The historical Paul

Preached on the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18C), September 7, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Rev. Samuel Torvend.

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 1
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

Woodcut Print by Sister Mary Grace Thul

By the beginning of the second week of the semester, my university students are well aware of the fact that if they commit the cardinal sin of the academy, their names will be written in the book of the damned – that being the cardinal sin of plagiarism – of using someone’s else’s research and writing as if it were their own. For the simple minded, we call it cheating. One student, a young man who flaunted my attendance policy and showed little interest in the course, turned in a midterm essay of such brilliance and superb writing that I asked him to see me. Thinking he would be congratulated for his wonderful work, he smilingly entered my office. He beamed brightly when I told him that I marveled at his essay; that is, until I showed him the copy I had made of the lengthy paragraph he wrote with his own hand on the second week of the term – a paragraph of monumental incoherence, botched grammar, and poor spelling. I then asked him how he had made such amazing improvement in a scant five weeks. Well, to say the least, the jig was up. He was caught and, thankfully, repentant with the promise that there would be no more plagiarism.

Such was not the case in the ancient world of Jesus and Paul. To copy someone else’s work or to use their name as one’s own was a common and legal practice. And so we know now from the labor of biblical scholars that the historical Paul, the Paul who experienced a conversion on the road to Damascus, established Christian communities, and was martyred in Rome, the historical Paul created only seven – seven – letters that were included in the New Testament, the letter to Philemon, our second reading, being one of them. Other authors, writing after the death of Paul, claimed Paul as the author of their letters – letters that either revised or contradicted the writings of the historical Paul. These writers knew of Paul’s fame and thus wanted to capitalize on his fame by using his name even as they endeavored to tone down or reject what was his revolutionary teaching. 

For instance, in the historical Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he clearly states that in Christian baptism, the patriarchy of his culture is washed away: women and men are fundamentally equal in Christ, something unheard of in the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean in which a woman was viewed as property or was considered a second class citizen who had to obey her father, husband, and son. But there is more. At the end of his letter to the Romans, the historical Paul spends considerable time praising women as leaders in the Christian movement: praising them as apostles, as preachers and evangelists, as church planters, as hosts for the Christian community and thus as leaders at the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist. I mean any Roman male, raised into the gender roles of imperial society, would be utterly horrified by this practice and view it as either foolhardy or subversive. As one Roman governor said of women leaders and their Christian congregations, “they are a contagion that needs to be confined and cured before it spreads any further.” 

And yet if we read the first letter to Timothy, said to be written by Paul but actually written by an author upset with the historical Paul, we hear these words: “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” (2:11-12). Well, let’s be clear: an apostle, an evangelist, a preacher, a church planter, and a presider at the Lord’s Table is not going to be silent and submissive. Thus, we discern in this letter to Timothy, written fifty years after Paul’s death, considerable anxiety over Paul’s clear intent to subvert an established cultural bias and practice. But to do this – to question and then disregard what served the desires of elite males – would lead to skepticism, intolerance, why even death. And so we discern in Timothy’s letter a profound anxiety concerning women in positions of leadership. Not so with Paul.

But this was not all. Jesus and Paul lived in the imperial Roman economy: an economy dependent on slave labor. Indeed, every city in the empire had a slave market and by some estimates twenty percent of the population was enslaved. Writing in the late 50s, some twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, Paul asks Philemon to release Onesimus, a fellow Christian and a temporary associate of Paul, from the bonds of slavery. Clearly Onesimus was owned by Philemon, but for the historical Paul, there can be no slavery among Christians for this demeaning and deathly practice was and is washed away in the waters of baptism. “I appeal to you on the basis of love,” writes Paul, to release Onesimus who Paul refers to so tenderly as his “own heart.” NO to slavery, writes Paul, for slavery is the objectification of a human being created in the image of a loving and liberating God. 

And yet if we read the letter to the Colossians, a letter thought to be written by Paul but in fact written by another author toward the end of the first century, we hear this: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything” (3:22), a clear rejection of the historical Paul’s insistence on freedom from slavery.

Now we might imagine that the concern of the historical Paul to end slavery at least among Christians is a thing of the past. It’s illegal, is it not? And yet – and yet – the exploitation of human beings is far from ended. Seattle is a major center of human trafficking on the West Coast. Many of the clothes and shoes we wear are produced in overseas sweatshops or by Los Angeles garment workers who are paid less than the minimum wage. And then there is debt bondage: the use of high interest rates to  keep one in perpetual servitude to a predatory lender. And this summer, a Midwestern congressman introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to loosen child labor laws. In all seriousness, the promoter of the bill said this: “I want young kids to experience the reward of hard work.” 

Dear friends, the historical Paul is the patron of this house, this  parish. His searing critique of cultural patriarchy, slavery in many forms, and economic injustice forms his legacy, a legacy of which you and I are the inheritors, a legacy that flows from the waters of the pool that marks the entry to this house. Thus, to dip our fingers in that pool and trace the sign of the cross over our hearts is to renew our commitment to live into that legacy in a time, sadly and tragically, marked by cruelty and corruption at the highest level of government. And yet here, in this place, we may join Paul in his prayer: Refresh our hearts in Christ! Yes, refresh our hearts in Christ, confident that we share in a power greater than any predator, any tyrant. Yes, I say, let us touch that loving, life-giving, and liberating water and let it then flow through us into God’s wounded yet beloved world.

I could use a miracle right about now

Preached on the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16C), August 24, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Rev. Stephen Crippen.

A hallway of Mary Washington Hospital, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Photo by The Rev. Dana Caldwell.

I could use a miracle right about now. How about you?

Would you like a miraculous healing? If so, I hear you. Just last Monday a longtime friend of mine told me that her husband is suffering a resurgence of cancer; and here at St. Paul’s we have a long list of people in need of physical healing. How about we just magically take care of all that?

But resuscitation from death is another miracle I’m interested in, like the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Now, I know that the raising of Lazarus is a deeply symbolic story that taps into mystical truth, not concrete, scientifically observable truth. And I know that mystical truth — the truth we discover on our journey of faith in God — is in many ways more important and more valuable to us than the facts we might learn from a news report. And I know that if the raising of Lazarus actually had been a literally factual story, nobody asked Lazarus how he felt about having to die twice. I know all of that. But I’m still a fan of literal returns from the grave. In fact, I would like to order, let’s see, one two three four five… How about ten of them, just to get started?

Or how about a political or electoral miracle — who’s with me? If we could only magically, I don’t know, change the district maps in all fifty states so that everyone gets equal representation, I would love that. And I confess I have some dark dreams about magical justice being served on politicians who invade countries and kill or starve innocent people. So, about miracles: I’m a fan. And like many of us, I harbor compelling daydreams of miracles as magic, miracles as wondrous supernatural fixes that we so desperately need in this war-torn, grief-infused world. 

But the miracles we encounter in Holy Scripture are, at once, both disappointing by comparison to magical events, and more valuable and inspiring than the kind of magic we would experience in a fantasy world where all of our problems just go away. So let’s delve more deeply into the initially disappointing, but ultimately inspiring miracle stories in the Gospel, the Good News, of Jesus Christ.

Today we hear about a miracle in the healing category, an encounter in which Jesus lays his hands on a woman suffering a spiritual ailment with physical symptoms. In our time, we would probably just diagnose her with osteoporosis. After eighteen years of painful bone fractures that stooped her over, she now stands tall. (Sidebar: eighteen years: this is a nod to the eighteen people, mentioned earlier in the chapter, who died in a freak accident. At this point in Luke’s narrative, eighteen means a lot — a lot of victims of accident; a lot of years to suffer chronic pain and limited mobility. Think of it this way: oppressive injustice these days is eighteen times worse than it would be in a peaceful, ethical, comfortable era of history, if such an era has ever occurred.) But back to the healing miracle: this woman can look across at people now, not just strain to look up to them. She can raise her eyes to the stars.

She was already in the synagogue, mind you. This is not a story of synagogue exclusion. She is a woman in a patriarchal culture, but she belongs in the synagogue. She is bent over with a physical ailment, but she belongs in the synagogue. 

But she is not reliably seen in the synagogue. Luke is careful to write that Jesus first sees her (seeing her is, all by itself, wondrous) and then touches her with his healing hand. We can relate to overlooking this woman. Real talk, all of us, from time to time, look over and around people, for one reason or another. This woman is bent over, and she’s been that way for years and years. Does she matter? Is she a leader? Is she interesting? Is she gifted? We might never know, because she’s all too easy to overlook.

Years ago, the priest Pete Strimer (may his memory be a blessing) gave me some advice. “When you look out at the congregation,” he said, “Try to see who isn’t here.” This is a step further than the prophetic act of Jesus seeing the bent-over woman. Father Pete suggests an even higher standard: train your eyes to learn the miraculous skill of seeing who isn’t here, particularly those who aren’t here because they lack a certain privilege, or because they know they aren’t really welcome.

But, again, maybe it’s just disappointing, the idea that it’s wondrous, perhaps even a miracle simply to notice someone who, in our stratified, judgmental culture, is all but invisible. It’s understandable to want more drama, more magic in miracles: the disabled man gets up and walks; Jesus rubs mud into their eyes and they see; Lazarus comes out of the cave. It’s not enough, for many of us, to say that these are just stories and parables, that they are symbolic vignettes that are written not because they literally happened, but because we’re supposed to learn something meaningful about Jesus.

We want more.

We can almost get there when we point to stories of wondrous healing that happen in our own time. I have one from my days as a chaplain at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, Virginia. A young man was found at the bottom of a swimming pool, having been under water for maybe ten minutes. He arrived at the trauma unit as good as dead; but he woke up. This is a true and startling story of wondrous recovery. The patient himself interpreted it as a second chance in life, given to him by the Holy One. 

But what about the many hospital patients (and their survivors) at Mary Washington, or at the University of Washington, who tell distinctly different stories of loss and grief? Why does the patient in, say, room 1502 get a second chance, but 1504 and 1506 do not?

And anyway, we all know better: life is hard; if magic is more real than a children’s fantasy story, it is not reliably, predictably real for us. I will not see my parents again in this life. I bear a few psychological wounds that I sense will never fully close. I will never preach to you the lie that what hurts your heart today can magically go away, if you just pray hard enough. That is an emotionally abusive thing to say to someone.

But we can say — we can clearly say, this:

If miracles are wondrous, restorative events that can hardly be believed, then our lives are full of them, and we are all empowered to perform these wondrous acts in our ordinary lives. This week, one of our pastoral caregivers visited a member of the parish who was experiencing severe physical pain. The visit was ordinary: a rung doorbell, an embrace, a gentle conversation, a prayer, and that was that. But the visit somehow relieved much of the pain. Is this a miracle? Well, no: if miracles are magical healings, that didn’t happen. But, yes: if miracles are unexpected — and sometimes unbelievable — occasions of God’s grace, then this counts as one, and everyone in this room, and in the hospital, may experience it.

Note well: the synagogue healing in Luke we hear today is more like this kind of healing encounter than a story of magic. When Jesus called the woman in the temple to come over to him, he didn’t then wave a wand or chant a spell. There was no flash of light, no theatrics or drama. He simply saw her, noticed her, and invited her to come to him. Then he gently put his hand on her, and told her that she was “set free” from her ailment. Not magically healed; not wondrously zapped into robust health. Free. He proclaimed freedom: freedom from isolation, from being ignored; freedom from never being touched with care by another person; freedom from a constant downward gaze.

This is all extraordinary. Yet it all happens within this physical, tangible universe. When we pray together here, and break bread together here, we do not escape the world and its many heartbreaks. My mother coped with lifelong chronic pain — at one point, in her late thirties, she was bent over and bent sideways. The man I cared for in Virginia who recovered from near-drowning did not return to a problem-free, risk-free, pain-free life. And in all of our contemplations, we must remember the danger — even the wickedness — of ableism, the idea that physical health is a sign of God’s favor, or the idea that physical limitations or physical disease is a sign of God’s judgment, or evidence of a personal failing. No. No, no, no. 

The woman in the synagogue: nothing was wrong with her, in her essence. She had every right to be where she was, and everyone knew that, for there she was in the synagogue, and no one was moving against her. She did not need a magical healing that would change her body into something everyone else prefers. And she was not deficient in God’s sight, for any reason.

But Jesus did wondrously relieve her of isolation and loneliness; and he relieved her of the physical impact of that loneliness, which had deepened the severity of her osteoporosis. And he demonstrated that meeting this woman’s needs mattered more than the community’s need to do other important things on their holy day. 

All of that is wondrous, miraculous: it is news of a difference; it is surprising. In that place and time, it was shocking. Perhaps the woman herself found it almost impossible to believe. Her body responded, at least for a while, with increased ability. Raised up and rescued from isolation, she praised God, joyfully. She truly had a most miraculous day.

Here we are, on another holy day, and while it is not Saturday and we are not Jewish, our rituals on the first day of the week descend from those at the synagogue of that ancient unnamed woman. We are about to pray for everyone in need… indeed, for the whole world. To pray for them, we must notice them: we have to see them. And then, later, we will embrace each other in a sign of the risen Lord’s peace. We will touch one other in a healing, restorative way. 

I am convinced that more than a few of us are desperate to receive these mercies.

See and touch; pray and embrace: are not these ordinary, easily overlooked things actually, well…

miracles?

"You must have been so scared"

Preached on the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin (transferred), August 17, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

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

Our Lady of Sorrows, by Christine Miller

Hail, holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, your eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile, show us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

Long ago now — in the mid-nineteen-eighties — my father, on a whim, bought a used dark-green Saab coupe. I remember it wasn’t expensive. But it was news of a difference. My dad always bought Chryslers, usually a Dodge van or sedan. The Saab was a lark, a fun step sideways for a straight-laced, silent-generation father of seven who sat on the state appellate court and pledged to his Lutheran church and generally did things conventionally.

And one day I foolishly, ridiculously rolled that Saab on its side and into a ditch. I wasn’t even supposed to drive it. I called and asked him if I could, and he said “No, I’ll be home soon, sit tight,” but I went ahead and drove it anyway, to take my friend to a nearby restaurant to apply for a job. She and I walked the rest of the way to the restaurant and I asked to use their phone, and I called my father. I told him what happened.

“Oh damn it, damn it, damn it,” he said. I started to say “I’m sorry” but he cut me off. I think he asked if I was okay, but everything was a miserable blur after his initial outburst. He was a decent man and a good father: he did care that I was okay. If he didn’t ask, well… Oh, he probably asked.

The cute green Saab was totaled. I have a memory that it had cost only three thousand dollars, or something, so it wouldn’t have taken much to total it. In the next scene of the drama, I’m sitting at the kitchen table, tense, defeated, guilty, ridiculous. My father is pacing, maybe muttering, mostly just going about his evening, and going through the motions of scolding me. My dad wasn’t a scold. He didn’t shout. Silent generation, remember? Endurance is their watchword.

