead, he allows it to continue for a time, even weaving some of its notes into his own music, transforming them into something new. 

Likewise, through the Word we have God speaking the world into being. We even hear it on this Christmas Day. However, this Word, this Song if you prefer, is not simply produced by God. Instead, it is God’s expression of themself. Yes, all things came into being through this Song, but in the beginning the Song was with God. And the Song was God. 

But God was not satisfied with just ruling over creation; so the Song entered into the world itself, the very opposite of Melkor’s infernal and oppressive din. The Song enfolded itself into the silence of the womb, and when he was born, the only “word” that he could utter was an inarticulate cry of utter dependence. The Word became an infant, literally “one who cannot speak.” The great Song of creation became a particular human being, Jesus of Nazareth. 

And as he grew, his voice did as well, and he went out to proclaim the message he was sent to give. His was not a theme of domination. It was not the expected messianic song of military triumph. It was a message of coming to serve, not to be served. To bring together, not to tear apart. To face the powers and principalities of the world . . . and to accept the death that they dealt. The Word-in-flesh went from the silence of the womb to the cry of utter dependence, to the cry of utter dereliction on the cross and the silence of the tomb. For the theme of strife, now the Song was stopped; now the Word was silenced. 

But on that third day, the day of new creation, in the silence of the grave, a still small voice began to sound once more. The gates of the realm of death started to shake and then flung open as the Song of life burst forth. And all creation joins with it. “Rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels . . . Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth . . . Rejoice and be glad now, Mother Church.” Let the trumpets shout Salvation. The darkn6ess has been vanquished. Let the holy courts resound with the praises of the people. What was silenced sings out once more. What was lost is saved. What was dead now rises once more. And through the baptismal waters of death and rebirth, we not only join our voices with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we become part of that song of love, of hope, of justice, of life. That, that is our Christmas song. 

"O holy child of Bethlehem, be born in us today"

Preached on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-20

Holy Family, by Gracie Morbitzer

O holy child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray.
Cast out our sin and enter in; be born in us today.

“Be born in us today.”

Yes. I want that. I want Christ to be born in us today, right here. I can think of a few places in particular – certain places in our here and now – where I would very much like Christ to be born, where I believe Christ is truly born.

Here’s a good one: Christ is born in hospital waiting rooms. Just this week I spent an anxious half hour in a hospital waiting room while a nurse worked on the medical needs of one of our parishioners. And I can tell you: Christ is born in that waiting room at Harborview, born into the worry and the fretting of every exhausted soul that lingers there. Christ is born in that waiting room to reassure the friends and families of patients that whatever happens, they will not be alone, and they will be saved from despair. I returned to the side of our friend with renewed strength.

But Christ is also born around our friend’s treatment room, and all the rooms along that floor, along every floor of that hospital. Christ is born into the hands and minds and hearts of the nurses and physicians making their rounds. Christ is born into the bodies of friends and family sitting in uncomfortable chairs around uncomfortable hospital beds, breathing and praying and quietly talking under those awful fluorescent lights. Christ is present throughout that vital, human building, not to magically relieve anyone of suffering, but – again – to liberate everyone from loneliness and despair.

But Christ is born in other places. Christ is born in ICE detention centers. Christ is born in detox clinics. Christ is born in supermax prisons. Christ is born in hospice deathbed rooms. Christ is born in couples-therapy offices, in playhouses and concert halls and theaters, in school counseling offices, in shuttered USAID centers, along war fronts, in hurricane relief centers, in dangerous mineral mines, in art museums and libraries, in delivery vans and ride-share cars, in cabinet rooms and state houses and governors’ mansions. Christ is born wherever humans are struggling; wherever humans are in peril; wherever humans are making art; wherever humans are giving birth; wherever humans are sick, ailing, or dying; wherever humans are alone. Christ is born wherever humans are helping other humans – but also when we are helping other creatures. So Christ is born at the veterinarian clinic, too, and Christ is born in the struggle to rescue animals trapped in factory farming.

A distant island slowly sinking beneath the rising sea – Christ is born there, born to lead the people into a hopeful future.

A bombed-out hospital in an occupied territory – Christ is born there, born to raise up new life from the ashes.

Your personal moment of crisis in your private life, a crisis you believe no one you know will understand – Christ is born there too, born to guide you, born to heal you, born to lift you up.

This is why it rings so true that our neighbors experiencing homelessness repeatedly tell us that simply looking in their eyes and saying hello is more valuable than food or even warm clothing. Of course we reliably share with our neighbors the food and clothing we all depend on for survival, but it’s the eye contact, the human-to-human “Hello”, that is truly life-saving, truly life-restoring. Christ is born in that “Hello,” born to guide us all into healing and life-giving friendship.

Here’s another way to say it: God is with us in these holy connections. Emmanuel is with us whenever we embrace each other, or even simply greet each other. I sat by myself in that waiting area at Harborview, and I sensed I was slipping under the waves of loneliness: my close friend was going through a life-threatening crisis, I felt helpless, and I didn’t know anyone in that waiting area. And yet I felt the reassurance of Christ’s promise to be with all of us, to abide with all of us, to knit us all together as one Body. I was strengthened to endure that lonesome hospital moment by the starchy sustenance I receive week by week here at this Table. I knew that everyone in that hospital – which in this moment included me – everyone in that hospital was being prayed for. And I had my own pastor close by, reassuring me via text message. God was with me there; Christ was born there; I was not alone.

Tonight, you are not alone. We build a faith community here week by week, a group of people who are here first and foremost to embrace you. If you’re new, we will embrace you and then teach you to embrace the next newcomer. Or maybe you have something to teach us. Some of the folks who arrived here in the last two or three years have knocked me over with their faith, their insight, their myriad spiritual gifts. Christ is born in all of our encounters in this house of God, this gate of Heaven.

But there is one key place in particular where Christ is born. Christ is born most especially in the very bodies of the people who are in the most dreadful peril, the people in the line of fire, the people being wheeled into surgery, the people shackled and caged by our government, the people conscripted for war, the people working in a sweatshop, the people who are sure they won’t live through the night, the people who feel sure no one cares if they live through the night.

We Christians proclaim this Good News by saying that the Christ child was born in the back room of a first-century Palestinian house, born to an anxious couple who initially weren’t sure where they would lodge for the night. We care about that young family. We remember and sing about their story, year after year.

But when we sing that Christ was born in a manger, that image can sometimes fall a little flat: how many of us have actually seen a “manger”? Manger scenes look good on greeting cards, but how do they really matter? We need to take another look at the story. Let’s go deeper than the gentle Christmas image of a baby wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a bed of hay. This isn’t merely an image of a sweet, serene baby being rocked to sleep: this is an image of extreme, backbreaking poverty. This isn’t just a quiet and humble young family: this is a terrified refugee family, frantically depending on distant relatives for makeshift lodging. This is a woman giving birth without anesthetic or sanitary equipment. And the shepherds are dirt-poor laborers working the night shift. Christ is born into a desperate crisis. 

So as much as Christ is most certainly born into the strong hands, open heart, and sharp mind of the nurse who tends his patients through the night, Christ is born especially in the broken or ailing bodies of those patients themselves, born into their weakness and vulnerability, born into their fears, born into their solitary struggle for companionship, born in them with power, born in them with abiding, heavenly peace.

But let’s keep going deeper. An infant in a feedbox can be a pretty way of saying that Christ is born in the bodies of prisoners on death row, visited by people who affirm their innocence, or, if that is not possible, people who affirm that no one is as bad as the worst thing they have done. Christ is born in the bodies of Black and brown human beings incarcerated by masked agents, joined in solidarity by allies and advocates. Christ is born in families torn apart by violence, guided to safety by counselors and social workers and pastors. Christ is born into all of our desperate crises – all of them, so that even as we live in a terrible and dangerous world, we live in a beautiful and hopeful world, too.

This past year, two of our members ended their time as companions of an unhoused neighbor. They became his friends, offering assistance and guidance, but more importantly offering ordinary human conversation. They got to know him, and they allowed him to get to know them. Finally, his health failed and he knew he was near death, so he reached out to his friends, to our friends. And they offered him prayerful companionship in his holy death. Finally, they helped arrange a funeral liturgy for him in our chapel, where this parish commended his soul to God.

You could say that these good people were good Christian companions, and you’d be right. You could even say they are Christ-like, for indeed they are. They study the scriptures, they say their prayers, they know the assignment. But Christ was born to them not just in their good works, but even more powerfully in the life and witness of their companion, their neighbor and friend. His body was the manger for the Christ child; his body was the cradle for the Incarnate One.

The holy child of Bethlehem descends to us, even now. The holy child of Bethlehem is born in us today – on the street, in the detention center, in the hospital bed; in the body of the unhoused neighbor, in the body of the deported migrant, in the body of the suffering patient. All heaven and earth fits into these ordinary human beings. God’s presence and power is crammed in their sacred bodies, and whether they live or die, they will never be separated from God.

Meanwhile, deep inside the most desperate and lonely human heart, a heart torn in two by anxious worry and even terror about being alone — deep inside that vulnerable human heart, the angel choir, even now, today, this very night, is singing Gloria.

Joseph listened

Preached on the Fourth Sunday of Advent (Year A), December 21, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 7:10-16
Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
Romans 1:1-7
Matthew 1:18-25

A little one among us: God-with-us, by Claire Fox aka Shimi

“Those who speak do not know. Those who know do not speak.”

