"These people actually believe in Angels!"

Preached on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels (transferred), September 28, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Genesis 28:10-17
Psalm 103:19-22
Revelation 12:7-12
John 1:47-51

St. Michael’s Victory over the Devil, by Jacob Epstein, at Coventry Cathedral

Years ago, Andrew and I watched “Scandal,” a smart, gritty television show about a political “fixer” named Olivia Pope. Olivia solved problems for hapless politicians who had gotten themselves into hot water. I haven’t watched “Scandal” for many years now, but I expect it is almost quaint by comparison to our current political misadventures. 

In one memorable scene, the White House Chief of Staff, a world-wise political operator named Cyrus Beene, is speaking with contempt about members of the opposition. He condemns them as brutally as he can, finding a particularly devastating insult to throw at them: “These people,” Cyrus says, “These people actually believe in Angels.”

What fools. They believe in Angels?! Fluffy, feathery winged beings of indeterminate gender who flutter about, invisibly, in the clouds. And the clouds are dotted with harps, most likely. And there’s St. Peter, right out of a New Yorker cartoon, standing behind a lectern next to the pearly gates, reviewing poor souls to decide whether they’ll get into heaven.

“These people actually believe in Angels.” How ludicrous!

But as I watched the show, I realized I actually like Cyrus Beene. He’s a wretch, a snake, a crook. But he is always more than one thing. He’s a gay man in a straight world, and if I remember the show correctly, it turns out he actually loves his husband, and is able to express that love. Cyrus harbors contempt for kind people, weak people, and stupid people. He doesn’t suffer fools. And since I am (I hope) much kinder than Cyrus, and I have several personal weaknesses, and I make my share of dumb mistakes, I surely would be one of the people he disrespects, and not just because I believe in Angels. Still, somehow, I like him.

But as surprisingly likable as he is, Cyrus is wrong about something: belief in Angels makes good sense. Belief in Angels helps us look at ourselves differently. Belief in Angels helps us cope with this troubled world, and make this world better. And, Belief in Angels even helps us look differently at, feel differently about, and relate differently to that awful man himself, Cyrus Beene, and all the other Cyrus Beenes out there right now.

But first, a quick sidebar about belief, about believing in things, and about your possible suspicion that this church needs you to believe in things. You may already know this, but you are currently sitting in a church that does not begin with belief. We don’t require you to sign on to a complex theological system before you can approach the Table. No. We begin with practice. So I don’t need you to believe in Angels; more importantly, God doesn’t need you to believe in Angels.

All you’re invited to do today is join us in our practice of prayer, singing, and contemplation; our practice of drawing alongside our neighbors in solidarity; our practice not of merely looking forward to an angel-filled afterlife, but rather our practice of celebrating the astonishing beauty of our physical, mortal lives in this wondrous world, and in that celebration, finding — and bringing about — God’s heaven right here, saints and Angels and all.

So let go of the dreary question, “Do I believe in Angels?” It’s not the right question, and anyway you probably do believe more than you think you do. Let’s ask this question: “Do we trust that God’s messengers are here, and do we trust that they are active, whether they’re angelic or human?” “Angel,” after all, is a Hebrew concept that only means “messenger of God,” not necessarily a surreal flying humanoid creature beyond our sight, and often enough beyond our belief.

Angels — God’s messengers — run vital errands, representing God to God’s people. Angels were – and this is as reductive and dismissive as I’ll get, when talking about Angels – Angels were a way for the ancient Hebrews to see and relate to the one God who is not visible, and whose image must not be carved in stone or drawn on wood. Angels speak with God’s inaudible voice. They appear on behalf of the invisible God, the ultimate One, the One beyond our comprehension, the one we cannot see or fully understand.

Are Angels winged creatures, like John Travolta in the starring role of the film called “Michael”? No, or at least they don’t have to be. Neither do they have to be the terrifying monsters described in the book of Ezekiel, with countless eyes and wings. The ordinary person sitting next to you right now may not be an Angel, but she might be, well, she might be angelic.

An Angel is someone real but always a little beyond our grasp, someone of ultimate importance who escapes our full understanding. 

I’ll say that again: An Angel is someone real but always a little beyond our grasp, someone of ultimate importance who escapes our full understanding. 