But my mother was sitting opposite me at the table. She looked at me. Then she said, “You must have been so scared.” I burst into tears. “I really am sorry,” I wailed. “I know,” she said. “He’ll be alright. You’ll be alright.”

Being my parent was a hardship for my dad that day, and for that, he truly has my empathy. And I’m forever grateful for his lifelong, nonviolent, powerfully ethical management of his anger, and his disappointment. None of us revisited this misery after that day. The world turned. We really were alright.

But I had something more, something precious, something invaluable: I had, for the rest of my life, the memory of my mother’s mercy, my mother’s lovingkindness, her chesed, to borrow the Hebrew word. “You must have been so scared,” she said. Behold the brilliance of this line: It was not a question — questions are stressful when one is in crisis. It was pure empathy, applied like a balm to my open wound. The healing began immediately, on contact. I was a poor banished child of Eve, sitting there at that kitchen table, and my mother was the Blessed Mother. I was not praying to my dad for forgiveness (even then I knew better than to ask for forgiveness when the offense was so fresh). I was not praying to God, either. My soul was just crying this out into the universe: “I want my mommy.”

And my mother heard that.

And now here we all are, here in Seattle, some forty years later, a world — a universe — away from that dumb kid who wrecked his dad’s inexpensive car. Maybe some of us are wrestling with guilt about one thing or another. Certainly many of us are despairing about something. A majority of us, I know, are reeling with grief here at this church, in the wake of the deaths of two companions whose souls magnified the Lord, companions who brought forth beauty in this place, companions who were lightly funny and fiercely kind. There is a stinging, pulsing anguish here, for many of us. And those who never met John or Tom are likely carrying into this room other wounds of the heart.

Yet today, I say with bracing joy, today it is Mother Mary herself who sits opposite the table, not my parents’ kitchen table in suburban St. Paul Minnesota, but this Table. Mother Mary herself gazes at us across this Table, and in my hearing she says, “You must have been so scared.”

And she says more. “You must have been so stunned, so wrecked, so aggrieved, so hurt, so confused, so mad, so horrified, so broken by all of this.” 

And she says more. “You must still be reeling, still grieving, still panicking as you try to make sense of this heartbreaking world, as you try to make sense of how small you are and how great the troubles are. You must still be scared.”

She need not ask us even one question. Like my own skillful mother, Mary knows that questions are stressful in a crisis. And I suppose she knows all of the answers anyway.

We craft beautiful prayers to speak — to sing — deep longing to Mother Mary, the Mother of God. We approach Our Lady of Sorrows with solemnity, knowing that she understands our grief; she has felt our fears. She never got over the death of her son. How could she? Our Jewish cousins would call her a shakula, a mother whose child has died. You can only befriend a shakula; you can only draw alongside them; there are no questions; there are no words. Yes, he was resurrected, but he came back different, and he came back belonging to the whole universe.

A shakula may understand the Christian Gospel that Christ trampled death by death, and bestowed life to everyone in the grave; yes, yes, we are Christian: we proclaim this Good News. But we don’t escape the scorching reality of death, even if it’s not the end of our story. We feel the great tear in the fabric of community when someone we adore departs from our immediate midst. Our beloved dead gather with us here, at this table, maybe on either side of Mother Mary herself. But that does not magically ease the pain of their departure from one of these benches, next to you, next to me.

But being with the grieving, being with each other — it can be healing. It is a balm. When we make art of Our Lady of Sorrows, like this icon, or, even more vividly, when we imagine seven swords rending her heart, we begin to find our way to consolation, wholeness, and hope. Sorrowful Mary carries grief right into the heart of God, right into the community of the Holy Three. And there, awash in divine love, that grief is redemptive, transformative, creative. It binds our hearts but also opens them, in mercy, to the grieving person on our right and on our left.

We live in a serendipitous, phenomenal, unpredictable world of shocking accidents and piercing grief, and so we are heartbroken. But our heartbreak is hallowed, it is harrowed, by the Risen One, the Risen One who still bears five grievous wounds on his hands, feet, and heart.

So go ahead and gaze at Sorrowful Mary, as she reaches toward you in mercy. Go ahead and ask her to help, hold, and guide you in these fraught and frantic days, when our hearts ache so badly. As for me, I may say just one thing to the Mother of God, the one robed in stars who stands on the moon, the Queen of Saints herself. But before I tell you my prayer to Mary, I’ll say in my own defense that like most of us here, I have grown to adulthood and grappled with hardship. I am not a child, or a fool. I know well the cost of love. And I know well that the mercies we receive from the Blessed Mother, and from her wounded and risen son — I know that these mercies must be shared by us in acts of liberation that lift up the lowly and send the rich empty away. I know all of this.

But Our Lady of Sorrows understands how young and small we sometimes feel, as the world breaks our hearts. We don’t need to pretend in her presence. And we shouldn’t submit to the weakness and cowardice of cynicism. We should choose instead to be bravely honest, and courageously vulnerable, as people of faith, people of hope, people of love. So I may say just one thing to the Blessed Mother, one thing that will restore my strong heart, focus my good mind, and sustain, for me, a ministry of mercy in my one small life. I know that she will hear me, and respond gracefully, when I pray this to her:

I want my mommy.

Jesus is a thief

Preached on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14C), August 10, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Rev. Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

Lantern for a Long Night © Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com

“Know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

Jesus is … a thief.

Maybe it’s difficult for many of us to imagine the Son of Man, the Risen One, Jesus the Good Shepherd, as a thief. Just a few moments ago, we imagined God as a caring parent (“Have no fear, little flock”), and then we heard about Jesus as a loving master, happily coming home from a wedding party. (Of course, the master image is more complicated: a master — loving or not — can’t be a master without slaves.)

But then Luke the evangelist sharpens the imagery even further: Now Jesus is … a thief, arriving unexpectedly in the wee hours, not unlatching the door but breaking in. 

This is a warning. Jesus is challenging us to get ready, to be ready. He’s confronting us with the dangers of complacence. He’s not kidding around: “Listen! I’m like a thief in the night,” he seems to be saying. We might feel an instinctive resistance to this comparison: we love Jesus, you and I (or at least most of us try to), and if you ask me, I find it hard (maybe impossible) to love someone who gives me a jump scare and takes all my stuff.

A few months ago we suffered a robbery at St. Paul’s. A thief came in the night and took our copper downspouts on the south side of the office building. It had already been a long two and a half years, disruption everywhere, noise and dust and commotion and seemingly endless complications in our effort to refit this mission base. That morning was a new emotional low for me. I didn’t reflect on the metaphorical insights of “God as thief.” I confess I didn’t (at least in the moment) pray for the thieves. I tried to remind myself that this is just a building, and that if we’re not careful we could fashion our possessions into idols. But I mostly just got mad. I fumed, helplessly. Then we installed new, less attractive downspouts, and moved on. And no, that theft doesn’t even register, even a little, on the long list of outrages plaguing the planet right now. “Come on, get over it,” I told myself. And so I did.

But now I can reflect. Jesus as… thief. God as… thief. That God or Jesus is unpredictable, even dangerous, coming by night to take things from us: there is something here. There is something to this idea.

If Jesus is a thief, then he likely takes from us things we don’t need, or worse, things that damage us the longer we hold on to them. What do you hold onto that might damage you, or diminish you? It’s easy to get materialistic, particularly in an anxious time, and those objects, or those mutual funds, can become like household gods, little idols. So Jesus the thief tells us to “make purses that do not wear out,” that is, set our hearts on our deepest commitments, our deepest values, and our deepest passions. Self-giving love — Jesus takes up that theme, once again. Self-giving love: when I give away what I would rather hoard, my treasure is stored in a flourishing community, and my heart soon follows.

But Jesus the thief may be pickpocketing a few other things, too, when we’re not looking. He might take from us a cherished belief, an old attitude, or a prejudice. I have most of the privileges that make life easier here on Earth, and while I’ll keep many of them all my life — I can’t divest myself of white privilege — Jesus steals from me the easy comfort of ignorance. The more we learn about privilege and power, the harder it gets to ignore how we benefit from it while it harms and even kills others.

But let’s reflect on all of this a bit more. I suspect this idea, this metaphor, this image — Jesus as thief – makes more and more sense to us as we get older. I am well into my fifties, and I’m discovering that certain things have gone missing, or have just fallen away. Things like the ease of sleeping through the night, or remembering why I came into a room. Illness, particularly later in life, can feel like theft, like a thief coming in the night and taking pieces of a person away.

I’ve long feared that I might have a crisis of faith when I lose physical abilities, because my spiritual practices are been centered on physical wellness and fitness. But nowhere in the Bible do we read that God favors the physically fit, or that as long as you’re young, hale, and hearty, God smiles on you. And we definitely never read in Holy Scripture that we will retain all the blessings of this life. Quite the contrary: Jesus is reliably found breaking bread with those who live on this earth but do not walk on it, and those who see into the souls of their neighbors but can’t physically see anything at all. Jesus is particularly concerned with those who are rejected from their communities or from the temple because they don’t meet a rigid standard of health or ability.

Now, I don’t believe and would never preach that Jesus the thief takes our health from us as we age. God or Jesus does not take things from us to teach us lessons, or test our mettle, or make us stronger. That heresy is always close at hand, so be alert. But maybe Jesus the thief takes away our complacency about health, our easy assumptions about physical ability, our vain beliefs about personal strength. “God’s weakness is stronger than human strength,” Paul, our patron, teaches us. Maybe this is partly what he’s talking about.

Some of us who are still quite young might occasionally feel robbed, as well: you may feel robbed of your innocence, or your future. If so, I hasten to say that Jesus the thief is not the guilty party in all of these losses. Maybe, for younger people, Jesus the thief is present in quieter ways, in your deeper moments of reflection and insight. Maybe you feel powerless and frustrated, or not taken seriously, or desperate for security. You’re facing years of student debt, or forbidding housing costs, or a changing and shrinking job market, or the specter of rising seas and rising temperatures. If Jesus is a thief for you, maybe he steals a belief you may have had that you alone can solve these problems, or that you were invincible. Maybe he takes from you your easy but unfair judgments of the older generations! But hear this good news: Jesus the thief also steals loneliness: in all of these struggles, you are not alone.

So… Jesus the thief takes one thing or another from us: the idols or household gods of possessions or money that isolate us and damage our communities; our easy assumptions and our casual tolerance of evil and injustice; the worldviews, or the views of ourselves, that no longer work for us as we age; the basic belief that we’ve got this, that I’ve got this, that we don’t need one another, that we don’t need a savior and shepherd, a teacher and guide. In all of this stealing, Jesus is, well, a holy thief.

But there may be one more thing that Jesus the holy thief takes from us, and that is this: Jesus the holy thief steals from us our casual assumptions about himself, about God, about the Holy Three. We gather here week by week and praise the One God whose open hand showers us with blessings, and turns us toward one another in love. Yes. We affirm that God in Jesus says to us, “Have no fear, little flock,” and that Jesus the Good Master is warmly opening the door for all of us — particularly those we have harmed — to come inside where it is warm, and the table groans with food. Yes.

But Jesus the holy thief steals from us our limited, sometimes simplistic ideas about who God is, and what God does. God is not a cosmic problem solver, and we who preach Christ crucified know this well. God is not tame, or under our control; God is not predictable. But we keep coming back, we keep giving thanks, we keep saying Yes to the mission, even as we work to accept that God does not save us from everything, or explain everything; and accept that God may take from us things we treasure — all those easy assumptions and beliefs about ourselves and the world.

I want to close with a story about God that may not imagine God (or Jesus) as a thief, exactly, but certainly appreciates that God is always beyond anything we would call easy, or controllable, or tame. The Anglican writer C.S. Lewis, in his children’s stories, imagines God as an enormous and dangerous lion. A good lion, yes! But not tame, not easy. To be in the presence of God requires our bravery, and our humility. In one vivid scene, a girl named Jill encounters the lion when she is desperately thirsty, and the lion sits between her and a refreshing stream of water. These are children’s stories, remember, so it won’t surprise you that the lion is able to talk. When Jill encounters this enormous, dangerous, yet strong and loving beast, she grows up a lot in a few moments. She finds courage she didn’t know she had, the courage of the daughter of a holy thief. Here is the critical moment in their encounter:

“Are you not thirsty?” said the Lion. “I’m dying of thirst,” said Jill. “Then drink,” said the Lion. “May I — could I — would you mind going away while I do?” said Jill. The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience. The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic. “Will you promise not to — do anything to me, if I do come?” said Jill. “I make no promise,” said the Lion. Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer. “Do you eat girls?” she said. “I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it. “I daren’t come and drink,” said Jill. “Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion. “Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.” “There is no other stream,” said the Lion. 

Let's hold each other all night

Preached on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13C), August 3, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Hosea 11:1-11
Psalm 107:1-9, 43
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21

The Rich Fool and the Watchful Servant, by Nelly Bube

I wonder if the one vital thing you really need right now is to be part of a Minyan Tzedek.

‘Minyan’ is a Hebrew term for a sufficient number of people (historically, ten people assigned male at birth) to proceed with public Jewish worship. (For us Christians, it only takes two to make Eucharist. But there must be at least two.)

So that’s ‘Minyan.’ Next: ‘Tzedek.’ Tzedek translates as justice, fairness, righteousness, or integrity. I recall the days after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died: because she died on Rosh Hashanah, she was hailed as a Tzadeket — same root word as the one for tzedek. If you die at the Jewish New year, tradition says you must have truly been an honorable and just elder of the community. God kept you around for the whole year.

Now, put it together: a Minyan Tzedek is a gathering of righteous ones, or better understood, a gathering for righteousness, a gathering for justice.

Here at St. Paul’s we’ve recently formed a Minyan Tzedek we call the Community Action Working Group — a somewhat more, well, ordinary term. CAWG is their acronym. CAWG is a Christian gathering to be sure, but it is, essentially, a Minyan Tzedek, a gathering for righteousness and justice.

There are two reasons why I wonder whether joining a Minyan Tzedek like CAWG is the one vital thing you really need right now. The first, as you might expect, is that this world needs a lot more tzedek. Surely you agree. During these hot summer weeks, I am trying not to look away from the famine and slaughter in Gaza. We must not look away. But Ukraine is languishing, too: we must not look away. And immigration raids are plaguing this country: we must not look away. 

And this week the U.S. president fired Erika McEntarfer, someone whose existence I learned about just yesterday. We must not look away from that firing, either. Ms. McEntarfer was the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a nonpartisan office. Labor statistics matter. They are crucial. We need to know about the state of the economy. Livelihoods, and lives, depend on an informed and active electorate. We need more tzedek in the world, and not just in the big, terrible atrocities. Pray for Erika. Pray for statisticians. Pray for all laborers.