This is a Taoist saying, attributed to the philosophical tradition of Lao Tzu. But we Christians pray alongside a few saints who seem to have lived by this maxim, first among them Joseph of Nazareth. Joseph says not one word in our scriptures. I like to think of him as the patron saint of my parents’ generation – the Silent Generation, the masters of endurance, the artisans and scholars and workers who know a lot, but say very little.

Joseph said nothing at all, at least in our hearing, but he certainly listened. He paid attention to four dreams, dreams that counseled but also challenged him. One: Joseph listened when God’s messenger reassured him that he and his controversial bride would be alright, that he should marry her, and that he should name her son. (By naming the child, Joseph became his legal guardian, saving his – and his mother’s – lives.) Two: Joseph listened when God’s messenger encouraged them to run for their lives – making them refugees. (In our time, we know a lot about refugees.) Three: Joseph listened when God’s messenger said it was safe to return home. And Joseph listened a fourth time when God’s messenger warned them to settle not in the political tinderbox of Judea, but in the tranquil Galilee region.

In all of this listening, Joseph comes into focus for us. Saying not one word, his identity and character nevertheless become clear: Joseph is faithful and obedient; Joseph is brave and dauntless; Joseph is a refugee and a caregiver. Joseph is a low-income survivor of state-sponsored terrorism who experiences homelessness. Joseph is a virtuous person, a discerning person, a person of integrity, a person who listens, a mensch.

Joseph is one of our best exemplars. If we want to follow his example, if we want to truly listen like Joseph, then first we need to get quiet. At St. Paul’s, we encourage quietude. Our organist counts off ninety seconds of silence after the second reading. After a sermon, and after the distribution of Communion, we keep a little more silence. We’re not in a hurry. Our liturgy forms us to be people who know and don’t speak.

But the problem with quiet listening is all of those disturbing dreams. “Get up, Joseph,” says God’s messenger. “Flee to Egypt.” Then: “It’s safe now, you can return; but wait! Take your young family around the dangerous city. Keep going another hundred and fifty kilometers – get yourself to Nazareth, up in the north.” (God’s messenger doesn’t explain how Joseph will feed his family on these long treks. Were they in Egypt long enough for the infant to become a toddler? Maybe, but it’s not much easier to travel with a toddler than an infant when you’re on the run from political oppression. Harder, even.)

And so it goes for us, as we get quiet, as we listen. God’s messenger sends us in mission. God’s messenger disrupts our comfort, our certitude, our contentment. And God’s messenger appears in various ways, unpredictable ways. Dreams? Sure. But sometimes we listen to our bodies; we listen to our neighbors; we listen to our friends; we listen to our enemies. When my therapist asks me where in my body I feel a feeling, I groan: I rarely know how to answer this. I wasn’t raised to listen in that way. I need help listening to my body, which carries feelings both hard and kindly in places just out of my conscious reach.

And listening isn’t always as straightforward as receiving a message and then doing as instructed. Listening is discernment; listening is a heightened consciousness; listening is a stance of humility, openness, and curiosity. Listening is a form of intelligence. And so… Saint Joseph is great, but we may need a few more exemplars.

Mary Magdalene listened. At first blush she thought she was meeting a gardener. Then she listened, and when he spoke her name she knew instantly who he really was. Mary the mother of Jesus – Mary the spouse of the listener Joseph – listened carefully to God’s messenger, and responded with a “Yes” to the messenger’s immense challenge, a challenge that would transform her life, and her destiny; a challenge that would painfully pierce her heart. Saint Thomas, another Advent saint – in fact, today, December 21, is his feast day – St. Thomas listened, no matter how impulsive he might have been when he first returned to rejoin the movement. When the risen Jesus appeared to him and invited him to touch the wounds, Thomas didn’t need to. He was paying attention. His mind and heart were open. He took one intelligent look at the risen Jesus and, for the first time in human history, affirmed that Jesus is God.

We have these grand exemplars. We cherish them. But we have some local ones, too. Since August 7, we have watched with deepening grief as five of our friends have died in the peace of Christ. They were, all of them, holy listeners. Tom listened gently to God with a kind and gracious heart. John listened intelligently to God with keen insight, creativity, and wit. Ellen listened to God faithfully with the fortitude of a wise and trustworthy friend. Robin listened seriously to God with a determination to work hard and make a strong difference in this community. And Prue listened courageously to God as a gardener, launderer, and laborer, listening with her hands, wearing out her shoes, tuning in to all the endless, often unnoticed needs of this community.

They all, like the great saints before them, are listening on a spiritual plane. They do not just hear about problems and respond to human needs; they discern what is best. They ignore anything irrelevant. And yet, their listening – our listening – does not always form Christians into the easiest people to know. When we are listening carefully, we can really pack a punch: burning with mission, we lead others into the arena. Frayed with impatience, we tap our feet with holy determination to lead, to fix, to heal. Blessed with courage, we can be daunting in our zeal for honesty, for truth, even for revolution.

In all of this, God is Emmanuel: God is with us. Like Joseph of Nazareth, that great dreamer, God draws astonishingly close to us, even into our dreams, to enlighten our minds and break open our hearts. We labor here under God’s power, with God’s compassion, on God’s errand. We receive wisdom, and strength. God gives us grace and skill to judge wisely, to serve skillfully. We are raised up in power, for the life of the world.

I want to close with one more Taoist treasure, this time a little story told by the Taoist sage named Lieh-Tzu, found in his eponymous book, Lieh-Tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living. The story is a parable about discernment and wisdom; about sound judgment and shrewd skill; about who we might eventually become when we really get quiet, and really listen. Here’s the story: 

Duke Mu of Chin said to Po Lo: “You are now advanced in years. Is there any member of your family whom I could employ to look for horses in your stead?” Po Lo replied: “A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But the superlative horse – one that raises no dust and leaves no tracks – is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air. The talents of my sons lie on a lower plane altogether; they can tell a good horse when they see one, but they cannot tell a superlative horse. I have a friend, however, one Chin-fang Kao, a hawker of fuel and vegetables, who in things appertaining to horses is nowise my inferior. Pray see him.”

Duke Mu did so, and subsequently dispatched him on the quest for a steed. Three months later, he returned with the news that he had found one. “It is now in Shach'iu,” he added. “What kind of a horse is it?” asked the Duke. “Oh, it is a dun-colored mare,” was the reply. However, someone being sent to fetch it, the animal turned out to be a coal-black stallion! Much displeased, the Duke sent for Po Lo. “That friend of yours,” he said, “whom I commissioned to look for a horse, has made a fine mess of it. Why, he cannot even distinguish a beast's color or sex! What on earth can he know about horses?” Po Lo heaved a sigh of satisfaction. “Has he really got as far as that?” he cried. “Ah, then he is worth ten thousand of me put together. There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than horses.”

When the horse arrived, it turned out indeed to be a superlative animal.

***

This particular translation of the Taoist tale about the horse is found in J.D. Salinger’s novel, “Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”

Children in the garden

Preached on the Third Sunday of Advent (Year A), December 14, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 35:1-10
Psalm 146:4-9
James 5:7-10
Matthew 11:2-11

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom; 
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert; 
the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water;
the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,
the grass shall become reeds and rushes. 

Long ago now, more than thirty years ago, I lived on 21st Avenue South in Minneapolis, sharing an old house with a few college classmates. One day, the city pulled up the asphalt street in a repaving project. For several days, the earth was bare and exposed. I remember different colors of earth, from black to light ochre.

My friend Bronwen wrote a poem about it. She imagined the exposed earth giving a glorious sigh, breathing with sweet relief after its release from the hard petroleum pavement. The earth rejoices upon its liberation from oppressive human infrastructure. I think of C.S. Lewis in one of his children’s fantasies, when a river god rises up from his watery realm, chanting, “Loose my chains, loose my chains,” and then the liberating army does just that: they tear down a bridge built by a tyrant’s engineers. The free people triumph, and the land rejoices. The rivers shout with joy.

I vividly recall yet another image of rejoicing land. Several years ago I watched a film that imagined the fate of the earth after the departure of all humanity. In a world fully devoid of human beings, there would first be great fires and other catastrophes as our complicated electrical and nuclear technologies, unmonitored by technicians, collapse or melt down. The toxic smoke would cause a nuclear winter, a little anthropogenic ice age, locking places like the former city of New York under many feet of ice. But regions like the American southwest, today an arid desert, today a “haunt of jackals,” would become, after all of us humans are gone, a serene, humid swamp. In what we now call the Sonoran Desert, a verdant land of reeds and rushes would flourish.

But there are many more ideas and images of the land rising up in joy, many of them (unsurprisingly) in our Bible. The prophet Isaiah sings of a happy land trodden by the returning children of God, back from their sad Babylonian exile. As they dash back home, they sing their songs again, the songs their ancestors sang as they climbed the hills to the temple. And the earth, tickled by the happy steps of the returning pilgrims, sings back to them in refrains chanted by the swampy pools of rushing, delicious, living water. In my reading of this vivid scene, happy frogs are plopping into the new rivers and pools, croaking their antiphons of praise to God. After the catastrophe, God brings the people back, and the land rejoices.

In our region this week, the land will rejoice not when it is filled with pools of water, but when the waters recede. This week, here in the Northwest, we want to sing a prophet’s song about the land mercifully drying out, with U.S. Highway 2 shouting songs of triumph as God restores the Skagit River valley to health.