But Angels — and that wondrous human being sitting next to you — these aren’t the only beings or things that are real but beyond our full grasp; ultimately important, but impossible to fully understand.

Take love, for example. Whatever your belief in Angels, do you believe in love? (I encourage it! I take my cue from Cher, who not only believes in love, she even believes in life after love!) But as much as I believe in love, I will never fully understand it, let alone control it. But I sure do believe in it. After all, I see love all the time: I see people practicing self-effacing kindness, one of my favorite forms of love. I have experienced passionate love, but also the heartbreak that inevitably accompanies such an intense and dangerous gift. And grief, as most of us have learned, at great cost – grief is a stinging, searing form of love. 

But love evades our full understanding. It is difficult to know why we humans love so deeply, and in so many ways. It is almost impossible to understand why or whether love is worth it, given all the grief it brings. We Christians look at an ancient instrument of execution, depicted right behind me, up here, and see in that horrible image a life-giving sacrifice of love. In one of our prayers as Episcopalians, we give thanks to God for “the mystery of love.” And that’s Angel territory: the mystery of something we know about and experience, but can’t fully grasp, can’t fully understand.

But I want to go back to the source on Angels, for more insight, and to demonstrate why all of this matters today. I want to consult a direct descendent of the people who first recognized and wrote about Angels. I need help from a Jewish rabbi.

This past Tuesday I began a two-part book study on a book called The Amen Effect, by the progressive Los Angeles Rabbi Sharon Brous. This is maybe my third mention of Brous’s work from this pulpit, but bear with me. Rabbi Brous reflects on the role of Angels in the great stories of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. It was an Angel who ministered to Hagar and her son Ishmael after they were cast out of Sarah and Abraham’s home. It was an Angel who intervened to prevent Abraham from slaughtering his son. Angels bridge heaven and earth, as we just heard this morning, in Jacob’s unsettling dream. An Angel appears to Joseph as he searches for his brothers, setting into motion the long story of salvation that culminated in the rescue of God’s people from bondage.

For us Christians, Angels travel a bridge that stretches from our Eucharistic community into the heart of God. Jesus Christ is, for us, the keystone of that bridge. 

Here is how Rabbi Brous interprets this tradition of Angels in the realm of God: “There’s a powerful through line in the angel stories that appear throughout the Bible and Rabbinic literature,” Brous writes, “from sacred text to folklore to liturgy.” She continues: “Angels, each one fueled by a unique purpose, appear in moments of great vulnerability to give us moral strength, clarity, and hope. They help us believe again. They awaken us to our responsibility to one another. They challenge us to think creatively about what might be possible. They let us know that we’re not alone. They offer protection. Connection. Inspiration.”

Brous then recounts personal stories when mentors and friends behaved like Angels in her life, guiding her, and others, offering protection, connection, and all the rest.

But later on in the chapter, Rabbi Brous gives us the compelling reason why all of this matters, why Angels matter. She asks herself this eternal human question: “Why do Angels sometimes appear, just precisely when we need them, and yet sometimes they do not?” This question looms before us in this chaotic, traumatic time. And here is Brous’s answer:

“I can only conclude that because we don’t understand the inner workings of angels, it’s that much more essential we make sure we step forward in those moments in life when we’re called.” I’ll quote her again: “Because we don’t understand the inner workings of angels, it’s that much more essential we make sure we step forward in those moments in life when we’re called.”

You don’t always believe in Angels? Okay. That’s reasonable. You’re as smart as the cynical, calculating Cyrus Beene. Probably smarter. But what’s not absurd, what’s easy to believe, is this: we are angelic when we protect, connect and inspire. We are angelic when we are more than one thing, never fully understood, and, every so often, when we are a delightful surprise to others in our lives. We are angelic when we bring God’s authentic message of hope to others. We are angelic when we go about all of this earthy — but also heavenly — work in God’s sight.

Believe in Angels if you like, with my encouragement. But I must insist that you adopt one particular, essential belief: Please, friend, please: believe in God; and believe also in yourself. God is with you, and God believes in you. You are a divine messenger in God’s graceful story of salvation.

The open hand

Preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20C), September 21, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Samuel Torvend.