But there’s a second reason why I wonder whether joining a Minyan Tzedek like CAWG is the one vital thing you really need right now, and that’s this: the minyan itself is an incarnation of righteousness in the world. The minyan itself is an intervention. The minyan itself is changing the world, simply by existing. And being a part of that can change you, too.

Some of you may have noticed that over the past few years, I’ve turned again and again to Jewish sources of wisdom and insight. I do this because the Jewish people are our cousins in faith, and also our forbears in faith.

I do this as well because on certain issues — particularly Gaza and the massive trauma suffered by the Palestinian people — I want a Jewish perspective on the tzedek required right now, and I want to draw alongside Israeli and diaspora Jews who are standing in solidarity not just with their own kin, but also with their Palestinian neighbors and companions.

And finally I want a Jewish perspective because, again and again in the Hebrew Bible, we read that the answer to injustice can be found right in the center of the people’s faith tradition. The exile to Babylon was an historical cataclysm, a multi-generational human tragedy for the people who once formed the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The scattered exiles made sense of that trauma by reflecting on their faith. 

That’s what’s happening in today’s passage from the prophet Hosea, even though Hosea lived two centuries before the Babylonian exile, and was responding to an earlier historical catastrophe. The trauma of the fall of the northern kingdom was interpreted as a break in their relationship with God. But then God lovingly calls them back, even as God “roars like a lion”: “They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt,” the prophet sings, “and like doves from the land of Assyria; and I will return them to their homes, says the Lord.”

We Christians, in turn, also interpret traumatic loss through the lens of our faith. “Again and again you called us to return,” we sing to God in one of our Eucharistic prayers. We identify with the wayward and ancient Israelites. When Christmas approaches we take up Hebrew prayers of longing for God’s justice, for God’s dawning. And our Easter Good News is a distinctly Jewish-sounding anthem of redemption and new life that transforms the whole land into a verdant garden.

To gain a strong Jewish perspective on current crises, I have often turned to — and sometimes preached about — Sharon Brous, the founding rabbi of Ikar, a Jewish community in Los Angeles. This week I’m reading her book called The Amen Effect, where she lays out her central theological premise, the guiding principle of her vocation, the central meaning of her life: the deceptively simple idea that (and I’ll say this in my words) when we gather, God saves the world. 

When we gather, God saves the world.

Rabbi Brous begins her book with the fundamental instruction from her faith tradition that we show up for one another, for celebration and mourning alike. So when I read Rabbi Brous and then read today’s Good News according to Luke, one of the first things I notice is the solitude of the rich fool. In this parable, the rich fool stands in for anyone in our faith tradition who underestimates our mission, and misunderstands the purpose of life in God’s abundant presence. It’s easiest to make this mistake when you’re twisting in the wind, out there all by yourself.

Someone in the crowd had asked Jesus to mediate a dispute about a family inheritance, and Jesus tells this parable to raise the sights of everyone in his hearing: this movement isn’t about petty legal disputes with a winner and a loser. It’s not about possessions. It’s definitely not about the heretical “prosperity gospel” that distorts Christianity into a personal self-help tool, pray diligently enough and you’ll have physical and financial security for many long years of leisure. No. The Jesus Movement, again and again, calls for an outpouring of possessions and time, passion and energy, for the benefit of our neighbor.

But this is not merely an ascetic way of life, all of us penniless mystics eating bugs in the desert so that our neighbor has enough to eat. The Jesus who tells the parable of the rich fool in Luke’s Gospel is the same Jesus who shares nineteen abundant meals with his friends in that Gospel. Christianity doesn’t offer a method of spiritual self-mortification or severe self-denial. It is okay to save enough to retire safely, with physical and financial security.

The deeper teaching here is about the deathly poverty of solitude. It’s about the dread foe of loneliness. It’s about a focus on self that pushes others away. And so we might notice that the rich fool talks to himself in the parable. “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years,” the wretched, lonesome landowner says to himself. (He has no one else to talk to.) In his determination to preserve himself, he loses himself in objects and money, in lavish but lonely dinners for one.

And this is the one thing in the Hebrew Bible that God proclaims to be not good. Rabbi Brous writes about this in her book. In Genesis 2:18 God says, “It is not good for a person to be alone;” and in Exodus 18:17-18, writes Sharon Brous, “Moses is rebuked by his father-in-law, Yitro, for taking too much of the burden of leadership upon himself. ‘It’s not good, what you’re doing,’ Yitro says. ‘You can’t do this alone!’ This is astonishing,” Rabbi Brous concludes. “The only thing the Torah identifies as fundamentally not good is aloneness. Twice.”

And this brings me back to CAWG, the Community Action Working Group, our own Christian Minyan Tzedek. CAWG may save lives before we’re done with our work. Some of us may get arrested for a good cause, protesting any number of atrocities besieging our nation in these hard times. But simply coming together as a group, as a minyan, is itself curative, prophetic, and powerful. And it’s not just CAWG. In fact, the Community Action Working Group is only one small extension of this Minyan Tzedek, this weekly gathering, this Eucharistic community of mission. Awash in baptismal waters and nourished by the Body and the Blood of Christ, we rise as one group, one people, united in mission, for the healing of the world.

But Rabbi Brous says it best. Here’s her take on the first and ultimate human gathering, the gathering that gave birth to all of our other gatherings. Sharon Brous offers us an insightful interpretation of the creation of Eve as a partner for Adam in Genesis chapter two. Here are her words:

“Even as God marveled at this wondrous creation, Adam’s heartache was something God could not abide. ‘I will make this one a partner,’ God proclaimed, an ezer k’negdo in the original Hebrew… and God set out to disentangle Eve from Adam. Only when they were severed into distinct beings were they finally able to find their way to one another of their own volition.

“Ezer k’negdo is usually translated as a helpmate, but it really means someone to help you (an ezer) by standing opposite you (k’neged lo). Someone to face you, even when everyone else looks away. Someone to turn toward you and say, ‘I am here. Tell me your pain.’ Someone to support, to challenge, even to confront when necessary. The anam cara, in Celtic wisdom. The soul friend.”

Brous continues:

“The Rabbis imagine the end of that sixth day of creation. After hours of naming animals and frolicking in the garden, the sun begins to set. Adam and Eve have never experienced night before, and Adam starts to panic. He wonders if maybe he did something wrong. As the sky blackens, his alarm turns into desperation. Could it be that the world is ending? Eve hears Adam’s cries and comes close, sitting down across from him (k’negdo). They hold each other all night long, weeping and wailing until — to their astonishment — the world does not return to null and void, and instead the first hint of a new dawn arises.

“It’s then that they realize: this is the way of the world.

“There are two important lessons here. First, you cannot escape the darkness. It’s part of the natural rhythm of the world.

“Second, perhaps the most important question we must answer in our lives is: When the night comes, who will sit and weep by your side? Who shares your worry? Who sees you?” (End quote.)

This is our reason for being here, you and I, all of us. Just this. We are here for one another, here to see, hold, and sometimes confront one another, for the healing of the world, as the sun descends and night falls.

If you’re willing, we can hold each other all night.

Building trust

Preached on the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12C), July 27, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Hosea 1:2-10
Psalm 85
Colossians 2:6-15
Luke 11:1-13

The Importunate Neighbour, by William Holman Hunt

How do I know I can trust you?

How do you know you can trust me?

Building trust is difficult, particularly during these times when the advance of artificial intelligence coincides with open corruption in government, technology, and media; times when it gets harder to know what we know, and harder to trust what we’re being told.

Building trust can involve a lot of trial and error. If we must behave perfectly to build trust, then we will surely fail, because none of us is perfect. There is no such thing as a flawless parent, or a perfectly trustworthy friend, or a spouse who never, ever lets their partner down.

We don’t have to behave perfectly. But what do we need to do, to build trust?

A basic, simplistic way of understanding trust goes something like this: if I say what I’m going to do and then do it, I build trust with my neighbor. If an investigator asks you where you were when a crime was committed and you tell the truth, you deepen their trust in you as a reliable witness. And we can always work to restore trust in conventional ways: we pay back whatever is not rightfully ours; we own up to a mistake and apologize; in the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, we make “living amends” by leading a more honest life, day by day.

In fact, amends after a betrayal can surprisingly build stronger trust between two people than they would have had if their bond had never been threatened or damaged. Think of the Japanese craftspeople who practice kintsugi when they repair pottery: they restore the broken vase by joining the shards with bright gold, accentuating rather than downplaying the new patterns caused by a painful break. The vase is even more beautiful now. The break and repair are intentionally, beautifully incorporated into its history.

This all makes good practical sense. We build trust by engaging in ordinary trust-building behaviors, including the things we do to repair a break in trust. 

But I want to dig deeper. And to do so, I want to draw on the work of two ethical, conscientious researchers and consultants in the business world. (There are still some good guys around!) Their names are Frances Frei and Anne Morriss (who happen to be a married couple), and in 2020 they published Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. Frei and Morriss say that there are three basic ways we build trust with one another. They add that many, maybe most, of us are quite strong in one of the three ways to build trust, and weaker in at least one of the other two.

Here’s how it works. In the trust model of Frei and Morriss, I can build trust with you in three ways:

• I can build trust by being authentic: when you talk to me, you are talking to the real me. If authenticity is my anchor, the thing I’m particularly good at, then you can just tell, over time and in different situations, that you are getting to know the real me.

• Second, I can build trust by practicing empathy. If empathy is my anchor, then you can just tell that I don’t merely understand and support you, I care about you, and I care about your success. If empathy is my anchor, I am here to empower you, to lift you up, to encourage you. Empathy, according to Frei and Morriss, is not just a feeling, which is usually how we understand it (we might say, “Oh, I know how she feels; I’ve been there!”). Empathy in trust-building is more about support and empowerment.

• And finally, third, I can build trust by having what Frei and Morriss call logic. This can also be understood as competence. If your anchor — your strongest asset as a trustworthy leader — is logic, then others just “know you can do” the job, that “your reasoning and judgment are sound.” But logic isn’t only about the neocortex. To build trust, we need emotional intelligence. People tend to trust us if they are confident that we not only know how to do our jobs, but we understand the deeper dimensions, we have emotional intelligence, we get it, we’ve got this.

Authenticity, empathy, logic: this is the trust triangle, if you ask Frei and Morriss. I like this approach, because trust is rightly understood as a hard thing to build, a challenge that follows us through all our lives; and Frei and Morriss give us a compassionate, empowering, and also practical way to build trust.

But as we take up this topic, we do well to remember that we are Christians, and that as Christians we have particular lenses we can use to view trust and trust-building, lenses that bring into focus some things and blur or obscure other things. 

One lens we use to look at the concept of trust is the Hebrew Bible, and the more we read that bible — Christians call it the “Old Testament” — the more we read it, the more we hear about, metaphorically speaking, a troubled marriage. The troubled married couple is God and God’s people. Again and again, God is upset with the people because they are faithless, and the people are upset with God because God seems to have abandoned them.

In this proverbial marriage that spans centuries, we can recognize the painful themes of any relationship: betrayal, misunderstanding, broken promises, painful absences, dashed expectations. The people rage at God, and in our own Christian tradition, the central figure of Christianity takes up their cry on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!” the humanity of Jesus screams from the cross, quoting Psalm 22.

But God expresses powerful anger, too. The people turn from God, again and again, finding almost anyone or anything else to fashion into a golden calf. At one point they demand a human king, so that they can be like all the other nations, and God takes offense at the idea. And then, as we follow the ages-long saga of this rocky relationship, we finally come upon the provocative prophet Hosea, whose book we opened and began reading a few moments ago. 

Hosea gets brutally direct with the marriage metaphor. It’s fair to say we can even hear misogyny in the prophet’s voice. If you haven’t already recoiled from the text, you might do so now, when I repeat a bit of it: “The Lord said to Hosea, ‘Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.’” This is not remotely my favorite metaphor, this image of a man married to a faithless, untrustworthy wife. You may be tempted to just discard it: surely there’s a better way for the prophet to challenge God’s people!

But our tradition invites us to keep this metaphor around, so let’s sit with it a bit longer. (Just a bit. Hang in there with Hosea for just a few more moments.) After consummating marriage with a faithless person, the prophet is to name his children terrible names, names that accuse the people, names that mean things like “No mercy!”. In our day, the prophet’s children might be given names that mean “God won’t restore the rivers you polluted,” or “God won’t forgive you for selling weapons of war that destroy innocent life.” This is rough.

But the more we sit with this troubling text, the more we can recognize all of this as a trust complaint: the people broke trust with God. “Why have you forsaken me?” the psalmist yells out to God. “What?! You have forsaken me!” God seems to yell back. The vase is shattered, and so far, the potter hasn’t pulled out the fine gold sealant that would restore what’s broken to something even more beautiful than the original.

For us Christians, that potter is Jesus Christ. The business consultants Anne Morriss and Frances Frei do not offer a Christian vision, and we should not expect them to do so. But for us, Jesus can be the One who builds trust with immense skill in all three dimensions: Jesus is authentic: he is who he presents himself to be; Jesus is empathetic: he is here for us, here to lift and empower and send us; and Jesus the Word of God is logic itself: the Logos, the creative Word through whom all things have come into being.

If we turn to Jesus as our master trust builder, then we need look no further than his counsel on prayer for a primer on building trust with one another, and with our neighbor. How should we pray? The answer of Jesus to this question is quite simple, but also riveting:

First, we pray with restored trust in God, whom we call “Father,” a familial name, an intimate name. The marriage metaphor is set aside in favor of something more fundamental, more visceral: Jesus calls God Father, and we in turn are invited to do so, evoking the basic, elemental trust that develops between a trustworthy parent and their beloved child. 

Then we affirm that God’s name is holy — an echo of the foundational trust that the one God established with God’s people at Sinai — and we ask that God’s kingdom come. Not our kingdom — God’s kingdom, God’s agenda, God’s presence, God’s justice, God’s peace. God’s trust. 

Then we ask for enough to live today, and enough to forgive today. You and I can only forgive each other if we have first received forgiveness from God. And we finally ask that God not “bring us into the time of trial.” 

“Do not bring us into the time of trial” can be a hard phrase to interpret. It doesn’t mean that we’re asking for a pain-free life. It’s more about not being abandoned during the hardships of life. “Why have you forsaken me?” wails the psalmist — and Jesus — in a desperate time of trial. When we pray for deliverance from this, we are reaching out in trust to God: please, God — please, Father — do not leave us. Save us from solitude. Save us from despair.

And then, tomorrow, we pray for these four things again: for God’s presence, and for our daily human needs; for God’s forgiveness (which we share with one another), and for salvation.

And then, the next day, we pray for them again. We can change up the words, of course: the so-called “Lord’s Prayer” is more like a prayer form, like the various and changing forms of our Prayers of the People. When he teaches us to pray, Jesus isn’t giving us a script. He’s teaching us how to build trust. 