And of course, today, in our time, a land that is pointedly not rejoicing is the land of the ancient Philistines, a strip of land in a region that we have named after those Philistines: we call it Palestine. Gaza lays in ruins, an arid, miserable terrain, flooded not with life-giving water but with injustice and oppression. The people of that land are far, all too far, from returning from exile. Meanwhile, in this land of the Northwest, in the land that we problematically call our land, the first peoples to arrive here are still here, but like the Gazans they also sing a song of great sorrow, after centuries of genocidal attempts to obliterate them and erase their cultures. Their songs of mourning are echoed by a sorrowing Duwamish River, still polluted by careless industry over the past century. The Duwamish is bound by many chains, built by the architects of a hostile takeover of this region. 

And so, perhaps it is good that we confess our sins at church most weeks, if only for the fact that most of us gathered here are the descendants, and the beneficiaries, of human migrations that damaged this land. One small bit of contextualization, if not consolation, is that European immigrants share with every human group, every human culture, the sinful potential to harm the land. Some cultures, like many First Nations tribes, and like the people of the prophet Isaiah — some cultures powerfully rise above this dreadful human inclination, and are even poignant and prophetic about caring for the good earth. But all humans carry the potential for wasteful destruction, for hoarding and warring, for locking the vivid, ochre earth beneath a toxic, oily, asphalt blanket of injustice.

And so it is good, it is healthy, it is right and salutary that we should, at all times and all places, offer thanks to God for this land, this land that belongs always to God and not to us, this land that will join us in our song of praise, that is, if our song truly sings about real, authentic justice.

I now want to invite your attention to a particular small plot of land, land that does indeed rejoice, in the here and now. You can see it out these windows on your left. Maybe, in the passing seasons, you notice the tree branches in their cycles of growth and dormancy. Maybe you can hear the sacred silence in and around this plot of land, silence that is undefeated by the groaning buses and wailing emergency vehicles.

A quarter century ago, a few members of this parish made a momentous decision about this land. They were told by our diocese, and by a few members of the parish, that they should just pave over this corner with asphalt so that a few more people could easily park here on Sundays. Maybe we could rent the tiny new asphalt square to Diamond Parking during the week, adding a new revenue stream. That might have been sensible. It would have given us a few more square feet of usable, parkable space. 

But our faith leaders at the time chose wisely. They decided to cultivate a garden on this land. This was a spiritual decision, a prayerful decision, a biblical decision. These members of our parish had been listening when the Gospeler told them, year by year, that the risen Christ appears to his followers in a garden. They understood in their bones the deeply incarnational, naturalistic ethic of our faith. They understood the assignment. They got it. “Let’s build a garden.” And so they did.

But the whole thing was a much simpler, more intimate matter for one of those members in particular. Not long ago, just this fall, she came into the office with tears of joy in her eyes. Her tears were not just hers, but also the garden’s: she lent the garden her eyes for their shared weeping. This member of St. Paul’s, this companion of ours, was overwhelmed with joy because she had just heard the sound of happy, playing children in the labyrinth garden. “This is exactly what I had hoped for,” she told Emily, our parish administrator. “This is what I dreamt of when we built that garden. I wanted to hear the sound of children here.”

The children she heard attend Three Dragons Academy, an alternative-learning community just a couple of blocks from here. They’ve been bringing their kids over here on a weekly basis for some time now, and the other week they dropped us a note. Here is what they wrote:

Thank you so much for inviting us to use your labyrinth [garden]! It’s beautiful, secluded, and we absolutely love it! The kids have decided, as a thank you, to keep filling up the little pantry out front (they understand what it is and what it’s for)!! Thank you so much!

This — this is what the land right next to us, the land beneath us, the land beyond these windows, this is what the land is rejoicing about, weeping with joy about. The land rejoices not because anyone here, years ago or now, has done or is doing anything extraordinary. The land rejoices not because this faith community is overcoming every problem and restoring the whole world to health. The land beneath us rejoices because however small we might feel, however weak we might be, however halting our steps in the direction of God’s justice and peace, with every sound of a happy child here, we hear this good news:

Here, right here, in acts of kindness that welcome children to this block; here, right here, in acts of prophecy that feed and clothe our neighbors; here, right here, in acts of mercy that console the sick and befriend the dying; here, right here, in acts of courage that confront the tyrants who harm vulnerable people and bind our rivers in chains; here, right here, the land weeps with overflowing joy, because here, right here, just here –

The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

The tree of life

Preached on the Second Sunday of Advent (Year A), December 7, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington, by the Reverend Samuel Torvend.

The Tree of Life, by Edward Burne-Jones, St. Paul’s within the Walls Episcopal Church, Rome, Italy

Let me say that it doesn’t take a genius to recognize that John the Baptist was not pleased with the way things were in his world. I mean you don’t call people a brood of nasty slithering snakes – vipers – if you’re in a good mood and all’s well with life. After all, John lived under a ruler who was an abusive womanizer, a paranoid and narcissistic leader who ordered the deaths of three of his children, a collaborator with the Rome Empire and its colonizing ambitions, a spreader of disinformation, and the king who ordered the crushing of any dissent with violent police force. [Does any of this ring a bell?] John knew that the land in which he lived was given to the Hebrew people by God and that Roman military occupation of that land with its worship of foreign gods was utterly blasphemous. And this, too: John held that religious leaders in Jerusalem were corrupt in their collaboration with Rome and their demand for a religious tax that the majority of the population – poor peasants – found difficult if not impossible to pay. Thus, when John announces that there is “wrath to come” and that “the ax will fall,” he is hoping that God will come – that God the liberator will come and at last clean up the incredible mess in which John and all Israel lived. 

Needless to say, John the fiery preacher was no life coach urging his listeners with that tiresome cliché to become the “best versions of themselves.” He was no friendly soulmate who gently urged a bit of improvement to one’s supposedly decent life. The time in which he lived – in many respects so similar to our own chaotic and topsy-turvy era – demanded a sweeping change in which the chaff – the dry and useless husk of grain – would be burned to a crisp. Indeed, John announced that when God begins the process of cleansing this messed up world, “every tree” – that is, every person – “[who] does not bear good fruit will be cut down.”  Let me say: this is no cocktail-quaffing-anyone-for-tennis preacher. John expects, longs for, a radical change: radical from the Latin radix, meaning at the root. The old way must be uprooted, says John, so that the new might appear. 

Thus, when John demands repentance, he is not concerned with the petty sins of life. Rather, he is asking people to change their minds, to go in a completely new direction, to wash away an older and presumably satisfactory way of thinking and acting – something that the privileged of his world and perhaps of ours – would resist. After all, who wants to change what appears to work? I’m mindful of the Russian nobility who in 1917 sipped vodka and ate piles of caviar in grand ballrooms as impoverished peasants and downtrodden workers joined the Bolsheviks in a revolution that changed the world. John is not interested in modest renewal: only a thorough clean-up will bring about a measure of justice and peace.

But then, but then, here’s the surprise, the unexpected thing that John himself could not have imagined: for when the Expected One comes, whose name is Jesus, he does not – he does not share his cousin’s cataclysmic rhetoric of the ax felling every tree at its root. Rather, if you can believe it, he allows himself, a young sapling as it were, to be cut down, cut down in an early death. That is, he enters our world in solidarity with any and all who suffer from the predations of corrupt rulers or life-threatening disease, with those who experience  loneliness or anxiety. He enters this world – our world – as a companion with any and all who wonder if their life has any meaning, any purpose beyond making a wage and paying the bills. And he does so – not with the threat of more violence, with more trees chopped down – but rather with an alternative to the rhetoric of condemnation: that soul-numbing rhetoric which presently suffuses the news we hear and read on a daily basis.

My friend, Susan Cherwien, of blessed memory, whose lyrics we have sung in this church, created a hymn text most apt for these Advent days. She writes, “Who was, who is, and is to come as servant lived in human sphere. Compassion was his diadem, his glory was the gentle tear; humility, his purple garb; and healing hand, his royal orb. Such love – such love – drew ire and ire drew death.” You see: John expected the ax to fall and so it did. But it fell on Jesus who offered another way of living in this world: not with brutality but healing, not condemnation but compassion, not arrogance but humility, not retribution but mercy. It was this other way of protesting the injustice and corruption of the world that drew ire, that is, drew anger and thus his death: his death on a tree – that which we see so clearly before us in this house – Christ crucified on the wood of the tree, the sacrament of God’s loving solidarity with the insults and injuries of life, of your life and mine and the lives of those who will never pass through the doors of this household.

And yet, and yet for us, the unexpected has happened: for the tree of death has become the tree of life. For we recognize that the One who was cut down by the cruelty of empire is the Living One, the living tree who grows out of the cut-down stump, who is raised from the tomb of death into unexpected life: raised, if you will, into your life and mine. Dear friends, it is into this life-giving tree, this wounded yet Living One that we have been grafted in the waters of Holy Baptism and nourished with the sap of his blood in the Holy Eucharist. 

And so, having been united with him, let me say that there is hope in these Advent days: hope that you and I, his living Body in the world, just might continue his work to seek justice for the poor and defend those in need; that we might chose to act with mercy rather than retribution, with humility rather than arrogance, with compassion rather than condemnation. Indeed, there is hope, when, from our treasure or our time, you and I feed the hungry, clothe the shivering, care for the sick, welcome the stranger, and protect the immigrant. For in these actions, we contribute to the growth of the tree of life whose name is “The Lord our Justice,” whose name is Jesus.   