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
Psalm 79:1-9
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13

Olive oil painting, by Giorgio Gosti

To grasp the significance of this seemingly odd parable of Jesus, it will be helpful to see the world in which he lived. For instance, rich land owners lived in cities: they constituted what we might call the millionaires and billionaires, the wealthiest 1 percent, of ancient Palestine at the time of Jesus. In turn, the landowners hired managers to supervise their land; in this case, property devoted to olive trees and wheat fields. The manager lived on or next to the land. And those who worked the land – that would be poor laborers, poor peasants – lived in the nearby village. 

Rich landowners became rich without lifting a finger through the manual labor of village peasants whose work produced the harvest of olives, olive oil, and wheat to be sold in the cities. The manager was paid for his work in the form of a percentage of what the peasants harvested. And the peasant laborers retained at best 10 to 20 % of the produce, a percentage that meant they would never escape poverty: their children and their children’s children would be consigned to harsh labor as well. To say the least, village laborers viewed absentee landowners as corrupt and greedy individuals who cared nothing for the harsh conditions of labor and poverty in which they worked.

In this story told by Jesus, the manager was accused of mishandling the owner’s  land, a squandering of property or produce with no details offered. By law the owner could do one of two things: he could take the manager to court and demand full repayment for the losses incurred or he could have the deceitful manager imprisoned. In both cases, the manager’s malfeasance would become public knowledge and ensure that the manager was never hired again: a man consigned to the lower status of a laborer or a homeless beggar. But the owner does the unexpected: no court hearing and no prison. He simply dismisses the manager privately – in what was an astonishing act of mercy. 

Jesus then notes that before the laborers could know of the misconduct of the newly-dismissed manager, he – the manager – seeks to have friends who will assist him now that he is no longer working for the owner. He does this by decreasing the amount of oil and wheat owed by the laborers thus allowing them to retain for their own use two staples of the Mediterranean diet: bread and olive oil. For the impoverished peasant laborers who lived hand to mouth, this, too, was an unexpected act of generosity, an act of mercy that would prompt incredible celebration in the village: an unexpected windfall, we might say.

Thus when Jesus says, “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth,” he is not suggesting that his followers engage in deceitful financial practices – though let me add that the history of Christianity is filled with people have done so – but rather encourages his followers to recognize what is at the heart of his story, his parable: two people who did the unexpected; that is, two people with terrible reputations who could have made life miserable for others but instead acted with mercy, with generosity. 

This, I think, is a troubling story: a troubling story for you and me, for we live in a culture that encourages us repeatedly to protect, to hold on to whatever money, wealth, or treasure we have earned or inherited. And thus as wages stagnant, costs rise, and the American middle class begins to evaporate, there emerges the fear little different than what this manager experienced some 2,000 years ago: the fear of becoming poor, of living in a lower status than one hoped for. And so the urge to close one’s hand around what one has – little or great – becomes quite strong. 

Indeed, it was the closed hand that appeared in statues found in medieval churches: the closed hand tightly grasping a bag of coins, a sign of being closed off to others, of demonstrating one’s concern only for oneself and no one else. It was the open hand that was praised as the sign of virtue for the open hand signified the person who saw money or produce as something to be shared. Rather than protected or hoarded, money or produce exists to be shared; that is, being generous is the virtue, the capacity that illuminates one’s care for others, even those who a society or family or political party might say are supposedly undeserving. For no one is undeserving of life, are they?

The open hand is also the hand that can receive from another, that signals the soul willing to admit its dependence on another. And so I wonder if you’ve noticed that we do not take or grab the communion bread or wine cup but rather open our hands – the small hands of children, the wrinkled hands of people my age – to receive the precious treasure of the Lord’s body and blood. And I wonder if you’ve noticed that each person receives the same amount regardless of gender, race, or social status. Here, again, it seems that generosity is extended to all, not just the few, not just the so-called privileged. Indeed, there is an economy at work, flowing from this table: an economy in which goods – food and drink – are shared equitably; a generosity that does not ask anyone to prove their worthiness before receiving; an economy so different than the one in which we are forced to live in which a few have more than enough, and the many have little. 

In his contemplation of the significance of the Mass, the Holy Eucharist, the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote this: “Not only bread but all things necessary for sustenance in this life are given on loan to us , given because of others and for others, and to others through us.” 