In this confusing and duplicitous age, do we need anything else, anything at all, more than this?

Breaking the cultural code

Preached on the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11C), July 20, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Samuel Torvend.

Amos 8:1-12
Psalm 52
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42

Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, by Johannes Vermeer

For all intents and purposes, I grew up in a bed and breakfast. Given the considerable number of guests who came to our home, my sister and I were part of the staff. As they would say on Downton Abbey: we were in service as cleaners and assistant cooks. The range of guests ran from young women who were pregnant without marriage, young women kicked out of their parents’ homes to bishops who wondered how my father, a clergyperson, animated considerable growth in the California parishes he served. In all of this, our mother, a gracious host and an art educator, oversaw the household, the frequent changing of bed and bathroom linens, the preparation of meals, the detailed cleaning of the house, the care for our gardens, and getting up long before guests did to ensure that breakfast was ready. No paper plates and napkins here: only the good linens would do for young women pregnant out of wedlock as well as elderly bishops who frequently overenjoyed the lovely California wines they were served.

To say the least, this gospel reading was not one of our mother’s favorites, with Jesus apparently looking down upon the work it takes to welcome people into one’s home. “Oh right,” our mother would say, “lazy Mary gets the credit for sitting at Jesus’ feet with that adoring look on her face while Martha is sweating away as she prepares their dinner.” So troubling was the story, that I decided to rewrite and then frame it as a gift to Mom on Mother’s Day: "Lord,” said Martha, “do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." The Lord answered her, saying, “Blessed are you, Martha, for you care for many things, a faithful steward of all that God gives you.” 

The biblical scholars who have constructed the social world of Jesus, Mary, and Martha offer an interesting interpretation of this story. In the cultural and religious world of the Mediterranean, women did not sit with men to whom they were unrelated unless there were chaperones present. In that world then, every attempt was made to diminish the possibility of untoward behavior between unmarried men and unmarried women. The surprise of this story is that Jesus, Mary, and Martha break the accepted cultural code of who is an acceptable or unacceptable companion. 

But there is more. In Mediterranean cultures at the time of Jesus, women were not educated. Indeed, village women – the women with whom Jesus grew up and had interactions in adult life – were not considered capable of learning anything except the management of a household. The surprise in this story is that Jesus appears to be teaching Mary and thus rejecting a culturally accepted norm while demonstrating that women, no different than men, are capable of learning. Do we not recognize his disregard for established gender stereotypes? And might his disregard for such stereotypes call into question the stereotypes with which you and I have been raised: stereotypes that can box us and others into neat and manageable and frequently unhealthy categories that wash the life out of us and them? If anything, this gospel story is a word of caution that invites us to reflect on the often unconscious views we hold of others – views or categories or stereotypes that rob others of their rich complexity.

I think it's good for us to remember that Luke directs his gospel to a community of non-Jewish Christians in the Mediterranean world: a world in which the emerging Christian movement was a minority in a society, a society little different than our own that traded in harmful stereotypes every day. After all, do we not hear today from the highest levels of government that immigrants are nothing more than “criminals,” that trans persons are referred to as “corrupters,” that investigative reporters are “evil distributors of fake news,” that a bishop who pleads for mercy is nothing more than a “hardline hater”? Indeed, the news seems to be awash in these vile stereotypes that are not only insulting but also give permission for dishonorable citizens to engage in harmful activity, in violence. 

And so I say, how grateful I am that each year you and I renew a solemn baptismal vow to “respect the dignity of every human being.” To say the least, it is a challenging vow to internalize given the socialization we have experienced in the bias and discriminations of American culture. The temptation is ever present to respect the God-given and inherent dignity discerned only in those who think and act just like you and me: the person or group who reflects our concerns, social status, and identity. This is why I think the profession of this sacred vow invites you and me to live into it throughout a life-time. And live into to it we must as followers of Jesus Christ, the One who honored the image of God in the street smart hooker and the wealthy matron, the army officer and the insurgent bent on murder, the corrupt tax collector and the collector’s victim – the One who could see through identity and social status to the flame of dignity illuminating the souls of one and all. 

It's of interest to me – and I hope to you – that the Greek term in this story which describes Martha’s tasks is diakonia, a term that refers to the one who serves at table. What, then, was she busy about? Why preparing a meal for Jesus, the One who broke the cultural code that said some are acceptable at table and others are unacceptable by virtue of their questionable identity, social status, or lukewarm religious devotion. Her meal at table, dear friends, is an image of the little meal we keep at this table: this fragment of bread, this sip of wine. Believe me: there are moments when I think it is a dangerous thing to come to this table for the One who freely offers himself to us, who unites himself with our bodies, minds, and souls in the most holy Eucharist is the One who gives you and me the strength to respect the dignity of each and every one we will encounter in the days to come. The only question is this: will we receive him with thanksgiving? 

"In the throes of laughter"

Preached on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 10C), July 13, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Amos 7:7-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37

Good Samaritan with a Lily, by Olga Bakhtina

The writer and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib published an essay in The New Yorker this morning. He wrote about an extraordinary, truly unbelievable experience he recently enjoyed. It happened on June 28, a couple of Saturdays ago, at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. That same evening, many of us were here celebrating the notable accomplishments at this parish over the past three years.

But the celebration in New York, at the Beacon Theatre, was vastly more important and wondrous, by several orders of magnitude. Ramy Youssef was there: Youssef is an actor, comedian, and producer. His presence alone enraptured the largely-Muslim audience. Their souls were soothed and delighted by his humor, and in his essay, Abdurraqib shared some of the inside-group humor that rallies and strengthens Muslims in this time of spiraling Islamophobia.

But surprise and delight stole across the room when the audience became aware of two more guests: Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York; and Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for more than three months. Khalil was released just eight days before this triumphant evening. His detention, in Louisiana, prevented him from witnessing the birth of his first child. Abdurraqib was struck by how young Khalil is — just thirty years old, he is a brand-new father who is only now learning how to hold his infant son. Abdurraqib also admired how quickly and fiercely Khalil resumed his public advocacy for Palestine, unafraid of government reprisals.

In his essay about that evening, Hanif Abdurraqib shared some of his favorite sayings, or Ahadith, of the prophet Muhammad. This is my favorite Hadith from among his favorites: “A Hadith that I love,” Abdurraqib writes, “[a Hadith] which underpins many of my actions, states that ‘the believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.’”

“‘The believers, in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy, are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.’”

Abdurraqib goes on to reflect on this Hadith: “I love the Hadith about a collective body because it is not just about pain—it is about sharing the full spectrum of human feeling. I am not drawn to action only because people have suffered or are suffering; I am drawn to action because I am distinctly aware of every inch of humanity from which suffering keeps people.”

“I am drawn to action because I am distinctly aware of every inch of humanity from which suffering keeps people.” I think what Abdurraqib means here is this: suffering keeps people from parts of their own humanity: suffering interferes with laughter and joy; suffering diminishes the human imagination; suffering bends humans low, sometimes quite literally, beneath a great burden of anguish, anger, and fear.

But even in the midst of suffering, humans do laugh; we do sing. And this night at the Beacon Theatre was a night of beautiful, curative comedy! Abdurraqib noticed the laughter of these famous and accomplished men, and it’s worth quoting him at length:

“It was a delight to catch a glimpse of [Mahmoud] Khalil in the throes of laughter. He laughed as though each laugh were a physical vessel urgently exiting his body, or a secret he’d held for so long that it had forced its way out. Khalil’s body jerked forward when he laughed — his laughter was more of a kinetic event than a sonic one. He rocked, he shook slightly, and he smiled wide. One seat over, Mamdani laughed, too, with a bit more volume; his laughter seemed to arrive less like a long-held secret than like an idea that he couldn’t wait to share. Most of the audience didn’t know [yet] that the two men were in the room, and because of this most of the audience missed out on the small miracle of watching them share their joy at the scene before them.”

If Muslim “believers,” as the Hadith calls them, are “just like one body,” then when one of them suffers, all of them suffer; but all of the emotions are felt this way, including laughter, sweet and salutary laughter. If one person laughs, the whole body of believers laughs. Of course many in the Beacon Theatre also wept, wiping away tears of surprise, relief, and hard-won joy. This was a nearly unbelievable inbreaking of hope, this wondrous event on a hot night in New York. Could the city of New York actually be poised to elect a Muslim mayor? Could the United States actually be raising up an advocate for Palestine who can inspire millions more, and finally throw off the dull and dreadful wet-wool blanket of bigotry and cruelty that still nearly smothers our Muslim compatriots and companions?

If so, then one strong way for all those here in this room who might have felt a little out of place at the Beacon Theatre that night — out of place not because we are not allies, but because we are not Muslims — one strong way for us to lock arms with our companions there is to affirm that our faith tradition also treasures teachings about the Body — the Body of Christ, the Body of this assembly, the Body of believers. But more crucially, our faith tradition extends our hand in peace to those who do not share our faith, and especially those who have been harmed by our faith — those who have been harmed by us.

This morning, we need look no further for this teaching than the wisdom we find in the deeply familiar parable of the man who traveled from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jerusalem to Jericho: this is a perilous road, both in our time and for those who first heard the teachings of Jesus. Jericho today is a city in the West Bank, in the middle of an inhumane conflict involving mass Palestinian displacement by Israeli settlers. In the time of Jesus, various factions turned the Jericho road into a dangerous path of violence. 

For help in our effort to open up this parable, and to push past some of the easier, more obvious interpretations, I like to turn to Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the Christian New Testament. Dr. Levine points to the fraught and complicated ethnic and cultural differences among the characters. The person who falls victim to robbery is traveling from Jerusalem: perhaps he is a faithful Judean man returning from pilgrimage at his holy city. The priest and the Levite are headed back to that city, presumably to take up their vocations in the temple. But if the robbery victim had been conscious enough to notice who was coming to his aid, he might have recoiled in anger and shock: it is a Samaritan. Judeans and Samaritans are geographical neighbors and ethnic-religious cousins, but they are not friends.

But this encounter is more nuanced, and troubling, than a kind gesture shared between estranged neighbors. Amy-Jill Levine brings this cultural conflict into sharp relief for us. “To hear the parable today,” she writes, “we only need to update the identity of the figures. [Let’s say] I am an Israeli Jew on my way from Jerusalem to Jericho, and I am attacked by thieves, beaten, stripped, robbed, and left half dead in a ditch. Two people who should have stopped to help [instead just] pass me by: the first, a Jewish medic from the Israel Defense Forces; the second, a member of the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. But the person who takes compassion on me and shows me mercy is a Palestinian Muslim whose sympathies lie with Hamas...”

This breaks open the surprising wisdom that Jesus is teaching. Who is our neighbor? A person who comes to our aid. Okay, sure. Who is our neighbor? A person we approach to give aid. Yes, of course. Who is our neighbor? Sometimes our neighbor is the very last person we might expect to stop and offer assistance. Sometimes our neighbor is the one person we have identified as our enemy. 

Like most parables — like all parables — this deceptively simple story disrupts our expectations, disturbs our contented, self-satisfied takes, upends our understanding of the world around us.

But back to that glorious evening in New York, late last month. I wasn’t there, and in a real sense I did not belong there: Beacon Theatre on June 28th was a truly safe space for Muslim mourning, healing, bonding, laughter, and love. The parables of Jesus we treasure stand proudly alongside the Islamic Ahadith, and with our own voices, with our own votes, with our own faith, we can work ever harder to be allies for those in greatest peril right now. But there is a difference — a healthy, natural difference — between allies and members of an oppressed group. 

We can, however, hold another glad event, and in fact we do that week by week. We practice the celebration, over and over, knowing we won’t really get it all right until God’s dominion dawns for every single human person on Earth. We lay this Table; we pour wine into one cup; we break one bread into many fragments; we watch and listen to be sure everyone is nourished; we send the gifts out from here to those in our Body who can’t be physically present with us today. Week by week, we do all of these good things.

This meal is God’s balm for the wounds of this world, some of them inflicted by us, some of them inflicted in our name. This meal is God’s answer to that nagging question, “What can we do?” What can we do? We can feed the hungry world. We can run to the assistance of the ICE victim. We can relax and check our privilege when the person we never expected to help comes to our assistance. We can just keep at it, week by week, with God’s presence and power, until that weary road from Jerusalem to Jericho blossoms into a broad avenue of justice and peace.

Sweetheart, what is it? What's wrong?

Preached on the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9C), July 6, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

2 Kings 5:1-14
Psalm 30
Galatians 6:1-16
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Reap What You Sow, by Ernesto Ybarra

Every person contains multitudes. This is something of an axiom in current psychological circles. If you have a therapist, I imagine they’ve said to you at least once, “Which part of you thinks that?”. Your therapist is likely to ask this when you say something self-deprecating, or discouraging, or anxious.

Our vernacular language carries this belief about human nature — that we contain multitudes: “Part of me wants to get married,” you might say to yourself; “but another part of me wants to wait and see.” Each of us is an individual, yet there are smaller selves within each of us.

Some of our psychological “parts” are quite young, even pre-verbal. When something upsetting happens, one of our inner selves is triggered, urging us to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn. (“Fawn” is the impulse to charm or flatter someone you perceive to be dangerous.) When one of our internal parts is triggered, it’s usually because we experienced a similar trauma when we were much younger, and the current stressor reminds us of that old wound. The body remembers. A body part remembers.

But the modern idea of psychological parts has ancient parallels. Often when we encounter a troubled person in holy scripture, we’re told that they have “demons,” often plural. What is a “demon,” really, if not a part or a dimension of the self that is upset, or triggered? The healing in these stories is not a medical procedure as much as a form of psychotherapeutic relief: the triggered psychological part is soothed, and gently brought back into a relaxed state.

Centuries ago or just this morning, that process can be quite simple and straightforward, even though many of us experience persistent and recurring emotional distress. Sometimes, when I am under great stress, it helps to simply find a quiet room, sit in a chair, and say to myself — out loud — “Sweetheart, what is it? What’s wrong?”. I encourage the distressed part of myself to let me know what is upsetting them. I normalize, and validate, their subjective experience. I begin to breathe more easily. I begin to regulate my feelings, and integrate them once again with my thoughts.

But it’s always much easier to do this when we have help. One of the great atrocities of this past week is the provision in the omnibus budget bill, now signed into law, that deprives seventeen million people of Medicaid — bare-bones, shoe-string health insurance for those who are disabled, sick, or low-income — foreclosing their chance to receive even basic mental health care. Physical illnesses will go untreated, but mental and emotional distress will also proliferate across our troubled land, particularly in this time of massive, roiling, global distress. Fewer and fewer people will receive the help we all need simply to make it through the day.

Every person contains multitudes, but in these basic existential matters we are all quite simple, and quite similar. When we are in distress, we often just need a helping hand. We need someone to recognize our humanity, and reach out to us with compassion. That’s really it. None of us needs a miracle cure, or a so-called “Cadillac” insurance plan that meets our every conceivable need. But we all need help, to soothe the anxious and sad parts within us; to apply balm to our chapped skin; to turn the pillow just so and remain with us through the long night.