"Peace be within your walls, and quietness within your towers"

Preached on the First Sunday of Advent (Year A), November 30, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington, by the Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44

Advent Begins: The Coming Star, by Claire Fox aka Shimi

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: ‘May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls and quietness within your towers.’”

***

What do you really want? Really?

We all want lots of things, including the basics: real food, warm shelter, good music, good art. We want silence and stillness in this wild world. Maybe you want cookies with hot coffee. I surely do. We have a lot of cookies waiting for us at coffee hour.

But really, seriously, ultimately, viscerally – what do you really want?

When I talk about my career, I say that I really want reconciliation. I may say it often enough to try your patience. For a decade I ran a private therapy practice for couples, a day job that was all about relationship repair. The problem was, I didn’t like running a one-person business. It felt lonely. And working on one relationship at a time felt piecemeal, disjointed. So I changed gears and deepened my involvement in faith communities. I doubled down on being a faith leader. I’m okay with counseling couples, but I really want reconciliation in all its forms, so I want to see it happen in whole communities.

When I watch television, movies, or plays, I’m always drawn to the reconciliation stories. In the drama series called Mare of Easttown, starring Kate Winslet, two friends are in wrenching conflict for many long months, and when they finally reconcile, they do it without words: One of them begins to weep, and the other embraces her, and they cry together in the kitchen, slowly falling to their knees, then sitting on the floor, just holding each other. “This is it,” I thought, when I saw that. “This is heaven. This is what I really want. This is what I want my whole life to be about.”

Here, in this faith community, I sometimes wonder: Is reconciliation really happening here? And if it is, am I helping make that happen? Sometimes, in the reconciliation department, I talk prettier than I achieve. But I honestly think the answer is yes, we are doing reconciling work here, at least some of the time, if not always in obvious ways. We are drawing new people into our community, week by week, and when I meet with them I try to listen not only to why they came here the first time, but why they keep coming back. And I hear stories of reconciliation in many of their answers. Reconciliation with self, with God, with the church, with one or more people in their lives. Sometimes we come here to reconcile with people who have died. We come here to talk with them.

But there are other things besides reconciliation that people really want.

Some of us come here because we really want an answer to an ultimate question, an existential question about the meaning of suffering, or our destiny beyond death. When you attend church, you are encouraged to contemplate the deeper questions. We get quiet here; we pray here. As we sing in today’s psalm, we cultivate peace in these walls, and quietness in these towers. All this peace and quiet helps us think, breathe, feel… and focus.

And then, still others come here because they want – maybe you really want – justice and peace in the world. (If I want reconciliation, it’s because repaired relationships serve that larger goal of justice and peace.) But this particular want — this desire for justice and peace — can sometimes feel frustrating and flat. What are ‘justice and peace,’ really? Do we have to overthrow the whole capitalist and militarist system to achieve them? Probably. Jesus and his first followers stood defiantly against the whole giant human machine of militant injustice.

But if we somehow manage to do that – if, by gathering in faith communities, humans manage to dismantle the whole system – how will our elders be able to afford assisted living? Younger adults can’t afford rent, let alone buy a house, in this system, but how would we empower them to do that in the new world we build? Justice and peace are what many of us really want, maybe all of us (hopefully all of us!), but we may have to work very hard just to bend the arc of history a little bit in the direction of justice and peace, one SPiN wagon at a time, one protest at a time, one visited sick person at a time, one repaired marriage at a time, one healthy divorce at a time, one forgiven wrongdoer at a time, one carbon offset at a time, one affordable house at a time.

I am going on about this – about our deepest wants – because we are not going to build a useful, healthy, and truly Christian community here if we dodge this deep discernment.

As a way to guide this spiritual work, take note: Today is the First Sunday of Advent, the first day of a new year in our life of faith. The First Sunday of Advent has a New Year’s ‘vibe.’ Gen Z might say that Advent One is “giving New Year’s.” Today’s a great day to take stock in the year gone by, and contemplate how we might work for what we really want in the year to come.

Are we hoping for the dawning of justice and peace, in this new year of grace? Of course. Again, some of you want that more than you want anything else, and if so, that desire of yours is deeply, profoundly Christian. I would like to see the gleam of that dawn right now, today. I want us all to get what we really want, the one thing we seek with the depths of our being, not just in the faraway future, but today, on Advent One.

Here is a way to get what we want, even if it takes all our lives. Here is how we do it, beginning today, even though we know we won’t accomplish everything in one lifetime. We need to climb a high hill, and as we climb, we need to sing an old song. Climb a high hill; sing an old song.

The hill we’re climbing was once a literal hill, a physical mountain, and it still is that same real hill for many people: it is the mountain of Jerusalem. For our Israelite forebears, Jerusalem was where God rested among God’s people; it was the high-altitude city of the divinely anointed king; it was a citadel of justice, a gleaming hilltop of peace. 

Our ancient Israelite forebears were pilgrims, climbing the Judean hill country, up out of the desert, up and up, until they arrived at the beloved city of God. Our proto-Christian forebears gratefully received this pilgrim tradition: you may recall that Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem. But the city of Jerusalem for the first Jesus followers evolved into something deeply symbolic, mostly because Christianity got going in the decades before and after Jerusalem was destroyed by Rome. Without the actual pilgrimage city, they had to use their imaginations. 

As they reeled from imperial violence that ruined their home and persecuted their faith, the first Christians imagined an apocalypse of justice and peace: war-torn Jerusalem will be visited by the risen Christ in triumphant, dreadful splendor, a return that will remind humanity of the global destruction of the flood. All of the enemies of justice and peace will be taken away, washed away, erased from the face of the earth.

In the meantime, as the first Christians waited for the second coming, with Jerusalem in ruins, ‘Jerusalem’ became, for them, the emerging Church, expanding across the map. Even now, whenever we gather as Christians, we are Jerusalem; this is Jerusalem. Christ is returning here.

But ‘Jerusalem’ also came to represent the human soul, an individual temple of God: Our mystical path of prayer and praise, of prophecy and proclamation, of love and service — our inner mystical path is yet another Jerusalem, a little city gleaming atop every Christian pilgrim heart.

And finally, ‘Jerusalem’ has become for us Christians the end-of-time city of God, descending to earth in heavenly glory. So when we sing songs about our beloved dead, we sing of their arrival in the New Jerusalem, where there is no more death, and where the trees bear fruit for the healing of the nations.

And so, therefore, we strive to get what we really want here at St. Paul’s by climbing a hill to arrive at the Jerusalem of this community, the Jerusalem of God’s Paradise, the Jerusalem that shines on the hill of your own beating heart. We pull wagons of hot soup through the Jerusalem of Uptown Seattle, reconciling with self and neighbor every time we greet someone and extend our hands in common mission. We protest along Roy Street, an asphalt Seattle street now paved in Jerusalem gold by our prayers and our prophecies. We raise our children and revere our elders in this city, the city of Seattle but also, for us, the New Jerusalem, the city where God is reconciling with humanity.

Is it reconciliation I really want? Then I can find it here, in this work. Is it the meaning of life, or the answer to an ultimate question, that you really want? You can find it here, in this mystical city, as large and public as Seattle and as small and private as your own unique soul.

As for justice and peace, well, justice and peace is what we sing about in our pilgrim song, the song we sing as we labor together in the city of God, as we climb ever higher, always together, toward a better city, a healed city, a city of gladness, a city of joy.

Our song proclaims a city of justice and peace, even if we haven’t yet reached it, even if we haven’t yet built it, even if we still pray fervently and desperately to God for it, even if the city as it is right now just breaks our poor hearts, even if we won’t see Jerusalem fully realized in our lifetimes. We already sang this song today. It is a good song for climbing hills. It is a song that expresses every pilgrim’s deepest hopes.

Psalm 122 is one of the Psalms of Ascent, sung by ancient pilgrims while clambering up to Jerusalem. Maybe someone would shout a verse, and the people right behind them would shout another verse back, and up they would go. “The tribes go up!” some of them would yell. Then others would call back, “To praise the name of the Lord!” Today, this is our song.

In our singing of it, our hopes take on flesh, in our voices and then in our hands and feet. Verse by verse, we find strength and insight. Phrase by phrase, we hear other pilgrims joining our song, and we draw inspiration from them. Note by note, we gather with them and countless others into a throng that begins to arrive even today in the city of God.

As we climb this hill together, you may hear me singing out with particular gusto when we get to my favorite part of the song. These verses express my deepest hope for a city blessed with delicious, healing, restful reconciliation. It’s the little section of the song I like to sing just before I lie down for the night, tucking in after a day of work alongside you. This is my favorite part of our pilgrim song, on my lips and in my heart in this Advent season of longing, hope, expectation, and hard climbing:

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: ‘May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls and quietness within your towers.’”

The already, and not yet

Preached on the The Last Sunday after Pentecost: The Reign of Christ (Year C), November 23, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington, by Jon Achee.