Dear friends, I say, let your open hand at this altar table lead you – lead you out there – into a world of profound need waiting for your generous spirit. 

Hello, you

Preached on the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 19C), September 14, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Stained glass window at St. Jacob’s Lutheran Church in Anna, Ohio

“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?”

Jesus advises the shepherd to just… leave the ninety-nine — to leave them in the wilderness. “They’ll be fine,” he seems to say. 

(Will we? Will we really be fine, out here, in the wilderness, while our shepherd runs off to find whoever that was who got lost?)

I realize I’m making an assumption at this moment that most all of us identify with the ninety-nine sheep who are not lost. And maybe you object: “I’m plenty lost,” you might be thinking. If so, that’s fair. In fact, I think we’re all encouraged to identify with anyone in this miniature parable, and tomorrow, we can identify with somebody else.

Some days you’re the one lost sheep (which means the shepherd is out looking for you). Other days you’re the shepherd trying to hold the flock together (which means you have to make some very hard choices, triaging the needs of people in your care). And then there are your days as one of the ninety-nine: you’re still where you were last year, or last decade, out here in the wilderness, with dozens of others. If you are one of the ninety-nine, what do you need, out here? I have some ideas.

A certain member of our parish likes to do a light, affectionate shoulder bump with me when we see each other on Sundays. We’re both typically distracted by many things, but this parishioner chooses the better part, coming over for an affectionate little bump with another one of the ninety-nine sheep — with me.

Hello, you.

This is definitely something we need out here in the wilderness, with the shepherd having gone off who knows where.

The wilderness: it’s not only a terrible, deathly landscape with little water, spiky succulents, and venomous snakes. Of course it is that: The wilderness holds up well as a metaphor for our world right now, news cycle after dreadful news cycle. But the wilderness is not only that. 

The wilderness is also where God’s people became God’s people. Our faith descends from desert nomads who wandered around the Sinai peninsula for two generations, often at least feeling like they were sheep without a shepherd. They wandered so long that no one who escaped bondage in Egypt was still alive when God’s people arrived at Canaan. It was rough out there, but the wilderness was formative: it taught God’s people what they must do, and what they must not do. It taught them who they were. The wilderness was a crucible for God’s people.

We melt precious metals in a crucible, refining the metal while it’s in liquid form, burning away all impurities. I’m backing into a mixed metaphor, so bear with me, but the wilderness gives God’s people a crucible experience. The wilderness gives God’s people a crucible experience. They are in the hot seat; They are under fire; they are confronted and even overwhelmed with stinging nettles, punishing heat, hunger and thirst, war with neighboring tribes, the bite of desert beasts. How will they come out of that, in the end? Who will they be, after all that?

When we are beset on all sides by hardships and disappointments, by painful disillusionment, by heartbreaking loss and bewildering change, how will we, finally, turn out? Who will we be? The crucible is devastating. But it is formative!

When the Israelites were in their wilderness crucible, it got bad enough that they wished they could go back to Egypt, where they had no freedom or dignity, but at least they had hot food. If we could go back a decade or two, or three, when the world made more sense (at least to people with lots of privileges), maybe most of us would jump into that time machine. But like the Israelites, we can’t. We have to trudge on.

And our shepherd leaves us here in this mess, going off on her absurd search for the one who is lost!

But we are not left on our own with nothing. Good shepherds wouldn’t do that. My friend Arienne Davison, the priest at St. Paul’s in Bremerton, says it this way: Arienne says that when Jesus tells this mini parable, his first audience would have understood that the ninety-nine sheep had the Torah to shepherd them while their actual shepherd was away. The Torah: the fundamental teachings of their scriptures. The Law, as Christian Protestants, echoing St. Paul, often like to call it. If we’re out here without a shepherd, we still have our shepherd’s holy book. We have our traditions, our stories that tell us who we are, our rituals and routines, our ethics, our consciences. 

So we know, out here in this wilderness, that we must care for the widow and the orphan — “widow and orphan” is biblical shorthand for vulnerable folks in our group, vulnerable because they’re young, or old, or otherwise in need of skilled, intentional support and protection. We know that we must visit our sick and those among us who are dying. We know that we must attend to the remains of our dead. We know this because the bible tells us so.