With all of this in mind, I now return your attention to the story of Naaman, an army commander, a man of war, a fearsome warrior. Naaman is in distress, in more than one way. Outwardly and most obviously, he suffers a skin disease, which in his time and place means that he is ritually unclean: he will not be allowed to enter the Temple. Skin ailments are a source of profound social shame.

But, just like you and me, Naaman contains multitudes. He harbors a skin disease, but he is also afflicted with pride, with stuffy and pompous self-confidence: maybe this pride, this inflated sense of self, was just one of his psychological parts, coping with a nagging sense of inferiority by whispering in Naaman’s ear that he is too good for common treatments, too good for medicines pedalled by some lower-class prophet or healer. In our day, Naaman would go to Swedish Hospital and demand a hospital room of his own, and the best specialists to review his case and administer state-of-the-art treatments.

And so Naaman balks after a common servant girl suggests he consult the prophet Elisha, and Elisha prescribes seven dips in the little, unremarkable River Jordan. There would be no theatrics, no dramatic invocation of the power of a fearsome god, no waving of the hands and complicated chants above the leprous wounds. Just a series of dips in a river at the edge of the map. 

But the good news for Naaman is that one or more of his internal parts manages to listen to the good counsel of his servants, who suggest that he submit to the humble — even humiliating — treatment, since he most likely would have endured a much more difficult treatment, had it been prescribed. “Fine,” Naaman seems to say, and he goes ahead and gets it over with. And he is healed.

But this is where things get interesting, and to fully understand the scene, we need to dip into the Hebrew language of the passage. Let’s go back a bit in the story, to the part where a young girl – a slave girl – steps in to suggest the treatment. In Hebrew, the term for “young girl” in the text is “Na’arah qetannah.” Na’arah qetannah. Nothing to see here, just yet. But then, later on, when the storyteller announces that Naaman has been healed, the text says that his skin was healed “like the flesh of a little child.” In Hebrew, the phrase “like the flesh of a little child” is “Kibsar na’ar qaton.” Na’ar qaton. That is, the same words that we heard for “young girl,” just in their masculine form.

What does this mean? It means that Naaman’s healing goes much deeper than the curing of his skin disease. The Hebrew Bible scholar Stephen Cook explains it this way. Dr. Cook says, “Naaman hasn’t just been healed. He [has] become humble, open. He’s been made like [the young slave girl]. The man of war becomes like a child. That’s not just about skin; it’s about the heart.” Naaman’s skin is restored, and the Hebrew word for ‘restored’ here is shoob – a verb that means not only restoration, but also turning, or returning – as Dr. Cook says, “a turning of the heart, not just the body.”

In our contemporary psychological terms, Naaman becomes emotionally regulated. His inner multitudes come back into balance. Some part of him was in distress, which expressed itself not only in a skin ailment but (even more powerfully) in his sour, self-righteous attitude. As the story opens, Naaman is on the extreme opposite end of the story from the young slave girl: he has all the privileges, she has none, or none but one: she can still speak, and shape events with her voice. But when Naaman goes through his healing experience, the two characters trade places. He submits humbly to a treatment – a common treatment, a humble ritual that the poorest, dustiest nomad in the land is entitled to perform – and he gets back in touch with his humbler self, his younger self, his more vulnerable self.

And we, you and I, all of us gathered here, we in turn are called to this same humility, this same vulnerability. We follow one who sends his followers into ministry with “no purse, no bag, no sandals.” They are utterly vulnerable to the hospitality – or lack thereof – of the hosts they encounter on their journey. This person at the center of our faith, Jesus of Nazareth, dies the humiliating death of a common criminal. And yet he rises, and his followers rise, and we rise, full of life and health and strength, like Naaman who emerges from the River Jordan with skin kibsar na’ar qeton, skin “like the flesh of a little child.”

So much is dreadful right now. And so many of the awful atrocities in this country are being committed by self-proclaimed Christians, if you can believe it, people who somehow have gleaned lessons from holy scripture that are entirely at odds with the Good News we actually find there. If we want to respond like mighty warriors, that would be understandable. If we want to rise up like battle-tested soldiers with an inflated view of ourselves, that would make sense.

But our Savior calls us to bathe in baptismal waters, waters that soothe our anxious inner selves, steady our angry hearts, and send us in mission like lambs in the midst of wolves. In this hard and humbling work, our vulnerability is our sword; our love for one another, and for the stranger, is our shield. Armed not with weapons of war but wearing tender armor kibsar na’ar qeton, we go forth from here as healers, helpers, allies, and friends of those in deepest need, those in dreadful peril.

Apostles Peter and Paul

Preached on the Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Apostles, June 29, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Rt. Rev. Phil LaBelle.

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

St. Peter and St. Paul, by Vladimir Zunuzin

We need something else. We need someone else.

Preached on the Second Sunday after Pentecost (Year C), June 22, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Most Rev. Melissa Skelton.

1 Kings 19:1-4, 8-15a
Psalm 42 and 43
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 8:26-39

From Violence to Hope, by Polly Castor

"I still have many things to say to you..."

Preached on the Feast of the Holy Trinity (Year C), June 15, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

Icon Trinity, by Kelly Latimore

Jesus said to the disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

Ten years ago, my uncle was dying of cancer. One of my sisters was his primary family supporter, making trips with him to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, about an hour from his home, to see doctors. The day came when they had an ultimate appointment, a moment of truth in his care: going forward, he would either keep up the treatments, or switch to hospice care. Because of his condition, it would likely not be – and, finally, it was not – a lengthy term of care.

My sister recalls asking him, “Do you understand what this means?” He nodded and said, “Yes.”

Uncle Ray was able to bear that truth.

The loss of life, particularly one’s own life, is a hard truth to bear. But there are other things we sometimes can’t bear to know. We naturally think of bad news, terrible news: a diagnosis – the brief rap of the doctor’s knock on the door, as you wait in the treatment room; a painful betrayal – you finally learn what that person did, and that your life with them will be different now; or a loss that strikes you hard enough that you remember exactly where you were when the call came.

But there are other unbearable things, beyond the various losses every human being faces. We suffer unbearable disillusionment: “Don’t meet your heroes,” goes the saying, because if you do, the real person behind the hero mirage could break your heart. Or we discover that something we took for granted, something we unquestioningly held as a core belief, has been upended. And that category of unbearable truth is more likely what Jesus is talking about when he tells his followers, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

This is certainly how former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold understood these words of Jesus. Bishop Griswold was our Presiding Bishop from 1998 to 2006, three presiding bishops ago. He oversaw a tumultuous time for the Episcopal Church. In 2003, Gene Robinson was elected bishop of New Hampshire, the first openly gay and partnered bishop in our communion. This election caused a massive eruption and schism, with congregations and dioceses quarreling and then breaking apart. The Church wouldn’t approve blessing rites for same-sex couples until nine years after Presiding Bishop Griswold left office. Both Presiding Bishop Griswold and his successor, Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, had hard jobs through those years.

As he made sense of his many challenges, Bishop Griswold turned with some frequency to these words of Jesus, about how there are truths that the people of God can’t yet bear. He recalled his own instinctive opposition, early in his ministry career, to the ordination of women. At a women’s bible study, when someone asked whether women could be ordained, the younger Frank Griswold quickly and simply said, “Of course not.” Years later, when he could confidently, enthusiastically bear the truth, he closed his time as Presiding Bishop by warmly welcoming a woman as his successor.

Griswold also spoke about the Church’s task of wrestling with our outrageous history of white supremacy and our shameful participation in chattel slavery. The truth of these atrocities was too much to bear for many generations of Episcopal Christians, and many (perhaps most?) white Episcopalians today still struggle against the transformation we must experience to become white allies. Griswold again preached that Jesus always has more to teach his followers, and that our task is to find the strength to bear it.

Following the upheaval of Bishop Robinson’s election, Griswold spoke with compassion about how many of us in the Church can’t bear the truth that God affirms the beautiful identity of all persons, including queer Christians. “God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good.” Some of us still can’t bear that truth.

The atrocity of slavery, the cruel and misogynistic subjugation of women, the atrocious rejection of people across the splendid rainbow of human diversity: these are truths that we bear now; these are outrageous sins that we confess now; these are cautionary tales that fire our compassion now.

But there is one more truth that we might find hard to bear: as followers of Jesus, our compassion should extend to those who continue to struggle, those who continue to oppose full inclusion and affirmation, those who stand against the Good News.

We bring our compassion – compassion given to us by the Risen Christ – first and foremost to those who have been harmed by the Church, those who continue to be harmed by many churches. But the compassion of Christ extends broadly to include even the perpetrators, the offenders. 

But before I reflect on that, I will say this clearly: if you are oppressed by racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia, it is not your job to educate or reform your oppressor. I have white privilege and cisgender-male privilege: it is not okay for me to depend on those I know who don’t enjoy those privileges to take care of me, to make me a more ethical person, to work for me until I am strong enough to be their ally. That only perpetuates injustice.

However, all of us gathered here, this whole faith community, this parish: it is our shared, collective task to practice ruthless compassion in our relationships with people who do harm. “Ruthless compassion” is a term created by Leticia Nieto, a poet, dramatist, psychotherapist, and trainer in anti-oppression practices.

My friend Laura Eberly, a deacon in the Diocese of California, studied Nieto’s work and explains “ruthless compassion” this way. Laura says, “[The word] ‘ruthless’ modifies [the word] ‘compassion’... [Our compassion is] disciplined, relentless. [Nieto isn’t] talking about [a compassionate] intervention so much as an approach – a clear, consistent understanding that [those who do harm] are also suffering; [they are also] dehumanized from their socialization [as offenders], even as they dehumanize [others].”

Racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, transphobia: these are social evils that dehumanize everyone. We see this in the lack of basic human empathy of many federal leaders who turn the military against civilians. We see this in the political violence that took the lives of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband. We see this in the callous and violent political culture of our time, a lethal culture that claims countless innocent lives.

The lives of the innocent are our first concern. We are baptized and sent to proclaim the Good News that the Holy Spirit still broods over the waters of chaos; that the Father still sees the suffering of those in bondage, and sends us to liberate them; that the Risen Christ tramples death by his own death, and defeats the Powers and Principalities that destroy all who are made in the image of God.

But we number the oppressors among those made in the image of God, and like Jesus himself, “we make intercession for the transgressors.” That’s how the prophet Isaiah puts it. We praise the Crucified One who prayed for the forgiveness of those who handed him over to condemnation and death. We learn from Jesus himself the sometimes unbearable mission of ruthless compassion.

And so we do not give up on even the worst offenders of our time. We are relentless in this compassionate work. They have been dehumanized. Everyone has. Sometimes we direct our ruthless compassion on ourselves, for surely many of us here have failed to commend the faith that is in us, and have fallen far short of the call to discipleship extended to us when we were baptized in the name of the Holy Three.

But Jesus does not stop speaking to us after telling us these hard truths. He says, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” but then he says this: “When the Spirit of truth comes, she will guide you into all the truth.” We are never, ever alone in mission. In a few moments we will embrace one another in the peace of Christ. And a few moments after that we will share food and drink that strengthen and sustain us to bear with confidence the ruthless compassion of the Holy Three.

And the Holy Three will never, ever stop creating and recreating this good and glorious world.

A city of justice

Preached on the Day of Pentecost (Year C), June 8, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Genesis 11:1-9
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-17

Pentecost, by Jennifer Allison

They said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

To make a name for ourselves: That is one reason to build a city. Imagine the city – gleaming towers, splendid temples, a vast library, a thriving theater district, waterfront walking trails, shaded parks with benches for reading, playgrounds for children. Once we have built this city, and named it after ourselves, we will be known, we will be admired, we will inspire awe.

But then God will see all of this and drive us apart, confuse us, scatter us. Why? Because our city is beautiful, but it only exists for our glory. And soon enough we will want more glory: We will want to build an empire, and an army; we will want to launch rockets to colonize Mars. Why? To make a name for ourselves. To banish the thought of our mortality. To avoid the hard truth of our weaknesses. To avoid the ordinary, human truth of our vulnerability, and our finitude.

God says No to this anxious hubris. We must be scattered, if only to protect the verdant land, the flowing waters, and the living creatures who share this garden of creation with us. But there’s an even better reason for our scattering: When God creatively scatters us, we get more diverse, more flexible. We learn how to cooperate. We begin to understand what we do not know, and get better at recognizing what we are doing wrong. We improve. We feel better. We do better.

And then, strengthened and encouraged by God’s challenging gift of diversity, we could build an even better city, for an even better reason. We could build a city to house a community that speaks fluently across difference, a city that welcomes pilgrims from all directions, a city where groups of friends gather and break bread. And in the breaking of that bread, those friends are given courage and skill to greet strangers and foreigners, and make friends with them, too.

We could build a City of Justice, rather than a city of glory.

Building is a metaphor close to our hearts these days. Not so long ago, this congregation got bracing, challenging feedback from an expert in universal accessibility, someone who scattered us away from our false belief that, because one can access this sanctuary from Roy Street without using stairs, we were adequately accessible. We learned how very far we had to go to make this mission base actually, genuinely accessible to more and more people.

There are four major floors in our complex: undercroft, classrooms, sanctuary, and office. While yes, we have direct street access to this room, three of our four floors have always been nearly or completely inaccessible to many of us. But our task force went beyond stairs and ramps to take a hard look at everything – not just how people get from floor to floor, but how every staircase needs two handrails, and at a particular height; how restrooms can be brought to ADA code, and also be gender neutral while still affording privacy; how we need to make room in these pews for those who pray here but do not walk here; and how we need to boost the sound so that everyone can hear the Good News.

In other words, we rebuilt the “city” of this community so that more and more people belong here. We do this not for anyone’s glory. We do it for everyone’s access. The glory belongs only to God, whose creative power makes all of this possible. We Christians like to talk and sing about the “New Jerusalem,” that great vision of a city coming down out of heaven from God. Whenever we install a handrail or a chair lift, we catch a tiny glimpse of God sending down that city, right here.

Today we hear again the Pentecost story, which tells not of God sending down to earth a City of Justice, but God’s own spirit descending to an old city to make it new again; God’s own Spirit descending and burning brightly on the heads of God’s people; God’s own Spirit descending and firing up the hearts of God’s people.

The Spirit of God descends on the scattered people and brings them together, from all the different directions, back into one community. But God does this not by collapsing them back into one language, one culture – not by reversing the great blessing of diversity that God gave the people at Babel. No, this time God gives the people yet another blessing: God gives them fluency. They can understand each other now.