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, by Claire Fox aka Shimi

A prayer from Richard Rohr:

God, Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything, please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere. We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough, because in reality everything and everyone is connected, and nothing stands alone.  To pray for one part, is really to pray for the whole, and so we do.  Help us each day to stand for love, for healing, for the good, for the diverse unity of the Body of Christ and all creation, because we know this is what You desire, as Jesus prayed, that all may be one.  Amen

Last Tuesday night I met someone’s child on Broadway in the Capital Hill neighborhood while walking with the street ministry of Nightwatch.  For over a year now, I have joined with the Nightwatch street ministry leader, Pastor Michael, and maybe one other volunteer, and we drive up to Broadway on Capitol Hill on Tuesday evenings with canvas bags filled with bottles of water, snacks, socks, gloves, beanies and Narcan.  We simply walk Broadway and the nearby streets and parks for a couple hours and stop to talk with any individuals or groups we encounter that we suspect might want something in our bags, and more importantly might want to just share a connection with another human being.  We are just like the St Paul’s folks who pull the SPiN wagons through this neighborhood.   We never push ourselves or the supplies we have on anyone.  We simply ask “Hi, we are from Nightwatch, can you use some socks or water?”.  This simple question sometimes leads to no reply and we move on, or a yes but without any further desire to interact after receiving something out of our bags.  Sometimes, however, this simple question leads to conversations and shared communion over difficult stories of abusive partners or parents, health problems, street sweeps, friends going through a difficult time, or run ins with others on the streets that have led to a loss of possessions, a tent home or injury.  Living on the streets is a constant struggle.  However, we also hear joyful stories of a book of poetry that is being published, some artwork created and sold, a friend taking care of another, a mother excited to give birth in just days and finding pre and post-natal care, an improving golf game practiced in the early evenings after the golfers have left the links, an upcoming job interview or the possibility of a new shelter opportunity.  Stories of past lives working in New York theatre, of marriages and children, or the sadness for a missed mother who lives in Los Angeles.  Whether a story of suffering or joy, the unexpected connections stay with me long after the encounter.  Every story is given grace and respect, as we have learned over time that some of the stories are true.  

Now I don’t speak of the experience of Nightwatch as a ministry that works for all, and hopefully you do not hear me patting myself on the back for “doing good deeds”.  Walking the streets at night can be uncomfortable and scary.  You can lose sight of the loveliness of connections and the building of community under the burden of encountering folks experiencing a full mental crisis or bent over in what I call the “fentanyl slouch”, completely lost to themselves and the world.  It is especially challenging for me when so many of the folks I meet are the age of my own children.  Then I am forced to confront the difficult reality that except for some seemingly small twist of fate, a fork in the road where they went right instead of left, some systemic inequality, bias or hatred they faced, or simply a lack of support or more tragically a lack of love, someone else’s child is in front of me on Broadway, while my own children are safe in their homes and lives.  

Walking into this liminal space between “the already and yet to come” one must honestly confront the question, where is God in all this?  To confront the desire at times to blame the person in front of me for their current condition and thus getting wrapped up in the justification of their suffering instead of remaining focused on just drawing alongside them in their suffering.  Be it only for a brief terrible and beautiful moment while we are in communion on the streets of Capitol Hill.   A desire, the sin, to break the relationship with those suffering, and to not bear witness and to forget how we are called to respond to our often messy and frustrating world by the God incarnate in Jesus, whose kingship we celebrate today on the Feast of the Reign of Christ.    

How do we respond to the Christ that we proclaim as Sovereign today?  A King that allowed himself to suffer death at the hands of empire, and rule from a cross and not the comfort and safety of a throne? 

In the letter to the Colossians, we learn of this odd King, “in Him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven by making peace through the blood of the cross.”  This Scripture makes clear we follow and profess a King that seeks reconciliation in the messiest places of humanity.  A God incarnate in Christ willing to take human form and meet us in the middle of our darkest places when we at our worst.  Willing to endure the suffering, the blood, the gore of an empire’s execution.  We can not only believe, but we can trust that we will find Christ in the midst of our own suffering. In fact, Jesus is calling to us from the suffering to provide the confidence that we can and must step into the challenges we confront in our world knowing that we will find God in Christ right there within the messiness waiting for us.  God always seeking reconciliation and relationship with us.  This is the beauty of the “the already and not yet” place, the liminal space that can feel so discomforting, a space of uncertainty and even suffering at times, but we can trust that Christ our Sovereign waits for us there.

In the Gospel from Luke, we find Christ the King at the moment of their own deepest suffering on the cross still working for reconciliation with us.  Instead of a royal decree the Sovereign Christ says, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.”  In this dark and terrible public moment, we witness Christ our Sovereign reject the catcalls of the leaders and soldiers in the crowd saying that he could just remove himself from human suffering.  Instead, Christ remains in the mess and blood of the cross, demonstrating that only the power of love, grace, and reconciliation, can build a Kingdom where everyone flourishes.  We find a King hanging on a cross between two suffering criminals offering mercy and grace to the criminal who prays for these things.  This gift of mercy and grace in the midst of all the suffering is not promised sometime in the future, but today and right now, in “the already, and not yet” as Christ tells his companion in shared misery, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise”.  Oh yes, we can be loud and grateful in praise for a King who will meet us within the suffering and joys of our lives only looking for relationship, and offering unending reconciliation, love and grace.  A King who delights in the flourishing of all people and creation.  This is the Good News!

However, and you knew there had to be a however, more is asked of us than just praise.  Getting back to my earlier question, how do we respond to Christ we proclaim as King?  There are a couple ways that seem appropriate to me beyond just praise.  First, we must respond in trust.  I know this is not easy in our current society where we are suffering from a crisis of trust, but we must know and trust that God through the incarnate Christ is waiting for us there in the midst of this doubt.  Secondly, we must have the confidence that we will find God in the midst of the suffering, that God meets us within our lived realities.  The trust and confidence to keep doing the work to alleviate the suffering in the world.  Let our first response not be to justify the suffering, our to simply walk past it as the religious leaders did in the parable of the Good Samaritan, but to reach out in love to alleviate it.  Walking alongside Christ on every Broadway we walk, in all our relationships, working for love and reconciliation with all people and all creation, especially those that might be suffering, economically oppressed, or facing injustice.  No questions asked.  

Last Tuesday, while walking Broadway with Pastor Michael, I asked him, how do you keep coming out here week after week over so many years, knowing you will most likely find the same level of suffering?  How do you stay so positive?  After talking about the need to bear witness and to provide comfort, he said, because this is my community now.  The folks out here are always first to ask me how I am doing, and what my kids are up to.  When I am at a dinner with church people feeding these folks, it is always the street community that makes me feel most comfortable and loved.  How can I not love them back? 

Dean Ian Markham's Sermon

A written manuscript is not available, but click here to watch a video of the sermon of The Very Rev. Dr. Ian Markham, Dean and President of Virginia Theological Seminary, recorded on the Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28C), November 16, 2025.

***

Isaiah 65:17-25
Canticle 9
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19

Getting to know you

Preached on the Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27C), November 9, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Haggai 1:15b-2:9
Psalm 145:1-5, 18-22
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38

Burning Bush, by Mark Wiggan

God knows who you really are, who you truly are. God greets you in heavenly peace – the real you, the authentic you, your true self that others don’t completely know or fully understand, your true self that even you may not fully recognize. The true you belongs to God.

Other people often tell you who you are. And often enough, you may happily accept their judgment. For more than three decades, a number of people have been calling me “Uncle Stephen.” I am an uncle: I accept that identity, and hope to honor it with my nieces and nephews. As their uncle, I belong to them. But is “Uncle Stephen” truly me, in my essence? When God meets me and gathers me into Paradise, will God say, “Welcome, Uncle Stephen?”

Someone calls you mother or papa, Grandpa or Oma, and maybe your heart surges with delight: yes, that’s me. But is this identity truly you, in your essence? “I am somebody’s mother,” you may say. And so you are, to the depth of your very being. But — do you, in your essence, belong to your children?

Belonging to others can be, and often is, a good thing. But belonging can be problematic when it shapes a person’s essential identity, and destiny. Sometimes, belonging to others reinforces unjust power structures. Consider the Sadducees, trying to lure Jesus into a trap. Their hypothetical is absurd: seven dead husbands, one wife — whose wife is she? That’s their chief concern. Not “does she have food and clothing and the ability to live and thrive,” let alone “does she… have a grief counselor?”. Forget about what her name is, or her vocation. Just this narrow, cynical question — “to whom does she belong?”

Maybe it doesn’t surprise us, this assumption that a woman must belong to a man, must receive her ultimate identity from a man, does not truly exist as a full individual without a man. We haven’t shaken off patriarchy and misogyny in our culture: we see this kind of thing all the time. But Jesus sets her identity above and beyond a marriage contract. In heaven’s reckoning, God blesses her with identity, dignity, and integrity all her own. Belonging only to God, she occupies a few square feet of heaven.

And lest we assume we are more enlightened today than those ancient Judean Sadducees, we live in a time when our government empowers officers in burglar masks, with no identification or warrant, to seize people and incarcerate them only because their skin is brown or black, or their first language is Spanish. ICE does not see persons of color as human beings, never mind their citizenship status, let alone their unique identities, their life stories, or the kin to whom they belong. ICE asserts that they belong to the government, as owned property.

In the midst of all that, and in prophetic defiance of all that, we keep coming here to pray, to serve our neighbors, and to protest, week by week, during these dark and darkening days. We come here to discern who we are, in our essence, as people who belong to God; and what we therefore must do in these days of anxious turmoil.

We recently finished celebrating Hallowtide, a micro-season of the church year when we pray for our beloved dead, and also the dead-serious reality of our own mortality. Hallowtide starts on Hallowe’en, a festival that borrows creatively from Celtic Samhain harvest rituals to make gentle fun of death. We carve squash lanterns in cheeky defiance of death, as the world around us (in the northern hemisphere, at least) dies back, as the wind strips the leaves from the trees, as the atmospheric rivers return and the floodwaters threaten.