And we know that we must be good neighbors to all who bump shoulders with us out here, even those with whom we strenuously disagree. That includes those who claim the label “Christian” but badly misread the Gospel, and twist it into a tool of oppression. We don’t have to like those folks, but out here in the wilderness, we know — whether our shepherd is here with us or not — we know that we have ethical obligations even to them.

But we know some good, reassuring things too, as we circle around one another on this hillside while our shepherd runs off to God knows where in search of… who was it again? Well anyway, it was someone important to the shepherd. We know some good, reassuring things too.

We know that children are here, and also on the way. I scooped one of them up the other week, and I blissed out because that individual is so uniquely who he is, so particularly wondrous and hilarious and delightful. We know that newcomers are here — new sheep. Our shepherd knows that we know that it is not only our duty but also our delight to bring them into our community with attention, gratitude, and affection. So while our shepherd is away, she knows we’ll care for them.

And we know our assignment. Being among the ninety-nine isn’t only about survival, about the flock taking care of itself and respecting its neighbors as a way to simply stay alive, to remain a healthy flock. It is about that, but we aren’t just here to be here. We have a mission. 

This week I’m talking to the vestry about a proposal that St. Paul’s join Sound Alliance, a community-organizing nonprofit that helps faith communities but also other businesses and organizations — among them, the Plumbers and Pipefitters union, Local 26 — learn the basics of advocacy and action. Think of it as our flock hooking up with other flocks, out here in this wilderness, to take action for peace and justice in this harsh landscape.

So. Inventory: We have the Torah, and the Gospels. We have our traditions, rituals, and routines. We have delightful (and also sometimes challenging) children, and we have elders full of years, full of insights, full of love. We have our sick friends, and the remains of our departed friends. And we have a mission, a purpose that draws our attention beyond this desert hillside to notice other flocks, other herds, other villages. (And yes, other enemies, too.)

But we also, finally, have each other. Off goes the shepherd, off to find — sorry, who was it again? — oh right, it’s your lonely friend who’s isolating in their condo, and you’re the shepherd right at this particular moment. (A little over twelve years ago, the shepherd left the flock to come after me.) Anyway, off goes the shepherd, we know not where, but we have each other.

I can’t tell you how important that little shoulder bump is to me. I’m out here in this wilderness, and it’s scary. It’s awful. Things are blowing up everywhere. If the shepherd in the story is Jesus, well, I love Jesus and I know Jesus loves me, for the bible tells me so, but honestly I don’t always sense that Jesus is right next to me. I find him in the broken bread — I really do! — but to be precise, Jesus the shepherd returns to our flock when you and I share that broken bread, together.

So as scary and awful as things are, I’ll be okay.

I have you.

"I'm ready"

Preached at the Liturgy of Holy Eucharist with the Rite of Commendation for Thomas Brewer, September 13, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.

Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 23
Romans 8:14, 34-35, 37-39
John 19:41-42, 20:11-18

Now there was a garden in the place where Jesus was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

It was all very practical, very straightforward: They needed to bury their friend, and there was a new tomb right there, in the garden, at the foot of the cross.

A garden is a lovely place to lay a friend to rest, even a troubled garden that grows alongside a cross, which is an instrument of execution. And our garden? Our garden is every bit as practical and straightforward as the Easter garden: our garden, the Bolster Garden, is just down here, hugging this building. You can reach it by walking around a lovely rocky hillside covered with lilac and hydrangea and azalea bushes, with day lilies and ferns and rhododendrons. The remains of many dozens of our beloved dead are also resting there.

Now, the Easter garden, the one in Jerusalem, was next to the place where Jesus was crucified, as we just heard. And so our Bolster Garden, in turn, is next to this place, where we gather beneath this carved cross of the Crucified One, this place where we break the fragrant bread in remembrance of the Risen One. And when we break the bread, we recognize the risen Jesus among us, with us, around and between and through us.

Right here, next to this garden.

Today we are laying Tom to rest in our Bolster Garden. And as Lincoln might say, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. We are right to lay our beloved friend to rest in this place where death meets life, in this place at once dreadful and beautiful, in this place both heartbreaking and joyful.