First, God gives us diversity, diversity that is almost beyond belief: thousands of languages and cultures, and something entirely unique about every single person. Then God gives us fluency, and we reach across our differences to embrace, collaborate, and to open even wider our accessible doors to more and more people. 

Yesterday, twenty-seven people came to this building and worked for many long hours, cleaning, organizing, painting, and repairing everything that has faltered or been broken. They tended to all of the needs, concerns, and hopes of this mission base, this city within a city. Their anonymous labor is known and enjoyed by everyone who finds refuge here, everyone who seeks justice here.

I bid your prayers for these quiet and faithful servants; I bid your prayers for all the people they serve; and I bid your prayers for you yourself – for you are beloved of God. We who were scattered by God in beautiful diversity are gathered today by the Spirit into one Body, singing together this psalm of thanks and praise: “All creatures look to you, O Lord, to give them their food in due season. You give it to them; they gather it; you open your hand, and they are filled with good things.”

Marked by self-giving love

Preached the Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year C), June 1, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by the Reverend Samuel Torvend.

Acts 16:16-34
Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21
John 17:20-26
Psalm 97

The New Jerusalem, mural by Adam Kossowski

I rarely think about the fact that my parents had to have sexy time in order for me to enter the world. When I mention this in class, my university students begin to look nervous, their faces expressing this question: “Is he going to tell us more than we ever wanted to know about him?” But my point, as I make clear, is this: I did not create myself. That’s a newsflash for some of my students. I am not the mythic “self-made man” or “self-made person.” No: a community of two brought me – and I dare say – brought most of you into existence. And at the moment of my birth we became a community of three: a very natural, biological, relational trinity.

And yet by age 14, I knew that I had three options open to me once I graduated from high school: get a job; join the military; or seek admission to college. It was also clear to me that though my parents loved me, I was to leave home: “Go out into the world by yourself. Off you go.” Does it ring a bell? I was surprised to learn that my cousins in Norway returned to their family compound after school and military service, there to live in close proximity to their parents and grandparents. 

How different is the American tendency to exalt the individual: “Leave home and make it on your own in the world.” Perhaps it should not surprise us, then, that the majority of Americans, over 60%, report the debilitating effects of loneliness, what the nation’s former surgeon general referred to as an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. We are so accustomed to entering adult life by ourselves that it seems quite normal. But, then, who acknowledges the terrible price to be paid in emotional, physical, and spiritual health? 

I ask my students to reflect on the many persons – most of whom they will never meet – who made it possible for them to be present in class. You know, the laborers who built the dam that creates the hydroelectric power that makes possible the lighting, heating, cooling, and computer use we take for granted. Or the architects, construction workers, electricians, and plumbers who design and build our houses, apartment buildings, and churches. Or the farmers we will never meet who planted, tended, and harvested what becomes our food, our daily bread. I mean if you think about it for any length of time, we are hardly independent agents but rather a people who live in an interdependent world, a world that includes the trees we see around us. Why, one acre of forest absorbs six tons of carbon dioxide and produces four tons of pure oxygen that we and many other creatures breath in. 

And so we encounter this tension in our lives: we live in a secular culture that repeatedly sends us the message that “you and you alone matter” and, at the same time, we live in a spiritual culture that prizes the bonds of community and the importance, the absolute importance of relationships. In today’s gospel, Jesus makes this intercession concerning his disciples: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” As these words were being recorded in the Gospel of John, the editor of the fourth gospel was well aware of the fact that Christians were prone to tribalism: to claiming that their one experience or one understanding of the faith, of God, of ethics was the one and only way – the very definition of  fundamentalism, be it conservative or liberal. Why, then, would anyone want to participate in a spiritual culture, a spiritual community, that promotes divisions rooted in ethnicity, gender, economic class, or ideology? Thus the intercession of Jesus is an aspirational prayer for you and me: “may they also be in us,” – may they be – a prayer that asks you and me for a good measure of intellectual and spiritual humility; a prayer that pleads for the one thing our world desperately needs and is seemingly incapable of creating and nurturing: a community of relationships marked by self-giving love. 

During his presentation before the ordination of our new bishop this past September, Michael Curry, the former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church said this: “After I was elected to this office, I looked for research on how Americans perceive Christians. What I found was disturbing. While the vast majority of Christians think of themselves as loving or compassionate, more than half of the non-Christians surveyed found Christians, both conservative and liberal, to be judgmental and arrogant. Indeed,” he continued, “when young adults were asked if they saw Christians as loving, the majority were surprised that the word ‘loving’ would be associated with Christians.” 

 But of course that word “love” can mean many things. When it is used in English translations of the New Testament what we don’t see or hear is the original Greek word agape: love as an action, action serves the wellbeing of someone else, that nourishes relationship with others. 

Truth be told, we live in a time in which such love is in short supply as aid to people caught in poverty in other countries is ended; as food is denied to hungry children by the federal government; as medical assistance to those in need is tossed out the window; as protections for wetlands, water, air, and soil are rescinded. What did Jesus say? “May they become one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them.” Who, then, are we called to be in this chaotic time? Why nothing less than a living cell of health and vitality in the body politic; that yeast which can leaven, enliven the lives of our friends on the street; that love which gives itself away for the good of another, why even a stranger.  

And so I wonder: will our eating and drinking of the Body and Blood of the One who poured out his life for others nourish in you and me the pulse of his love and so lead others to give thanks for our commitment to their wellbeing?

Ascension Day

Preached Ascension Day (Year C), May 29, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by the Reverend Samuel Torvend.

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

In 1529, the German reformer, Martin Luther, met the Swiss reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, in the city of Marburg in order to discuss how Christ is present in the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Communion. Zwingli cited this confession in the Creed: “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” Of course, this portion of the Creed was inspired by todays’ gospel reading. Given that the risen Christ is seated with the Father in heaven, so argued Zwingli, he could not possibly be present in any real way in the eucharistic gifts of bread and wine. What this feast day acknowledges, he continued, is Christ’s physical absence from the earth and its many forms of life. 

Luther was dismayed by this interpretation and called out Zwingli for being a poor student of the Bible even though Luther knew that Zwingli was quite learned. But that was not enough: he also accused Zwingli of a childish literalism. “Seated at God’s right hand in heaven above us?” asked Luther with astonishment. “Why, you naïve priest,” he continued, “God is spirit. God has no right hand, no right hand. God is not seated on a throne in the highest heavens for we know that the right hand is a reference to God’s presence throughout the universe and God’s power to be wherever God wants to be: in the smallest acorn as well as the most humble house servant. Christ is not distant from us, for Christ was raised into the Father’s presence throughout the universe.”

Luther thus claimed that the risen Christ is really, truly, deeply present in, with, and under the bread and wine of the Eucharist, offering himself to anyone who is hungry and thirsty for his presence in their lives. Thus we might say that this feast of the Ascension is not about taking a trip into outer space but just the opposite: Christ’s ascension from one local – a hillside – is his ascension into our world. We might speak of this mystery as his descent into the creation with all its wild diversity; his descension, if you will, into you and me. 

And yet in a time of sickness or loss, or in the midst of the chaos that has gripped our country over the past few months, it might be difficult to discern that presence should we experience bewilderment, anxiety, or fear. So frequently we can live between the promise of the divine presence and the downright cussedness of life. In such moments or stretches of time, I have found these words of the Anglo-Catholic poet, W.H. Auden, to be both challenge and consolation: 

“He is the Way. Follow Him through the land of Unlikeness. He is the Truth. Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety. He is the Life. Love Him in the World of the Flesh.”

In the midst of anxiety, bewilderment, or fear, suggests Auden, Christ is present – not as escape but as companion. For this is the truth of who he is: our ever-present friend and advocate. Thus, the poet invites us to find Christ in the world of the flesh, our flesh, in the face of the person next to you, in the ordinary bread and wine that reveal his life-giving presence; in the world of matter, of materiality, of which he is the creator. Come, then, dear friends, to his table and let bread fragment and sip of wine nourish your soul with the pulse of his love. 

Help is coming soon

Preached on the Sixth Sunday of Easter (Year C), May 25, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by the Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 16:9-15
Psalm 67
Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
John 14:23-29

The Dove – Come Holy Spirit, by Philip Mantofa

All my life, I have needed help. There are all the obvious, universal examples. When I was an infant, just like you, I needed help with everything, and would quickly have died without it.

But there were particular moments over the years when I needed help, and help did not come. When I was in seventh grade, I needed help with my attention problems, even just the basic help of someone in authority who would tell my parents that attention was the issue, and that this professional helper had a clear solution. That authority figure could have been my friend and ally. They could have eased my deep loneliness while helping me function better in school. Instead, I just struggled through it alone.

I wonder if you have felt lonesome and confused at some point in your life, and if you sensed that you didn’t have the help you needed.

In ninth grade I was overwhelmed, it’s fair to say traumatized, by my family’s move to a major city, and I didn’t have enough help with my depression and anxiety. At the time, my mother was going through a similar rough adjustment. She didn’t have enough help, either.

I wonder if you have felt anxious or depressed at some point in your life, and if you sensed that you didn’t have the help you needed.

In my sophomore year in college I needed help coming out as gay. But I had precious little help. One particular pastor was a champion helper! But I came out to my parents all by myself, and I had no idea how to handle their complicated first reactions. And then, for years afterward, I didn’t have help learning the ropes of being a gay man in his twenties. 

I wonder if you have had an identity crisis at some point in your life, and if you sensed that you didn’t have the help you needed.

When a person doesn’t have help, they do the best they can, but they are likely to make mistakes. They are likely to say and do things they later regret. These days, when I recall a particularly upsetting or embarrassing event from my life, I’ll try to take a good, deep breath, and then I’ll say to myself — often out loud! — “You just needed help when that happened. You just didn’t have help.” This is a form of self-compassion. I encourage you to try it. I mean it.

Today we celebrate the Good News that all of us, individually but also — more powerfully – all of us together are going to get a lot more help. The help is coming in the form of an Advocate, who in Greek is called the Paraclete. An advocate is someone who speaks up for us: the word ‘advocate’ is related to “vocal,” and also “vocation.” The Holy Spirit, the Paraclete — she advocates for us. She speaks on our behalf. She is coming to help us.

But of course the Paraclete is already here, and has been here for all of the uncounted eons that there has been a here, here. The Holy Spirit brooded over the waters when the Holy Three brought order from chaos. The Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. The Holy Spirit has always moved through the entire created universe. We wait for more help to come, but we affirm that the Paraclete, the Advocate, the Helper, has always blown around us and between us like the wind, the very Breath of God. We affirm that the Paraclete, the Advocate, the Helper, has always provoked us and driven us, the very Fire of God that blazes a path of liberation for those in bondage — liberation for the Israelites fleeing ancient Egypt, liberation for the American slaves on the Underground Railroad, liberation for all people today who are in bondage in all its forms, crying out for freedom.

‘Already and not yet’ — that’s how we say it. The Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the Advocate, the Helper, has already been here, has always been here; but we wait for the ‘not yet’. We wait for even more help to come in our uncharted future.

I grasp for an example, to bring it home, into this room, and I am delighted to find one almost immediately, an example of two members of St. Paul’s. Both of these persons would be mortified if I named them now, so I will honor their shared preference for modest discretion. Let’s call them Faith Leader 1 and Faith Leader 2. Faith Leader 1 volunteers diligently for the parish in many ways. Recently, Faith Leader 2 spoke up — by speaking up, this person became an advocate — and offered their help with a major project at the heart of the St. Paul’s mission. This help now relieves Faith Leader 1 of as many as eight hours of work each week. 

Truly I tell you, this is nothing less than a visitation of the Holy Spirit, who surrounds these faith leaders, draws them together in collaboration, brings sorely needed help to one of them, and fills the other with power and purpose. 

Again, it’s already and not yet. Already the Spirit has been here; already the Spirit abides here now. Faith Leader 1 has done a great deal, and they have done everything by the Spirit’s power. But there was a gap, an absence, a ‘not yet’: Faith Leader 1 didn’t have enough help. And so the Spirit brought more help. The Spirit blew in. The Spirit fired up. 

We rehearse all of this in the rhythms of our Sunday prayers. We take seven Sundays out of our year — seven out of fifty-two, just about one seventh of the year, a Sabbath Day of the year — and we devote these Sundays to joyful contemplation not only of Resurrection, but also the descent of the Spirit, the arrival of the Advocate, the Good News that more help is coming.

To aid our prayers, we open the Holy Book to a chapter before Jesus dies, the long conversation when he says goodbye to his followers. Jesus gives them a lengthy, oh so lengthy, goodbye speech. There’s a lot to unpack in that speech. But today, it’s enough that we hear this message: Jesus has departed from our immediate sight, but he remains with us, he remains with all creation, as the Ascended One; and — pay close attention to this part! — and, Jesus is sending us more help.

Dear friends in Christ, we sorely need this help. We need someone like Lydia to come into this room and be a helper for us. We just heard about Lydia in the Acts of the Apostles. Lydia, like Tabitha, is one of the ancient women lifted up by Luke the Evangelist. (Luke loved recording the names and accomplishments of women in that time: this almost never happens in ancient literature! I believe this is yet another action inspired by the Paraclete, who in this instance helped Luke proclaim the Good News about Lydia.) From the perspective of the Jesus followers, Lydia is a foreigner. They — and we — don’t spend too much time with her. She is baptized, and she joins the People of the Way.

But then Lydia does something intriguing, something remarkable, something inspired by the Paraclete: she “urges” Paul and his companions to stay in her household; she “urges” them to accept her hospitality. Let me dip into the Greek for just a moment (stay with me, I promise it’s interesting!): the Greek word for Lydia “urging” them to stay with her is parekalesen. That is, the word is the same as paraclete. That is, Lydia is an advocate. She is filled with the Holy Spirit. She is a helper. She has come to help.

Lydia makes it plain for us, for you and me. Where is the Holy Spirit in this frantic age? She blows through you, she fires you up, she rushes between and around all of us, and the Holy Spirit sends us into the embrace of our neighbor. The Holy Spirit inspires us to urge our neighbor to stay with us. We advocate to and for our neighbor, urging them to join us in this community of the Paraclete.

For here is where the Spirit of God broods over the chaos. Here is where the Spirit of God heals our aching hearts. Here is where the Spirit of God drives us into the wilderness places of the world. Here is where the Spirit of God rushes to the aid of those in need.

Here is where help comes.

Friends in Christ, I need help. And so do you. We may all be doing the best we can, but we need help. And so we rejoice to hear the risen Jesus say this to us today:

“The Advocate, [the Helper,] the Holy Spirit, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid.”

God’s Magic-Making

Preached on the Fifth Sunday of Easter (Year C), May 18, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by Dr. Mark Lloyd Taylor.