Then we celebrate All Saints, a major feast on our calendar; and All Souls, another chance to walk down to our burial garden and make our song of alleluia. Hallowtide: as all God’s creatures prepare for winter, we prepare for our own endings, and we attend to the remains of all who have gone before us.

Hallowtide may have just ended, but as November grows older, our focus on death, endings, and end times continues. This is one of the reasons why we open Luke’s Gospel this morning to the scene where the Sadducees test Jesus. Even though they are being cynical, they ask him an intriguing afterlife question. We can be serious and ask Jesus even better questions, ultimate questions, Month of November questions.

Questions like: To whom do our beloved dead belong? Who are they, really, in the eyes of God? Who are we? What is the depth and breadth of our shared identity, as we all huddle here together under the shelter of this roof, with that baptismal font back there and this Eucharistic table up here, and our loved ones at rest in yonder garden? How does our essential identity form and send us into the world, with so many of our neighbors in peril? And if our neighbors belong to God, in their essence, what, then, shall we do?

I want to share a short reflection about one of my own beloved dead, to deepen your reflections on your own identity, your real self, the true you, in God’s sight.

My mother has been gone for twenty-nine years, long enough for me to reflect with some balance and distance on her departure. One day, in a quiet moment of meditation, I visualized seeing her again, after my own death, the two of us reunited at last.

New to the afterlife, I was just exploring the territory, and I came upon my mother in a forest glade. I approached her from behind and called out to her. I simply said, “Mother.” But as I called out to her, I noticed with surprise that her hair was auburn and youthful again, and it was tied in one large braid that reached the middle of her back. (This being heaven, her back was no longer broken by childhood polio. She was healthy and whole.)

The problem is, my mother, in her earthly life, never wore her hair that way, long and in a big braid! Why would I imagine her looking so different, now that she is beyond death?

Here’s my explanation: Even now, on this side of death, I already perceive that my mother, in her essence, is not my mother, or at least not just my mother. She has other identities, of course. Wife, union boss, sister… But more crucially, she is not any of her various roles. Like the woman widowed seven times over, she was far more unique than anyone knew. The real person who happened to be my mother transcends any and all identities given to her by others, or by her actions, or by herself.

But I called her “Mother” anyway, because to me, that’s who she was. I said “Mother,” and she turned toward me. Then she said something she once said to a person who, when first he met her, greeted her as “Mrs. Crippen.” When he addressed her that way, I remember her saying, “Hello! My friends call me Nancy.” And that’s what she said to me, her son (!), in our meeting in that country where there is neither sorrow nor crying, but fullness of joy with all the saints. “My friends call me Nancy,” she said to me, with kindness, with empathy for my understandable mistake.

Every person in your life — even your parent, or your child, or your most intimate companion — every person in your life is someone you do not fully know. And that includes every person here, in this faith community. God knows each person here fully, having formed us from the earth. Christ meets us, and changes us, painfully, in baptism. The Spirit descends on us as a hot pillar of fire, stirring and sending us in mission. The Holy Three know each of us fully. But everyone else just meets parts of us, shards of us, pieces — true pieces, but pieces — of us. Even we ourselves are only partially self-aware.

A shard or piece of the person called Nancy gave birth to other persons: that is part of her story. A good part, a major part, a part of her story that she treasured deeply, all the days of her life! But the person doing the treasuring runs deeper than the part of the person doing the mothering. 

If this sounds to you like a doctrine of individualism, let me rush to assure you that the Holy Three always, relentlessly gather we who are many into one Body. The Father who forms each person from the earth forms them from the same earth; the Son who goes before each person in the baptismal waters drowns and rescues all of us as his own Body; and the Spirit’s fire descends on whole communities, not just individuals. 

But the individuals are all unique. They — you, we — are all wondrously, astonishingly unique. And so, whenever we say, “We who are many are one Body,” that is quite a thing to say. Nancy — also known as my mother — is, like you, endlessly elusive, impossible for other people to fully understand, delightfully unique, wondrously and singularly the beloved of God. Your father, my niece, your grandchild, my second cousin once removed: all of us, a jumble of people with complicated inner lives and a kaleidoscope of inner identities — we all come together as one Body, and we will spend eternity getting to know one another.

All of this should inspire in each of us a holy humility: whether friend or foe, family or stranger, that person beside you will always, forever be out of reach, beyond your grasp, impossible to fully understand. I pray this inspires empathy and compassion in each of us, particularly with those we find hard to know, or hard to like. Perhaps one of the main purposes for this wondrous and troubled universe created by God is to give us all an eternity of time to truly meet, and get to know, one another.

I hope to see you along the Way, and truly come to know you. 

"We are at the same Table, together"

Preached on the Feast of All the Faithful Departed (transferred), November 4, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Wisdom 3:1-9
Psalm 130:2-7
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
John 5:24-27

All Souls Day 1910, by Aladar Korosfoi-Kriesch

A poem by Seamus Heaney:

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

***

We will gather again later this evening, in the dying of the year, in our burial garden, to pray for those we love who have died. We honor our grief, and their lives, with solemnity. We proclaim our hope with faith. And we make our song of alleluia with confidence, even if our voices break with the freight of it all.

Our earliest forebears in the Christian faith, those who knew Jesus personally and the couple of generations that followed them: they were especially concerned about the topic of death. Many of them had assumed that Christ would be returning in their lifetimes, so the deaths of the first members of the movement were alarming and upsetting. They had to reinterpret the Gospel. They had to make sense of how they were a people of the Resurrection who nonetheless experienced physical death.

And so they have left us tonight’s passage in the first letter to the Thessalonians, which may be the very oldest book of the New Testament, in which Paul deliberately, consciously tries to console the first Christians that the dead will rise again and meet them, with the Lord, in the air. We may or may not imagine trumpets and clouds, but we share their great hope, and we proclaim with confidence another consolation they gave us: The first Christians taught us that we meet our beloved dead even now, long before a great apocalyptic reunion. We meet our beloved dead here at this Table. At this Table, the great cloud of witnesses descends as we go up, and all are together for the feast.

But I want to bring all of these grand ideas home for you with a story from my father, from many years ago. It happened in the 1970s, when he was still an attorney in southwest Minnesota. He was beginning to shape his career around family law, focusing particularly on the legal and social needs of children. This focus developed across his career, into the years when he sat on the Minnesota Court of Appeals.

One of my father’s clients was a woman in a domestic dilemma. I don’t recall the details, I think mostly because as her attorney, my father wasn’t at liberty to reveal the details. And they are none of our business, of course. As they worked together, my father learned that this woman was a person of faith, but did not have a community of faith. It’s possible that the family situation had left her abruptly without a church home, for some reason. She was in deep personal distress. She felt alone; she was alone.

My father invited her to come to church – to his church, the church where all seven of his children were baptized, St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Worthington, Minnesota. He mentioned that they offered Holy Communion, if I recall correctly, once a month. (Here, at St. Paul’s, tonight is our fifth celebration of the Holy Eucharist in just four days!)

He invited her to church, and then my father said this to his client: “If you come on a Communion Sunday, you will probably be sitting somewhere else in the room, away from me. We will probably get up at different times to receive Communion. If you see me up there while you’re at your seat, or if you see me in my pew while you’re up there, I want you to know: We are at the same table. Together.” 

We are at the same Table, together.

My father is not near my pew now, which in these years of my life is that bench over there. When I receive the sacrament, I do not see him with my eyes. But as I grow older, I look and feel more and more like my father, and I am weaving these stories of his into my own life. I sometimes look across this room and see someone, and feel that same connection he described to his lonesome and frightened client. 

None of that is possible for me without my father, whose physical presence has escaped far beyond this room, but whose spiritual presence is palpably here, alongside someone you love but cannot see. And so, yes, like you, I grieve, but then I dry my eyes, and I see my father in my very own hands – I have his hands – and I see my father when I look across this room and see you.

Our beloved dead sometimes tear our hearts apart with grief. But they are here with us, meeting the Lord with us, joining their prayers with ours, and drawing alongside us at the Table that banishes loneliness and fear.

The courage to turn the other cheek

Preached on the Feast of All Saints (transferred, Year C), November 2, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18
Psalm 149
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31

Celebration, by John August Swanson

Jesus said to them, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.”

Sometimes, over the course of my life, I have kicked myself with frustration. I’m in a conflict with someone, and I give away the store. I sell myself down the river. I don’t stick up for myself. I lament my own cowardice. And then, deepening my frustration, I think of a snappy comeback two or three days later, far beyond the moment of confrontation when I could have really zapped my adversary with a great line. 

I think of this occasionally when people voice their frustration about weak political resistance during this apocalyptic time. In the Senate primary campaign in the state of Maine, two candidates are taking up familiar positions: an establishment candidate in her late seventies who seems like a safe choice but is hardly inspiring; and a young idealist with the common touch who stirs and inspires many people but has a controversial past, and a controversial tattoo. I read news reports on this and I think, “I’ve never been to Maine, but I’ve seen this play. I know how it ends.”