For Tom is our friend, and close friends share both joys and sorrows. But also — Tom himself has tended this garden. He would come during dry spells to water the plants. Tom was a regular. And now he will rest beneath the plants he loved, cared for, nurtured. Meanwhile, we will love, care for, and nurture Tom’s remains, and we will care for his happy memory.

We will look for Tom, prayerfully, every time we gather with the Communion of Saints at this table. We will wait for the day when Tom joins us not just at this foretaste, this bite of bread and sip of wine, but at the great mountaintop feast, the feast where we all eat food and drink well-aged wine, and everyone has enough. And while we enjoy that feast together, with Tom in our tangible midst, God will not eat the food or drink the wine: God will swallow up death.

But even then — even at the mountaintop feast on that great gettin’ up morning — even then, I expect Tom will be quiet and kind, modest and receding. In his last days Tom had trouble with crowds of people: they would startle and overwhelm him. But then, don’t we all feel that way, often enough? It makes sense especially now, when the world feels so relentless. A few years ago, on a sitcom that imagined the afterlife, one of the characters described planet Earth in this way: “Earth stinks, y’all. It’s hot and it’s crowded, but also somehow cold and lonely.” Hot and crowded, cold and lonely.

Tom felt that; Tom lived here. Tom knows what it is like here, where our beautiful gardens grow in such a hot and crowded, cold and lonely world. And Tom had an answer for all of that, for all of this. Tom offered a solution to the heat and crowds, a solution to the cold loneliness: Tom taught us to respond to the hard world with the gentle (yet fierce) kindness of a gardener.

“I’m ready,” Tom said to me, with quiet tears, as he sensed he was near the end. “I’m ready.” How could he be ready? I think I know the answer.

Tom the gardener has grappled with life and death, all in the same garden. I am not a gardener but I am married to one: I am more comfortable here in this room where the cross is, while Andrew is more comfortable in God’s garden. But I can readily see, even from here, how gardeners learn the lessons of life and death as they turn the earth in their hands, trim back the lilac, and dead-head the rosebushes. 

I can readily understand how Mary Magdalene saw the risen Jesus and mistook him for a gardener: even as the awful wonder of resurrection was confusing and overwhelming her, Mary immediately saw in the risen Jesus a gardener’s wisdom: here is someone who knows about both life and death. Here is someone who bridges life and death. Here is someone through whom life triumphs over death.

Gentle and kind Tom received this gift from God in lavish abundance: Tom knew how to bring life from death, and he knew that because he understood and did not shrink from death. When Tom was lying in great weakness, ailing in that hospital room, and said, “I’m ready,” he was speaking the truth, with authority: This life-dealer whose gardening skill brought so much beauty into the world — this good servant of God knows about gardens… and he knows about the graves that hallow those gardens.

We lay our beloved friend to rest in this garden as the first hints of autumn are quietly appearing. All the dazzling spring blossoms are long gone. The lilac needs trimming. Through the long winter months, for several years now, I have seen Bolster garden descend into death, into sleepy oblivion beneath the grey and drizzle. There is a sad and even holy beauty in our garden during these deathly seasons. And there is always, always the color of forest green. Every November, at All Souls, we all troup down to Bolster Garden to remember all of our beloved dead. This year, on All Soul’s Day, Tom will be fresh in our minds and hearts. 

But then, of course, life returns, with dazzling glory. The hydrangeas and rhododendrons throw wild riots of color. The blue spring sky smiles on Bolster Garden again, and we might be tempted to mistake the risen Jesus not for the gardener, but for the whole garden itself. 

Tom has taught us to understand this rhythm, these seasons. Tom has trained us to accept the cold drizzle of death alongside the abundant life-giving warmth of the summer sun. Tom is a master of calm acceptance, of creative patience, of quiet observation and skillful caregiving. Tom teaches us what it means when the scriptures tell us that God swallows up death forever. 

I want to learn Tom’s ways, our lovely Tom, our good and kind Tom. I want to learn from someone Mary Magdalene would readily see as a master of life and death — she only needs to look into his kind eyes to see that. I want this for us all. I want, for us all, the gift of Thomas Brewer, the gift of a saint of God who looks directly at both death and life and says, with full assurance of God’s promises,

“I’m ready.”

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.”