Acts 11:1-18
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35
Psalm 148

Make All Things New, by James Janknegt

The book is called Make Magic – by Brad Meltzer, New York Times bestselling author of a dozen thrillers, non-fiction books investigating alleged conspiracies, like those around the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, as well as a series of children’s books on “How Ordinary People Change the World.” Make Magic is based on Meltzer’s commencement speech at his son’s graduation from the University of Michigan. The first proper graduation many students had had since middle school because of COVID. Although Meltzer’s son was disappointed when he learned his dad was going to be the commencement speaker: “YOU? Not Tom Brady? There’s so many people they can pick.”

Make Magic is a cute little book. It has the usual white sheets of paper with black letters on them; but also lots of dark blue pages with white letters or bright orange ones. Many in huge font sizes and just a few words on a page. If I held it up, you could probably read some of the book from out there in the pews, or up in the choir loft. For sure, the orange front and back inside covers would stand out.

I was drawn in by the subtitle of Make Magic: “The book of inspiration you didn’t know you needed.” But I’d also push back a bit. You see, Make Magic is one of four or five books I bought these past few months, so desperate have I been for inspiration of any sort. And for me at least, Meltzer’s book lives up to both its subtitle and its title.

Here’s the premise. According to Brad Meltzer, there are only four types of tricks used by professional magicians:

1. You make something appear.

2. You make something disappear.

3. You make two things switch places.

Finally, 4) you change one thing into something else.

And here’s the graduation-speech-appropriate application and inspiration the book offers. Like magic:

You need to make the best version of you appear.

Make your fear disappear – but not because fear is bad. Use your fear. Harness it. Don’t attack your critics, prove them wrong.

Switch places with someone else. Put yourself in their shoes. Switch places and feel empathy – especially today when cruelty and venom towards others has become a sport in our culture. If you really want to shock the world, unleash your kindness.

And the hardest trick of all – changing one thing into something else. Transformation. Never stop changing, learning; and never think you know it all. Instead, see yourself in a hall of mirrors – with endless possibilities.

Those are Meltzer’s four ways to make magic: Make the best version of yourself appear. Make your fear disappear by harnessing it. Switch places with other people to find empathy. And never stop transforming.

+++

There’s magic like this going on in all our scripture readings this morning. Things appear and disappear in the book of Revelation. “I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away….And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (21:1-2). Things disappear and appear before the eyes of John the seer – a human being like us, writing to a beleaguered community of Jesus followers. But God was the magician. It was God making magic. “See, the home of God is with mortals,” proclaims a loud voice from the heavenly throne; and “See, I am making all things new.…I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” (3, 5-6).

From the gospel of John – in words spoken at the last supper, before his crucifixion – Jesus tells those gathered around the table with him that he will disappear: “Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; [but] where I am going you cannot come” (13:33). Then he promises to re-appear, in a new way; one in which he and his followers seem to switch places, somehow; even that his followers are transformed into Jesus: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (34-35).

Above all, hear and take to heart the magic, the inspiration, of our reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Peter has been out on the road – away from the earliest mission base of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem. He’s begun switching places, literally, by visiting little circles of believers in and around what we would call the Gaza strip; encouraging them and being encouraged by them. Peter, the Jewish fisherman from Galilee, ends up in the household of a Roman centurion named Cornelius and shares a meal, breaks bread, with the Gentiles gathered there. What we heard in our reading this morning was Peter’s defense of that stop on his tour, when, back in Jerusalem, some of his fellow Jewish-Christian apostles criticize his choices and actions. “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” (11:2)

Why? It was God working magic. Things appear and appear and appear over and over again. “I was in the city of Joppa praying,” Peter reports, “and in a trance I saw a vision” (5). The original Greek actually reads: in ecstasy – standing outside of himself, beyond himself – already switching places in prayer, a vision appears to Peter. Three degrees of separation from what he would have considered the old, the safe, the straight and narrow. What appeared in Peter’s vision was something like a sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners. It came close to Peter and he looked closely at it. The sheet was full of four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. All unclean. Forbidden. And yet Peter was commanded to kill and eat them. This happened three times and then everything disappeared again into heaven.

At that very moment, three men sent by Cornelius the Roman centurion from Caesarea – a city named after the Roman emperor – appeared at the door of the house where Peter was staying. Because – and so the magic spreads – an angel had appeared to Cornelius saying, “Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved” (13-14).

Peter’s initial response to the magic appearing before his eyes was to stay put. To remain standing firmly where he always had been. “By no means, Lord;” Peter says when told to feed upon the creatures of his vision, “for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth” (8). But then the magic of switching places comes fully into play. The voice from heaven answers: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane” (9). And so, at the door of the house, but still safely inside, God’s Spirit invites Peter to go with Cornelius’ men “and not to make a distinction between them and us” (12). Step out. Cross that threshold of difference; of us versus them. And so Peter makes his unexpected stop in Caesarea – accompanied by six of his fellow Jesus followers. They enter Cornelius’ unclean, Gentile house. As soon as Peter begins to speak, “the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning” (15). Jew and Gentile alike. Roman centurion and Galilean fisherman. Cornelius’ whole household: male and female and otherwise. Slave and free. And Peter delivers his closing argument: “If then God gave them” – those I once considered unclean, different from me and other – “if God gave them the same gift that God gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” (17) Hinder God’s magic of switching places. Of empathy. Of reconciliation and inclusion.

This morning’s reading also marks a further step, no, a giant leap forward, in Peter’s transformation. Peter, who at first was so eager to follow Jesus. Impetuous. Quick to speak and quick to act, even when he did not really understand what he was doing or saying. The Peter who claimed he would go to death with Jesus, but then three times denied he even knew him. The seeds of Peter’s transformation were planted five weeks ago – in our hearing – on Palm Sunday when Jesus turned and looked at Peter across the courtyard (Luke 22:54-62). Looked at him with mercy, and grace, and a path back to friendship, as Father Stephen said in his sermon. Transformation sprouted as Peter stooped and looked into Jesus’ tomb at dawn that first Easter Sunday and found it empty (24:12). Transformation blossomed as he recognized the stranger on the shore as Jesus, dove headlong into the sea – once again leaving nets and boat behind; shared the breakfast Jesus had prepared; wrestled with that threefold question about love; and finally heard Jesus say puzzling words about how, later, someone else would fasten a belt around Peter and take him where he did not wish to go (John 21:4-19). Transformation finally bearing ripe fruit when Peter entered the house of Cornelius and found God’s Holy Spirit as active there as we will hear it was in the upper room on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4). And, our tradition tells us, when Peter was taken to Rome to die a martyr’s death. For the hardest magic trick is changing one thing into something else.

+++

Now I wonder what needs to appear before our eyes? In our relationships? Our places of work and service and community? Here at St. Paul’s? In neighborhood and city and country? Our global social, political, and economic structures?

What needs to disappear?

With whom do we need to switch places in order to find empathy?

And – hardest of all – how do we change into something, into someone, else?

Here’s the little bit I can say by way of inspiration. When we gather around this table to share the meal Jesus still prepares for us, one of our priests – Samuel or Catherine, Mary Jane or Stephen – will say on our behalf words like: presenting to you from your creation, this bread and this wine. We pray you, gracious God, to send your Holy Spirit upon these gifts that they may be the Sacrament of the Body of Christ and his Blood of the new Covenant. But then they will always go on and pray something else, something like: Grant that we who share these gifts may be filled with the Holy Spirit and live as Christ’s Body in the world. Or: Breathe your Spirit over the whole earth and make us your new creation, the Body of Christ given for the world you have made.

But be careful what you ask for. If we are transformed into Christ’s own body, then we become his hands to heal the sick, the wounded, and the abused. Dangerous! Christ’s feet to go places we otherwise wouldn’t go. Dangerous!! Christ’s mouth to speak inclusion and justice and peace. Dangerous!!! But then who are we to hinder God’s magic-making?

Resources

Bard Meltzer, Make Magic (William Morrow, 2025).

Some of the other books I have purchased recently, seeking inspiration, have been: Steven Charleston, We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope (Broadleaf Books, 2023); Elizabeth Banks Cox, Reading Van Gogh: An Amateur’s Search for God (Mercer University Press, 2024); and Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (Riverhead Books, 2005).

The lines I quote from our Eucharistic prayers can be found in: The Book of Common Prayer, 369, and Enriching Our Worship, 1:59, 62.

Tabitha understood the assignment

Preached on the Fourth Sunday of Easter (Year C), May 11, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 9:36-43
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30

Old Yaffo

Yafo is one of the oldest cities in the world, an ancient port on the Mediterranean coast. Nowadays, Old Yafo is considered part of the larger city of Tel Aviv-Yafo. Yafo has a significant Arab population and has historically been an encouraging example of peaceful co-existence.

‘Yafo’ is the name in romanized Hebrew. Another pronunciation is ‘Jaffa’. When we hear today the story of Tabitha, one of our forebears in faith, Jaffa — Tabitha’s hometown — is translated into English as ‘Joppa’. The Israelites received the cedars of Lebanon at this port, for use in building their temples. 

We also find ourselves in Joppa when we meet Jonah, that mercurial, reluctant prophet who tried to run from God and wound up inside the belly of the great fish. Jonah runs to Joppa and books passage on a boat bound for Tarshish, a city in modern-day Spain — that is, somewhere at the very edge of Jonah’s known world. God intercepts Jonah long before he makes it to Spain, as God does with all of us. We can’t escape the reach of God’s piercing but redemptive grace, no matter how desperately we run.

I have been to Joppa. When I was there, I visited the Shimon Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, south of Old Yafo. The Peres Center stands at the edge of the sea, built to honor the memory of 1994 Nobel laureate Shimon Peres, the eighth prime minister and ninth president of Israel. His memory is particularly worthy of our attention these days. Like every one of us, Peres was not perfect, but in the 1990s he emerged as an advocate for peace, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat.  

Whatever your thoughts about imperfect politicians and their complicated human-rights records, if you go to Yafo, to Joppa, I encourage you to look at the sea. The Peres Center has a room with sweeping views. The waves break peacefully over the sand, rhythmically moving beneath dazzling azure skies. The waves just keep coming, and you can marvel at the fact that they have done this for eons — that these waves came ashore when Jesus lived a bit inland.

Joppa is one of our pilgrimage sites, one of our holy places.

When I was at the Peres Center, I was with a tour group that paired Christian clergy with Jewish rabbis. I bunked with my friend Seth Goldstein, the Rabbi at Temple Beth Hatfiloh in Olympia. Our tour group heard from Palestinian and Israeli activists who fought disillusionment and worked hard to build dialogue and understanding. 

Joppa, a port city: a place of arrival and departure. Joppa, a human village: a place where people dwell and work, live and love, eat and give birth, grow old and die. Joppa, just up the coast north of Gaza, one of the most anguished and traumatized places in this anguished and traumatized world. Joppa, the location of Jonah’s personal crisis, and the mission base for Tabitha the skillful artisan.

We are currently dwelling in a far younger city, though the waves have been crashing ashore here for eons, too. I invite you to settle yourself, breathe, and become aware that you say your prayers just a little bit inland from another great sea. Like Jonah, like Tabitha, we are here only briefly, but we are here. And we can make choices here, choices that carry great consequences.

I suggest that we pay our respects to the prophet Jonah, but choose to follow Tabitha’s path instead. Poor Jonah inspires me greatly: I follow his story with interest, and I sometimes find myself alongside him in that claustrophobic fish belly. I even have tattooed on my left arm Jonah’s liberation from the grave of his own making. But given the choice, I would rather not be remembered for my resistance to grace, for my orneriness and self-centered rejection of God’s call. I would rather be remembered as Tabitha is remembered. I would rather that my friends remembered me with tender grief and fierce love.

For we are told that when Tabitha died, they “washed her:” this intimate detail is preserved. Tabitha’s body was sacred to the memory of her community. They took tender care of her and prepared her body for a dignified burial.

Then they held up her works of art, her tunics and other clothing. Tabitha probably created garments like the one I am wearing right now: carefully crafted, lovingly woven, flush with vivid color, garments that underscored the dignity of every body that wore them. If she was who I think she was, Tabitha probably thought about who would be wearing each garment, weaving prayers for the person into each stitch, each fold, each hem. 

And so we learn Tabitha’s lesson: if you find yourself in a human community at the edge of a sea, reach out your hands in labor for that community. If you find yourself at a port where people come and go, stay there, dwell there, serve there. Our faith often inspires much grander ambitions than the simple life and witness of Tabitha, but I really think she understood the assignment.

Christians down the ages all too easily have fallen for grandiose and perverse visions of the faith: that we can convert the masses to our Way, that we can govern nations by the light of our faith, that we are history’s winners. And so we watch in dismay as the Gospel is distorted to support nationalism and xenophobia, racism and sexism, the erasure of trans persons, the separation of families, a “bully on the playground” approach to foreign affairs. All of this is the opposite of the Christian Gospel. Those who draw on our faith to espouse these values reveal that they have not received, let alone understood, the Good News of the Risen Christ at all.

No, the Good News is revealed by a weaver of clothing whose death inspired grief, storytelling, and tearful embraces. If Tabitha’s daily labor led to the liberation of the oppressed; if her tender death scene was recorded because her community brought peace and justice into the world — peace and justice arriving, like the cedars of Lebanon, via the port of Joppa — then it all began with the weaving of Tabitha’s tunics. Tabitha understood the assignment.

But she is not alone. This past week the world watched as nearly one and a half billion people welcomed their new spritual leader. Soon after Robert Cardinal Prevost (often called Father Bob) chose to be called Pope Leo the Fourteenth, Sister Helen Prejean wrote this on social media: “I’m very happy about our new Pope Leo!,” she gushed. “As soon as I heard the name Leo, I knew he’d be strong on social justice. Pope Leo XIII started the social justice movement in the Catholic Church by standing on the side of laborers and their right to belong to unions. I believe he’ll continue Pope Francis’ spirit of championing the rights of immigrants and poor people. And, dear to my heart, work zealously to abolish the death penalty worldwide.”

Sister Helen’s excitement is infectious, and though I will probably disagree with Leo the Fourteenth on many important topics, including the goodness in God’s sight of my own marriage, I pray with confidence that Father Bob will try to keep the main thing the main thing. Are you a person of faith? If so, “standing on the side of laborers and their right to belong to unions” is a good way to express that faith.

The Gospel teaches us nothing about how to conquer a country, how to secure our wealth, how to win a cultural conflict, how to win an election, or even how to win friends. The Gospel simply teaches us to learn from an ancient textile worker that the mission begins with ordinary work such as weaving clothing. We change the world by working together. That’s the assignment. That’s how we preach Christ Crucified. That’s how we proclaim the Resurrection.

Tabitha probably knew all of this at least partly because Jesus himself often drew upon the imagery of sheep and shepherds to teach his followers who he is, what he does, and where he wants to lead them. In the ancient world, there could hardly be a more humble and menial metaphor than that of sheep hearing their shepherd’s voice. I like to think that my dogs know my voice, that they know how deeply I love them, that they know how vital and central they are to me. But sheep and their shepherd — this is even more workaday, more humbling, more humiliating than the mild image of an upper-middle-class Seattleite who loves his dogs. 

Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God incarnate in human flesh, the One who has come into the world, the one who trampled death by death and to those in the tombs bestowed life: he comes among us as a field worker on the night shift, mucking out stalls, driving flocks up and down the hills, counting wayward livestock, picking out the ticks embedded in their rough skin. His hands are filthy. He likely can’t live independently. There is no plumbing, no electric light. This is the One who teaches Tabitha, and teaches us, how to live.

But each day, each week, we have a choice. Here we are, not in Joppa but Seattle, yet still in the same house as Tabitha, the same predicament as Jonah. The waves of the sea are crashing over the shoreline. Here we are. What choice do we make, here in our city by the sea? We could bolt: get ourselves on board a boat heading out of here, duck the task God sets us in Holy Baptism, choose fear and our own small selves over the messy ministries of the Good Shepherd and his grungy flock.

Or we could stay, and serve. We could unroll bolts of fabric and begin our labor that puts clothes on the backs of our companions. It is not glamorous work, but we would proclaim Good News of great joy to a world crying out for it.

Here we are together in Joppa. What should we choose to do?

We have no fish

Preached on the Third Sunday of Easter (Year C), May 4, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Acts 9:1-6
Psalm 30
Revelation 5:11-14
John 21:1-19

The Resurrection appearance in John 21 is my favorite Gospel passage. In 2021, I had the icon tattooed on my right arm.

Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?”

They answered him, “No.”

We have been fishing all night long, and we have no fish.

I expect everyone here has known this feeling of exhausted futility. Many of us feel defeated because of all that is going wrong in the world. We feel powerless to do anything about it. We have been fishing all night long, and we have no fish.

But we can feel like that for other reasons. Some of us are waiting for a diagnostic report about a health scare. Others of us have gotten the report back already, and the treatments have started — excruciating, enervating treatments. One of our members says it this way: when she recovers from chemo, she feels “puny.” Puny: small, little, diminished. We have been fishing all night long, and we have no fish.

Still others of us feel puny because we made a big mistake, or just did the wrong thing. Occasionally someone meets with me for confession and absolution (one person did this just last week), and the deep, wrenching feelings gush out. The pain pulses: Like Peter fishing through the night, ruminating on his denials, we feel sorry, but we also feel strung out. We have been fishing all night long, and we have no fish.

But these terrible, vulnerable places in our lives are the precise places where the risen Jesus appears to us. He is strange, mysterious, even unnerving. He knows our inner selves. But he draws near to us with compassion in difficult moments of our lives. He draws near to us with mercy and grace, with healing and challenge.

All of the resurrection stories confirm this. The Risen Stranger approaches his friends on the seashore precisely when they are lost in their gray, early-morning despair. The Risen Challenger approaches Paul when Paul is a violent persecutor, traveling to Damascus. The Risen One overwhelms, even traumatizes Paul, forcing him to be dependent on others — dependent on the very people he persecuted! They lead Paul by the hand into his new life. This dreadful encounter reveals Paul’s desperate vulnerability, his dreadful weaknesses, his many mistakes. The appearance of the Risen Challenger is painful, even devastating. But Paul is transformed. He rises to a new life.

The risen Jesus appears to many others who are lost, vulnerable, guilty, or grieving. He approaches Mary Magdalene — a faithful, savvy disciple to be sure, and the first to realize that she had seen the risen Lord — but he approaches Mary from her blind side: lost in her grief, she doesn’t recognize him at first because he is not at all what or who she expected him to be. And the risen Jesus appears to Cleopas and their evening companion as they walk the road to Emmaus. They are out of ideas and out of hope, exhausted by the massive disappointment and trauma of the crucifixion. That’s when the Risen One appears.

And so it is with us. The risen Jesus approaches us precisely when we throw up our hands in weary exasperation about all that is going wrong in the world. The risen Jesus approaches us precisely when we are terrified by our own mortality, coping with both physical and emotional pain — when we are feeling “puny.” The risen Jesus approaches us precisely when we are lamenting our failures, when we know that we messed up, when we don’t know how to make things right.

The Risen Stranger comes to us in our worst moments, and when he appears, he asks, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” Somehow, he knew. Somehow, he knows. He knows we have no fish, even though we’ve been fishing all night.

He knows we have been giving in to helplessness when there are so many things we can do to mend the world, if only in this little corner of that world. He knows we are frightened of our frailty and mortality. He knows what we did, and what we failed to do. It’s no use to hide the truth from him, from one another, from ourselves.

He knows.

So it works like this: where in your life are you weakest, most vulnerable, most afraid, most frustrated, most defeated? Go there. Focus there. Then, take a deep, cleansing breath. It is there, right there, in the terrible places of our lives, where the risen Jesus draws close to us. It is there, right there, where the risen Jesus confronts us.

And then the resurrection breaks into our dreadful contemplations, into our sleepless nights, into our desperate gray days. Jesus tells his friends to fling their nets in the other direction, and suddenly their boat is groaning under the weight of a wondrous catch of fish. Then he invites them to shore, for breakfast, and they are transformed into his apostles. In my reading, he pairs the hot breakfast with strong, steaming coffee. They awaken from their miserable ruminations. They shake their heads clear of despair. They rise to new life, abundant life, resurrected life.

This happens here, in this community of faith. Many, many of us are gathering and networking to build our skills as advocates for those who are under threat from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many, many of us are gathering routinely to pray for those who are sick and organize our visits to them. Many, many of us are listening to our children and young people, hearing their worries, learning their insights, joining their cause.

But the resurrection is about much more than all that’s going well here at St. Paul’s. The resurrection is not just a metaphor or image for the hope we feel when our community is taking care of people and cultivating, however slowly, authentic hope for the future. The resurrection is about that, but it is about more than that.

We don’t just encounter the risen Christ in our flurry of ministry activities. We encounter the risen Christ here, at this Table, in our prayers of thanksgiving at this Table, in the breaking of bread at this Table, in the drinking of the cup at this Table. We just need to understand that idea, that truth, that Good News, more deeply.

One of our great contemporary Anglican writers can help us. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, says that we meet the risen Christ here at this Table when — and only when — we are what Williams calls “a community that actively seeks to live in reconciliation.”

When we are a community that actively seeks to live in reconciliation, this Eucharistic Table is our breakfast table by the seashore; this Eucharistic Table is our crisis point on the way to Damascus; this Eucharistic Table is our vision of Mary Magdalene’s Rabbouni in the graveyard garden; this Eucharistic Table is our evening encounter with the Risen Christ on Emmaus Road.

But the good archbishop says it better. Yes, the Eucharistic meal becomes for us an encounter with the risen Christ “when [we are] a community that actively seeks to live in reconciliation.” Yes. But this reconciliation is not merely a quick kiss-and-make-up session after a quarrel. 

This reconciliation — the reconciliation we experience when we encounter the risen Christ, the reconciliation that reveals to us, here in this Eucharistic meal, not only resurrection but the Risen One himself — this reconciliation is nothing less than this: Quoting Rowan Williams, “...[T]he risen Jesus is present where [people] turn to their victims and receive back their lost hearts.”

“...[T]he risen Jesus is present where [people] turn to their victims and receive back their lost hearts.”

We have lost our hearts in this deathly world of human struggle. Now, we may know that we are vulnerable and fallible; we may know that all human beings are prone to error; but we may not necessarily think or feel that we have “lost our hearts,” or worse, that we have “victims” we need to turn toward to receive back our lost hearts. If I have a victim, then I am… well, then I am an offender. I am guilty of offenses. I am offensive. That’s a bitter pill to swallow, and it doesn’t easily make sense as part of a message of Easter Good News. 

But let’s face it: we do have victims, each of us, and all of us. We have taken what does not belong to us, including this very land we stand on, and pray on. We enjoy privileges that most of the world can only dream of. You or I may be innocent of many things: I have not taken a life; I do not consciously steal; I habitually tell the truth. But we all have victims. 

So we come to this Table to face our victims. We turn toward them with courage we can only receive from the risen Christ. And when we do this, then it is repaired; the wound is closed; the patient begins to recover; life resurrects.

There is nothing more valuable, dear friends in Christ, nothing more significant, nothing more desperately desired by our exhausted spirits, than this reconciliation, this restoration, this turning toward our victims, and this receiving back our lost hearts. 

When we turn toward one another in painful reconciliation; when we turn toward the world with forthright honesty, bracing courage, and breathtaking vulnerability; when we acknowledge our terrible mortality and choose to live fully and courageously in this reconciled community… When we do all of these brave things, then, when the Risen Stranger asks us, “Children, do you have any fish?”, then we can reply, with astonishment and gladness,

“Yes.”

___________________________

Work cited:
Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd Ltd., 2014 edition), 101-102.

Belief as Imagination

Preached on the Second Sunday of Easter, April 27, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.

Acts 5:27-32
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31
Psalm 118:14-29

Go On, Saint Thomas, by Jack Baumgartner

Jesus says to Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe, but believe what, exactly? In Thomas’ case it seems to be belief that Jesus is resurrected, so that Jesus can be seen, close enough to touch. For so many in all the centuries since, this is sticking point. Historians agree that Jesus the person existed, and that he was executed. Opinions vary on whether he was resurrected. Arguments against Christianity often enough focus on the resurrection.

I think it is not helpful to focus too narrowly on whether the resurrection happened or not. In fact I affirm my belief in the resurrection, both Jesus’, and ours. But for me, resurrection is not that interesting unless it is paired with what it signifies about Jesus. It signifies two related things. First, I stand with Thomas here when he says, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus is God. Second, if Jesus is God, we would do well to pay very close attention to what he says and does. In other words, the resurrection of Jesus is most significant to me when it compels us to pay better attention to the life of Jesus.

See, to me, belief in the resurrection too easily becomes a stark binary: either you believe or you don’t. The switch is on or off. But my experience of belief is not like that. My experience of belief is like a rainbow, a spectrum, or a vast field of moments of clarity, and doubt, and then clarity, but different than before. Belief is not static for me; it is lived. It is breathed.

Jesus said to them… “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” I experience belief as breath, as the Holy Spirit, literally the Holy Breath of God, in me, in my heart.

The resurrection of Jesus should not be reduced to a doctrinal statement, or a talking point in a theological debate. Belief in the resurrection should not just be belief in an extraordinary miracle two thousand years ago, nor even an essentially self-centered hope in some sort of afterlife for ourselves. I think belief in the resurrection is better framed as belief in Immanuel, God with us. 

God is not the once and future king, like the legend of King Arthur who is not dead but magically sleeping only to rise again when the Britons need him most. Belief in the resurrection can be belief in the Holy Spirit at work here and now. Jesus is so alive in all of us as members of the Body of Christ that we might mistake him for a gardener now and then.

So in light of all of this, I propose reframing the idea of belief in today’s Gospel. I’m going to use a different word altogether: imagination. Let’s hear the passage again this way.

The other disciples say to Thomas, “We have seen the Lord.” But he says to them (and I paraphrase here), “Unless I see him up close, I will not imagine it.” And then when Thomas meets the resurrected Jesus, and says, “My Lord and my God,” Jesus says to him, “Has your imagination expanded because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to imagine so much more.”

Belief as imagination is not binary, but multivariate, expansive, creative, alive. Belief as imagination cannot be contained in any creed, in any orthodoxy, although those things can certainly help us focus our imagination toward our loving God.

Blessed indeed, I say, are those who have not seen a more just world and yet have come to imagine it. Blessed are those who have not seen the economic benefit of caring for the most vulnerable, and yet have come to imagine that to care for the vulnerable is to care for God. Blessed are those who have not seen the Kingdom of Heaven, and yet have come to imagine that it is indeed in-breaking here and now.

I suppose that for some, the word imagination is not more helpful than the word belief. Neither word reliably balances a checkbook, but I retort that neither does a balanced checkbook reliably convey love, or offer hope to the hopeless.

And we can get crunchy and practical too. It took imagination for scientists to prove that germs exist and then to prove that washing our hands can save lives. It took imagination to read between the lines of the Bible to hear the Holy Spirit teach our species that slavery is wrong, even though our Scriptures support it much more than not.

It takes imagination to interpret Scripture away from misogyny, homophobia, and all manner of other bigotries. Belief that is strictly binary, on or off, does not necessarily allow for a living faith. But belief as imagination does.

This is how I hear the end of the Gospel passage, when we hear that it is written so that we may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing we may have life in his name.

Through believing we may have life in his name. Or in my paraphrase this morning, through the use of our imagination, guided by the Holy Spirit, we may participate in a living, God-centered, faith. Further, our faith can be such that it is not a part of our lives but instead our lives are a part of our faith. Imagine, or believe in, a faith that is so in tune with God’s will, that all that we do, and all that we are, is taken up in that faith, is held in its embrace.

In the winter of 1995 there was a song that was popular for a time. Some of you may know it. It’s called “One of Us,” written by Eric Bazilian, and sung by Joan Osborne. One of the lyrics is a question that is repeated several times: “What if God was one of us?” I remember at the time being struck by what it might suggest about our culture that this was an interesting question to ask. Surely it is an article of our faith that God was one of us, Jesus.

But in my experience this article of faith is expressed the other way: one of us, Jesus, is God. Or put as a question, like the song, “What if one of us was God?”

The two questions, “what if God was one of us?,” and “what if one of us was God?” are not quite the same. There is a difference in emphasis, in direction. When we ask “what if one of us was God?” we are starting with an us, and then elevating one of us, setting that person apart. It’s a distancing.

I am prepared to affirm at any time that Jesus is God, but that only makes sense to me in the context of the prologue of John’s Gospel in which it is clear that Jesus is not elevated to Godhood in his life but rather was God in the beginning. This is why I tend to revere the Incarnation fully as much as the Resurrection, because if Jesus was God in the beginning, his God-ness is not so remarkable as his human-ness. That, for me, is the power of the question in the song, “What if God was one of us?” It’s essentially a song about the Incarnation.

The reason I am going on about this song is that the question in the song is such an effective example of belief as imagination. I’ve talked about the problems of belief that becomes static, or binary. Here is another way to put that. I have not often found belief that is all about statements, with periods at the ends of them, all that useful in real life. More useful, I have found, is belief that is made up of questions, but not just any questions – questions that inspire our imaginations – “what if” questions.

What if God was one of us? What if God so loved the cosmos that he gave his only Son? What if rainbows are a sign of God’s covenant with us? What if justice and mercy are the offerings God chooses? What if when we pray to the Holy Spirit at this table, the bread and wine were to be for us the body and blood of Jesus, spiritual food that brings us together in an eternal, loving communion with God and each other? What if God was not just one of us, but deep within the hearts of all of us?

Blessed are those who have not seen these things, and yet still imagine them, and order their lives accordingly.