We could really use a win. And by “we” I don’t mean a particular political party – I really don’t. My parents formed me to belong to one party with the same loyalty my father showed to one car company; but at this point I just want to support someone, anyone who can reduce student debt and reduce atmospheric CO2 and reduce predatory business practices and reduce the toxic madness of social media and reduce voter suppression and reduce the cost of all prescription drugs and reduce the stratospheric housing prices that cause most of our urban problems and reduce the environmental threat of AI and reduce the violence, racism, transphobia, and misogyny in our culture. And then, on day two…

But my hope for a political savior is not all that different from my vain hope to have a quick, witty comeback in a personal argument. It’s an attractive vision: characters portrayed by Martin Sheen and Allison Janney are running the country, and you and I, we’ve got Hollywood moments in our personal lives, rising up with just the right things to say and do, in every situation. We’ve got personal courage and interpersonal skill; we have what it takes to meet the moment; we’ve got this.

We could even point to all the saints as examples of this vision. The saints are great, right? You might know that old hymn with the line, “If you cannot pray like Peter, if you cannot preach like Paul, you can tell the love of Jesus, and say he died for all.” The saints rise in our imaginations as great figures of strength and skill. Dorothy Day was a twentieth-century saint known for her courage. (Okay, Dorothy Day technically isn’t a saint yet, but her cause is being championed in Catholic circles, and she was born in Chicago. I like her odds.) She wasn’t born in a faith tradition, and became an anarchist and social activist in a fully secular context.

But upon her conversion to Roman Catholicism, Dorothy Day quickly made the connection between her secular ideals and Catholic social teaching. She was a co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, which organizes social-service agencies that not only ameliorate suffering for those with food and shelter insecurity, but also advocate for them. The Catholic Worker Movement is known for its nonviolent stance and strong critique of the unequal distribution of wealth.

It would be easy to number Dorothy Day among the mighty saints, the Christian superheroes we’d love to vote for, the champions we need so desperately right now. But though I never met her, I suspect she would be among the many saints who disdained such honors in their lifetimes. This is the great disappointment of the saints: they all went down. Most of the first ones were martyrs, slaughtered for their beliefs. Paul (or someone speaking as Paul would speak) says this in the second letter to Timothy: “As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come.”

The saints are weak. The saints fail. The saints align themselves with the poor and the oppressed, and whenever you do that, you tend to take on the fate of the poor and the oppressed. There is not much worldly glory when you stock our little free pantry, or pull a wagon of hot soup around Uptown. There isn’t much snappy dialogue when you’re knitting hats and socks, or holding the hand of someone in hospice care, or just keeping your mouth shut and making eye contact and truly listening to someone telling you their story. The Catholic Worker Movement doesn’t win pennants, or primaries.

But sainthood – the life of the saints, being a so-called ‘saint’ – carries even harder consequences than the mild humility of social service. There’s a delicate loveliness in being a faithful companion, in sewing warm clothes, in stacking cans and dry goods on a shelf. But Christian saints also enter the fray, and we do so without weapons, without devastating retorts, without winning campaign strategies.

Let’s hear the losing strategy again, the strategy our Savior gives us for political engagement, for battle against the powers and principalities of this world. Here it is:

Jesus said to them, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.”

This can hit us, on first or second hearing, as weak, even pathetic. But a key insight is often lost when we hear these words. When someone says to you, “Turn the other cheek,” they usually misinterpret the teaching as encouraging passive submission. It sounds like we should just be doormats, that we should let the aggressor just take what they like. If the army invades our country or bombs our hospitals, we should just take it, let it happen, give in.

But that is not what Jesus is saying. His first hearers would have caught the subversive resistance in his teaching. In their time and place, any Roman official could strike someone on the face to shame them, but the honor code forbade them to hit the person below them more than once. That crossed a line: two hits amounts to abuse. A Roman official could also demand that a noncitizen give him her coat, but not also her shirt: that’s too much, because now she is naked at nightfall, and the Roman official brings shame upon himself for depriving another human being of basic clothing. 

It’s a subtle tactic that might not make much sense in our own cynical and chaotic place and time, but hear the great insight of this instruction: by turning the other cheek, you shame your opponent, whose face is now red because they went too far. To do this, you need a lot of courage. For one thing, it hurts to be struck on the face. It’s cold at night without your coat or even your shirt. 

Turning the other cheek is a stance of provocative defiance. There is a good reason the first saints were slaughtered. Their movement posed a real threat. For one thing, they shared all that they had in common, and this is an economic provocation: it disturbs the society of the empire when people see a group operating with such health and solidarity. And their movement posed a real threat by making it clear who the bullies were, empowering more and more people to stand up to them.

All of this might seem too subtle. Won’t the good guy do good things by fighting? But this is a powerful way to fight. This is a strong way to be in conflict, and to be effective in a conflict, even if the positive effect happens long after the death of the saint who steps into the fray with their cheek turned. It takes more courage, not less, to let the adversary score points at your own expense, and rise up as the better person.

The theologian Howard Thurman eloquently writes about the predicament of saints of color, who all too often have no choice but to turn their cheeks to the slap of the oppressor. In Thurman’s vivid description, their “backs are against the wall,” existentially. A person of color is rarely going to identify with the Roman official who can physically hit their inferiors and take their coats. Most of the people in this room, including me, are the aggressor in the story. But Saint Howard Thurman presents a Way of subversive resistance that can be taken up by all of us if not for our own sake, then for the sake of our neighbor whose back is against the wall. As we learn so often in the lives of the saints, this work is costly. There’s a reason it takes great courage.

In his great work, Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman tells a story about his mother, and how she embodied for him the courageous Way of Christian faith. She was a Black woman with a Black son: her back was against the wall. But faith helped her overcome any fear or hatred she may have felt, for herself or for her vulnerable son. Here is his story, a story for all God’s children, for all who want to learn how to turn the other cheek with courage. Thurman writes:

“When I was a very small boy, Halley’s comet visited our solar system. For a long time I did not see the giant in the sky because I was not permitted to remain up after sundown … One night I was awakened by my mother, who told me to dress quickly and come with her out into the backyard to see the comet. I shall never forget it if I live forever. My mother stood with me, her hand resting on my shoulder, while I, in utter, speechless awe, beheld the great spectacle with its fan of light spreading across the heavens. The silence was like that of absolute motion. Finally, after what seemed to me an interminable time interval, I found my speech. With bated breath I said, ‘What will happen to us if that comet falls out of the sky?’

“My mother’s silence was so long that I looked from the comet to her face, and there I beheld something in her countenance that I had seen only once before, when I came into her room and found her in prayer. When she spoke, she said, ‘Nothing will happen to us, Howard; God will take care of us.’

“O simplehearted mother of mine, in one glorious moment you put your heart on the ultimate affirmation of the human spirit! Many things have I seen since that night. Times without number I have learned that life is hard, as hard as crucible steel; but as the years have unfolded, the majestic power of my mother’s glowing words has come back again and again, beating out its rhythmic chant in my own spirit. Here are the faith and the awareness that overcome fear and transform it into the power to strive, to achieve, and not to yield.” 

Salt and Light

Preached at the Holy Eucharist with the Commendation and Committal of Ellen and John Hill, November 1, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
Psalm 23
Matthew 5:13-16

Ellen is salt.

John is light.

We begin with salt. Salt is often overlooked, a little canister in your kitchen that hides in plain sight, but salt is everywhere. Just a half teaspoon develops the flavor of your soup, or your cookies. Salt is the base for medications. You use salt when making ice cream to lower the melting point of the ice. Salt preserves food; it de-ices roads and airplane wings. Our bodies require salt to regulate fluids and nerve impulses. We use salt in cleansers. You keep salt on hand for your healing bath, and to soothe your throat. Salt softens hard water. Life on earth began in the salty sea.

And so, in turn, consider Ellen, our salt friend: she is modest and receding, but her influence is everywhere. She draws alongside you with a word, or with her famous side-eye. She quietly reads a library of books and attends countless plays; then she turns that curated wisdom into a lifelong vocation of skillful companionship. She is the ‘fairy godmother’ for countless children and youth; she comes to the aid of foster families; she is a feminist whose chosen full-time job was raising three children; she smiles with mischief when a grandchild says something lightly salty – or whenever they say something that their lightly-salty Nana would have said.

Meanwhile, John blazes. His light is blinding: we all know a polymath when we see one, a dazzling supernova who builds five or six careers just by following his own natural curiosity. In six weeks or so, under the shadows of the winter solstice, the church will once again imagine God as light. (More specifically, we will imagine Jesus Christ as our Dayspring.) ‘Dayspring’ is an older, poetic word for sunrise, for dawn, for a rising light, for a glorious star in the east. Our John shines with the Dayspring of Christ.

Ask John a question about this room, this sanctuary, and John’s star will rise in splendor: he’ll delightedly recount all the stories, all the background details that formed this house of prayer. He knows all about this pulpit, how it’s built like a boat, reinforced for hard sailing. He can tell you how everything works in here, architecturally but also theologically. He treasures hilarious old stories of wild parishioners who paused here. His eyes dance with light as he regales you, as he teaches you, as he makes your day with ideas and images, with stories and insights, with his endless dreams, with his insatiable creativity, in the visual and dramatic arts, but also in music – endless music. But then, to your astonishment, John turns the conversation back toward you: burning brightly with God’s light, John is truly interested in you, his neighbor, his friend, his kin. 

Ellen’s salt is everywhere, making life delicious, saving us from loneliness, encouraging and soothing us, delighting us with a word. And John’s light shines into every shadow, every dull corner, every dark day. 

Are they saints, these two? Of course! But they are also – and bear with me here: I’m about to say something that Ellen and John might heartily endorse – they are also, by heaven’s standards, not quite newsworthy. They are, in God’s sight, delightfully ordinary. All of you who sing their praises, please know that I share in your song, with gusto! Ellen and John are not newsworthy in God’s sight only because all of us are the salt of the earth; all of us are the light of the world. All of us, together, are salt and light.

The Good News does not belong only to two of our grievously departed friends, as much as our hearts ache with their incomprehensible absence. We join them, we draw alongside them, as salt and light. The salt washes over us at Baptism; the light dances on all of our heads, each of us aflame with the Spirit.

We grieve because these two are so easy to love, so tremendously strong and kind and wise and good. We grieve deeply, for those excellent reasons. But we also know – even if it’s hard at this particular moment to believe – we also know that everything Ellen and John taught us, everything they were and are, everything they showed us in lives of savory goodness and dancing sunlight, everything we grieve today is still right here, always here, close at hand.

You all are the salt of the earth, sent from here to save and preserve; to cleanse and enhance; to regulate and ravish; to deepen the flavors of life on this lovely planet.

You all are the light of the world, sent from here to enlighten those clouded with ignorance; to warm those chilled by the harsh injustice of the world; to delight and even dazzle Ellen and John’s grandchildren – and all children – with the wonders of this life. 

But we can all be forgiven for lingering a while longer in God’s garden, to grieve our departed friends. I’ll close with an image of a saint, an image of a woman in Paradise who captures or reflects – for me – the spirits of both Ellen and John. The Anglican writer C.S. Lewis wrote a fantasy novel that takes place at the edge, at the outskirts, of heaven. Lewis describes a saint walking down from the glorious mountains of heaven proper to speak to a poor soul at the edge, someone who isn’t sure he wants to stay.

We readers of the story see all of this through the eyes of a visitor, who turns to his heavenly guide with wonder and disbelief. Here is the scene:

“All down one long aisle of the forest the under-sides of the leafy branches had begun to tremble with dancing light… Some kind of procession was approaching us, and the light came from the persons who composed it.

“First came bright Spirits… who danced and scattered flowers… Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys and girls. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no [one] who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done… Only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.

“‘Is it?... Is it [the blessed Virgin Mary]?’ I whispered to my guide.

“‘Not at all,’ said he. ‘It’s someone you’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.’

“[I said], ‘She seems to be… well, a person of particular importance?’

“‘[Yes]. She is one of the great ones. You have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.’

“‘And who are these gigantic people,’ [I asked]... ‘Look! They’re like emeralds… who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?’

“‘Haven’t you read your Milton?’ [my guide replied.] ‘“A thousand liveried angels lackey her.”’

“‘And who are all these young men and women on each side?’

“‘They are her sons and daughters.’

“‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’

“‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’

“‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’

“‘No… [H]er motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more… [M]en looked on her [with] the kind of love that made them… truer to their own wives… Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.’

“I looked at my Teacher in amazement.” (End quote.)

Ellen and John are great saints – salt not only of the earth but the salt of heaven too; light not only of the world but light that shines even in that heavenly country. Ellen and John show us these delights; they teach us this Way. But like ordinary Sarah Smith of Golders Green, the salt always enriches someone else; the light always shines not on the saint himself but on the wondrous world around us.

Grieve, and keep grieving, for these beloved friends of ours. But hear also these great words of comfort, consolation, and also challenge:

You are the salt of the earth.

You are the light of the world.

God's compassions, new every morning

Preached on the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25C), October 26, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Lord Be Merciful to Me, a Sinner, by Gilderhus Grant

A reading from Lamentations.

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for God’s compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for the Lord.”

We could use some good news. We could use a few compassions of God, freshly baked this morning. Flaky, luscious compassions: the mercies of God lovingly prepared for us, like a croissant with homemade jam and hot coffee.

We could all benefit from deep rest. I think it is both probable and likely that every person in this room is sleep-deprived.

Since our celebration in late June, when the bishop was here and we thanked everyone who made it possible to refurbish and rebuild this church, we have grieved the deaths of four people: Tom, John, Ellen, and now, just two mornings ago, our own Robin Jones. Please pray for his wife, Denise, one of our companions who prepares God’s compassions, new every morning. Denise is in our knitting group, the group of saints who keep neighbors warm during the cold and wet months. Denise is also one of our protestors, giving voice to the voiceless. Pray for Denise, as she grieves… and as you grieve.

I miss Robin. I do not know, and neither do you, a harder worker in the service of this altar. Robin took every role, every task, extremely seriously. He sought out Gary James, our musician, for coaching, and practiced for hours to sing our prayers. He practiced holding and swinging the incense thurible. He carefully studied all the details of our liturgies. He prepared short introductions for the altar-serving team, to rally us and make us ready.

But we are not only exhausted with grief for our companion Robin. We pray fervently for several people in the parish who are sick, sharing in their anxiety, and also their hope. We have organized weekly protests while keeping up our usual life-giving mission in this neighborhood, but the political turmoils keep raging, as they have done for nearly a decade now. I wonder if it feels right now like it did two generations ago, when St. Paul’s buried so many beloved friends and the world was ravaged by the HIV crisis.

I want us to rest. I pray for the repose of the souls of our friends, and for all who mourn; I pray for all who are sick, frightened, and alone; but my deepest prayer is for rest.

And I have one more prayer, for you, for all of us. I pray that we might learn from two teachers in our life of faith. We just met them again, in the Good News according to Luke. For many of us, they might be flat stock characters by now, stale stereotypes from an old-time Bible lesson. But they still have something to offer. They still hold compassions of God in their hands, new this morning.

The first is a Pharisee, and right away I fear I’ve lost your attention. ‘Pharisee’ is a Bible word, and it hardly evokes warmth or kindness. We meet the Pharisees when they rise up against Jesus, and they rarely transcend the caricature of bad guys in a B movie. Jesus sketches a portrait of a Pharisee in today’s parable, and it’s not flattering: this Pharisee “trusts in himself that he is righteous, and regards others with contempt.”

But the Pharisees were faithful. They did their homework. They cared about things worth caring about: “What does our tradition really teach us?” they wondered. “How does one live a good life?” “What does it mean to be righteous?” There is even a possibility that Jesus himself was a Pharisee.

This particular Pharisee may be guilty of too much self-regard, but he is praying faithfully, and he’s praying next to a tax collector. Tax collectors were collaborators with the empire. They were part of the problem. They were not known to take the tradition seriously. They didn’t seem to care about living a good and honorable life. For us today, in this room, the Pharisee might be pulling one of our SPiN wagons around the neighborhood, serving hot soup to our neighbors. Meanwhile, the tax collector might be wearing a red ballcap, and attending a church very different from St. Paul’s Seattle. So: give the Pharisee a second look. 

Before I move on to give the tax collector a second look, I want to offer one more small defense of the Pharisee. There is a fuzzy, misleading translation of one small word in today’s Gospel, which was originally written in Koine Greek. In our English translation, we hear that the tax collector “went down to his home justified rather than” the Pharisee; but the original text doesn’t necessarily say that. It may be more accurate to say that the tax collector went down to his home justified “alongside” the Pharisee. If so, they were both justified, walking alongside each other, like a couple of altar servers walking down this main aisle.

So: The Pharisee isn’t a bad guy. He might not be someone you warm to; he might strike you as stuffy and pious; his contempt for others is not attractive; we’ve all met someone who is undeniably good but not good company. But I want that Pharisee on our team. I want to be his friend. I think he is our friend.

Next: the tax collector. He often seems much more relatable to us. What’s not to like about a guy who confronts himself with bracing honesty? But remember: in the ears of the first people to hear this parable, the tax collector was not a friend, not a companion, not relatable. If the Pharisee was a stuffed shirt, the tax collector was dangerous, even deadly. He defrauded them. Tax collectors of that day and time were not like IRS employees, just making sure people filed their tax returns. They collected funds for the rapacious Roman Empire, and only made money of their own by fleecing people on the margins. 

In this brief parable, Jesus doesn’t tell us whether the fictional tax collector mended his ways. If he did, then the story isn’t all that realistic: tax collectors didn’t exactly have good career prospects. They were trapped under the boot of Rome just like everybody else, and it’s extremely risky to let go of a trade that pays for your food and your home. This brings us back, then, to the relatability of this character: he knows he does what he should not do, and he repents of that, even as he may go right ahead and keep on doing it.

Soon we will finish our prayers here, and our time together as a community on this Lord’s Day will end. Then, like the Pharisee and the tax collector, we will go down to our homes, alongside one another. And, again like the Pharisee and the tax collector, we will all be more than one thing: good but sometimes insufferable; bad but sometimes self-aware and remorseful.

But hear this Good News: today, we will go down to our homes justified. God justifies us; God makes us righteous – righteous, a word that might sound haughty to your ears, but a good word that really just means healthy, strong, in right relationship, of sound mind, of stout heart. God gives us God’s compassions, new every morning. These compassions make us righteous, that is, they make us useful, and good, as we go from here to mend the world.

And so, when you go down to your home today, justified in God’s sight, I will be saying a prayer for you. I will be praying that whoever you are and however complicated you may be – the good and the bad within you, the proud yet prayerful Pharisee inside you who brushes uncomfortably against your inner tax collector with a heart of gold – whoever you are and however complicated you may be, I pray that you will rest in the soothing peace and healing mercy of God, all the night long.